Hey all, the next update is going to pretty immense so I hope you can forgive me. That said, in case you were wondering why I couched the in-universe rhetoric about the effect of the Second Arabian War in such an apocalyptic light ... you're about to find out.
Eerie Quiet
Extract from ‘The Arab Tragedy: 1944–1956’ by Abdul Nazim
With the total occupation of Tunisia, the French now faced the thorny problem of their own Metropolitan in Algeria. While there was a massive terror threat within her major Algerian cities, deep within the country her presence was simply non-existent. In the vast deserts in the far south of Algeria, the FLN created their own camps, ran the towns and villages and went about their lives as if France had never existed. France had extracted most of the Colon [1] that resided deep within the country (fearing a repeat of the Tunisian slaughters) and transferred them around Oran and Algiers. Tensions in the two towns were, as one BBC journalist described, “So pervading that one can almost feel a knife hovering over their back at any moment”. The cities were under martial law, with the Arab population being searched and detained arbitrarily in a manner that only served to increase resentment. Hate crimes by Colons (including murder) often went unpunished, while bombings by the FLN saw the whole Casbah put on lockdown. Riots pervaded the cities near-nightly, as Algerians clashed with the army. It was considered miraculous if no one was killed in a town on any one day. French troops, not used to police work, regularly committed acts that outraged the Arab population and were hated just as much as the Colons and Jews. Taking inspiration from the Klan in America, car bombings became a regular occurrence in Algiers and Oran. It’s estimated that in the course of the conflict, nearly a thousand people were killed in Oran and nearly one and a half thousand were killed in Algiers. However, the FLN had done what they wanted. They had forced the French to spend so much time defending the cities that they created a vast desert network to continue the conflict, as they saw it, forever.
Just across the border in Morocco, Franco had taken his time in building his forces, not wanting to encounter an embarrassing loss. Ifni was holding strong, supplied unceasingly by Spanish and British naval aid. In the Spanish Sahara and northern territories, Spanish, Portuguese, Argentine and Cuban troops made ready. Of course, Franco was desperate for
his troops to get the glory, relegating his allies mainly to occupational duties. Finally, on June 19th, Franco began his assault on Morocco. In the south, troops marched to lift the siege on Ifni, succeeding on July 2nd. The new aim was to meet the troops moving southward and eastward from the Tangier region. On July 10th, Spanish troops met French troops on the Morocco-Algerian border before marching south to Oujda and taking it on August 3rd. More notably, Rabat was taken on July 27th, leading to the largest battle in the Moroccan theatre: the Battle of Casablanca. The city of Bogart and Bergman was a victim of the cruelties of war, specifically Fascist warfare. Of particular note, the Army of Africa (a Spanish contingent recruited from local Moors) was renowned for being just as cruel as any native-Spanish division. Summary executions and rapes were so common in the fall of the city that one British naval officer complained to London that, “The conduct of Spain in Casablanca would disgrace the Devil.” The incident was covered up in British media and received only scant coverage in the American press, wary of offending the many ethnic communities of America who actively supported the West in the Second Arabian War. On August 19th, Casablanca would fall, simultaneously linking the northern and southern wings of the advance and connecting Spanish Sahara to the Tangier region along the coast. The Moroccans retreated to Marrakesh where they hoped (like the Algerians) to drag the Spaniards into the merciless abyss of the desert to bleed them dry and obliterate their moral. This was also a concern of Franco, who told his generals that once Marrakesh fell he considered everything else to be a question of ‘Turning every village that rises against us into a new Guernica”. Franco’s troops reached the outskirts of Marrakesh on September 12th. However, the horrifying events of the coming days would throw all the plans of Western leaders out the window.
Extract from ‘Tears of the Pharaoh: The Story of Egypt’s Tragic Twentieth Century’ by Talal Hussein
For Mussolini, there was no doubt about his path through Egypt: it began in Alexandria and marched straight to Cairo. To get to Cairo, he needed to pass through another three major defensive lines: Damanhour, Tanta, and Banha. While it was certainly direct, it was certainly defended too. Egyptian society had united to face the Italians and was in no mood to surrender. Of course, the Italians didn’t care either way. The three cities fell one by one with a similar pattern: the Egyptians fighting without uniforms regardless of sex with any weapon they could get from a gun to a kitchen-knife, the Italians shooting almost every military-age man that could be found with a shrug and the Greek conscripts being witness to the horror while desperately trying to stay alive. ‘Anti-Partisan Operations’ by Blackshirt regiments only added to the nightmare, with reprisals being swift and brutal. The three cities fell one by one: June 30th, July 19th and September 2nd respectively. By now, Cairo was visible in the distance, and the Italians settled down to prepare for the final operation against the capital. They knew they needed more men and resources for the final attack, so they simply bombed the city relentlessly. Little did they know of what was in store.
After seizing the Suez Canal, the British spent most of the following days forming a solid defensive line around the area to ensure the Egyptians would not take it back. However, due to the immensity and destruction of the Italian march to Cairo, no such assault was forthcoming. The only thing that was forthcoming were thousands of refugees desperate to escape the Italians by making a flight to British lines. The British had never expected anything of the sort and were thus forced to make some accommodation for the escapees, all the while trying to find any spies and saboteurs among the number. In continuance with their mission, British forces cleared the Red Sea of ‘every Egyptian vessel down to a pair of wooden planks tied together with a piece of string’ as Lord Mountbatten put it. This was solidified on July 28th, when the British sent a military force to land at Hurghada. After relatively light resistance, Egypt’s largest Red Sea port fell. This massively helped the supply situation, not to mention massively exposing the Egyptian flank. With that, the British felt comfortable reinforcing their own Empire. Sudan was dealing with an Egyptian incursion, which would finally be successfully stopped at Dongola. After recruiting significant amounts of black soldiers from the south to increase its dependence, the Sudanese army began the slow crawl up the Nile. Suggestions by Mussolini to dam off the Nile to starve the Egyptians were turned down by Eden as ‘counter-productive’, though he privately denounced the idea as being of part of ‘the casual barbarity of that man’. On August 9th, the Egyptians were fully expelled from Sudan. On August 18th, Abu Simbel fell to the British/Sudanese forces, providing a devastating morale blow to the Egyptian forces and Egyptian people in general. The population reluctantly readied themselves for the imminent attack on Cairo.
Extract from ‘The War that Ended a World’, by Francis Gautman
The Israelis, after recovering from the initial shock of war, were able to gather themselves and create a strong defensive line. While the initial assault had been sudden and overwhelming, the UAR plans for their armies encircling the Golan and of the Egyptians and Jordanians meeting at Eilat had been rebuffed. Slowly but surely, air superiority had been achieved over Israel’s skies, and the fall of the Sinai had freed up countless resources to fend off the far more serious northern front. From Acre on July 20th, the Israelis slammed into Arab flank with the full intention of marching into Lebanon itself. The Arabs fought often to the very last, and there was no easy victory for any Israeli mission in the campaign. Nevertheless, with dogged determination, the UAR was forced to send its troops back into Lebanon to make a final stand, the last Israeli town being liberated on September 4th. The plan was then to move along the Golan Heights along the Litani River, thus cutting off the vanguard of the UAR. From there, it was theorized the Phalangists would lend a helping hand in clearing out the rest of Lebanon, leading to a reunion with the Turks sometime close to Christmas. It was estimated by Israeli planners that the war, if it became a fight to the last like in WW2, would probably last another year. Of course, circumstances radically disproved that assessment. The Irbid salient was a gnawing sore, but there was no way they could realistically cross the Jordan River and logistics were so poor in the region that a mass Israeli assault would be hard to pull off. For that reason, and uneasy stalemate graced the region, as the main fighting occurred in the Palestinian region of Israel. On August 17th, the Israelis recaptured Aqaba from the Saudis, beginning their march down the Red Sea coast, where they were well-supplied by the Royal Navy and Regia Marina. By the end of the month, the entirety of the Tiran Straight was in Israeli hands.
While a mood of optimism began to creep into the Israeli populace in light of all these victories, in contrast to the agitated confusion of the first few weeks of the war, few Israelis were aware of the tension within the army. A few years ago, in accordance with Ben-Gurion’s ‘One State, One Army’ decree, the Lehi were merged into the Haganah. The Irgun had already voluntarily done so during WW2 due to the requests of the Allies (in return for a more avowedly Pro-Jewish policy in Palestine) and the surge of Right-Wing, Revisionist Zionism among European Jews which blurred the lines between the traditionally socialist Hagannah and Right-Wing Irgun. Yet the Lehi dragged their feet, desiring their independence. The Lehi (under the name of the ‘Homeland Party’ – though supporters and opponents would often interchange the terms) went into a coalition with Begin’s Herut to form the first Israeli government. Begin was sympathetic to the Lehi and their leader Yitzhak Shamir, and so allowed the Lehi to continue being an independent paramilitary group. It was mainly seen along the borders, warding off Fedayeen incursions and terrorizing border Arab provinces. Begin was pleased with the Lehi’s actions, seeing them as a way of giving the Israeli government plausible deniability for the things Begin believed helped preserve the Israeli state. However, a serious of disastrous PR moves by Shamir and the Lehi (culminating in an Anti-Polish screed after Begin attended a memorial for the nuclear bombing of Warsaw) ended the coalition and put Socialist Ben-Gurion in charge. Ben-Gurion had nothing but utter contempt for Shamir and the Lehi, telling his then secretary and Mapai Party organizer Anne Frank [2] that, “If I could, I’d ban the bastards like poison.” While he couldn’t illegalize the Homeland Party itself, he could ban the Lehi. The problem was that an outright ban would likely lead to severe insurrection that would be an invitation for the UAR to take advantage. The solution was proposed by Moshe Dayan that the Lehi would be merged into the army, which was ultimately accepted. It was passed with the support of the left-wing parties, the blistering dissent of the Homeland Party and the stony abstaining of most of Herut, including Begin – needless to say, Begin and Shamir were no longer on great terms, with the former believing the latter had taken advantage of and humiliated him. It was fate, therefore, that the three should have been forced together in the coalition government Israel would create in the midst of the Second Arabian War. Yet just as Shamir had a say in the cabinet, the Lehi soldiers had not dissipated in the way Ben-Gurion expected. One senior military official, Yitzhak Rabin, went as far as to argue, “The army has integrated more with the Lehi than the other way around.” Due to a contingent of factors, Israeli soldiers had hardened their hearts to the Arabs. Israeli soldiers would often refuse to take surrenders from Arab troops and shoot them out of hand, even in the face of reprimand from their superiors. As Rabin would tell the Post-war committee set up to investigate the quality of Israel’s performance in the war, “If I told my men to take prisoners, they’d turn and look at me like they would shoot me in the back at the first chance.” This mood was heightened by Shamir’s merciless declarations through the party papers and radio, including, “The only innocent Arabs are unborn”. One reason for the significant delay in moving troops into Lebanon was that Ben-Gurion was terrified that Lehi troops in the army would create a series of massacres, thus permanently blackening the name of the IDF. The question remained, ‘how this could be accomplished without letting the UAR have breathing room?’
Further north still, the Turks had realized that a slow crawl down Latakia was a waste, with Orbay angrily demanding ‘Why are we playing a Gallipoli except where
we lose?” Instead, finally working up the courage to accept foreign troops being used in the main assaults, the coalition forces smashed southwards towards Aleppo, the second city of Syria. Getting close to the city proved easier than anticipated due to the number of resources being sent to the Israeli front. Turkish assaults along the coast also kept a large contingent of Arab forces busy. By September 9th, the Turks made it to the suburbs of Aleppo. It was no small city, with its gigantic metropolis holding several hundred thousand people all dedicated to stopping the Turks from reasserting their Ottoman desires. The Turkish, Bulgarian, Croatian, Austrian and German troops of the coalition went to work encircling the city, completing the job on the morning of Friday, September 14th, the first day of Yom Kippur.On the annointed day, the Turkish leadership decided to camp down for the night and prepare to bomb the city into surrender - which they assumed would be a tiring and long process.
Across the world, Jews began the ancient service, commemorating God on the holiest day of their year. While perhaps they prayed harder that year, hoping that their enemy would be vanquished, hoping that their family was safe, the front was eerily silent. It was almost as if the Arabs had decided to leave them alone for once. It was seen as a reprieve to both the soldiers and to the population at large. When Israelis are asked to remember Yom Kippur 1956, the first thing they will always tell you is how eerily peaceful it was … right before it happened. Close to midnight, Tel Aviv was awakened by the blare of ear-splitting explosions and the sight of fireballs rising to the heavens, all while every ambulance in the city shrieked their sirens as loud as they could. Civilians ran in terror, but that wasn’t the main payload. That was seen when people started dropping to the ground for seemingly no reason, riving and foaming at the mouth. The more perceptive could work out what had happened immediately: gas. Yet even those in the masks seemed helpless, and that’s when the awful truth began to dawn on the emergency services: this was nerve gas. For thirty minutes, with seemingly no pattern, black lightning bolts seemed to fall from heaven with a sickening thud. Many swam out to sea, trying to escape the carnage. Fires raged across the city as firefighters died fighting the flames mixed with nerve agents. Buildings tumbled to the ground from the damage they took from the missiles. Blind terror seized almost the entire citizenry. By the time the final missile had landed, and the last of the gas had dissipated, it was estimated that roughly 3000 people had died, of which 1200 were Nazi or Soviet Holocaust survivors. Due to the child evacuation program, only 50 of the dead were under the age of 13.
The news hit Jerusalem like a thunderbolt, as it soon did to Rome, Ankara, Paris, London and even Moscow. Of course, there was no place in the world so emotionally impacted as Israel itself. As the news filtered in about what had happened, any questions of the UAR's intention to begin a Third and final Holocaust had vanished. But there was no time for grief or tears. There was no time for eulogies or prayer. There was time for only thing: to teach the Arabs that ‘Never Again’ meant ‘
Never Again’.
[1] The term ‘Pied Noir’ doesn’t exist ITTL, using the old word ‘Colon’ (Colonists and their descendents) instead
[2] Einstein is dead by now, so her services have switched to the new PM on Einstein's recomendation. The two got along in being German speakers.
