Britain’s presence was anomalous to the verge of absurdity: Egypt was an independent sovereign state ruled by King Farouk, where the British supposedly exercised rights only to defend the Suez Canal. The Cairo government did not formally enter hostilities until February 1945. The sympathies of most Egyptians lay with the Axis, which they believed would liberate them from more than seventy years of British domination. Indeed, such views were widespread among Arab nationalists throughout the Middle East, and were stimulated by Hitler’s 1940 successes. That August, the secretary of the grand
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