Gamal Abdel Nasser - Military Career

Military Career

In March 1937, Nasser applied for entry to the Royal Military Academy, temporarily abandoning his political activities in favor of studying to become an army officer. However, he did not have a wasta—an influential intermediary to promote his application against many others—and was turned down. Disappointed, he enrolled in law school, but failed and then attempted to enter the police academy where he again was unsuccessful because he lacked a wasta.

Convinced that he needed a wasta, Nasser managed to secure a meeting with the Secretary-of-State, Ibrahim Kheiry Pasha, who sponsored his second attempt into the military academy. From then on, with little contact with his family, he focused on his military career. It was at the academy that he met Abdel Hakim Amer and Anwar Sadat, both of whom became important aides during his presidency. After passing his final exam at Abassia, he was posted to the town of Mankabad, near his native Beni Mur, and was commissioned as 2nd lieutenant in the infantry.

In 1939, Nasser and Amer volunteered to serve in Sudan (which was a part of Egypt at the time), where they arrived shortly before the outbreak of World War II. Aburish states, however, that he and Amer were posted to the Sudan in 1941. During the war, Nasser and Sadat established contact with agents of the Axis powers, in particular a group of Italians, and planned a coup to coincide with an Italian offensive that would expel the British forces from Egypt. The plan, however, was never executed. After briefly returning from Sudan, Nasser returned there in September 1942, then secured a job as an instructor in the Royal Military Academy in Cairo in May 1943.

In 1942, the Egyptian Prime Minister, Ali Maher, was suspected of having pro-Axis sympathies at the time when Erwin Rommel was leading the Afrika Korps into Egypt. Lord Lampson, the British Ambassador in Egypt, backed by a battalion of British troops, marched into King Farouk's palace and ordered him to dismiss Maher and appoint the pro-British Mustafa el-Nahhas in his place. Nasser, like most Egyptians, saw this as a blatant violation of Egyptian sovereignty and wrote "I am ashamed that our army has not reacted against this attack." He said further that he prayed to Allah for "a calamity to overtake the English." Nasser also began forming a group consisting of other young military officers with strong nationalist sentiments and who supported some form of revolution. Mainly through Amer, Nasser stayed in touch with the members of the group. Meanwhile, Amer continued to discover interested officers within the various branches of the Egyptian Armed Forces and presented a full file on each of them to Nasser.