The World's War

by David Olusoga

  Not long after he had taken up his post, Nivelle himself had a signed note suggesting the army should ensure that it was ‘not being gentle with Black blood’, because the higher priority was to ensure ‘that White blood can be saved’. In a letter to the Ministry of War written in February 1917, he had demanded ‘that the number of [African] units put at my disposition should be increased as much as possible. [This will] increase the power of our projected strength and permit the sparing – to the extent possible – of French blood.’69 But Nivelle was merely the most high-ranking of many commanders who made calls of this kind. A report written in 1918 openly described how the French had come to regard their West African soldiers as chair à canon (‘cannon fodder’) and suggested that they should be used even more intensively ‘in order to save whites’. The general attitude was perhaps most honestly and frankly summarized by Colonel Eugène Petitdemange, the commander of the camp in which the Tirailleurs Sénégalais trained while in Fréjus, the town on the Côte d’Azur to which the Africans were dispatched each autumn to spare them the worst months of the French winter (the system known as Hivernage). In a letter to Pétain, who by now had replaced Nivelle, Colonel Petitdemange wrote:

  My aim is to seek to increase the use of the Senegalese… in order to spare the blood of French servicemen, France having already paid a heavy tribute during this war. It is essential to try by all means possible to diminish their future losses through the enhanced use of our brave Senegalese… The Senegalese have been recruited to replace the French, to be used as cannon fodder to spare the whites. It is essential then to use them in an intensive fashion… .70

  Most damning, though, were the words of the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau. He was defending his decision to begin yet another recruitment drive in French West Africa, the need for more troops for 1918 being considered to outweigh the risks of further revolts in the colonies or even their potential destruction as functioning economies. On 20 February 1918 he told the French Assembly:

  We are going to offer civilization to the blacks. They will have to pay for that… I would prefer that ten blacks are killed rather than one Frenchman – although I immensely respect those brave blacks – for I think that enough Frenchmen are killed anyway and that we should sacrifice as few as possible.71

  To find more ‘brave blacks’ to take the place of Frenchmen at the front, France in 1918 thus embarked upon another recruitment drive in its colonies. In Africa, France was faced with peoples who had grown resistant to the activities of the army and its recruiting agents. Mangin, ebullient as ever, remained confident that France’s reservoirs of African men were still able to offer up yet more of their sons, perhaps as many as a third-of-a-million. The first obstacle, though, was not the resistance of the Africans but the opposition of the white French colonial administrators, who feared further recruitment would leave their territories financially ruined and socially devastated. Enticed by the enormous manpower figures Mangin set out in a report, but hoping to avoid inciting outright rebellion in Africa, Clemenceau turned to a man who was the very personification of the French ideals of equality and assimilation, the concepts upon which the whole imperial project was supposedly founded.72

  In 1914, Blaise Diagne had become the first black African elected as a deputy in the French Parliament. Born in Gorée, in Senegal, he was a remarkable figure. Highly educated, well travelled within the French Empire and remarkably energetic, Diagne believed earnestly and passionately in the French mission civilisatrice. For him, the war was not just an epic struggle but a great opportunity – for France to demonstrate to the peoples of its empire that French egalitarian values were paramount over considerations of race, and for Africans to offer to France what he described in 1916 as a ‘harvest of devotion’. Diagne had spent the first years of the war touring the army camps. With all the powers and status of his position as a deputy, he had demanded better treatment for colonial soldiers and confronted racist white officers. In the French Chamber of Deputies, he pushed through a new law that realized a longstanding demand: the Loi Blaise Diagne. It secured full French citizenship for African soldiers from the most integrated regions of French West Africa. There were to be rewards for military service, and Diagne’s task was to convince his fellow Africans of his own conviction: that France and its colonies were destined to become integrated and unified ‘above any question of origin or race’.73

  Arriving back in West Africa in early 1918, Diagne set about the task of recruitment with characteristic fervour. The sight of a black French politician, one of their own, accompanied by three black officers, all decorated war veterans, had a powerful impact. Communities who had come to regard recruitment as a death sentence, or at the very least as a form of military servitude, now encountered black veterans who had not only survived the conflict but attained, through their service, new status and authority – authority that even extended over white men of inferior rank. By September 1918, Diagne and his team had recruited 77,000 Africans, by persuasion rather than coercion, and had far exceeded the target set for them by Clemenceau. The Diagne mission was looked upon with horror by the Governor-General of French West Africa, Joost van Vollenhoven. It was he, the white governor, rather than Diagne, the black politician, who pleaded with Paris to end the recruitment, complaining: ‘This African empire is poor in men but rich in products, so let us use its miserable population for food supply during the war and for post-war times! This country has been ruined just to recruit another few thousands of men.’74 Van Vollenhoven resigned and volunteered for service on the Western Front himself, where he was killed in the Second Battle of the Marne. Blaise Diagne was appointed Commissioner General in the French Ministry of Colonies.

  That France was willing to grant full citizenship to some of its colonial subjects reinforces the fact that French racism was distinctive from that which prevailed within other European nations and the United States. Yet the French faith in the ideals of assimilation and eventual equality existed in parallel with an unshakable belief in the supposedly innate racial characteristics of black Africans, a belief that had disastrous consequences for the men recruited from West Africa.

  As with the British view of ‘martial races’ of India, the implication of the French concept of the races guerrières was that there were races that were non-guerrières – a phenomenon that can perhaps best be demonstrated by comparing the wartime experiences of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais with that of men from other parts of the French Empire. During the war, French deployment of the almost 500,000 men recruited from their colonies was in accordance with these prevailing racial theories – and where evidence from the front seemed to contradict the theories, it was usually explained away as an anomaly or simply ignored. Thus while West Africa was regarded as the home of the most spirited and ferocious of the races guerrières, matters were more complex when it came to the peoples of North Africa, Madagascar and the French colonies in Asia. Sometimes they too were written off as men of low intellect, and it was claimed that North Africans were, for the most part, poor marksmen because they lacked ‘notions of precision, indispensible to soldiers in specialized branches’.75 The experience of men recruited from French Indochina was, however, in many ways the mirror opposite of that of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais.

  Throughout their deployment, the French military authorities remained convinced that the Indochinese were members of a races non-guerrières – an essentially feminine and passive people, who generally did not make good soldiers. Their relatively small stature came to be seen as physiological evidence of a lack of martial qualities. The army went as far as designing a special rifle, shorter than the standard model, for issue to them. While supposedly frail and passive, the Indochinese had other virtues of use to the army. They were deemed to be more intelligent than black Africans and suited – in ways that Africans were not – to specialized and technical roles. During the Battle of the Somme, Indochinese were deployed as military drivers, and by the war’s end 4,000 of them w
ere driving trucks behind the lines. Their ability to remain focused, for long periods, in this role was put down by one French commander to their vegetarian diets.76 There were also two battalions of Tirailleurs Indochinois on the Western Front, and two more on the Salonika (Macedonian) Front; but the Indochinese were for the most part deployed as support units, behind the lines, rather than as front-line combat troops.

  Despite their generally races-non-guerrières status, some Indochinese did face the full horrors of trench warfare, fighting at Verdun, on the Somme and at the Chemin des Dames. As was the case with other colonial armies, the Indochinese arrived full of confidence in the power of the empire of which they were part, only to be stunned by the military might of Germany. Like the men of the British Indian Corps they wrote letters home to relatives describing the unimaginable scale of the conflict and, at times, warning their comrades still in Indochina not to join up. Even when Tirailleurs Indochinois did fight as combat troops, and acquit themselves well in battle, it did little to change French attitudes. One company of the 6th Battalion Tirailleurs Indochinois took part in the assaults to retake Fort Douaumont in October 1916. The men were said to have performed well and remained a cohesive force despite sustaining losses. They fought again at the Battle of Chemin des Dames (1917) and in the defence of Reims, winning awards for their service. Yet the power of racial theory was such that none of this had much impact on the prevailing assessment that the Indochinese were not natural warriors. Forty years after the start of the First World War, when an army of white French troops, North African units and Tirailleurs Sénégalais were decimated by the North Vietnamese Army at Dien Bien Phu – in a battle that descended into trench warfare – the nonsense of such racial categorizations was comprehensively and painfully demonstrated to the French nation.

  The most telling example of the power of the idea of the races guerrières and non-guerrières was to be found behind the lines. In the Commis et Ouvriers d’Administration, men from France’s empire worked as office clerks, performing skilled and semi-skilled tasks behind the lines, including everything from butchering animals to working as mechanics on vehicles. While a high proportion of Indochinese and Madagascans, and smaller proportions of French North Africans, worked in the Commis et Ouvriers d’Administration, not a single West African spent the war behind a desk or in any other auxiliary role.77 This unwavering devotion on the part of the French Army to racial theory, over and above any empirical evidence, shaped almost every aspect of the experiences and deployment of West Africans in the French Army. They remained shock troops, deemed of insufficient intelligence for other roles. One consequence was that West Africans were almost completely absent from those parts of the army that suffered the lower casualty rates – cavalry, artillery and engineering units.78

  During the last two years of the war, French racial theory fused with the growing determination to deploy Africans in ways that would save white lives. Race became a determinant of who was likely to live and who was likely to die. The results can be seen in the casualty figures. Over the four years of the war, around 140,000 West African soldiers served in combat. According to the official estimate, around 31,000 or roughly 23 per cent of them died; but the real number is almost certainly higher. Several historians have examined the casuality statistics of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais,79 the most exhaustive analysis being that of American historian Joe Lunn. His work has demonstrated that when deployed in combat in 1917 and 1918 – the period when they suffered the majority of their casualties – the probability of a West African soldier being killed at the front was two-and-a-half times higher than for a white French infantryman.80 Life expectancy was even lower for men from the West African tribes whom Mangin and the other ‘colonial experts’ had defined as being especially warlike: men from the Wolof, Tukulor and Bambara ethnic groups were about three times as likely to die in combat as a white French soldier recruited in the same years.

  Numbers measured in the tens of thousands seem small when compared to the total losses of the metropolitan French Army – 1.3 million men. In pure terms, many more white Frenchmen from the mother country died than did men from France’s empire. There is also much truth in the argument that when compared to its British and American allies, France – boasting its republican, egalitarian values – was in certain respects less racist towards troops with an African lineage. However, the widespread acceptance of the theory of the races guerrières, and the willingness of the French – traumatized as they were by the losses of 1914 and 1915 – to use Africans only as shock troops eventually translated into a higher rate of proportional loss and proved disastrous for thousands of young African men and the communities from which they came.

  FRANCE, 10 MAY 1940. Nazi Germany unleashes Blitzkrieg against France and the Low Countries. For the third time in seventy years, a German army has crossed the frontiers, its pincers stretching out to the coast and threatening Paris. The old battlefields of the Western Front that have stood quiet for twenty-two years are once again contested by British, German, Belgian and French troops. At Neuve Chapelle, the memorial to the dead of the British Indian Corps, built in the 1920s on the site of the trenches from which the Indians had advanced, is peppered with machine-gun fire and struck by shrapnel – scars that survive into the twenty-first century. In 1914 the German Schlieffen Plan to knock out France in weeks failed. This German invasion will have quite different results.

  As Blitzkrieg thunders across France, German forces very quickly come into contact with around 40,000 Tirailleurs Sénégalais. It soon becomes clear that when coming up against Africans, the German Army is adhering to set strategies and military policies that are dramatically different from those they employ when facing other enemy units. In numerous engagements, Germans refuse to take black prisoners. In combat, the Tirailleurs battalions suffer a casualty rate far higher than most of their white comrades. It is when Tirailleurs are captured, or encircled or surrender, that the full dimension of German policy is revealed. Thirteen days into the Battle of France, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) – the German High Command – orders its propaganda operatives to scour the makeshift prisoner-of-war pens and there to ‘quickly take photographs showing particularly good-looking German soldiers alongside particularly bestial-looking Senegalese Negroes and other coloured prisoners of war… Sharp racial contrasts are of special importance.’81

  Six weeks later, on 20 June 1940, a group of sixty Tirailleurs Sénégalais and their eight white officers surrender near the French village of Chasselay. They are marched, en masse, to a field outside the nearby village of Chères. Under the gaze of two Panzer tanks, the officers are instructed to lie down, while the black soldiers are ordered to assemble in the centre of the field with their hands raised in surrender. Huddled together, the Tirailleurs are then ordered by the Germans to run. At that moment, the Panzers open fire with their machine guns and canon, shooting into the backs of the fleeing men. Fifty of the Tirailleurs are killed. The Panzer commanders then run their tanks, back and forth, over the bodies of the fallen, crushing to death the wounded as they lie helpless.82

  The incident at Chères was just one of many, ranging from the battlefield executions of captured individuals to orchestrated mass-murders, that took place in May and June 1940. In those months, French African soldiers were systematically sought out by German units, separated from their white comrades and officers, and summarily killed. The accounts collated by the historian Raffael Scheck – found in both local French archives and the archive of the German Army – describe an orgy of murder and abuse, motivated by a widespread and intense racial hatred. Witnesses – often white French officers – described how German soldiers justified these summary executions by dismissing Africans as savages, sub-humans who had no legitimate place within a European war. All the myths of the First World War appear to have been inherited by a new generation of German soldiers – the hatreds of one generation effectively passed down to their sons like family silver, a bequest that was eased
by Nazi propagandists. Particularly feared, again, was the coupe-coupe, seen as an ‘illegal weapon’ (it was not): German soldiers were genuinely convinced it would be used in an appalling fashion should they fall prisoner to the Tirailleurs Sénégalais. The coupe-coupe in itself was sometimes regarded as justification for the murders of Africans. Their French officers were beaten and berated for having supposedly betrayed both the white race and European civilization by fighting for a nation that had brought into its army, and on to its soil, such savage peoples. Some white French officers were even shot and killed for the crime of having led Africans into battle.

  The policy of executions was directed unambiguously against black Africans from the French colonies below the Sahara, rather than at all non-white combatants. On one occasion a group of Moroccan soldiers were gathered together with the white prisoners while their black comrades were segregated and taken to a separate location. There, the black Africans were massacred. The Moroccans and the whites were accorded their legal rights as prisoners of war.83 In all, over 3,000 Africans, subjects of the French Empire and soldiers of the French Army, were murdered by the Germans in 1940. After the war there were some investigations into the killings, mass graves were unearthed, and bodies exhumed; but there were no trials and none of the killers was ever held to account.

  Germany’s little-known race war against Africans in 1940 complicates a neat division of the Second World War into the ‘decent’ war in the West, fought by the rules of the Geneva Convention, and the war in the East from 1941, a vicious fight to the death witnessing brutality and genocide. Yet to understand the forces that inspired the murder of 3,000 black Africans in the spring of 1940 – and which compelled Hitler to single out Mangin’s statue for destruction – requires us to look backwards in time to 1914, rather than forward to 1941.