French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  Despite the low expectations placed on them, of the six major foreign formations (including the GRD 97 but excluding the 13e demi-brigade) that took part in the battle for France, only the 23e RMVE, half-trained and inadequately armed and thrown into the conflict on June 5 when the battle was already lost, failed to turn in a stellar performance. (Instead, they broke and ran near Sainte-Menehould on June 13.59) The 11e étranger was engaged almost from the opening attack, tenaciously defending a section of the Inor Wood north of Verdun against repeated German offensives backed by artillery. On June 11, it began a fighting retreat that, like so many regiments of the French army in that desperate summer, quickened the disintegration of the regiment. By June 18 when the commanding officer burned the flag and buried the battle streamer near the church of Crezilles in the Meurthe-et-Moselle, the 11th had lost three-quarters of its men, many in an eleventh-hour attack mounted simply to retrieve the honor of the regiment. The rest escaped encirclement and moved south to Toul.

  The 12e étranger was snatched from its main training center at La Valbonne on May 11 and after various peregrinations was ordered on May 24 to defend the town of Soissons on the Aisne River. The new legionnaires appeared reluctant to dig in, convinced perhaps by the absence of serious defenses that the high command did not intend to make a determined stand. “We were wasting our time,” wrote Sergeant Francois of the 7th Company of the general attitude. “Either complete rest in the rear or an attack. At least a well defined task, organized and whose utility can be understood by everyone.”60 However, increasing German air activity, the sound of incessant motor traffic from the German side of the Aisne, and the appearance of German advanced elements across the river on May 31 caused a change of attitude. The legionnaires began to fashion loopholes in walls, place obstacles and barricades in the roads, and dig antitank trenches. Strangely enough, this activity conjured up for Francois a sense of déjà-vu an image of “La dernière cartouche” of 1870—“One only lacks the red trousers to make the illusion complete,” he wrote. “We are nervous perhaps, but resolved. We are not afraid.”

  Perhaps this was the courage of ignorance. On June 5, waves of Stukas began an air bombardment of the town unmolested by French fighters or antiaircraft fire. “Really, I never would have imagined such a thing,” he noted in his diary. “Soon the whistling of bombs and the noise of the explosions create an hallucinating concert coming always closer to us. My men take cover where they can. Many must regret not having worked harder to create a shelter.” However, the bombs caused no casualties, so that when the German artillery joined in in the afternoon, the legionnaires hardly bothered to take shelter, an indication that German airpower was not a decisive element in the 1940 campaign. By June 8, Francois's legionnaires definitely had the impression that they were being surrounded and cut off and soon received an order to retire. The legionnaires of the 12th joined a general flow of refugees and soldiers heading south, keeping whenever possible to the wood line to avoid enemy aircraft.61 Not all were so lucky. Many were cut off in the Soissons pocket; others like Francois were killed or wounded during the retreat. The armistice found the 12th at Limoges, only three hundred men left of the original two thousand eight hundred who departed La Valbonne a few weeks earlier.

  The 21e RMVE had barely taken up positions on the Maginot Line when the German offensive broke. Shifted north of Verdun at the end of May, the 21st suffered badly from German attacks on the night of June 8—9. Like the rest of the French army, the 21st joined the general retreat. Those left when the armistice was signed on June 22 were disarmed in Nancy and dispatched into captivity. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the campaign, however, was the conduct of the 22e RMVE. Shipped out of Barcarès on May 6 for the quiet of the Alsace sector, the volunteers lacked many essential elements of equipment. The seriousness of the German breakthrough caused them to be taken by train, army truck, and finally a six-day march to take up positions at the village of Marchélepot on the Somme. The unit fought a number of costly actions between May 22 and 26 before it was withdrawn. On June 5 as it prepared to attack Villers-Carbonnel near Marchélepot, the 22nd together with the 112th Infantry Regiment was hit by a massive German preemptive strike that included artillery, aircraft and tanks. Although the casualties were high, the attack was repulsed. While the claim that they were outgunned by the Germans became something of an alibi for the French high command, and one that historians have subsequently punctured, in the case of the attack upon the 22e RMVE, as elsewhere, the Germans were able to achieve local superiority by concentrating their forces.

  A second attack led by what the regimental commander called “an absolute invasion of tanks like a rising tide” broke upon the defenders, supported by air power and artillery. “The only option was the struggle of an infantry regiment left on its own against an enemy admirably equipped and deploying in every area modern materiel.” The commander noted that, although German artillery and air support were well coordinated with infantry attacks, the enemy consistently deployed and maneuvered in full view of the French lines. The result was that when the French could bring artillery and air support into the battle, they could produce panic among the attackers, as on the afternoon of June 5 when a bombardment of the deploying Germans by 81-millimeter mortars operating at the limit of their range coincided with a bombing run by three French planes, “which spread panic among [the Germans]. This incident raised the morale of the 22nd to the highest point and despite the presence of enemy tanks the men wanted to pursue the fleeing Germans.”62

  By nightfall on June 5, the defensive positions of the 22nd were still intact and morale was good. However, the first battalion had lost half its strength, half its automatic arms, a section of mortars and two of its antitank guns. The second battalion was reduced to two companies, while the third had also seen its numbers cut in half. Even more serious, the 22nd suffered from a complaint common to all Legion regiments in the heat of the battle in 1940—lack of munitions. Daylight on June 6 revealed fresh German preparations for an attack, which began at 4 A.M. with artillery bombardments. German infantry assaults supported by tanks were repulsed, so that the task of breaking the position was given over to the artillery and the Luftwaffe, “work which they carried out conscientiously,” Hermann remarked bitterly. Finally, around six o'clock, the Germans turned the 22nd's position to the west: “We had nothing to stop such a manoeuvre. We would have needed field artillery. . . . We were reduced, due to lack of means, to allow the Germans to come within the range of our arms before we could fire and slow his advance and inflict losses.”

  At eight o'clock, the Germans opened a general attack along the front of the 22nd. A combination of skillful German infiltration tactics through the woods and the lack of munitions caused the 22nd to withdraw gradually around the village of Marchélepot. “The audacity of the Germans grew as our volume of fire diminished,” Hermann recorded. “They profited to infiltrate everywhere and by 11 o'clock all the liaisons [between companies] were cut in the regiment.” The regiment was reduced to eight light and two heavy machine guns, one 81-millimeter mortar and nine 25-millimeter antitank guns, which at least imposed prudence upon the panzers. At midday, the Germans sent in a French lieutenant who had been captured early in the morning when he attempted to make contact with division headquarters to tell them of the lack of munitions. Obviously, the message had not been received, for the car in which he had been traveling had been ambushed and he made a prisoner. Either the 22nd surrender, Hermann was informed by his subordinate, or three hundred prisoners would be shot. Hermann refused, but he had few illusions: cut off, virtually out of ammunition, he had no radio contact with his division or liaison with the units on his flanks. “It remained to us only to make the enemy pay dearly for his conquest.”

  That was difficult to do, for as the Germans threw themselves into the French lines or into the houses occupied by the 22nd, they confronted men who had shot their last cartridge and thrown their last grenade. The chaplain looked to the fifty
wounded gathered in the cellar of the chateau of Fresnes-Mazancourt where Hermann had set up the regimental command post. German artillery continued to sprinkle the French position, and as the Germans advanced cautiously to occupy the positions of the second battalion, which had completely spent its munitions, their commander could hardly believe that so few men had held his units in check. Although Hermann claimed that 150 German tanks massed to his front, they were reluctant to advance into the village because of the French antitank guns and the presence of the Spaniards, “not ignoring the number of the regiment which held Marchélepot.”

  The afternoon was spent in a house-to-house battle: “This was a street battle around the command post, from the church and toward its north entrance it was defended by real demons who standing on the barricades threw their grenades until they were killed by enemy fire,” Hermann wrote. “The copse destroyed by [artillery] shells, the survivors sought refuge in the command post followed by groups of the enemy. The fight continued in the courtyard of the farm behind fallen walls. There were few munitions. The end was near. Despite the grenades, the Germans penetrated into the streets and the gardens, the straw of the barns and the trucks were on fire. At 4:40 the ground floor of the command post was invaded. Resistance ended there. Several legionnaires who had kept their last bullet committed suicide rather than fall into the hands of the Germans.” The 2nd Battalion continued to fight for another two hours, before they exhausted completely their munitions and surrendered. The Germans complimented Hermann on the performance of his regiment.63 Some of the captured volunteers of German extraction were shot out of hand by their captors. It was also charged by survivors that the continued solidarity of the Spanish POWs in German captivity caused most of them to be sent to concentration camps, where they perished. Over four hundred individual citations were awarded, and the 22nd was cited in army orders and awarded the croix de guerre with palm. That was a regiment that understood how to faire Camerone! On September 20, 1985, the croix de guerre of the 22e RMVE was included among the battle streamers that decorated the flag of the 2e étranger.

  The point of this brief combat sketch is to allow one to draw the conclusion that, with the possible exception of the 23e RMVE, the conduct of the Legion and the RMVE in the battle for France in 1940 ran from very credible to spectacular. What the regiments lacked in military skill they made up in courage and tenacity, and this despite the fact that most had been hastily cobbled together from very heterogeneous elements, poorly armed and given almost no air, artillery or tank support. French logistics badly failed them, and all of the regiments complained of lack of munitions, as well as an absence of adequate armament, especially of antitank weapons. Sergeant Francois praised the courage of the legionnaires of the 12e étranger: “With equal arms, we were easily worth our adversaries,” he wrote,

  . . . who did not show more audacity nor more decisiveness than we. And that is magnificent when one realizes that the military training of most of us was abbreviated, that most of the cadres coming from the reserves possessed only one thing, important certainly but insufficient in itself, “good will.” And, last, do not forget that these soldiers which we fought were used to all the difficulties of combat. And despite this the 12e REI fought from the Aisne until the last day of the campaign for France, reforming constantly and facing each day an enemy which certainly dominated us materially but never morally.64

  Similar praise was lavished on the 22e RMVE from its commander, languishing in a German prisoner-of-war camp: “The short existence of the 22e RMVE ended on the Somme, barely eight months after its formation,” Major Hermann concluded in the epitaph for his regiment.

  At least we had the satisfaction of seeing confirmed in the last days of combat that it was worthy of its forebears because even its adversaries rendered homage to its valiance. If it had not found itself disarmed before the enemy, exhausted, it would have taken its place in a short time among the elite regiments.65

  The obvious question, however, is how much did this performance owe to the “traditions” of the Legion, to notions of upholding the honor of the regiment, to the detachment and expertise of professional cadres? According to Manue, the comradeship and regimental pride of the 11th more than made up for its lack of expertise in fighting a modern war. The same does not appear to apply to the other foreign formations other than the small GDR 97. As in 1914–15, for France to have ordered these volunteers into Legion regiments or at the very least regiments with Legion associations appears to have been counterproductive. The obvious conclusion to draw is that the élan of these regiments of foreign volunteers was the product of the anti-Nazi sentiments of many of the men, and the previous military service and cohesion especially, but not exclusively, of the Spaniards. Afteraction reports for the 12e étranger concluded that “The Polish Jews, not courageous by nature, did their duty,” while that of the 22e RMVE, which contained about 30 percent “apatrides,” or Jewish residents without French nationality, not to mention foreign Jews, asserted that “The troops fought very well whatever their origins.”66 Perhaps, too, as in the offensives of May–June 1915, the enthusiastic ignorance of men experiencing war for the first time caused them to perform beyond the limits veterans would have believed prudent.

  However, this is not to say that, beyond the 11e étranger or the GRD 97, which, outgunned like the rest of the Legion, finished the war with a most respectable record as part of the 7th North African Infantry Division operating near the World War I battlefields of the Somme, the “Old Legion” made no contribution to this performance. The 12e étranger drew about half of its cadres from the Legion, and the other half from the reserve. Colonel Besson, commander of the 12th, claimed that all of his cadres were excellent, with the exception of the German NCOs, who, “magnificent in training, were mediocre under fire (perhaps afraid of being made prisoner during the retreat).” According to Besson, it was the cadres who held the regiment together: “The soldiers lacked a little cohesion,” he wrote “There were many Polish Jews (around 600) and 900 Spaniards, good but looters. All of this held together thanks to the cadres.”67

  Sergeant Francois confirmed that, cast into this mass of temporary volunteers, veteran legionnaires felt it their duty to set the example during the first bombardments: “We legionnaires coming from Africa had a reputation to uphold and to affirm for our comrades enlisted for the duration of the war, who watched us and who were often only as good as the example set by those whom they took to be the tough chaps,” he wrote. “So we could not stop ourselves from swaggering a little and to comment a trifle too severely upon that which among young legionnaires could give rise to remarks.”68 Yet the contribution of Legion cadres could not be the entire story, for the three RMVE had very few Legion cadres. Captain de Franclieu, who commanded the Third Battalion of the 22e RMVE, described his staff as “cadres de circonstances” taken from everywhere, but who nevertheless performed well.69

  How far were the men permeated with the consciousness of being legionnaires, of having the traditions and honor of the regiment to uphold? This is impossible to say. As has been seen, many were reluctant legionnaires. The fact that a majority of the volunteers for the duration belonged to one of two large blocks—Jews or Spaniards—each of which maintained its own autonomous attitudes and esprit, made it difficult to create a regimental spirit. Nor did most have access to the temples of indoctrination in North Africa, or the time to imbibe the regimental traditions of the Legion. Nevertheless, it would have been difficult to remain indifferent to the fact that they were considered legionnaires. Some, like the Czech Charles Hora, assigned to the 11e étranger, were so taken by the life that they made it a career. Sergeant Francois noted that as the 12e étranger moved to the front in May, they were greeted enthusiastically by the population once it realized who they were. “Going through the hamlets and villages, all the inhabitants ran to their doors, distributing drink and food to those who passed,” he wrote.

  In return, we give them hope, a bewildering mome
nt at the sight of all this poor humanity fleeing in all directions, a vision aggravated by the pessimistic statement of soldiers returning from battle. THE LEGION. Does not this name sum up all the military virtues? Is not its past a guarantee for the present, for all these people, who perhaps would be afraid to billet us, but who are ready to give us credit for all the most terrifying wartime actions invented but plausible, because it's a question of the Legion, and that gave them cause for hope? To hope that the invasion would not reach them, that the enemy will stop there where we will be.70

  But it is impossible to know how far this spirit percolated through to the ranks.

  Along with these positive causes for motivation, one might include a negative one—that of executing legionnaires who defaulted in battle. It remains to future historians with access to Legion justice records to discover if Legion courts-martial were trigger-happy. However, Manue speaks of two legionnaires executed for desertion in his regiment just hours before the armistice:

  For an instant I thought, “What's the use now?” The voice of a humane leader replied: “You speak of justice! And the 500 killed and wounded yesterday, what do you think of that? Dead in the line of duty and these left alive?” He was right. [In] The other war, we shot each time that Salvation required it.71

  Favrel also claimed that he was tasked with leading two legionnaires convicted of desertion after a summary court-martial, but who claimed simply to have crawled into a house to catch some sleep, to their executions in Norway.72 If these four executions took place, that makes exactly three more executions in the Legion in 1940 than occurred in the entire U.S. Army in World War II. Perhaps this helps to explain the contention of Lieutenant de la Rocque of the 12e étranger that his legionnaires did not fall to pillaging during the retreat in 1940 as did much of the rest of the French army, whose discipline often collapsed.73 What is certain is that the foreign units that fought for France in 1940, though for the most part far removed in both structure and motivation from the “Old Legion” as Rollet had conceived it, were equal to its most impressive faits d'armes.