French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  Unfortunately, the euphoria did not last. In the autumn of 1942, British General Bernard Montgomery prepared to throw Rommel into retreat. Reequipped by the British, with strength up to 1,274 men organized into two battalions, the Legion's role was to carry out a diversionary night attack upon Axis positions at El Himeimat—a strongly fortified ridge about 1,300 feet high that overlooked the sandy depression of Quattara and anchored the extremity of Rommel's defensive lines running south from the sea at El Alamein. Several factors would make the attack a difficult one: El Himeimat was held by four hundred Italian paratroopers backed by artillery, and covered by deep minefields. Furthermore, the French lacked up-to-date intelligence on the defenses. Last, the attack had to be carried out across an open plain swept by enemy fire.

  While Montgomery's plan worked, the Legion's part in it was a shambles. Problems began almost as soon as the 13th crossed the starting line at seven-fifteen on the evening of October 23. Like many night attacks, this one became difficult to control, especially after the command radio net went out. Tanks and vehicles stalled in the deep sand. Just when the engineers had cleared a path through the minefields, the enemy artillery opened up. With their radios dead, the forward observers could call up no artillery support of their own. The half-tracks began to set off the mines, while a group of German panzers intervened against the flanks, all of which caused the commander of the first battalion, Major Paris de Bollardière, to abandon his attack. Without radio contact, however, he was unable to inform Lieutenant Colonel Amilakvari, who continued to push the second battalion forward into heavy fire.

  To complicate their problems, German armored elements counterattacked as dawn broke. The French artillery fired badly and the Luftwaffe appeared in force, which forced the second battalion to withdraw to a small hill and establish a defensive position that was pounded heavily by the Germans. At nine o'clock on the morning of October 24, Koenig ordered a withdrawal. As the Legion retreated, a fragment of shell from a German 105-millimeter cannon caught Amilakvari in the head, killing him. By three o'clock in the afternoon, the 13th, or what was left of it, was back at its starting line.

  The British were extremely critical of this Legion performance. In their view, the casualty figures of eleven killed, sixty-nine wounded and 10 missing for two battalions were too light to have merited a withdrawal. French General Edgard de Larminat defended his troops with a hot attack on British “bad faith,” demonstrating the ticklish nature of the relations between the two allies. The British liaison officer with the French offered a more dispassionate explanation for the failure of the operation, blaming it essentially on the lack of artillery support and poor coordination caused in part by lack of radio communication. However, the French obviously had a case of bad conscience, for Koenig relieved de Bollardière.

  El Himeimat was an unfortunate incident above all because it placed the 13th under something of a cloud for the remainder of the North Africa campaign. The Legion had fought poorly at El Himeimat. In its defense, it can be argued that in a night attack things often appear more confused than they actually are, especially when the radios go dead. The attack was poorly prepared, the terrain unfamiliar and difficult, and the Axis forces offered a very respectable resistance. Be that as it may, Montgomery withdrew the 13th from the front.

  This exposed the fragility of French morale. The awareness that theirs was an enormous gamble whose payoff hinged upon the success of their arms, made them especially sensitive to failure. The death of Amilakvari, the temporary disgrace of de Bollardière, and Montgomery's November 14 decision to withdraw them from the front, threw them into a melancholy mood. What followed was known in regimental history as the “time of forgetfulness,” one of bitterness and lassitude, of dreary bivouacs and depleted reserves. In May 1943 they were permitted to participate in the last stages of Rommel's retreat in Tunisia at Djebel Garci. But with North Africa now in the Allied Camp, the Legion could at last recover unity. Not everyone in the 13e DBLE regarded that as a happy outcome: “Our role is finished,” declared de Sairigné. “We return to the ranks where fantasy will be less tolerated and where one must put up with weaklings and imbeciles.”46

  But the divisions in the Legion could not be forgotten in the euphoria of a victory parade, any more than could those between de Gaulle and his detractors in North Africa, whose quarrels were mirrored in the Legion—in the Tunis celebration to mark the defeat of the Axis in North Africa, held on May 20, 1943, de Gaulle's Free French forces marched with the British Eighth Army because the French 19th Army Corps, loyal to de Gaulle's rival General Henri Giraud, refused to accept them, and vice versa. If marriage there was to be between Gaullist and anti-Gaullist factions of the Legion, it would be at the business end of a shotgun. The remainder of the war for the 13th might be summed up as follows: The 13th and the Legion fought until the downfall of Hitler, sometimes on the same side. To understand why the divisions were so bitter, perhaps one should return to the Legion in North Africa to discover how they had fared since 1940.

  Chapter 23

  A FRAGILE UNITY

  The “Vichy” Legion

  The defeat of France in 1940 and the restriction by the Germans of the French army to one hundred men brought to the Legion the inevitable problems of demobilization. And none was to prove more difficult to resolve than the status of those foreigners who had volunteered to serve for the duration of the war, either as legionnaires or in the RMVE. In this respect, Vichy did not mark a radical departure from the policies toward refugees of the Third republic, but a continuation and intensification of those policies. However, in the aftermath of a defeat whose roots seemed too deep to be attributed to mere military mistakes or incompetence, refugees, and especially Jewish refugees, became associated in the minds of the Vichy elite with the now-intensified problems of unemployment and the “purity” of French culture. Furthermore, their presence was an embarrassment to Vichy officials eager to prove their neutrality to their German captors. Therefore, the volunteers for the duration were demobilized, and in the process stripped of the military status that might have protected them from German reprisals. Some were simply returned to the streets, where they confronted the same problems that had bedeviled many of them before 1939—lack of working papers or a residence permit, which some Vichy prefects refused to deliver despite previous military service. Therefore, Vichy fell back on the old policy of internment.

  A law of September 27, 1940, reinforced on November 28, 1941, required all those considered “superfluous to the national economy” or without evident means of support to be interned. Therefore, some volunteers never tasted the delights, however brief, of freedom following the armistice, but were simply told that they were demobilized but interned. Labor camps, known as groupements de travailleurs étrangers or GTE, were created in the “free” or southern zone of France not occupied by the Germans, for men between eighteen and fifty-five who had arrived in France after January 1, 1936.1 Many did so voluntarily, including ex-volunteers for the duration, to obey the law, to avoid starvation or escape internment camps, because the promises of work and steady pay were attractive, or because the alternative was to go underground. These camps often became the first stage of deportation to Germany, especially for Jews, who began to be separated from other workers in “Palestinian” GTE groups. The massive deportation of these groups to Germany began in August 1942, not, as recent research has shown, because Germany demanded them but because French Prime Minister Pierre Laval saw this as a way to ingratiate himself with Hitler and gain concessions.

  Some ex-volunteers were shipped to GTE camps in North Africa reserved for “undesirables,” where they met volunteers for the duration whom the war had stranded there. These camps had no formal links to the Legion, even if some ex-Legion officers and NCOs served as cadres.2 There were other, less formal links, however, not the least of which were the former legionnaires and volunteers for the duration there, a situation most of them regarded as a betrayal of their support for the
French war effort and their Legion service. The threat of internment was also used freely by Legion commanders as a threat to force legionnaires to reenlist when their terms of service expired. A report of October 21, 1942, claimed that discharged legionnaires were even taking the extreme measure of volunteering for Service de Travail Obligatoire (STO), forced labor service in Germany, because their Legion commanders refused to give them the necessary support for residence papers and they feared the North African labor camps.3

  Even the Legion intelligence service, the BSLE, recognized the moral dilemma these camps posed for the Legion, at least in part, when it protested the treatment of ex-legionnaires in a report of August 28, 1941. In the category of “undesirables” consigned to the camps were included legionnaires whose contracts had been annulled because of disciplinary infractions, legionnaires or volunteers for the duration “judged undesirable from a national point of view,” Jewish legionnaires or volunteers for the duration, and German and Italian legionnaires who had asked for repatriation to their countries. There was a “grave malaise” in these camps because they were staffed by old NCOs who could find no other employment and whose pay was insufficient when it arrived at all. As for the inmates, whose nominal salary was fifty centimes (about two cents) a day, they often received no pay for up to three months at a time. The BSLE believed that the Legion had obligations toward some of those men, especially those who could not go home.4 Last, it does appear as if the Legion were at least involved in running one of these groups, designated as the compagnie de discipline des travailleurs, reserved for deserters and troublemakers from the other camps. Not surprisingly perhaps, Spanish republicans were prominent among them. This was run along the lines of the famous discipline of the Legion at Colomb-Béchar, complete with Legion NCOs. Beatings, brutal punishments and virtual starvation were said by several witnesses to be routine.5

  Conditions in the camps, especially those in the Sahara, created to revive the long held but elusive dream of a trans-Saharan railroad, could only be described as slave labor. The American consul in Casablanca reported that many of these ex-volunteers were kept there at the insistence of the German Armistice Commission out of fear that, if released, they would join the Allied armies. “A good deal of just indignation has been expressed in North Africa over France's treatment of these men,” he wrote on May 15, 1942.

  Many French military officers of superior rank have expressed their disgust, saying frankly that the maltreatment of these volunteers had been acquiesced in out of sheer servility to the Germans, that by doing so France had stained her honor and built up hatred and vindictiveness against herself in those men's countries, and above all, would hardly be able to obtain either foreign or North African volunteers in any future emergency. They also admit that there will be a heavy reckoning with the North African natives afterwards.

  However, the American envoy to Algiers, Robert Murphy, reported that the Germans merely served the Vichy government as an alibi to pursue a purely French policy of internment.6

  On a few occasions, the Vichy government did intervene in favor of the veterans of 1939–40, as in late 1942 when it pleaded for those released from German POW camps only to be rearrested by German authorities in France, and when it exempted some war veterans from deportation to death camps in Germany after mid-1942.7 But apart from a few high-profile political refugees, the Germans did not seek repatriation of Jews and other undesirables, but were content to allow Vichy to support German interests by confining them to concentration camps, as she did by defending her colonies against the Allies.

  The Germans were keen, however, to recover their nationals still serving in the Legion, the first installment of a continuing struggle throughout the war to retain legionnaires demanded by the belligerent countries. Article XIX of the Armistice Agreement of 1940 obliged the French to turn over all German nationals on French soil, whom it would designate to German authorities. General Maxime Weygand, the Vichy government's délégué général in North Africa, saw the ensuing “struggle for the preservation of the Foreign Legion” as part of an Axis plan to abolish the Legion, as the Italians also began to reclaim their nationals. The French tactic, Weygand decided, would be to preserve the tradition of asylum while using the German demands to shed undesirable elements. “This would give an appearance of satisfaction [while] the Legion did not suffer too much from this ‘purge/ “ he wrote.8

  As Weygand suggested, the smashing German victories had left many German legionnaires impatiently marooned in North Africa, many of whom “are becoming dangerous by their propaganda, especially those from Morocco,” Legion officers began to report.9 Philip Rosenthal, a German Jewish refugee who had abandoned his Oxford studies to enlist in the Legion to fight Hitler, found that the French collapse had made the Germans in his unit contemptuous of serving in a beaten army and eager to leave.10 In August 1940, around 320 Germans who had been removed from their regular units after having demanded repatriation, mostly to escape punishments, were “in a state of permanent mutiny” at Koléa, the Algerian internment camp where they were awaiting repatriation. Attempts by French officers to address them were drowned out by shouts of “Heil Hitler,” followed by “a torrent of invectives against France, her army and the Legion. . . .”11 On September 26, and October 9, 1940, two installments totalling 996 German legionnaires were collected for repatriation.12 After January 1941, the German-dominated Armistice Commission became more insistent, demanding names of Germans serving in the Legion, which seriously threatened to compromise the Legion tradition of asylum. This caused Weygand to send a group of German legionnaires to Tonkin and therefore out of reach of the Armistice Commission.13 However, under increasing German pressure, the Legion “sanctuary” began to crumble as names were delivered to the Armistice Commission over the protests of General Alphonse Juin, and finally on March 31, 1942, the government ordered that all German legionnaires must be interviewed by the German military delegate even if they were not volunteers for repatriation.14

  No doubt many Germans who wished to remain in the Legion were disguised as Czechs, Poles or Alsatians, although the Armistice Commission was not fooled by this ruse.15 But the pressures soon began to tell—in early 1941, French authorities acting in the best traditions of creative administration invented a loophole that allowed them to give up fifty German legionnaires whom the Reich claimed were deserters, by classifying them as POWs.16 Furthermore, although Legion authorities continued to protest that they only repatriated those Germans who requested it,17 clearly French weakness and administrative concessions on names and interviews caused many German legionnaires to lose faith in these promises. As early as September 1940, the 2e Bureau, French military intelligence, in Morocco noted that German legionnaires were asking to be returned to Germany often to avoid punishment, but also because they believed their status insecure under the armistice.18 A year later, the BSLE reported that “The German legionnaires are fed up with signing declarations right and left and so many loyal legionnaires have declared, They'll finish by getting us too.’ ” Seventy-six legionnaires, including seven NCOs, asked for repatriation, “believing that it is better to volunteer now than to be forced to return later and to be opened to reprisals.”19 Enough German legionnaires were repatriated to allow the formation of the 361st Afrika Regiment, which was used as a labor unit until April 1942, when it was armed and its designation changed to the 361st Infantry Regiment. It fought with the Afrika Korps in the vicinity of Bir Hacheim in 1942.20 Most of these men must have been legionnaires of fairly ancient vintage, as those Germans coming into the Legion after 1934 were increasingly Jews and other political refugees who would not have risked repatriation. The departure of these Germans from the Legion would indicate that the Legion traditions accentuated by Rollet in the interwar years exercised little profound influence upon these men. By serving the Afrika Korps, Goebbels declared, these German legionnaires could earn rehabilitation, which after undergoing rehabilitation in the Legion must have made them the w
orld's most rehabilitated soldiers.

  The atmosphere in the Legion in North Africa appears to have been profoundly depressing to many legionnaires. Despite claims by the BSLE in September 1941 that legionnaires in North Africa were immensely proud of the heroic resistance of the 6e étranger in Syria,21 it could escape the attention of no one that the Legion had been left to molder on the sidelines of the greatest conflict in world history. Enlistments had declined from 5,549 in 1940 to 2,381 by 1942, and Legion strength plummeted from a 1940 high of perhaps almost 50,000 men to 18,000, excluding of course the 13e DBLE. General Juin, contemplating these large deficits, was forced to consider the abolition of some Legion units like the 4e étranger and the reduction of others to skeletal forces,22 and this at a time when the army in North Africa as a whole was having no trouble filling vacancies with men eager to flee the dreary existence of occupied France.23 Furthermore, most of those volunteering for the Legion were Frenchmen, generally a poor recruitment source but especially so as the BSLE estimated in 1941 that fully half of them had prison records, while almost all had been excluded from enlisting in other French corps.24