Last, in the battle of “myths,” uncharacteristically perhaps, the Legion enjoyed less than complete success. Already the high command had protested the battle order issued by the 1e DMI in which it lay claim to having thwarted the German attack upon the Colmar pocket in January 1945 almost singlehandedly. This was seen as a transparent ploy by the Gaullists to seize the public relations high ground from their rivals in the Armée d'Afrique. But these campaigns of self-advertisement paled beside the enormous prestige of the 2e Division blindée, which fought in the much more prestigious Normandy invasion behind the legendary General Philippe Leclerc de Hautecloque, a “Gaullist of the First Hour” who had marched his troops from Chad to Libya across the Sahara to strike a blow against the Axis. Then there were the forces françaises de l'intérieur (FFI), the Resistance, whose legend of heroic sacrifice was being constructed even before the liberation, encouraged both by the Communists and the Gaullists, and fed by the need for the restoration of French self-esteem. Faced with this stiff competition, the 13e DBLE finished an interesting but poor third in the battle to win public recognition as the primary heroes of the French liberation.
Not surprisingly, the great fatigue of the Legion in 1945, the dearth of recruits and the seeming indifference of the population caused some in the Legion to worry about the unit's future, much as Rollet had done in similar circumstances in 1918. “In general, the Foreign Legion is not well known, and conditions do not favor the massive enlistments required by her in wartime,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Gaultier of the RMLE in March 1945. This is difficult to credit, however, given the massive publicity showered upon the Legion in the 1930s. The more logical explanation is that the Legion mystique had been dwarfed, marginalized and made unfashionable by the immensity of the war. The ministry consoled Gaultier that the war would soon be over and that the Legion could recruit in Germany,63 a prospect that must have filled many traditional Legion officers with joyful expectation.
Clearly, while the Legion had fought bravely in World War II as in the earlier conflict, and while it could even claim a share in the redemption of French honor out of proportion to its actual numbers, large, world-scale conflicts were not its preferred milieu. The mobilization or occupation of many nations caused it to suffer a dearth of recruits, and forced it to absorb resentful refugees who slotted uncomfortably into the regimental ambience. One might also argue that the mechanized character of World War II caused the Legion problems that it never completely resolved—those of training a polyglot soldiery in forms of warfare more complex than the imperial conflicts the Legion had fought hitherto. The traditional courage and drive of the Legion often was not matched by an expertise in modern forms of warfare. In part, this was the product of a unit operating with a system, and with support services, that were not its own. But it is difficult to escape the feeling that the Legion was not altogether comfortable in the professional conditions of La Grande Guerre, that its reputation and its image were better fulfilled in marginal conflicts in distant lands, wars that allowed more scope for the Legion's special brand of theatrics—trials of endurance and glorious last stands amidst remote and exotic landscapes.
Happily for the Legion, as peace settled over the wreckage of Europe, it appeared as if these conditions were about to be fulfilled once again. By 1946, the Germans were coming back and the Legion was headed for Indochina, where the enemy had neither panzers nor Luftwaffe. It was going to be almost like old times.
Chapter 24
“MASTERS OF THE BATTLEFIELD” — THE LEGION IN INDOCHINA
Prelude to War
After a month spent in the cramped, stinking hold of the Pasteur, the sight of Cap Saint Jacques in the summer of 1952 should have come as a great relief to the nine hundred legionnaires, North Africans and Senegalese who milled on the decks amidst a chaos of kit bags as they prepared to transfer to a liberty ship that would take them up the Saigon River. But this foreland of Asia, which pushed its dark green jungle into a sea as gray as the sky that lowered above it, appeared even from this distance alien and unwelcoming. Nor were spirits lifted during the eight-hour ride upriver to Saigon. The ship steamed slowly against the muddy current, through dreary marshlands that stretched off both bows as far as the eye could see. The impression of desolation was heightened by the carcasses of ships, sunk by the Japanese in 1945, that rusted against the banks. The threat of Viet Minh snipers, or a heavy downpour that blurred swamp and channel into an indistinguishable gray shadow, forced the already bad-tempered soldiers into the stifling heat of the hold, where they passed the last hours of their voyage sweating, swearing and drinking warm beer or wine soured by the heat. Finally, isolated houses began to appear, which soon became numerous enough to qualify as suburbs. The ship nosed between the rotting jetties and half-submerged hulks to the quayside. The legionnaires stood to attention on the deck, rainwater dripping from the bills of their kepis and soaked to the skin, as the notes of “Le Boudin” gurgled through the downpour, and an impeccably dressed staff officer delivered a speech of welcome, made unintelligible by the sound system, even had the polyglot draft of replacements for the corps expéditionnaire français en Extrême-Orient been able to understand French.
Saigon, the entrance to the land that was well on its way to becoming a graveyard for two modern Western armies, combined the normal frenetic pace of an oriental city with a fin du monde atmosphere. The wide, tree-lined boulevards were filled with a torrent of taxis, jeeps, army trucks, bicycles, pedestrians and pousse-pousses—pedaled or motorized rickshaws—whose drivers appeared intent upon committing either murder or suicide. Interspersed among the handsome administrative buildings were restaurants and cafes bursting with soldiers. The bar and roof garden of the Hotel Continental were the most fashionable and most popular of these spots. Here senior officers and functionaries, businessmen and journalists arranged transfers of piastres to Paris at lucrative rates of exchange, traded gossip or espionage, or basked in the company of delicious Chinese and Vietnamese “taxi girls,” the side vents of whose slim dresses of bright blue, yellow or red silk reached to about mid-thigh. No one appeared to notice the distant rumble of artillery that announced that, just beyond the comfortable villas smothered in bougainvillea, a war of almost unimaginable savagery was being fought.
Soldiers in search of female company could always resort to the Buffalo Park, an army bordello whose two hundred females exhibited such predatory ferocity in the competition to drag the clients into one of the small cubicles that lined the large hall that only courageous, mad or uninformed males dared to enter. Those soldiers who preferred a leisurely selection of their companions, or who looked to have their libido rather than their survival instincts stimulated, took themselves to Cholon, a labyrinth of cooking stalls, bars, brothels, dance halls, shops and opium dens just across the river from Saigon. However, it was not considered safe to go there alone, especially after dark.
By 1952, even the dullest legionnaire was coming to realize that the Indochinese War was not going well for the French. In fact, the whole affair had rather got off on the wrong foot, although in 1946 when the war broke out there were few in the French ranks who had predicted defeat, much less disaster. The signs of imperial erosion had been evident, however, for by the interwar years this Pearl of the Orient, this jewel in the French imperial crown had already begun to demonstrate the centrifugal tendencies that were to cast it into bloody conflict. This had not prevented Indochina from remaining the Legion's preferred garrison, a prize held out to men of long service and good conduct. Life there was a tangible mirage of higher pay, comfort and facile women. After decades of tramping the jungle highlands of Tonkin, the Legion had gradually been regrouped near Tonkin's Red River delta in barracks considered sumptuous by North African standards. The barracks at Vietri, sixty miles northwest of Hanoi, which became the headquarters of the 5e étranger when it was formed in 1930, looked more like a holiday resort than a garrison. From the large windows of the three-story barracks built in an airy
colonial style, legionnaires could look out over well-tended gardens across the large lake formed by the confluence of the Red and Clear rivers to the mountains beyond. The garrison at Tong, about thirty miles from Hanoi, had a slightly more martial appearance, if only because it lay next to a training camp. However, the arcaded verandas of the two barrack buildings that faced each other across well-tended lawns telegraphed the distinct impression of a corps that had increasingly devoted itself to its own well-being.
And that well-being was immense. The higher cost of living in Tonkin, double that of North Africa, was more than compensated for by higher pay. Junior lieutenants, who could barely make ends meet in France, were able to keep at least three servants in Tonkin. This privilege was even extended to legionnaires, whose pay of twelve francs twenty-five centimes a day for those with only three years’ service in 1937 was almost six times that received in North Africa. And most legionnaires in Tonkin counted over ten years’ service and therefor were paid considerably more. Naturally, such wealth freed them from the fatigue duties that so reduced leisure time at Sidi-bel-Abbès—when one Legion lieutenant freshly arrived from North Africa in 1932 ordered his men down to the washhouse to clean their uniforms, he provoked gales of laughter, for in Indochina such work was done by “boys.” “Boys” also did the cooking, polished boots and belts, and kept the barracks tidy for a monthly stipend that varied from twenty francs for menial duties to a top pay of two hundred francs for a really experienced bep or cook. So, apart from the eleven-mile march required every fifteen days, and annual maneuvers that took place in December during the belle saison in Tonkin, when the temperature dropped all of two degrees, there was little in the way of duties to keep the men occupied, and even those were curtailed in the monsoonal summer heat. Apart from tennis, played exclusively by officers; some hunting, which was also reserved for rank; and fishing for the men, even sports were practiced with restrained enthusiasm, in part because of the climate, but basically one suspects because legionnaires had lost their competitive edge in this atmosphere of la dolce vita.
This must not be taken to mean that legionnaires found nothing to occupy their time—quite the contrary. Officially, Thursday afternoons, Sundays and evenings were free. For fully half of the legionnaires in this period, these moments, as well as any others away from duties, were spent with their congaïs. For the modest sum of between twenty and forty piastres—two hundred to four hundred francs—a month, the co would accept the legionnaire as a temporary husband, provide him with a cainha or house, one meal a day, a few cigarettes and choum (rice alcohol), and wash his clothes. Competition was keen among legionnaires to have the most attractive co, to show her off at the cinema, or to invite other legionnaires “home” for an evening of cards. The sight of a legionnaire taking a Sunday turn in a pousse-pousse, his co beside him and their child balanced on his knee, was a common one. Even when legionnaires were sent to worksites elsewhere, they were inevitably accompanied by their cos. Quite naturally, this pervasive domesticity came as a shock to officers fresh from Morocco or Syria, where tough conditions, the absence of women, and frequent operations required a taut military posture. Those who attempted to react against this, however, got nowhere. Most sought consolation in the fact that if the Legion in Indochina did not exactly tremble with military readiness, at least it avoided the worst excesses of Legion behavior elsewhere. The embourgeoisement of the legionnaire translated into relative sobriety and fewer punishments, for a prolonged sentence to the cells led to a suspension of pay, which meant inevitably that the co was obliged to find another legionnaire to support her. The disciplinary section spéciale contained only twenty inmates in 1931, and desertions were infinitesimal in Tonkin fn the interwar years. This was in part a reflection of the fact that legionnaires were sent to Tonkin as a reward for a good disciplinary record.1 However, cognoscenti might be forgiven for worrying that legionnaires who had ceased to drink, fight and take up the challenges of desertion had stepped across the threshold of premature senility.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, this domesticated garrison force was ill prepared to confront the turmoil that erupted in Tonkin and northern Annam in 1930–31, the first in a series of events that were to lead to the large conflict of 1946. Rising resentment against heavyhanded methods of French imperial administration erupted on the night of February 9–10, 1930, when a group of nationalists with the connivance of some tirailleurs tonkinois in the garrison of Yen Bai led an insurrection. Although this revolt was quickly put down, it began several long months of agitation, which included a Communist-led revolt in the Nghe An province of northern Annam, mostly of peasants, known as the Nghe Tinh soviet movement. The Legion participated in the police actions carried out with great severity against what the French were already calling, not without justification, the “Red Terror.” On September 12, 1930, planes were called in to bomb a group of twenty thousand peasants who were marching upon Vinh, the capital of Nghe An province. Unrest was not ended, however, and continued until November 1931. A May 1931 report from the 3rd (operations) bureau of the troupes d'Indochine reminded local commanders that soldiers were not allowed to take food from civilians without paying, install themselves at villagers’ expense or force them to perform unpaid labor. Above all, it complained of summary executions of “leaders” and of an apparently widespread belief that such acts carried out in full view of the villagers “produce an effect very favorable to our cause upon the population.”2
While this report was not directed at the Legion specifically, that corps was staking out a reputation as one of the most uncompromising in dealing with often cruel and bloodthirsty rebels. On October 5, 1930, the siege of a native police post was lifted by a Legion company that killed around one hundred rioters. Another company of legionnaires operating near Vinh left thirty-three attackers dead and took fifty-one prisoners on December 12. Other bands were summarily dispersed by Legion patrols in actions that earned the “Ordre du Dragon d'Annam” for the standard of the 3rd battalion of the newly created 5e étranger, and over one hundred individual citations for its officers and men. As a consequence, a sullen and hostile crowd gathered for the parade to celebrate the centenary of the Legion on March 9, 1931, at Vinh—as the battalion marched past, agitators shouted offers of one thousand piastres for the head of the battalion commander and threw tracts into the ranks of the legionnaires. One witness described what happened next:
Furious, Major Lambert ordered a platoon with bayonets fixed to charge the Annamites massed there. The legionnaires, hitting out at random, grabbed six Annamites and, immediately lining them up near the bridge in front of the Residency, shot them. Two of these unfortunates managed to jump into the water. They were followed by shots and killed in the water.3
With tensions running so high, only the merest spark was required to produce an even larger conflagration. That spark was struck on May 27, 1931, when twenty-six-year-old Legion Sergeant Perrier, cycling along a road in the Vinh region and unarmed, attempted to intervene to prevent a Communist-led crowd from decapitating a village chief and his elders. Perrier was immediately set upon, cords tied to each wrist, and two groups of agitators pulled in opposite directions until his arms were torn from their sockets. After suitable mutilations, which included sticking bamboo stakes into his eyes, his lifeless body was pitched into a rich paddy. The reaction of Perrier's comrades upon the discovery of his body was fairly predictable. At the Legion post of Nam Dan, a number of prisoners were taken out of the jail and shot. In the subsequent trial of five of these legionnaires, the defense argued that the accused were merely following orders. “To avoid overcrowding, one killed prisoners every evening, even innocents,” including coolies who supplied the post and who were imprudent enough to request payment. “That was done in all the posts,” including by officers who “amused themselves by cutting off heads, even with a small regulation knife.” Furthermore, the legionnaires had come from Morocco, where “all the dissidents are executed. One led the legionnaires ar
riving here to believe that it was the same in Annam.” After a moving appeal by a Catholic missionary, Father Gauthier, who told the court that “Our legionnaires ... have done good work, patriotic work, French work, and restored peace in the country,” the legionnaires were acquitted.4
Estimates place the number of dead in the repression of the rebellions of 1930–31 at around two thousand, with up to four thousand political activists arrested. The first conclusion many Vietnamese patriots drew from the repression of the “Red Terror” of 1930–31 was that no compromise was possible with the French, and that revolution was the only course open to them. The Nationalist Party (VNQDD), which had masterminded the Yen Bai revolt and which was an important rival of the Vietnamese Communists, was destroyed as an effective force by French repression. The Communists, too, suffered greatly. But enough of them remained abroad, including Ho Chi Minh, to live to fight again another day. Above all, they had learned that revolution must be backed by sufficient military force to defend itself. Also, they collected the glory for opposing the French, which helped to give them the leadership of the nationalist movement by 1945.5
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