As in both world wars, Indochina demonstrated the difficulty of sustaining Legion quality and numbers during a prolonged conflict. Legion number peaked in 1953 at 36,312,18 which rivaled its strength in 1939–40, although some of these were Vietnamese being trained for their own army. In a way it gained an advantage in this period from the dissolution of the German army, which eliminated competition for recruits in that country, despite a campaign by the German Social Democratic Party against the Legion's recruitment of Germans that began in 1949. Yet it did not organize itself to take as full an advantage of these numbers as it might have done. The Legion could have increased its efficiency had it run fewer units at full strength, and trained its soldiers longer, and if possible in Indochina, before sending them into combat.
Many of these solutions may have been out of its hands. But it seems to suggest that the Legion was ideal for short, sharp conflicts that did not place too much strain on its manpower, “come as you are” operations of the sort it fought before 1914, or as after reorganization in 1915 as the RMLE or in Morocco in the interwar years, drawing a relatively small amount of fighting strength from a fairly large manpower pool. Forcing it to place too many men in the field invariably led to problems of staffing, training and replacements, which compromised efficiency to a greater or lesser extent depending upon the unit. The superior performance of the BEPs and the groupes mobiles was bought at the expense of line infantry units. Poor training and low numbers increasingly told as the Viet Minh regular battalions grew stronger. The Legion fought less well because they were tired, because they usually did not have enough men to engage and maneuver against the enemy, and because they invariably could not take all of their heavy weapons on an operation due to lack of strength or a lack of specialists to operate them.
The Legion was also hurt by the gradual erosion of the French imperial military system, and its final collapse at Dien Bien Phu. One of the cornerstones of this system had been a faith in the value of the heterogeneity of its troops, a division of labor among them according to the racial characteristics and combat qualities ascribed to each type of unit. As has been seen, this had already been called into question in the interwar years, when the absence of Frenchmen had led to the creation of the REC and eventually even of Legion artillery batteries, over the protests of some like Rollet and Lyautey. Likewise, the creation of the BEP caused some to resurrect the old arguments about legionnaires being fit only for heavy infantry.
But the steady deterioration of many of the imperial formations imposed extra combat burdens, and required a variety of missions from the Legion such as pacification or the training of Vietnamese troops. As in Mexico, discipline in sedentary Legion units began to fray around the edges when they were scattered in isolated posts, often under the command of young and inexperienced NCOs. The Legion was special, its officers repeated ad nauseam. Its personality, its character, its traditions required that legionnaires become paratroopers, fight in groupes mobiles or mobile infantry formations, even hold doomed fortresses like Dien Bien Phu. “The majority [of Legion officers] believe that the pressing interest of France is in Africa,” the 13e DBLE declared in the aftermath of Dien Bien Phu. “But also everyone would like to find elsewhere missions more in keeping with the nature of a troop like the Foreign Legion.”19 In Algeria, the Legion would be able to return to its “traditions.”
Chapter 27
“PRIESTS OF A DEAD GOD” — THE WAR IN ALGERIA, 1954 – 1956
THE LEGION RETURNED from Indochina to an Algeria already in rebellion in a somber mood. The shock of the humiliation and loss of face at Dien Bien Phu had already begun to create great holes in the regimental memory banks even before the terrible year of 1954 was out. The cease-fire had precipitated a morale crisis, the 13e DBLE reported in December 1954: ‘They have suffered the humiliation of giving way before an adversary who could never, to tell the truth, break them,” its colonel wrote. “For the anciens, it was the requirement to treat on an equal footing an adversary who they always dominated, which brought on the crisis.”1
As thirty-two-year-old Captain Hélie de Saint Marc of the 1er BEP, a veteran of the French Resistance and Buchenwald as well as three tours in Indochina, watched the Viet Minh troops clad in their loose black uniforms and sun helmets march over the Doumer Bridge to a rapturously contrived popular welcome in Hanoi, he thought to himself that it would be nice to be on the winning side for once.2 Janos Kemencei was made to sign a declaration of thanks to Ho Chi Minh for his humane treatment, given a new shirt, trousers and a belt, and on August 27, 1954, handed over to French sailors who took him down the Red River to Hanoi, one of the eleven thousand POWs released by the Viet Minh. Although all were suffering desperately from malnutrition and various tropical diseases, they were the lucky ones—twenty-six thousand POWs had died in communist care. Planes of the SDECE, the French secret service, repatriated them quietly to Algeria via France, to avoid publicity. Upon arrival, Kemencei discovered that the food allowance of the POWs had been deducted from their back pay upon the infallible bureaucratic logic that they had been fed by the Viet Minh during captivity and therefore were not entitled to it.3
For men who were frustrated and bitter in 1954, memories, even the most recent ones, tended to be selective. The years of fighting in Indochina had been heavy with personal dramas and sacrifices, leaden with the remembrance of dead comrades whose graves were already disappearing beneath the tropical vegetation, troubled by the spectacle of shoals of refugees swimming to French ships departing Haiphong to beg for rescue. Almost unanimously, they transferred this frustration onto their government and their countrymen. Kemencei blamed the Paris “intelligentsia” for having handed to the enemy “the keys of his victory.” Even the colossal military blunders of R.C. 4 and Dien Bien Phu, not to mention the poor logistics, lack of intelligence, lack of an infrastructure, desperate underestimation of the enemy and so many other military failures and shortcomings, could be laid at the feet of the miserable republic, which appointed generals who were “incompetent, unworthy of commanding men who have the misfortune to serve under their orders.”4 Lieutenant Colonel de Boissieu, commanding the 5e étranger, wrote that
A parallel is easily established for those who fought and suffered in this country since 1946, between our loss of prestige in Vietnam and the outbreak of the present rebellions in North Africa. This region in which all have served, where they will continue to serve, and which is the cradle of the Legion, is particularly dear to them. The policies followed disturb them greatly; even the more so as there again, as before in Vietnam, the origin of the directives, the place of indoctrination and the refuge of certain leaders, even treasons, come from the metropole.5
The republic was not blameless—far from it. But for French soldiers who already viewed their profession as a calling, a national priesthood, it was but one easy step to interpret their ordeal in Indochina as a martyrdom imposed by national neglect, indifference and even sedition. “The inconsistency of the IVth Republic, upon whom we had a tendency to blame Dien Bien Phu, led us to believe that the army was the ultimate rampart of the country's honor,” wrote General Jacques Massu, commander of the crack 10th Parachute Division in Algeria.6
The French forces in the colonies in general, and the Legion in particular, was an army increasingly cut off from its political base. Therefore, the Algerian War would begin in an atmosphere of mistrust between a portion of the army and the French IVth Republic, a mistrust that only deepened when the republic placed Tunisia and Morocco on the road to independence in the wake of Dien Bien Phu. Deeply colonialist, profoundly anti-communist, the veterans of Indochina accepted, albeit with bad grace, the release of Algeria's two North African neighbors because these were protectorates. Compromise on the autonomy of Algeria, French since 1834 when a smallpox of enclaves on the North African coast had been declared “Possessions françaises du Nord de l'Afrique” and considered an integral part of metropolital France, was quite impossible.
An
d in no military unit was this uncompromising attitude more developed than in the Legion. While the Legion prided itself upon the professional detachment with which it fought its wars, Algeria offered a conflict to which legionaires were sentimentally bonded from the outset. Why this was so can be traced directly to its “traditions” as embellished by Rollet in the interwar years, when Sidi-bel-Abbès became the bastion of Legion ritual—the quartier Viénot with its vote sacrée and museum, which enclosed the corps’ most sacred relics, sat like some miniature Vatican surrounded by the modest military capital of “Bel-Abbès.” The shadows of thousands of legionnaires who had caroused in its village nègre or listened to the Sunday concerts of the Legion band at the foot of the bandstand on the Place Carnot hovered there, as they did across the hinterland of the Oranais beyond the seat of its retirement home, La Maison du Légionnaire, and its cemetery. This was the Legion's terre d'élection, the epicenter of its geographical and spiritual existence, whose unforgiving landscape and raging sun were the grindstones of the legionnaire's suffering and redemption, without which there could be no Legion. The Legion's myths, its history and the recession of France's imperium after 1954 had carved out of Algeria a psychological world that became at once the Legion's temple and its prison. Algeria and “Bel-Abbès” formed components of the Legion's personality, like Camerone and the képi blanc. These could not be relinquished without enormous anguish and trauma.
Nor was the Legion unique in this attitude. The republic, too, discovered its ability to maneuver, to take initiatives and make compromises that might have limited what became the vast tragedy of the Algerian conflict, compromised by a second group who held French Algeria dear—the pieds noirs. Algeria in 1954 contained over one million people of European extraction who were very much in the driver's seat there. Most had arrived between 1872 and 1914 from Sicily, Malta and Spain as well as France, when the phylloxera epidemic had wiped out French vineyards, thereby boosting Algerian wine production, and when wheat began to be grown profitably in the broad, dry valleys of the north. Emigration virtually ceased with the First World War, the pied noir birthrate leveled off, and most of their smallholders surrendered their unequal struggle against an unyielding countryside to move into Algiers, Oran, Constantine and Bône. There they lived as modest merchants, artisans or tributaries of the French state, whose contracts, subsidies and civil service jobs breathed faint life into a stillborn economy.
An amalgamation of heterogeneous elements of which only 20 percent were reckoned to be of French origins, the pieds noirs—literally, “black feet,” a reference to the high black boots worn by many of the early settlers that had so impressed the Arabs—were gradually melded into a fairly coherent expatriate culture by their common sense of isolation and foreignness in Africa. They spoke French with a voluble accent that mainlanders immediately recognized as white North African, produced their own comedians and musicians, and shared their sense of superiority over their Jewish and especially their Moslem neighbors. This deeply ingrained sense of racial and social superiority had political consequences, for it had resulted in an almost total political disenfranchisement of Moslem Algerians, who were subjects, but not citizens, of the French state. Attempts in 1936 to extend French citizenship to a mere twenty-five thousand select Moslems collapsed on pied noir opposition, as did post-World War II reforms that sought to enfranchise Moslems in a meaningful way.
The bomb blasts coordinated by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) that signaled the beginning of the Algerian War on All Saints Day of 1954 came at the worst possible time for the left-leaning government of Pierre Mendes-France. The prime minister had already expended his government's political capital to purchase support for the break with Indochina and the granting of “internal autonomy” to Tunisia as a prelude to complete independence in 1956. The prime minister's well-publicized attempts to get the French to drink more milk had set a substantial posse of wine growers, alcohol merchants and cafe owners howling for his scalp, and earned him the derisive popular nickname of “Mendes Lolo,” or “Mendès Milk.” The votes of the twenty deputies of the Algerian lobby were vital to his government's survival in the fragmented, undisciplined and unstable French National Assembly of the 1950s. This was especially true because the pieds noirs, for reasons both historic and economic, were a mainstay of support for the parties that sat to the left in the Assembly—even Sidi-bel-Abbès had a Communist mayor in this period. In practical terms, this meant that the left-of-center parties that attempted to father reforms that might have made French rule more acceptable to the 90 percent of the Algerian population made up of Moslems became the hostages of the roughly ten percent of pied noir Algerians.
For this reason, on November 12, 1954, Mendès-France declared solemnly to the Assembly that “L'Algérie, c'est la France. And who among you . . . would hesitate to employ every means to preserve France?”7 To ensure his parliamentary majority, Mendès-France was forced to insist that repression of the rebellion must come before any concessions could be made to the terrorists. This declaration demonstrated less imagination even than the Indochinese policy of too little too late, for under its blinkered directives virtually no political concessions at all could be offered to the Moslem population to give them an incentive for supporting France. In this way, a combination of government instability, which gave inordinate parliamentary power to a clutch of pieds noirs deputies, and the inflexible credo of L'Algérie, c'est la France was to tie France and Algeria together in a Gordian knot of war that was finally sliced, rather than untied, by Charles de Gaulle.
If the French dated the beginning of the Algerian War from November 1, 1954, Moslem Algerians remembered May 8, 1945, as the war's birthday. A VE Day celebration in the town of Sétif, whose bleak streets etched a rectilinear pattern on a dusty plateau eighty miles west of Constantine, turned nasty when Moslems transformed what was meant to be a wreath-laying at the monument aux morts into a demonstration for Algerian independence. Shots were fired, touching off a frenzy of rape and killing by Moslems that lasted five days, butchered over one hundred Europeans and left many others wounded. Government repression, when it came, was brutal. “Sovereignty columns” made up of legionnaires and Senegalese combed the Constantine region imposing order and exacting retribution, backed up by dive bombers and even French naval gunnery, which indiscriminately shelled villages along Algeria's eastern Mediterranean coast. Also, the political crackdown fell most heavily upon moderate Moslems who were most likely to come to some sort of compromise with Paris. While the number of Moslems killed during the repression was greatly exaggerated by Moslem opinion makers, and was probably more like six thousand rather than the fifty thousand claimed by Arab nationalists,8 Sétif was Yen Bai all over again, and many Algerians never forgot it, including the tirailleurs returning from their distinguished service in Italy and France. One of them, Sergeant Ahmed Ben Bella, was convinced by tales of the French repression that Algeria must be ruled by Algerians.
The sheer savagery of the conflict on both the French and Moslem sides was to polarize the two communities and cause any sort of political compromise to recede out of reach. Already, a century and a quarter of French rule had done much to reduce viable Moslem intermediaries to a mere handful. French policy toward the Moslem population traditionally had been to break up the large families of Algeria and rule through French-appointed cdïds, men who had no real following in the population and who were often corrupt. Some Frenchmen realized that the intentional breakup of traditional Algerian social and political structures by the conquerors had reduced Moslems in Algeria, in the opinion of nineteenth-century French statesman Jules Cambon, to “a sort of human dust over whom we have no influence.” When Hubert Lyautey became resident general of Morocco upon the French conquest of that country in 1912, he sought to avoid the mistakes of Algeria and preserve the native elite there, so long as they remained loyal to him. French arrests and harassment of moderate Algerian nationalists in 1945, the capitulation of successive Fr
ench governments before pieds noirs pressure, FLN assassination of those Algerians who cooperated with the French, and torture and indiscriminate reprisals carried out by the French in reaction to FLN outrages did the rest. One had to choose between the French and the revolution. Compromise became effectively impossible. In these ways, the trench of bitterness and racial hatred that had traditionally existed between the communities was widened by the war into an unbridgeable gulf.
This digression into the political background of the war is necessary, for without it one is able to evaluate neither the methods used by the elite French soldiers who fought the war, including the Legion, nor the reasons and ideals of those officers led by Legion paras who sparked a revolt against the government of Charles de Gaulle in April 1961. “Together with most of my contemporaries, I sincerely believed that, even if the prophecies of Lyautey and of [Charles de] Foucauld were correct (that it is more difficult to hold a colony than to conquer it), France could not leave the southern shores of the Mediterranean without dangerously weakening herself, and running mortal risks,” wrote General Massu. Nevertheless, in 1954 it appeared that, compared to Indochina, the pacification of Algeria would prove to be a piece of cake: “... The effort required of us so close to the metropole, in an incomparably easier terrain and climate, seemed to us easy enough . . .”9
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