French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  Massu might have gone even further, for the FLN, called into being in August 1955, had great weaknesses, especially when compared with the dedication, political and military organization and ideological homogeneity of the Viet Minh. Its leadership in 1954 was small and virtually unknown. Throughout the war and even into independence it would be split by rivalries and divisions that would bring it to the brink of self-destruction. Its unity was largely a negative one, brought about by a sense of the injustice of French rule and dedication to Algerian nationalism and the Moslem religion. It lacked leaders of the stature of Ho Chi Minh and Giap, as well as the guiding hand of Marxist ideology and the Maoist theory of war that had supplied the Viet Minh with both a blueprint for fighting the war and a rigid discipline, almost a messianic fervor, that sprang from a sense of serving the “Cause of History.” Although many French officers saw the FLN as yet another manifestation of the international Communist conspiracy, support from the Eastern Bloc was largely rhetorical, as was that of Nasser, the high priest of Arab nationalism in Cairo. Even the French Communist Party was for once obliged to mute the tone of its strident anticolonialism because of its electoral support among pieds noirs.

  Militarily, the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN) was never able to achieve a modicum of the success enjoyed by the Viet Minh. Although it grew steadily in numbers and skill, especially after it gained sanctuaries in Tunisia and Morocco in March 1956, the ALN seldom operated in anything above katiba or company strength lest a larger body of men attract the attention of French bombers and intervention forces of paras and legionnaires. To the end, the shotgun remained a standard weapon in their armory. In Maoist terms, the ALN was never able to move their war beyond the opening stage of guerrilla war and terrorism.

  Indeed, a particularly vicious devotion to terrorism was to characterize the FLN, both because sadists and thugs were well represented in its ranks, and because terrorism paid off in political terms. The alacrity with which ALN operatives sliced off the noses and upper lips of Arab “collaborators,” and even wiped out whole families, both Moslem and pied noir, down to babes in arms, often after mutilating their victims in the most grisly and obscene ways, sent shudders of horror and rage through all who witnessed such spectacles. One such witness was Janos Kemencei, in Philippeville on the Mediterranean coast north of Constantine in August 1955 to complete the six annual jumps required to retain his para status when he was requisitioned to restore order in the outlying village of El Hallia. “On the side of the road, near me, a horrible vision froze me,” he wrote.

  Women and men were shouting their heads off—yes, shouting, overwhelmed with an indescribable hopelessness.... A baby and a very young girl were impaled in the vines, on metal spikes on the side of the road. Dead. Their parents, deranged with grief, cried out their distress. A little further on, I saw other small bloody silhouettes lying on stretchers. Nearly 80 children, men and women, without defense, had been massacred, torn limb from limb in this little village, by Arabs who until then had lived on good terms with their victims. After that, I understood the furor of some soldiers, who administered their own justice by liquidating without mercy these assassins, sending them—but cleanly—into another world.10

  Kemencei got one detail wrong, for most of the assassins had long since departed, so that French retribution generally fell upon the Moslem civilians, precisely as the FLN had calculated. The French became convinced that every Moslem was a potential enemy, and pointed to the savagery of FLN terror to justify their own repressive measures. Even Algerian Governor-General Jacques Soustelle, who came out with the intention of pursuing genuine reform for the benefit of the Moslem population, was so sickened and outraged by the Philippeville massacres that he abandoned all thoughts of conciliation and compromise until the war had been won. In this way, the Philippeville massacres became a victory for the FLN, for they served to separate further the two communities and adjourn the possibility of compromise.11

  The optimism with which the French initially tackled the Algerian pacification slowly hardened into a more realistic assessment of their opponents after the FLN managed to survive their first grim winter in the mountains of the Aurès and the Kabylia. In Moslem eyes, the fact that they had survived at all bestowed the baraka—literally “the gift” from God— upon them, which brought in recruits, including a number of deserters from the tirailleurs. When the rebellion broke out, the French had less than forty thousand soldiers in Algeria. And while those numbers increased to four hundred thousand by the end of 1956, the French discovered belatedly that they were poorly organized to deal with the Algerian revolt. In the first place, Dien Bien Phu had been the last gasp of the old Armée d'Afrique. The Sétif massacres of 1945 had already destroyed much of the esteem in which many Moslems had held the army until then, a respect that had caused so many of them to add to its glory in Italy and France in World War II. Indochina, following upon the heels of the campaigns of 1943—45, had created a break between the Armée d'Afrique and its traditional homeland. For the tirailleurs, this translated into an increasing disaffection with a war to impose French sovereignty upon Asian peoples. For the Moslem mind, much impressed with force, the stunning defeat of the French in that forlorn valley in upper Tonkin was a sign that the baraka had abandoned their colonial masters. Perhaps this feeling was most developed among Moslem POWs, who received a special anticolonial “disintoxication” at the hands of the Viet Minh. This did not make them Communists, but it did in many cases seriously undermine loyalty to the French.

  The second casualty of this long separation between the Armée d'Afrique and the Maghreb was the officer corps. The last campaigns of conquest in Morocco had closed off in 1934, and the number of officers with practical experience of North Africa had steadily diminished. A few old North Africa hands were still to be found in the upper ranks, but an entire generation of younger officers who normally would have served their apprenticeship in the Maghreb had been shunted off to Europe and Indochina. With them had disappeared a body of men whose deep experience of Algeria, whose contacts with its people and knowledge of their psychology, although often summary and cliché-ridden, were irreplaceable. “The requirements of the Indochinese War have caused great misery in the Armée d'Afrique,” General de Monsabert told the National Assembly on November 23, 1954. “The local command cannot respond to surprises. One must restore the primacy of the infantry and troop training, give preference to native regiments whose presence alone will suffice to avoid trouble.”12 Toward the end of the war, the French were to use native formations, usually irregular ones, very effectively. But the brunt of the war would have to be shouldered by conscripts and reservists imported from mainland France. However, the lack of motivation, poor training and usually inadequate leadership of these men often limited their usefulness to garrison and other static duties, and meant that the hard fighting in the inaccessible hinterland fell to an elite of paratroopers, legionnaires, and a handful of other first-echelon units.

  The outbreak of the Algerian War caught the Legion, like the rest of the French army, quite literally, on the hop. The only Legion units in Algeria in 1954 were the 1er étranger and the depôt commun de la Légion étrangère at Sidi-bel-Abbès, both essentially training and administrative formations. Most of the other Legion regiments were wrapping up last-minute affairs in Indochina. The 2e étranger disembarked in Tunis in 1955, and then shifted to Morocco, where it remained until 1956, in the company of the 4e étranger, re-created in 1955, which did not arrive in Algeria until 1957. The 3e étranger returned from Indochina in late 1954, the 13e DBLE in May 1955 and the 5e étranger not until February 1956. The BEPs became the 1er and 2e REP, operational from early 1956, while a 2e REC had also been re-created in 1946 to accompany the 1st Foreign Cavalry Regiment. All of this meant that the response to the rebellion in the early days was very much an improvised one, even in the BEPs. Kemencei, repatriated from a Viet Minh prison camp in a very fragile physical state, was flung together with a number of
recuperating prisoners into action almost immediately, with the predictable result that the operation had to be called off because many of the men simply could not keep up.

  Kemencei realized the sad truth that the French army in the spring of 1955 was hardly better prepared to take on its Algerian role than it had been in Indochina in 1946, or 1950 for that matter. When he was distributed his equipment in March 1955 just before a jump with the 3e BEP into the Hodna plain, equipment that included puttees and World War I surplus tents together with other odds and ends utterly unsuited to airborne operations, “It was only with difficulty that I could overcome my anger.” And while the equipment gradually improved, Legion paras preferred to purchase surplus U.S. boots and down sleeping bags with their own pay rather than utilize stiff French-issue hobnail boots and sleeping bags that were not moisture-proof. Conditions in the base camps at Batna and Biskra were primitive, with four or five water faucets and one open-air latrine for a five-hundred-man battalion: “These overcrowded installations hardly improved morale,” Kemencei wrote, “and rather than a well earned rest of a few hours, this promiscuity produced belligerence and even fights.” Daily rations on operation were totally inadequate, a serious situation because, unlike in Indochina where it was common practice to live off the country, “here, in Algeria, we were totally dependent upon official and regulation rations.” Daily rations consisted of a two-and-a-quarter-pound tin of green beans to be shared among four men, a pound of corned beef for three, sardines, Gruyère, a crust of dry bread and the ubiquitous vinogel, all often eaten cold because the men were usually forbidden to light fires on operation. And even then, on one operation in the Aurès, his commander decided to increase mobility by undertaking a five-day operation with only two days’ worth of food and water. “What good could these imbecile maneuvers do,” questioned Kemencei, “except weaken the physical and moral resistance of the combatants before the battle?” In any case, it simply caused the legionnaires to purchase their own rations.13

  Even in 1960, Simon Murray found conditions in the Legion para training camp at Sully, a disaffected farm about ten miles south of Sidi-bel-Abbès, below the standards one would expect to be laid on for elite soldiers:

  The dormitories are enormous converted barns, the lavabo is a horse trough in the open yard outside the barracks, and the réfectoire is in a loft above disused wine vats. . . . There are no lavatories as such, but a trench three hundred yards from the barracks represents the facilities; we share them with the flies. We don't have plates to eat off as in Mascara, so we have to use our tin gamelles, which substantially reduce appetite—like drinking Dom Pérignon out of a dirty coffee cup. All in all this is a hole and I don't like the look of it one little bit. . . . The food here is unbelievable; almost inedible after Mascara . . . and there is insufficient fresh water. It has to be brought each day in a cistern from Bel-Abbès. By lunchtime it's already warm and undrinkable.14

  The tactics employed in the early days appear to have been little better than the equipment. Until the Philippeville massacres of August 1955, the war was treated as a police action in every sense of the word, with gendarmes taken along on operations and FLN suspects hauled before justices of the peace, who often released them for lack of evidence. “My indignation was immense when I realized that several times ‘fellaghas’ [FLN guerrillas; proper plural is fellouze] arrested on one day with arms in their hands, reappeared the next day in town scoffing at us,” Kemencei wrote.15 After one such operation in which several fellouze were killed and others captured, gendarmes appeared at the hospital to interview wounded paras of the 1er REP to ask if they wanted to “file a charge” against the FLN prisoners.16 Nevertheless, although Legion paras at first made fun of the attempts by unfit policemen to maintain the blistering pace of operations through the hills, they were much missed when they were withdrawn because, as Arabic-speaking pieds noirs, they were useful for interrogations.

  “Bouclage” or “quadrillage,” a counterguerrilla technique used as early as the suppression of the Chouan revolt in the West of France during the French Revolution, was applied initially. This consisted of several units, usually of conscripts or even police, sealing off a section of terrain while a mobile unit, acting as beaters, sought to drive the rebels toward the blocking force. But while the guerrillas often suffered in these operations, largely because it forced them to keep on the move, it failed to eradicate them, for several reasons. The French were often operating on the basis of stale or inaccurate intelligence. They knew the impossible rugged terrain far less well than the rebels, who were usually able to slip away at night because the blocking troops were tired, inattentive, unable to read maps properly or too slow to get into position. And while Legion units often turned in very respectable lists of “fells” killed or captured and numbers of weapons seized, in fact much energy was expended for small results. The FLN was able to replace its losses faster than the French could kill them.

  “For all these reasons . . . these operations are not worth it,” Captain Pierre Sergent of the 1er REP believed. “How much wasted energy! And also, how many losses sustained when a cornered enemy decides to use his arms.”17 Captain Antoine Ysquierdo of the 1er REP discovered that Algeria was “exactly like Indochina,” minus the monsoons.

  The supposedly innocent inhabitants know everything, say nothing or tell you that they have never seen the fellouze, when they are sitting on an arms cache. Everyone works for the rebels. The most insignificant shepherd knows everything. But to capture the bands, that is another story!... We have sent out 5,000 to 6,000 men and who knows how much materiel to kill a dozen poor fools and recuperate a pile of rusty shotguns, some semolina and cans of sardines. . . . But then, to track down the real fellouze, those who slit the throats of the civilians in the bus the other day, nothing, zero! Impossible to keep an operation like this secret when it has been prepared for months by 36 chaps and in which participates a bunch of good for nothing soldiers.18

  There were some bright spots in these early days, which, when expanded, served as the basis for more successful policies in later times. One was the creation of the Sections Administratives Spécialisées (SAS) officers, an initiative of Soustelle. The task of these officers was to live in the villages, usually alone and at great personal risk, to bolster the authority of the traditional djemmas or councils, ward off FLN intimidation and call in military intervention when necessary. This was one of the more successful French initiatives of the war, and one that earned for them a good international press. Yet they never realized their full potential because they were too few and because their programs were underfinanced. French mistrust of Moslems caused them to hesitate to give them rifles to defend themselves. The critics of the SAS also found them to be very paternalistic, more interested in ensuring the docility of the Moslem populations than in understanding them. Nor was their work of pacification always advanced by the attitude of French units. One of the SAS officers, Captain Helmut Ontrup, echoed complaints heard in Indochina that, while incomparable in open combat, the Legion performed pacification duties poorly: “The Legion ... does not worry about the fine points and subtleties of a guerrilla [war],” he wrote. “A static unit in a sector which must win the heart of a Moslem population can never be the Legion.... The 3e REI remained a deaf and blind giant!”19 Also, a ratissage, or sweep, by a mobile group like the paras keen to increase their score in dead fellouze and none too refined in their methods of interrogation could undo in a few minutes the patient pacification work of several years.

  A second innovation pioneered in the Constantine region by General André Beaufre, a tirailleur officer and veteran of Indochina, was that of regroupement. A student of Mao, Beaufre's aim was to separate the population from the guerrillas by relocating them into zones de pacification that were watched over by sedentary conscript units, while mobile forces harassed FLN rebels in the zones d'opérations. During the war, over two million Moslems were resettled and 1,840 fortified villages created. The success of t
his policy has been hotly debated. Defenders of regroupement point out that it removed the source of support for the FLN and eased the problems of operations elsewhere. It also diverted the flight of Moslems from the countryside toward the horrid conditions of the bidonvilles that sprung up around the major cities, and placed them where they could take advantage of French medical services.20

  Its critics do not dispute that it hurt the FLN, but argue that regroupement did little to win the population over to the French side, and instead caused at the least great resentment at the uprooting and, at worst, provoked flight into Tunisia or Morocco into the arms of the FLN. Because the French often allocated too few troops to guard these camps, which could number thousands of refugees, the policy often resulted in a French-FLN condominium. Perhaps its greatest weakness, however, was that, like so many other military tactics employed in Algeria, regroupement became extremely controversial. Like the scandal that broke out in Great Britain when Kitchener first used “concentration camps” in the Boer War, popular opinion in France and elsewhere, including the French army, was disturbed by revelations of ghastly conditions of filth, malnutrition and general neglect that prevailed in many of these camps.21 Nevertheless, Beaufre was the first French commander in the war to show some military success against the FLN.22

  The mobile war in the bled, in which the Legion was involved, lost nothing in harshness and cruelty, especially after the Philippeville massacres. In part this sprung from natural fear, suspicion and hatred, of the sort that erupted in 1956 when a company of the 1er REP descended upon an Arab village in the Nementchas after one of its sergeants had been knifed by an Arab, slaughtered sixty-four people with submachine guns and bayonets and set fire to the village.23 This is not to say that the Legion was necessarily more savage than other French units, all of whom were liable to act in this way. A great part of the problem sprang from the policy of “collective responsibility,” of the sort applied by a Legion unit that shot nine farm workers near Sidi-bel-Abbès after two fellouze were discovered hiding in a barn. Again, it must be stressed that there is no evidence that the Legion was more guilty of this than other French units, or the FLN for that matter. But it did not escape the attention of many that it was this sort of conduct that had caused a number of German officers to be hanged as war criminals at the close of World War II, not to mention the baleful effect it had on the Moslem population.24