French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  That said, however, it is possible that the Legion was particularly liable to behave in a harsh and ruthless manner. This sprang in part from its tradition of unquestioned obedience to superiors and the unit's sense of racial separateness, especially its dislike of Arabs. The high morale and sense of solidarity in Legion para units possibly made them more likely to fly off the handle when provoked. Certainly their training, described by Simon Murray as a tough, no-holds-barred affair, far more intense than his basic training at Mascara, appears calculated to harden sensibilities as well as bodies. Close-combat instruction was carried out on concrete slabs rather than in pits of sand or sawdust to soften falls, and anyone who pulled his punches became the object of the special attentions of a German sergeant, a veteran of Monte Cassino, who demonstrated the correct method, on at least one occasion breaking the leg of his unfortunate victim. In fact, Murray, certainly no enemy of the Legion as he is generally enthusiastic about his time there, discovered that a “meaningless barbarism” permeated his Legion para training, with beatings and savage application of pelote or punishment gymnastics common. For committing small lapses in training,

  the punishment is to stand the man to attention with his hands behind his back and then thump him with every ounce of strength, deep in the solar plexus. Nobody survives. The body folds into a crumpled form, sags to the ground and is left writhing and gasping in agony with the lungs screaming for air, like a pole-axed ox. Lustig enjoys inflicting this kind of pain.

  While Murray gave the tactical training high marks, the frequent, arbitrary and apparently meaningless punishments destroyed morale:

  There is no camaraderie.... We are fed up with being pushed around by these second-rate N.C.O.s, particularly the corporals who have no fire in their bellies, no enthusiasm, no sense of humor, and are quite incapable of generating any kind of spirit in the section. There is no direction and sense of purpose. We are just drifting. There is no focal point on which to concentrate; there are no objectives at which to aim. It's as stagnant as a blocked drain.

  The officer in charge of training was “totally wet and completely overshadowed by his N.C.O.s. He has no discernible qualities of leadership, in fact he has no discernible qualities at all.” By comparison with Sully, the army para training camp at Blida where everyone was sent to carry out the jumps was “a dream world” of luxurious surroundings and good food. But above all, the NCOs, “known as moniteurs, are great guys, full of humor, without all the endless forced toughness that Legion N.C.O.s wear as part of their uniform.”25

  Such an atmosphere does not condemn the Legion out of hand. Torture and the corvée de bois, the practice of telling a prisoner that he was free to go and then shooting him in the back as he walked away, were not Legion monopolies. The American experience in Vietnam also proved that conscript units were very capable of getting out of hand, as at My Lai. But retaliation does seem to have been part of a policy vigorously applied by elite units in Algeria,26 as Simon Murray discovered in the Aurès Mountains in August 1961: “The normal course of events in these villages which are supporting the fellagha is for the legionnaires to wring the necks of the chickens and stuff them into their musettes,” he wrote.

  Livestock are set free and the mechtas [houses] are then burned to the ground. The order to burn the huts came in each case from a captain of the Deuxième Bureau who was with us and presumably knew that these were the dwellings either of fellagha themselves or sympathizers.... Just before noon we came across some mechtas, and this time the men had not had time to flee. Under questioning by the officer of the Deuxième they refused to admit that they had any dealings with the fell and in fact they had very little to say at all. This all changed when they were put inside one of the huts and it was set ablaze. They started to scream blue murder and when we let them out we couldn't stop them talking.

  One of them was finally elected as spokesman and he said he could lead us to a cache that was filled with arms, and so off we set. We followed him over hills and plains and valleys for about fifteen miles, at the end of which time he said he couldn't find it. We had all stopped and were lying about waiting for the order to move on while the Arab explained his problems to the Deuxième captain. I was sitting just above the Arab who was jabbering away to the officer and waving his arms around in desperation. They were below me on the side of a small valley with a dried-out stream bed at the bottom.

  Suddenly the officer grabbed a sub-machine-gun off a legionnaire standing near him and as the Arab started to scream in protest he kicked him in the side and sent him rolling down the hill. The machine-gun came quickly to the officer's shoulder and he squirted bullets into the writhing body of the Arab as he rolled down into the dried bed of the stream. When he reached the bottom he was as dead as the stones around him. We left him. We had a long walk back and in between us and our lorries was a mountain barrier 5,000 feet high. Nobody mourned the Arab—it was too hot and we were too tired.

  We have no souls, we have no feelings, our senses are dead—dead like the dead corpse in the stream. Is this really me?27

  Not surprisingly, perhaps, the frustrations and inconclusive nature of this sort of warfare caused French soldiers to welcome the Suez expedition of November 1956. The reasons for the invasion of Egypt by a joint Anglo-French force, in conjunction with an offensive by the Israeli army, are complex, but illustrate well the observation that though allies fight on the same side, they do not necessarily fight for the same goals. The Israelis were fighting for what they believed to be their survival, while the British, angered by Nasser's nationalization of the canal, feared a threat to their interests east of Suez. Why the French became involved is not clear. It appears that the French Socialist prime minister Guy Mollet was passionately pro-Israel, both because he regarded her as a pioneer socialist country and because he believed she needed to be defended from Nasser, who, like British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, he saw as a nascent Hitler in the Near East. Those involved in the Algerian War, including the officers of the 1er REP who were dropped on Port Saïd on November 5, believed that the fall of Nasser would decapitate the FLN by depriving them of their most fervent supporter. That this view was naïve both because it gave Nasser far too much credit for FLN success and because it ignored most of the factors that had encouraged the Algerian uprising in the first place goes without saying.

  None of this prevented disappointment from being all the more poignant and bitter when objections by the United States and the Soviet Union caused the operation to be canceled after only forty hours. For the French paras, who had scattered the Egyptians like rabbits and displayed a sort of raw efficiency that left their British counterparts blinking with disbelief, this was yet one more example of betrayal, by the “Anglo-Saxons,” by the West, by the IVth Republic. The FLN took heart from the tremendous propaganda windfall and even collected arms left behind by the hastily withdrawn allied armies. For the passionately anticommunist Hungarian Janos Kemencei, the simultaneous defeats in November 1956 of the Hungarian revolution and of the French at Suez were deeply felt: “I no longer had any faith,” he wrote. “My professionalism remained intact. But I no longer wanted to fight for causes lost in advance, like here in Algeria.” For Kemencei, Suez brought to the surface a general discontentment with the poor conditions of the service in the Legion, as well as with the attitudes of the French soldiers whom he had been detached from the Legion to train. “Then our old fashioned and even frankly bad logistics did not encourage me to waste my health any longer. To support an intemperate climate without appropriate materiel, support the constant absence of hygiene, swallow on operations execrable food, all of this had literally disgusted me with the army.” He was saved from resignation only by a providential posting to Madagascar.28

  For many officers, the sense of betrayal was so profound that their loyalty to their government was shaken. Massu's paras obeyed the ceasefire order of November 6 with “rage in the heart... when Cairo seems to us just around the corner, with no serious
obstacle to prevent our advance.” On his return to Algiers, he discovered that the FLN had transformed “Nasser's unexploited defeat” into

  a triumphal victory. Not only do its faithful take heart, but those who had given over to panic want to reaffirm their loyalty.... Our hearts are heavy. The deception runs through all of my beautiful division so ready to carry out a task worthy of it! We chew over without end this senseless story which has deprived us not only of a glorious victory, to which a soldier cannot remain indifferent, but also the beginning of a solution to the Algerian affair, which we are now confronting once again.29

  Chapter 28

  THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS

  MASSU'S PARAS HAD little time to brood, however, for they were ordered almost immediately to undertake what was to become one of the most publicized and controversial operations of the war—the Battle of Algiers. In January 1957, when Massu's 10th Para Division was called in to establish order in the second city of France, Algiers was a town of almost nine hundred thousand people that spilled across a ribbon of hills separating the Mediterranean from the rich agricultural plain of the Mitidja. From the sea, the triangular shape of the old city enclosed within its crumbling walls and watchtowers was plainly visible, its mosques and houses tightly layered upon the hillside like kernels of an albino pine cone. This was the Moslem heart of “Alger la blanche,” a teaming labyrinth of torturous alleys, stairways and cul-de-sacs that smelled of dung and urine, which outsiders found both disorienting and intimidating. It was here that many of Algiers's four hundred thousand Moslems crowded into houses that were vertical cubes of masonry, bolted and blind against the dark, narrow streets, but whose central courtyards rose to flat-roofed terraces that opened onto breathtaking views of the harbor and the azure Mediterranean beyond. This was to be the stronghold of the FLN in the Battle of Algiers, the one that the paras had to dominate to be victorious.

  Although the escalating brutality of the confrontation between the paras and FLN terrorists caused each to blame the other for initiating the skirmish, it appears that it had its origins in a major conference of FLN leaders held in August 1956 under the very noses of the French in the Soummam valley, which separates the Greater and Lesser Kabylia. This conference defined a military command structure for the ALN and greatly strengthened the organization of the FLN. More important, perhaps, it defined the organization's war aims, something successive French governments were never able to do in Algeria, which made their policies appear weak and vacillating next to the coherent demands of the nationalists. It also took the decision that there was to be no cease-fire before a complete recognition of Algerian independence had been achieved, a policy upon which de Gaulle's peace initiatives would eventually founder. It was also at Soummam that the FLN decided to open a major front in Algiers.

  Violence in Algiers began to escalate in the summer of 1957 with random assassinations by the FLN, which provoked a reprisal bombing by pied noir extremists on August 10 of Moslem dwellings in the Casbah that left seventy dead. Under the direction of twenty-year-old Saadi Yacef, the FLN had established a network of operatives fourteen hundred strong that included several revolutionary Moslem women. On September 30, 1956, Yacef handed three of these girls bombs and instructed them to plant them in the Milk-Bar and the Cafétéria, both frequented by pied noir youth. The carnage, and sense of outrage, caused by the explosions was predictable. A third placed in the hall of the Air France terminal failed to detonate. These bombings were followed by a wave of assassinations of French officials, which provoked predictably violent reactions by the pieds noirs, ratonades, or random assaults, that, because FLN operatives took care to remain behind closed doors, fell upon innocent Moslems who were beaten and even killed. It was at this point that the governor-general called in General Massu.

  By January 1957, the reputation as the elite of French forces that the paras had already tailored for themselves was approaching mythical proportions. Their heroic conduct in Indochina under a clutch of flamboyant and aggressive commanders had made them the darlings of the army, and any young man with a military vocation believed his curriculum vitae incomplete without a brevet de parachutiste. Of no unit was this more true than Jacques Massu's 10th Para Division, which included the 1er REP. Its commanders, around whom lingered a strong odor of Indochina to the point that they continued to refer to the FLN as the “Viets,” cultivated a very macho command style, energetic, tough, suicidally brave. Top Saint-Cyr graduates jostled to be taken by the Legion, and the best of these sought out the REPs, pitying their less fortunate classmates condemned to serve in regiments of “voters” as conscripts were derisively called. (And in this way ignoring that equally efficient and elite colonial and chasseur paratroop regiments were one-half to three-quarters conscripts.) The Legion even creamed off their best men to go into the REPs—Simon Murray was called into his lieutenant's office at three o'clock in the morning and told to sign a form volunteering for the REP. “I refused initially, but after he implied that I was scared—which I am—I finally said I would go and signed the paper. This is all unsatisfactory as I am not keen on heights at all. There is no justice in the world—or is it just here?”1 As has been noted, this sense of elite status had been heightened by the tactical scheme in Algeria that made the Legion and the 10th and 25th Para Divisions the firemen of the war for whom was reserved a lion's share of the hard action. In this way, the paras became symbols of force and violence, and their colonels took on the status of saints in a hierarchy of the elect.

  The French writer Jean Lartéguy, whose Algerian war novels explore the para myth, defined the popular version of the collective para personality:

  A simple, rather pathetic lot, anxious to be loved and delighting in contempt for their company, capable of energy, tenacity, courage, but also inclined to abandon everything for a girl, a smile or the prospect of a good adventure.... Vain, disinterested, thirsting for knowledge but adverse to instruction, sick at heart at being unable to follow a big, unjust and generous leader and being forced to attribute their reason for fighting to some political or economic theory ...to take the place of the leader they haven't been able to find.... Pathetic and at the same time exasperating.... Ubu [The imaginary king of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi] turned hero.... They're on the lookout for a master who would know how to break them and at the same time cover them with glory, inflict on them the discipline they're longing for and give them back the admiration of the people which they feel they are being denied.2

  It is possible to argue that without the hard-hitting military capabilities of the paras the French army in Algeria would have turned in a plodding performance. However, leaving aside for the moment the question of the controversial antiguerrilla tactics of the paras, the “para myth” was to have at least two negative consequences for the French army in Algeria. The first was that, as in Indochina, the indiscriminate expansion of the paras came about at the expense of the other units, and ultimately created a cleavage with the remainder of the army. Officers in “classical” units found their resentment rising at the increasingly cavalier attitude taken by para units toward military regulations, regarded as having been conceived for the “lead asses” in line units. They also disliked the fact that para companies counted their full complement of five officers, and might even include officers à la suite waiting for a vacancy, while line companies were run by one regular lieutenant or a passed-over captain and two conscript “aspirants,” men preparing for commissions as reserve second lieutenants, and some platoons were even led by corporals.

  “To begin with, the paratroops were a wonderful myth, a story to enthrall every schoolboy in France,” Lartéguy's Captain Naugier explains to Colonel Raspéguy.

  But instead of spreading it throughout the army, and growing bigger and bigger, the myth has shrunk, as you've seen for yourself, and now it's turning to vinegar.... We have created a sect of fighters apart from the army, but that's not the way you win a war like the Algerian war, or remake a country. All you do is get you
rself hated.3

  To be hated by the enemy is one thing. However, the para myth also gave rise to resentment in the French army toward the paras, and in particular toward the 10th Para Division. This was an important factor in the so-called revolt of the conscripts against the generals’ putsch of April 1961, spearheaded by the 1er REP. “A growing hatred for the ‘paras,’ ” according to Jean Planchais, the defense correspondent for the prestigious French daily Le Monde during the Algerian War, found despised “lead ass” officers in line units telephoning Paris to say “that they were ready to come with their men to sort out the problem.”4

  The second problem with the para myth is that it helped to politicize them. The Battle of Algiers played a very important role in the formation of this political outlook, for, to borrow Lartéguy's imagery, it turned them from centurions into the praetorian guard of Algérie française. The spectacle of Massu, his jaw locked into an expression of unbending professional determination above stalactites of metals, marching into Algiers at the head of his immaculate division, like the new marshal and his deputies come to clear the town of desperadoes, left the pied noir population limp with exhilaration. This adulation was only increased by the paras’ remarkable success in crushing the FLN network in Algiers. But it had a negative side, for it encouraged their narcissism, stimulated their sense of elite status, fostered their feeling that long-accepted military and even political conventions did not apply to them. Their colonels increasingly came to believe in their own legends, and treated their regiments as if they were their personal property, reviving in a way the proprietorial attitudes of the ancien régime army. This was encouraged by the fact that the Algerian War was essentially one fought on the regimental level, with generals appearing as distant and remote figures far up the hierarchy. The Battle of Algiers deepened their political commitment to French Algeria by casting them in the role of the people's tribunes: “Fear has made film-stars out of us, and that's not what we wanted.” Lartéguy's Captain Naugier remarks. “So, of course, one shoots a line, squares one's shoulders and draws one's stomach in, but we feel like crying. Here we are, turned into praetorians for having wished too strongly to be soldiers of the people, and into bogeymen for wanting to be loved.”5