The French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Boyd

  In the Rif war, Klems shrewdly decided which posts to attack and which to surround by a small besieging force while the main Moroccan Liberation Army continued on its victorious progress. Each victory of the tribal confederation brought more men to Abd el-Krim’s banner, frightening Madrid and Paris into making peace overtures that he turned down in the hope of forcing out of them an autonomous Republic of the Rif.

  In Paris, the politicians blamed Lyautey for the situation he had foreseen, with the result that in June 1925 the man who had ruled Morocco single-handed for so many years was consigned to oblivion in France. Marshal Philippe Pétain had retired from military and political life to raise chickens on a farm in Provence with his new wife. In July, he crossed the Mediterranean to take command of what was now considered a full-blown war, arriving in Morocco with all the advantages Lyautey had begged for and not been given.

  To restore French prestige, fifty battalions were extracted from the French army of occupation in the Rhineland and sent to Morocco. With 160,000 French and 200,000 Spanish troops against him, Abd el-Krim’s forces melted away, weakened by poor harvests and an epidemic of typhus sweeping through their mountain villages. Aware that the fragmented campaign against a mobile enemy which Lyautey had been fighting was a very different war from what he had known in Europe, Pétain was too shrewd an old soldier to rush into battle. One lesson he had learned at St-Cyr was that time spent in preparation is seldom wasted. So he took his time, refusing to be drawn into premature rescues of isolated Legion outposts, reasoning that they could be re-established when he had taken out Abd el-Krim and that the men in them were not his responsibility.

  Each afternoon, he wrote to his wife, giving her detailed instructions of which chickens to keep and which to kill off when their laying fell behind his quota for them, but that domestic image contrasts ill with the business of his mornings when Vegetius’[302] maxim First lay waste the enemy’s land could have been the motto on the wall of his office. In mid-September he launched his offensive with modern equipment, artillery, motorised divisions and reconnaissance aircraft as well as huge columns of mules, camels and men including Moroccan mercenaries – all meticulously organised down to the placing of the Bordel Mobile de Campagne in the safest place on the march, its dozen or more Moroccan girls aged between fifteen and eighteen being visited between fixed hours by scores of men each evening.[303]

  Relentlessly, Pétain’s columns burned crops and destroyed homes to leave the surviving tribesmen and their families starving and homeless in the cruel sub-zero winter of the Rif. On 8 May 1926, Spanish and French forces moved in for the kill and slaughtered so many of el-Krim’s army that two weeks later on 23 May its leader was brought to bay. Surrounded, luckily for him by French forces, Abd el-Krim signed the surrender treaty on 26 May, all his dreams of independence shattered. To the incomprehension of his Spanish allies, who wanted to shoot the captive Berber leader, Pétain exiled Abd el-Krim to a comfortable estate on the remote island of La Réunion in the Indian Ocean with a generous pension of 100,000 francs per annum.

  In 1947, as a gesture of clemency, the first president of the Fourth Republic Vincent Auriol commuted this to a more pleasant exile on the French Riviera. When the ship transporting Abd el-Krim and forty-two members of his household was passing through the Suez Canal, the 65-year-old warrior managed to slip ashore at Port Said and go to ground among his co-religionists. He lived in Cairo preaching the liberation of the Maghreb until shortly before it began under the FLN in 1954.

  Pétain’s defeat of the confederation did not stop the tribesmen of the Rif from returning home to re-build their ruined villages and defy the French from inaccessible mountain fastnesses, much as the Pathan tribesmen had defied the soldiers of the Raj on the Northwest Frontier. Not until the summer of 1933 did the last Riffians surrender.

  It has been claimed that Abd el-Krim’s initial successes against Spanish and French troops inspired other colonial uprisings, in particular the Druze Revolt in Syria of 1925, but all they have in common is the cause: the high-handed arrogance of the European colonial administrators, insensitive to local and religious customs.

  Although the native peoples were not supposed to know about it, the Middle East was carved up as early as 9 May 1916 by an agreement signed by Sir Mark Sykes for Britain and Georges Picot for France and kept secret until ‘blown’ after the Revolution by the Soviet government. The main provisions were that France should get Syria, Lebanon and some other territory after the war, while Britain grabbed oil-rich Iraq and the Palestinian ports of Haifa and Acre, to which it was intended to build a pipeline. The mission of archaeologist-turned-soldier T. E. Lawrence starting in October of that year was a scam and his promise to Sharif Hussein ibn-Ali of Mecca that he would have a country of his own to rule after the war in return for raising the tribes of the Hejaz against the Ottoman Empire, was thus completely deceitful. Seldom has more misery come out of one set of lies.

  As a token of Franco-British solidarity, Paris sent a régiment de marche to fight in Gen Allenby’s army. More of a mixed bag than most of its kind, this comprised both French and Algerian infantry, a squadron of aircraft and one of African cavalry, plus some officers to command a hotchpotch of locally recruited Syrian and Armenian ex-soldiers. The last element was known as La Légion d’Orient, and claimed some remarkable successes against the Turks.

  When the French took over Syria and Lebanon with the approval of the League of Nations after the First World War, one of their first acts was to expel Sharif Hussein from Damascus, after which the embarrassed British created a consolation prize for him in the form of a puppet-king’s throne in Baghdad. Among the cocktail of religions and races he thus left behind in Syria/Lebanon was the religious minority of 100,000 Druzes or muwahhidun, who had broken away from the rest of Islam in the eleventh century and permitted neither conversion nor intermarriage with their neighbours.

  With all its commitments in North Africa and the post-war recruiting problems, the Legion had little manpower to spare, but to establish French control in Syria, two battalions of 4 REI and a squadron of 1 REC were shipped there, as well as some Saharan camel corps riders under French officers and colonial troops from Senegal and Madagascar. The war of ‘pacification’ that ensued was very like the one going on in the Rif, with atrocities on both sides, but needed no inspiration by Abd el-Krim or anyone else because the ingredients were local.

  Things were relatively peaceful by 1923 when a certain Capt Carbillet was appointed governor of the area of Jabal al-Duruz, where most of the Druzes lived. Carbillet seems to have been the best kind of French colonial administrator, squeezing out of the taxes he collected the necessary funds to build schools and roads and provide clean water supplies, and in other ways improving the lot of the local population. In 1925 he stepped down, or was sacked, and five Druze leaders sought an interview with France’s High Commissioner for Syria to reassure themselves about his successor.

  The current High Commissioner was Gen Maurice Sarrail, whom we last met leading the surviving legionnaires from the Dardanelles to Salonika in the Great War. The appointment of one of France’s least diplomatic soldiers to such a post was an appalling choice. Typically, instead of listening to the worries of the Druzes, he clapped all five in prison for their brazen effrontery. It was the spark in a powder keg. Starting in July 1925 Druze guerrilla fighters led by Sultan al-Atrash raided towns and held up trains, defeating various French military units throughout August, including detachments of 4 REI. The Druzes were joined in September by Syrian nationalists calling for a country-wide uprising. With Damascus in ferment, the French bombed the city, causing a thousand casualties[304] and literally fanning the flames of revolt throughout Syria and Lebanon.

  The reaction of the government in Paris to the defeat of a mixed force of 3,000 Malagasy and Syrian troops in French uniform was to order Sidi bel-Abbès to despatch a battalion of legionnaires to Syria to sort out the mess. US legionnaire Bennett Doty from Demopolis in A
labama was in 8th Battalion of 1 REI and wrote a book about his experiences, Legion of the Damned. It could have been entitled Legion of the Drunk, for, according to him the sea voyage to Beirut was one long alcoholic binge from start to finish.

  That accords with the story of unemployed Welsh miner John Harvey, who joined up and found himself grooming the mounts of the aristocratic White Russian riders of 4 Squadron 1 REC in Sousse, Tunisia. Drafted to Syria with 165 horses and fifteen pack mules, Harvey was locked up in his lieutenant’s cabin when the transport Porthos called at the British-controlled ports of Alexandria, Port Said and Jaffa, in case he jumped ship. His garbled story of the fighting in Syria is interesting because it illustrates how many soldiers have fought – like the Tommies in France 1914-18, who thought that Germany was just over the horizon – with no clear idea of where they were or what they were fighting for. Nor did he have much understanding of the Legion’s structure beyond that of his own unit and officers.

  Harvey’s Levantine geography is likewise vague, but his account of travelling inland from the port of Beirut on a train attacked by Druzes is graphic enough, with the attackers riding alongside like Indians in a Western film and the legionnaires firing back through slats in the carriage sides. The odds were radically changed against the Druzes when the machine gun company of 4 REI opened up on them, but before arrival in Damascus, four of Harvey’s comrades were wounded and three civilian passengers were dead. He was lucky the machine gunners had come along for the ride. In a recent attack on the same line, casualties had numbered over seventy, with the train out of control for several kilometres after the engine-driver was shot dead. Eventually a passenger managed to clamber onto the footplate and avert disaster by closing the wide-open throttle.[305]

  On 10 September 1925 Doty, Harvey and the Cossacks and ex-hussars of 1 REC rendezvoused with 5th battalion of 4 REI at the village of Musseifré, clearing a landing strip and building six strong-points around the village while 1 REC threw out a screen of mounted skirmishers to give them cover from the Druzes known to be in the surrounding countryside. In the late summer heat, with only combat rations and brackish local well-water that had to be boiled before it could be drunk, Doty’s alcohol-deprived comrades were near mutiny at the end of three days’ labouring.

  When scouts heliographed a warning on 16 September that a large party of Druzes was approaching, no one apparently took much notice. At 0300hrs next morning the first shots roused the defenders to send up flares that revealed hundreds of white-robed men crawling towards the inadequate wire defences. Infiltrators killed the men guarding the legionnaires’ horses and slaughtered some of them on the spot, riding the others out of town through gaps between the strong-points. The Legion marksmen treated this as sport, shooting the horses first and then using the riders scrambling for safety as target practice.

  When the main attack came in, the numbers were so great that the defenders’ machine guns jammed from the heat of continuous firing. Shooting through loopholes, Doty saw the mass of attackers reach within a few metres of the walls several times. Under plunging fire also from infiltrators who had climbed onto the roofs of the houses and a holy man’s tomb behind them, the drunken slobs whose behaviour had so appalled him on board ship now revealed their true colours as highly trained and disciplined soldiers with nerves of steel. A 37mm machine gun crew took care of the infiltrators on the roofs, but only after several officers and NCOs had been shot.

  Towards dawn commanding officer Capt Landriau was hoping for French aircraft to bomb the Druzes after daylight. Ammunition was running out and each man was warned to keep the last bullet for himself, but the Druzes melted away with the daylight, taking their wounded with them. Out of 165 men, 1 REC had lost twenty-five dead, with twenty-four wounded. Relief came in the form of a battalion of 16th Algerian tirailleurs, who charged into the village and cleaned out the few remaining Druzes.

  On 19 November the same men under Capt Landriau were in a crumbling hill fort built by the Turks at Rachaya on the flanks of Mount Hermon, together with a squadron of Tunisian Spahis. A patrol under Lt Gardy was ambushed nearby, which was the first indication that a force of 4,000 Druzes, well provided with arms and ammunition from looted Turkish magazines, had surrounded the fort. The only outgoing communication being by carrier pigeon, the garrison’s last message was, Send a battalion. Again, ammunition became so scarce that bayonet charges were the only way to force the attackers back and gain some breathing space. It was a Hollywood script in reverse, with the cavalry dying on its feet until rescued by a column of Algerian infantry from the Bekaa valley.

  At the far end of the Mediterranean, the war in the Rif continued. At Djihani in 1929 an inexperienced Italian lieutenant allowed himself to be tricked into a battle in open country with the result that forty-one legionnaires died. Such a loss was nothing compared with the Great War, but French public opinion was outraged and moves were made at last to update the Legion’s equipment. In March 1930 the first motorised company was created at Meknès by equipping Lt Gambiez and his men of the mounted company of 2nd Battalion of 2 REI with four Berliet armoured cars to replace their mules. Motor transport requiring roads, roads were built using the civil engineering experience of the Legion. A 140km highway from Marrakesh to Ouarzazarte was constructed, in the process a 700-metre tunnel having to be hacked with picks through a mountain that stood in the way.

  And still the war of skirmishes and razzias went on fanning the flames of bitterness that flared up on 23 May 1930, when a Legion mounted company was surrounded in the Wadi Guir by 750 tribesmen and only rescued from complete annihilation by their comrades of 3rd Mounted Company of 2 REI and a squadron of Spahis. On 29 August, 1st Mounted Company of 2 REI lost twenty-one dead at Tadighoust.

  One enemy stronghold held out for three months against the Legion. At Jebel Baddou in the Atlas Mountains 3,000 tribesmen and their families, supported by several hundred refugees from elsewhere with flocks of 15,000 sheep, were eventually driven out of their homes and took refuge in the extensive caves of the area, emerging only for water from nearby springs. Bombed from the air and mercilessly machine gunned from the ground, they finally surrendered to slake their and their children’s thirst, but not before many of the men had thrown themselves over a precipice for the pleasure of taking one of the assaulting legionnaires with them at the end of his long climb. After the ‘rebels’ had handed over their weapons, salt was metaphorically rubbed in their wounds by the sight of a French victory parade on the spot, the participants in which then feasted on a méchoui of the tribesmen’s sheep, cooked whole on spits over the embers in a huge fire-pit. The scene could have been from one of those desert films that caught the imagination of would-be legionnaires between the wars.

  One of history’s lesser secrets is whether any legionnaire was similarly motivated by seeing the operetta Desert Song, written by Sigmund Romberg with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. The plot corresponded loosely with Klems’ story. Finally brought to bay in a cave after being betrayed to the French by one of his unwilling Berber wives, he was expected to make a heroic last stand and then ‘do the decent thing’ and shoot himself, rather than be taken.

  Not Klems. He surrendered, was court-martialled and sentenced to death early in 1927. However, political instability in Paris and pressure from German diplomats had the sentence commuted to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. After seven half-starved years in the misery of la bagne there, he was released in 1934, following representations to Paris by Hitler’s new National Socialist government in Berlin. Repatriated to Germany, Klems committed suicide while held in jail for some minor offence, shortly before Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939.

  Chapter 27: Veterans and Volunteers: Confusion and Courage

  France, 1939 – 1940; Norway 1940

  The version of the 1940 French defeat and capitulation usually accepted in Anglo-Saxon countries was created when stand-alone Britain boosted its morale by accusing its continental allies of having ‘let
us down’. This simplification is as true – and as misleading – as for a Frenchman to say that the British had fought to the last drop of French blood before unilaterally renouncing their obligations at Dunkirk.

  By vilifying the French army for having no fighting spirit, Britons could pat themselves on the back and say, ‘It would never happen here,’ ignoring the fact that Britain was as ill prepared for war as France, despite the dire warnings of Churchill and his ‘war party’ during the 1930s. The only reason why it ‘never happened here’ was that Britain had twenty nautical miles or more between her shores and the Wehrmacht, which was well equipped and trained for continental river crossings, but not for an invasion of Britain, because that was not on Hitler’s original agenda.

  The French general staff’s monumental error was to regard the immense investment in the subterranean citadels and immovable artillery of the Maginot Line as an English Channel. Incredibly, they forgot the modified Shlieffen plan that had brought the Germans to the outskirts of Paris so swiftly in 1914 and shut their eyes to geography: at the western end of the Line, Holland and Belgium provided the perfect terrain for Guderian’s Panzers to outflank it – as his tankers’ fathers in the Kaiser’s uniforms had done twenty-five years before.

  The Anschluss with Austria and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and the end of the Spanish Civil War in May 1939 all produced influxes of volunteers to the Legion. As war crept nearer in the summer of that year the French War Ministry could not make up its mind about the foreigners volunteering to fight for France. The vacillation continued until 16 September in the second week of war. Among those kept waiting for an answer was the American flier Charles Sweeney, who again offered to form a squadron of fellow Americans to fly French planes. He was still waiting in May 1940, by which time his offer had been overtaken by events.