The French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Boyd

  So many tanks had been put out of action that from a distance they looked as though simply parked for re-fuelling. When German and Italian trucks drove confidently up to the French wire, believing themselves to be in a friendly tank laager, their loads were a welcome addition to the French larder. The Jock columns slipped out again through the gaps and brought home a German supply convoy which had lost its bearings in a nascent sand storm, plus an even more welcome 1,000-litre tanker full of drinking water. The drivers of these vehicles were the first German POWs taken by the Legion, which was a great morale booster, but by the end of the day Koenig had an unforeseen headache in the shape of 154 Italian and 125 German prisoners to share the limited rations of the defenders, already stretched by the Jock columns liberating from their Axis captors 654 British and Indian personnel captured during the first stage of the battle.

  In a ding-dong combat 15km to the north, Rommel seemed to be losing his impetus until he ordered his troops trapped in a minefield to drive right through it and attack. The resultant capture of 3,000 British prisoners and 123 artillery pieces was a severe jolt to 8th Army. Meanwhile Koenig’s mobile patrols were having a field day, shooting up Axis supply columns with their 75mm guns lashed on the back of flatbed trucks to serve as home-made tank-busters.[338] In one such encounter Pierre Messmer, now a captain, brewed up fifteen German tanks, firing at the limit of range.[339] During the lull around Bir Hakeim, a French supply convoy brought in supplies from El Adem and took out with it on the return leg ‘useless mouths’ in the shape of POWs, released prisoners and some wounded.

  A solitary staff car going in the other direction – towards Bir Hakeim – was being driven by Susan Travers. Ordered to the rear with the female nursing personnel just before the first attack, she had collected Koenig’s car from a repair shop as her excuse to return, relying on her personal relationship with him to be allowed to stay, the only woman in the box. Commandeering a semi-dugout with corrugated steel roof for his Ford Utility station wagon only 200 metres from Koenig’s HQ, she accommodated herself in what she called her grave, another dugout hacked four feet deep into the rock, with a sandbag wall above ground level and a canvas roof which kept the sun off her but would have been useless against shrapnel or bomb fragments.

  Its sole furniture was her camp-bed purchased from the Army and Navy Stores on the Strand. Her folding canvas bath, purchased at the same time, was left in the car boot because of the water shortage. For a while until she grew lonely, she lived there day and night, eating her way through a stock of corned beef and tinned asparagus, which she consumed with the intention of leaving none for the Germans when they arrived.[340]

  Until 31 May it seemed the Allied line was being held. Then the Italians made a significant breakthrough north of Bir Hakeim. Taking advantage of the lull on his own doorstep, Larminat paid an inspection visit and was impressed by all the preparations. On his departure, Amilakvari went hunting with four of the flatbed truck tank-busters, destroying several enemy tanks before being forced to return. In another fast-moving and very confusing tank battle between Panzers and British armour right outside the wire, several victims were claimed by Capt Gabriel de Sairigné’s field artillery, although no one could say for sure whether they had all been enemy tanks, so bad was the visibility in the heat haze and all the dust stirred up by the tank-tracks and shells detonating.

  This sort of activity might have been considered an unwise provocation, had Koenig wanted a quiet life, but he was not that kind of soldier. However, on 2 June Legion patrols were urgently recalled as two enemy armoured columns rumbled closer from the west and north. The nearest estimate of their strength with all the supply vehicles was about 1,000 vehicles. Bir Hakeim was surrounded, bombarded from the ground and by the Italian air force throughout daylight hours. After two armoured attacks supported by infantry were halted on the south-western perimeter by the anti-tank gunners, two Italian officers approached with a white flag. Their arrival coincided with the time-limit Koenig had been given: to hold for ten days, come what may. However when the Italian officers were taken blindfolded to his HQ he replied politely to their invitation to capitulate by saying, ‘Mi dispiace, signori, but tell your general we’re not here to surrender.’ With equal courtesy, the Italians bowed and left after congratulating him and his men on being grandi soldati.

  Their driver having been panicked by threats on his life from malicious Italian-speaking legionnaires, the officers had to drive themselves back. Half an hour later, the first 105mm shell crashed into the French positions and, to make life even more unpleasant, a sand storm blew up reducing visibility to nil. Susan Travers sat it out in the theoretically airtight Ford, trying not to move in order to perspire as little as possible, but the men in the 1,200 slit trenches, dugouts and gun-pits had no such option. The water ration was getting critical again.

  On 3 June at 0930hrs two British POWs had the unpleasant experience of being shot at by Legion sentries before they were recognised as friends approaching the wire. With them, they brought a letter on squared message-pad paper signed by Rommel personally telling the garrison to put up white flags and walk out unarmed. Such a letter should have been addressed to the commander, not to his men, and should not have used the familiar form Wenn ihr weisse Flaggen zeigt – meaning, if you show white flags – which implied that Rommel was talking to men under his command. Koenig, nicknamed by his men le vieux lapin was not a happy bunny after reading this insulting breach of protocol. Had he needed anything to stiffen his resolve, Rommel’s letter would have done it.

  The Bofors battery claimed four Stukas shot down in the space of a few minutes at 1700hrs. Another unusual event that day was the landing on an improvised strip within the box of a Spitfire, whose South African pilot ran out of juice. With a tank full of truck fuel, which cannot have done the engine much good, it took off again shakily during a fortuitous lull in the shelling. A fragment of shrapnel piercing the radiator of Koenig’s car, Travers managed to persuade one of the Vietnamese mechanics to dismantle it and haul it with her to the primitive workshop, where the hole was welded up. Finding her way back to the bunker, she repeatedly lost her way in the fog of abrasive dust particles.

  That night a British supply convoy made it into the camp through the lines, narrowly missing on their return journey a trio of German officers who drove up at 0430hrs on 5 June with a third invitation to ‘avoid unnecessary bloodshed’. Refusing even to see them, Koenig gave orders for them to be allowed just five minutes to get out of range. In their haste to depart, they drove over a mine that put their Kubelwagen out of action, leaving them to walk home in rather a hurry.

  The bad news after daybreak was that an immense battle to the north had cost the British 6,000 men killed, wounded or taken prisoner – and 150 tanks. No sooner had the implications been digested – there was little else for breakfast – than the first 150mm and 210mm shells began arriving with a sound like express trains ripping through the air overhead, accompanied to the amazement of defenders and attackers alike by a light shower of rain that became a slashing downpour of hail. Immediately seeds germinated, so that the wasteland bloomed within hours beneath a sky criss-crossed by friendly and enemy aircraft so interwoven that the Bofors crew could often do nothing except watch as aircraft shot up by other aircraft plummeted down in streaks of black smoke to explode on the desert below.

  Rommel now put everything he could spare into the reduction of Bir Hakeim. Two Italian divisions, two German ones and twenty-one batteries moved in for the kill. Overhead, as many as 500 Heinkel and Savoia bombers arrived and departed in waves, dropping their loads on the French positions. At this point it has been estimated that the 3,700 men inside the wire were diverting from Rommel’s main push around ten times as many enemy forces, plus a significant part of the Axis air forces in the Western Desert. In the military game of numbers, the French were winning for the first time since Narvik.

  That night German sappers lifted the mines from a wide avenue throug
h the minefields, preparatory to a major ground attack. Under cover of early morning fog and beneath a heavy overcast, the Lebanese sappers replaced them, unaware that the same fog was hiding the approach of a battery of the best German multi-purpose artillery piece of the war: the 88mm. gun. They were also up against the best machine gun of the war in the shape of the rapid-firing Maschinengewehr 42, which was beginning to replace the MG 34. Recoil-operated and firing up to 1,000 rounds per minute of belt-fed 7.92mm rifle ammunition, both models dealt with over-heating by having barrels that could be changed in seconds.

  As waves of tanks and infantry pressed in from south, west and north, the German 88s were firing over open sights with barrels horizontal, blasting the only rise from which the French artillery observers had any view of the battlefield. The attack was only broken up by raids from the RAF, but no sooner had they returned to base than sixty Junkers bombers appeared overhead, dropping loads that included delayed-action land mines to hamper collection of wounded and repair of the day’s damage.

  Nearing desperation, with large gaps torn in his defences, Koenig ordered Messmer’s company, which had been in continuous action without sleep for forty-eight hours, to act as a flying squad and plug the holes. Another raid from thirty-five Junkers took out the bunker sheltering the main French ammunition dump, a deficit that was partly offset by small, fast-moving convoys slipping between the German forces at night, bringing in supplies and taking out wounded, some of whom had lain in the open for hours because no help could get to them in daylight.

  By 8 June the French had held for far longer than anyone on either side could have predicted and Rommel was now personally driving his men on, impatient to finish off this running sore on his southern flank. Although a crucial position fell to the enemy that day, still Koenig’s forces held on, moving like zombies, asleep on their feet. The water reserves were down to one gallon per man. Many men had already drained the radiators of trucks and drunk the bitter, rust-coloured liquid inside after passing it through the filters of the gas masks they hoped they would not have to use for their original purpose. Shaving and washing water was similarly treated.[341] To see good food and drinkable water falling beyond the wire during an unsuccessful air drop was torture.

  Thick fog shrouded the dawn of 9 June. As it cleared, four 88s and six heavy machine guns opened up from the position taken the previous day. In case any defender wondered why infantry did not follow up, the answer arrived in the shape of forty Stukas dive-bombing with their sirens screaming. The afternoon brought a raid by forty-two Junkers, after which German infantry threatened to overwhelm the French positions until broken up at the last minute by the half-tracks manoeuvring at close quarters under the energetic command of a Breton veteran from the First World War, Lt Jean Dève, nicknamed ‘Dewey’.

  The German counter-battery fire was pinpoint-precise by now. A shell detonated the magazine of one French gun position producing a gigantic secondary explosion. Miraculously unwounded, the sergeant immediately improvised a tourniquet on the stump of arm through which the only other survivor was bleeding to death and carried him away to safety just before the position was over-run. By now, men were taking unbelievable risks, whether in the belief that they must be immortal to have survived so long or because their judgement was destroyed by the noise and adrenalin of three weeks’ sustained bombardment. When Koenig sent a crate of beer to a sergeant of 3rd Battalion whose gun crew had knocked out two mortars and a 77mm gun, the gleeful sergeant climbed onto the parapet of sandbags to yell defiance and was promptly shot dead.

  The big event of the day was a successful airdrop with a container of 170 litres of water, which was immediately distributed to the wounded. Restricted to a smaller circle was the gist of a coded radio message from 8th Army, to the effect that Bir Hakeim had more than served its purpose and further resistance was unnecessary. Koenig, however, had no intention of surrendering and seeing his men in cages before being taken away to sit out the war as POWs. Nor, to his credit, was he prepared to leave his wounded behind and break out with only the able-bodied. However, there could be no question of making a mass breakout in daylight, and he needed twenty-four hours to plan and prepare the sortie by which he hoped to get the maximum numbers away to safety.

  Among the few to whom he communicated the plan was the faithful Travers. He had only sought her out a couple of times in the past three months, making a point of telling her little so that, if taken prisoner and identified as his driver, she could truthfully reply that she knew nothing of his plans.

  Half-asleep in her dugout, she heard him approaching and tried to smarten herself up. So exhausted that he could hardly keep his eyes open, he informed her of the breakout planned for the following night. The only preparation she had to make was to smash the windscreen of the Humber, so that it would not blind her if hit by an Axis bullet.[342]

  On the morning of 9 June, the first flight of enemy aircraft was unable to unload its bombs because the German and Italian positions were so close to the French ones. Ammunition of all calibres running out, 2nd Battalion drove off an Italian attack with hand grenades. At 1300hrs, 130 Luftwaffe aircraft flattened what remained of the northern perimeter and a bomb destroyed the clearly marked hospital, killing the wounded and most of the orderlies. In the artillery bombardment that followed, ten tanks advanced so tightly coordinated that shrapnel from air bursts was spattering their hulls. Again the Bren-carriers were used to blunt the attack, which was finally broken up by the cannons of a flight of RAF Spitfires that appeared in the nick of time – which was just as well because few guns were still serviceable after firing a daily average of 700 rounds each, totalling 42,000 shells during the siege.[343]

  After a diversion provided by British 7th Armoured Division attacking the enemy rear, by dusk all essential preparations were in place for the breakout – not to the east in the direction of the British rear, but to the southwest where the Axis forces were thinnest on the ground. After clearing the enemy besiegers, the idea was to swing round to the southeast and then head north for a cairn and British fuel dump known as B837. This had to be found in the darkness by picking up three red lamps shining southwards to avoid the enemy sighting them.

  The news spread as legionnaires saw their officers changing into clean uniforms and using precious last drops of drinking water to shave off several days’ growth of beard. Then came orders to destroy what could be destroyed and render unserviceable everything else, with 3rd Battalion given the dirty job of staying to guard the flanks of the column. Trucks and ambulances were loaded with the 200 most severely wounded men. Those who volunteered to walk included the German colour sergeant of 3rd Battalion, whose arm had been amputated only hours before.

  At midnight the disengagement began as quietly as possible, not to alert the besiegers. Desert navigation, especially on such a moonless night, always had an element of luck. It seemed this was missing when Koenig’s best navigator Lt Bellec led the long column of vehicles straight into a minefield. As his Bren-carrier blew up, the explosion cued the unmistakable sound of MG 34s and 42s firing at the flash. A second carrier hit another mine. Travers and everyone else held their breath. Was the secret out, or did the besiegers think they were dealing with a small party infiltrating with supplies?

  Bellec clambered aboard a third carrier, realising his error. The only way out was back. In hushed tones, the wounded who could walk were ordered out of the trucks in the hope of making them too light to detonate the anti-tank mines all around. They started walking, aware that every step could blow them to hell. Equally gingerly, Travers slewed Koenig’s car round in her tightest three-point turn and followed Amilakvari’s car through the darkness broken by flashes as vehicles brewed up on all sides. Amilakvari’s was the next to go. Edging around it, scared of setting off a mine herself, Travers took the somewhat blackened Georgian prince on board, aware that each extra passenger made it more likely that the Humber would set off a mine under them all.

  Once the Germ
ans started firing flares, speed was the only weapon. One particularly close heavy machine gun was taken out by Lt Dève driving his half-track right over it and its crew. After repeating the operation on a second machine gun, he died trying the same trick with a third. Incredibly in all the confusion of explosions, screams and enemy fire, Bellec or someone else had regained his bearings and the column slowly forged ahead through the gap in the enemy lines. With Amilakvari waving a Tommy gun beside her in the front passenger seat and firing it at any target he could see until told by Koenig to shut up, Travers kept her foot down, ignoring the bumps and potholes over which she was crashing – and her general’s yells from the back seat to slow down and reduce the risk of smashing the suspension or colliding with another vehicle.

  There surely can have been no other battlefield on which a woman drove to safety through minefields and enemy positions two high-ranking officers, both of whom had been her lovers – and was allowed by them to drive because she was the best of the three behind a wheel. The ultimate tribute to Travers’ driving is that the only damage to the car was ruined shock absorbers, a dent in the rear where another vehicle drove into her – and eleven bullet-holes. By 0200hrs they had lost everyone else and were alone in the desert, navigating by guesswork and a pocket compass of Amilakvari’s, which he had to get out of the car to use. At one of these stops, they clearly heard German voices nearby and drove straight on, never mind the compass bearing!