The French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Boyd

  One of these, whose war was only a little more involved than those of many others, was ex-Sgt Brückler or Brockman, who had betrayed the long-range raid on Darnah airfield in 1942. Another was Mussolini’s private doctor, who enlisted and rose to the rank of adjutant-chef médic. In those years Legion recruiting officers did not ask too many awkward questions because France needed as many experienced soldiers as possible for another war just beginning.

  More or less at the same time that 13 DBLE was transferred to the Alps, the forgotten Legion regiment in Indochina was in a parlous state. After obeying orders from Vichy not to resist the Japanese invasion, 5 REI[360] had been reinforced by the two phantom columns of ‘European workers’ in 1941, but the suspension of normal rotation since then had increased average age considerably. In addition, the stultifying boredom of garrison life under occupation by the Japanese had reduced combat efficiency to an all-time low. Lack of medical supplies combined to lower general levels of health by malaria, dysentery and venereal diseases. Although on paper the French forces totalling 65,000 outnumbered their Japanese occupiers two to one, most were colonial troops. Secondly, they were substantially disarmed and low on ammunition. Thirdly, the Japanese were increasingly jittery after the loss of Burma to the British and Gen Douglas MacArthur’s re-taking of the Philippines and capture of Iwo Jima.

  Contingency plans had been drawn up by the French command to deal with a rumoured Japanese plan to massacre all the Europeans in Indochina during their own withdrawal. After repeated false alarms, on the evening of 9 March 1946 many French barracks were unguarded and numerous personnel living out with their Vietnamese wives and families. Officers and men were seized in their homes and in bars and restaurants. In Lang Son Gen Lemonnier authorised a number of his officers to accept an invitation to a banquet, where their Japanese hosts welcomed them to the strains of a jazz band – until 2000hrs, when they found themselves surrounded by armed guards. Those who resisted were shot or run through with their hosts’ swords.[361]

  The legionnaires were machine-gunned while singing the Marseillaise as a last gesture of defiance. One of three survivors there, Legionnaire Hardouvalis[362] managed to make it to the house of his Vietnamese congai. Betrayed by her neighbours, he refused to divulge the hiding place of some recently parachuted American arms and had the distinction of being forced to dig a vertical grave shorter than himself and stand in it so that his head could be hacked off to make him fit.[363]

  When Lemonnier and the French Resident Camille Auphale refused to sign a surrender document, they were ordered to dig their own graves, kneeling on the edge of which they were beheaded. In Hanoi legionnaires fought to the last bullet and then with bayonets before being overpowered, the survivors being beaten, knifed and bayoneted to death. Resistance at the punishment battalion in Ha Giang was also swiftly overcome and followed by mass executions.

  The young officer who had brought the phantom columns to Vietnam, Lt Chenel was nearly caught in a Hanoi hotel room, but escaped armed solely with his service revolver. Hi-jacking a rickshaw at gunpoint, he then stole a bicycle, and another when that broke, continuing on horseback and on foot to rejoin his men at Son La – a journey of 200km accomplished in less than three days. Chenel then launched his own war against the Japanese after being given command of 1st Company of 1st Battalion on 20 March.

  It was in vain. Surprise and savagery had done their work. The French commanding general was on the run wearing no badges of rank and posing as a colonial administrator after sending a signal to De Gaulle assuring him of the intention to fight to the last man against the Japanese. Reaching the airstrip at Dien Bien Phu six days ahead of his own staff, Brig Gen Sabatier welcomed De Gaulle’s right-hand man and Intelligence chief Col Passy[364] who flew in from Calcutta, informed Sabatier of his promotion to major-general and made him the supreme representative of the government in what remained of French Vietnam.[365] Sabatier later wrote a book justifying his conduct.[366]

  In northeast Vietnam soldiers like Chenel fought on, but were eventually forced to withdraw in five columns totalling 3,000 mixed troops across the Chinese border, repeatedly ambushed during a fifty-two day epic march. Although their congais had been left behind to their fate, one did follow the column for 240km from loyalty to Sgt Leibner. After he was killed in a skirmish with Japanese pursuers, she gazed briefly at his body before vanishing into the jungle.

  Just over 1,000 men of the column survived to reach friendly territory in China suffering from beri-beri and general exhaustion. It was their good fortune that the French ambassador to Chiang Kai-Shek was Gen Zinovi Pechkoff, the ex-legionnaire, who was able to arrange repatriation to Europe via India for some of the wounded.[367] After 5 REI was formally disbanded on 1 July 1945, the fittest were then formed into a bataillon de marche that on 8 February began the long trek back to Vietnam, fighting their way against local warlords along what would become the Ho Chi Minh trail.

  While dragging the Lang Son River to recover the breech-blocks of some 155mm guns dumped there to save them from the Japanese, the pioneers also recovered several brass-bound antique chests. When forced open, they were found to be full of mint-condition Mexican coins dated 1884 and 1885.[368] Against all the odds, after more than half a century, the caisse noire dumped there by Gen Herbinger during the panic withdrawal of 1885 had been recovered by its rightful owners.

  Truly, 5 REI was the lost legion. De Gaulle’s attitude was that they were Pétainist collaborators. In Washington, President Roosevelt had died on 12 April after saying that France had milked Indochina for one hundred years and that the people of Vietnam were ‘entitled to better than that’.[369] Neither he nor his successor Harry Truman had any sympathy for the pre-war colonial administrations of their European allies. In London, Winston Churchill had been rejected as Britain’s post-war leader and could do nothing to influence Washington. His successor, Prime Minister-elect Clement Attlee had sympathy neither for France nor colonialism.

  Playing his own long-term game, Stalin at the Potsdam summit conference in July-August 1945 grabbed all the Baltic and Balkan countries he could to extend the only empire of the twentieth century and agreed for Britain to accept the Japanese surrender on the Asian mainland including Vietnam south of the sixteenth parallel, with Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang doing the same to the north of it. Great Britain’s representative at the surrender ceremony was Adm Louis Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander in South-East Asia. In a secret despatch to the Foreign Office, he warned that the French would not be able to retake possession of their pre-war colony of Vietnam as though nothing had happened since 1940 because of the growth of the Viet Minh independence movement under Ho Chi Minh during the Japanese occupation.[370]

  With Vietnam divided in two, while the Chinese moved into the northern half of the country British troops disembarked in Saigon during September and European survivors had the unnerving experience of seeing them re-arm surrendered Japanese soldiers as a force to re-impose law and order. It may seem strange, in view of his sustained successful campaign to drive the French out of his country, that the main proponent of the return of French troops at the time was Nguyen Hai Quoc, whose nom de guerre was Ho Chi Minh, meaning He Who Lights The Way. Ho was by profession a history teacher, who saw clearly that the European powers, humiliated by the Japanese and financially ruined by the two world wars, would never regain their pre-war status in Asia. Whatever colonies they did recover would soon be lost to national independence movements – as happened in British India, Malaya and Africa and the Dutch East Indies. China, on the other hand, would never let go.

  Having formed the Viet Minh[371] in May 1941 during his exile in China, Ho considered that it was – in his own words – better for his countrymen ‘to sniff French arse for a short while than eat Chinese shit for centuries to come’.[372] Some of his supporters resented his agreement to 15,000 French soldiers being stationed north of the sixteenth parallel, but since the quid pro quo was the departure of 180,000 Chines
e soldiers, he won that point.

  Ho was a founder member of the French Communist Party and a Comintern delegate. Although led by Communists, the Viet Minh purported to be a national front organization, open to all political persuasions. After the Japanese surrender to the Allies on 10 August 1945, Viet Minh units armed by American OSS operatives seized control of the northern capital of Hanoi on 19 August and proclaimed the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Gen Leclerc did not return to Hanoi until 18 March 1946, with a token force to replace the Chinese, who were in no hurry to leave. At his side as he inspected a guard of honour was a small Vietnamese man in western suit and a floppy felt hat. This was the DRV’s Minister of the Interior, Vo Nguyen Giap who had commanded the Vietnamese guerrilla forces fighting the Japanese in Vietnam since 1943.

  The French-Vietnamese Accord recognised the DRV in return for it accepting the status of a member of the French Union and granting concessions to French business interests, foremost of which was the Michelin rubber company. Yet De Gaulle’s High Commissioner Adm Georges Thierry D’Argenlieu denounced the Accord from the outset, placing his faith at the time in the force of French arms – which is where the Legion came into all this. D’Argenlieu was a curious character, having served in both world wars in the navy, but been a barefoot Carmelite monk in between – as he would be again after playing his part in this tragedy.

  Leclerc’s French and North African troops began the long push northwards from Saigon – among them 3 REI and 13 DBLE, whose commander Col De Sairigné was an early victim of a Viet Minh ambush. On 5 October, 1st and 2nd Battalions of 2 REI under Col Lorrilot landed at Nha Trang to secure the coast of Annam, or central Vietnam. Dirty tricks were the order of the day on both sides. The mixed bands of Viet Minh, Japanese soldiers and local bandits had the unpleasant habit of dum-dumming their bullets, which ensured few prisoners were taken. So 2 REI cheated in different ways, disguising the smaller and darker-skinned legionnaires as nah qué peasants in black pyjamas and conical hats to achieve maximum surprise.

  In the famine-torn northern provinces the peasants, who had not enough food for themselves and their children, were raped and robbed by armed bands of native and Chinese irregulars. The tension mounted until 19 November, when the Viet Minh threw down the gauntlet by cutting Hanoi’s water and electricity supplies before attacking the French garrison with mortar and small arms fire. They released all the prisoners in the jails before melting away into the jungles in traditional guerrilla style. Their killing of twenty-nine French soldiers brought a savage riposte: on 23 November approximately 6,000 Vietnamese civilians were killed[373] when French warships retaliated by bombarding the defenceless port city of Haiphong – which in turn led to 600 European civilians being abducted or killed.

  Like the attack on Fort Sumter that started the American Civil War, the bombardment of Haiphong was the first blow in Vietnam’s Thirty Years’ War: Round One, France v. Viet Minh; Round Two, USA v. NVA and Viet Cong. De Gaulle having resigned after doing his best to re-unite a deeply divided country, few people in France took any interest in what was happening in their name on the other side of the planet. On 7 December two second-lieutenants disembarking at Haiphong with 2 REI were to become Legion legends. Their names were Bernard Cabiro and Roger Faulques. The French High Commissioner, Monsieur Sainteny was trying to keep the civil population calm, but the capital was surrounded by an unknown number of enemy troops. After being transported up-river by landing craft of the Naval Assault Division, nicknamed ‘Dinasau’, 2 REI’s job was to find out how many and to re-open Highway One joining Hanoi and Saigon.

  It was a grim Christmas with Junkers bombers inherited from the Luftwaffe parachuting ammunition to French units cut off from re-supply even in the centre of Hanoi.[374] Cabiro’s 1st Company suffered four legionnaires killed and two officers, two NCOs and eighteen men wounded. Steadily, the French won the upper hand, so that in temperate Hanoi, its shady villa-lined avenues laid out like a provincial town in the Midi, officers and their European wives once again played tennis and swam at the Cercle Sportif, attended Mass in the huge redbrick Catholic cathedral and concerts in their own opera house. In sweltering Saigon, 1,200km to the south, the Continental Palace Hotel on Place Garnier – now Lam Son Square – was a chunk of Europe come adrift, offering cool drinks on the terrace and air-conditioned rooms with every possible service. Prudent Europeans did not venture across the river into the Chinese city of Cholon after dark, but that had more to do with tong gangsterism than Communist terrorists.

  Outside the main towns, the impossibility of ‘pacifying’ mountainous and jungle terrain without killing the entire population in which Giap’s dedicated troops swam ‘like fish in the water’, forced the French to achieve a delusory paper progress by dotting command maps with strategically distributed ‘hedgehog’ forts. One of these, at Hoc Monh outside Saigon, was built by legionnaires as a fortified palace complete with dining-hall, sickbay, prison, electricity, modern plumbing and sanitation. Serving in a less luxurious ‘hedgehog’, Legion WO1 Eugen Brause recalled massacring human waves with well-sited machine-guns in concrete emplacements and the overpowering smell of fuel and roasted pork when the fougasses – tanks of napalm buried beneath the glacis – were remotely fired during an attack.[375]

  Unless with its own airstrip, even the best constructed ‘hedgehog’ was vulnerable when replacements and supplies came in by armoured convoys on the network of routes coloniales, which are still the main highways of Vietnam. Highways Three and Four became death traps for all except the most heavily armed convoys. Routinely, the Viet Minh besieged a strongpoint, waited for the relief column, ambushed it and then faded away.

  As in all confrontations between conventional forces and guerrillas, the anger of the soldiers boiled over in occasional killing sprees, as testified by some of the Germans who made up 60% of those involved. Describing one such excess when headless male bodies were left in a village square as a warning and women and children burned alive in their homes, ex-Cpl Günther Woitzik claimed to have been so sickened that he deserted soon afterwards. Whether it was before or after some of his comrades were found by a river where they had been swimming with eyes gouged out and penises and testicles thrust into their mouths, he was unclear. ‘I always kept the last three bullets for me,’ he said.[376]

  Joachim Schriever not only deserted, but fought as a renegade with the Viet Minh before being repatriated to East Germany via China and Moscow in 1951. ‘The Chinese were officially friendly because our countries were Socialist brothers,’ he recalled. ‘But privately they said, “Long-noses no good.”’ East German politician Eric Honnecker organised a total of seven transports of Legion deserters by the same route. Some, like Schriever, were produced at Press conferences to denounce the imperialist war in Vietnam, but were afterwards destined to lifelong surveillance by the Stasi as having probably been corrupted politically during their time in the West.[377]

  Legion deserter Willy Deckers recalled being greeted when his Moscow-Berlin train reached the East German border station at Frankfurt-an-der-Oder by what he thought was the Hitler Youth band to which he had belonged, only to be informed that it was the Freie Deutsche Jugend – the Communist equivalent. Afterwards, he and the others in his transport were held for months in a ‘quarantine camp’ ostensibly awaiting the result of their blood tests for malaria.

  This was long before the Berlin Wall, so he took a chance after being released and crossed the border into the West. However, after fellow-deserter and Communist activist Jackie Holsten was imprisoned, it seemed safer to be treated as a spy in the East, so Deckers went back.[378] At the same time in the French zone of Occupied Germany, Legion recruiting teams were openly defying the German police and smuggling up to fifty young men a day across the border into France.[379]

  Time, said Ho, is on our side because, since the imperialists cannot kill one of us for each child that is born, we must win in the end. At the time, less than 5% of the Vietnamese population
supported the Communists, but the longer France and then the US kept the conflict going, the stronger the Party became.

  The tactics of the Legion in North Africa were patently unsuitable for pursuing across flooded rice paddies and the river deltas, jungles and mountains of Vietnam enemy soldiers who had only to cache their weapons in order to look like any other peasants. Initially, 1 REC was equipped with US M29 ‘Crab’ amphibious vehicles. When too many men had died in these open-topped death traps, they were replaced by another modified all-terrain vehicle, the closed-in Alligator, which at least gave protection from grenades thrown by suicide volunteers during ambushes.

  The disciplined Viet Minh became adept at the same technique used by the Chinese Communists against the British in Malaya: blowing up the road after the leading armoured vehicles had passed, isolating them from the rest, then raining grenades and fire from well-sited machine guns into the stalled column of civilian and military vehicles. The French High Command decided that the only way of taking the war to the enemy was to convert some of its ex-Luftwaffe Junkers bombers to drop men where they were needed, fast. The Legion formed its first paratroops with volunteers from 3rd Company of 3 REI under Capt Morin in April 1948. After training, the first Bataillon Etranger de Parachutistes, known as 1 BEP, landed at Haiphong in autumn 1948. Lt Cabiro and other officers of 2 BEP disemplaned at Than Son Nhut on 24 January 1949, followed by their men landing from the transport ship Joffre at Saigon on 9 February. Six weeks later they were in action in the central region of the country.