The French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Boyd

  The equipment of both battalions was so obsolete that their unwieldy, outdated Lebel rifles had to be dropped separately to avoid injury on landing. Once on the ground the paras were thus at first armed only with combat knives until they could locate the bundles of rifles. Since parachutes were in such short supply that they had to be collected after each drop for re-use, the observant Viets made it a priority to steal or destroy them. A Legion para’s first decision after landing was therefore whether to roughly re-pack the billowing folds of silk or to head straight for his weapon maybe a couple of hundred metres away. Even so, la guerre aeroportée – airborne warfare – was the trump that would win the war in Vietnam. At least, that was what the generals thought until the defeat at Dien Bien Phu taught them otherwise.

  Part III

  THE POST-IMPERIAL PERIOD

  Chapter 32: Who needs the Legion now?

  When the Evian Agreements ended the Algerian war in 1962, the consensus in many French officers’ messes was that the Legion had outlived its usefulness, since there were no more colonial wars to be fought. President Charles De Gaulle understandably dissolved 1 REP, but what saved the rest of the Legion and transformed it into a modern world-class fighting force was – according to Legion lore – former wartime résistant and ex-Legion officer Pierre Messmer, who was his Minister of the Armed Forces at the time, charged with reorganising all the French armed services after the generals’ revolt

  Was De Gaulle a man to be swayed from his chosen path by a subordinate, albeit a much-trusted one – or was he playing a deeper game?

  The world, as seen from the banks of the Seine in 1962, was becoming an increasingly monolingual planet, on which all other cultures were being submerged or swept away by a flood of Pepsi, Coke and Proctor and Gamble detergents bearing with it a flotsam of Hollywood films, Y-Fronts, Playtex bras, Levi jeans and Nabisco cereal products. Later would come the totally irresistible cultural tsunami of transatlantic television series and the implantation worldwide of multinational companies able by secret boardroom decisions to destabilise entire countries, but in 1962 it seemed to President De Gaulle that there was still time for France and the French-speaking countries to build a politico-cultural coffer dam around themselves and keep at bay this threat to their continued independent political, cultural and commercial identity.

  Francophonie is a word coined in 1880 to mean the linguistic community of France, Quebec and those parts of Belgium and Switzerland where French was the first language, plus regions like the Levant and south-east Asia, where it was the second language used for commercial and cultural exchanges by a French-educated middle class. De Gaulle’s plan was to unite the fifty-plus francophone countries in a bloc where their common interests could be protected from what he saw as an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy to dominate the entire planet. The zenith of this policy was his speech in Montreal in the summer of 1967 ending with ‘Vive le Québec libre!’ – a call to arms that did not amuse the Canadian federal government.

  English-speakers take for granted the convenient pre-eminence of their language, but Arabic script is the second most widely used in the world. If every business executive had to master it for routine international correspondence, that would change our worldview. Spanish is the first language of 250 million people. Basic Spanish is easy for Europeans to acquire, but tourism and business would be very different if we were all obliged to learn it in order to travel abroad. Mandarin Chinese has 800 million first-language speakers and is used as a second language by millions more, but if we were compelled to master even a modicum of 15,000 Chinese characters in order to use our computers, we should see the world differently.

  The examples give a measure of how disadvantaged French-speakers are and why De Gaulle wanted to re-validate what had been the language of diplomacy, respected worldwide for its precision. To some extent, his dream outlives him at today’s francophone summit meetings bringing together the heads of state from fifty-five countries – Belgium, Benin and Burkina Faso all the way to Togo, Tunisia, Vanuatu and Vietnam – thus keeping French culture alive in those countries and encouraging trade and tourism between them for their mutual benefit.

  Another aim of De Gaulle in shaping the francophone bloc at the time was to de-fuse some of the tensions in the dangerously polarised Cold War, whose two principal players in Washington and Moscow manipulated smaller countries like pawns in a game that could end in global disaster. France was a founder member of NATO but its president’s hostility to American control of the Alliance would lead in March 1966 to his expulsion of NATO forces so that nuclear missiles could no longer be launched from French territory without the French government being consulted. Since any launch against the USSR would have triggered immediate retaliation against the source of the incoming missiles, few people in France queried his decision.

  In 1962, he saw interference by the Soviet bloc and the US in the domestic affairs of Third World countries as steps on the path leading to global conflict. To reduce the possibilities of French and Belgian withdrawals from their African colonies being exploited for Cold War ends, De Gaulle believed that France could become a force for peace by offering an alternative to intervention by Moscow or Washington in countries wishing to become clients of neither power bloc. This new peace-keeping role could only be exercised after expunging the stigma of ‘colonial oppressor’ that attached to France’s armed occupation of Algeria. With that behind her, she could play a major part in world politics again, providing she had a self-contained rapid-reaction force capable of mounting effective low-cost peace-keeping missions with very little support in the jungle, desert, swamp and mountain environments that prevail in much of the Third World.

  Even in 1831 many voices had been raised against the folly of French colonial adventures. In 1962 after the war in Algeria had cost almost every family in France the life of a relative or close acquaintance, De Gaulle knew that few voters would buy into his dream – unless the rapid reaction force was officially composed of foreigners, whose deaths would lose no votes in French elections. Thank you, Marshal Soult.

  The problem for Charles De Gaulle and future incumbents of the Elysée Palace after his resignation in 1969 was that an army of foreigners, whose NCOs and men were as loyal to their officers as the paras of 1 REP had been, was far too dangerous to keep on French soil, unless dismembered in such a way that all the president’s men could only put the pieces together again outside France.

  To ensure the Legion never mounted another insurrection or became the tool of another coup, its regimental depots in France were therefore separated geographically by hundreds of kilometres and all situated well distant from the capital. About as far from Paris as one can get on the mainland, 1 RE[380] runs the main headquarters at Aubagne near Marseille. 4 RE, entrusted with training, is at Castelnaudary near Toulouse. The cavalry regiment 1 REC is at Orange, with 2 RE in Nîmes. The engineers of 1 REG and 2 REG in Laudun and St Christol on Corsica. The most dangerous legionnaires – those in 2 REP – are confined on the island of Corsica with no means of getting to the mainland faster than the speed of an overnight car ferry. On the occasions when they are deployed elsewhere in more than detachment strength, an outsider might be forgiven for thinking that the French air force is reluctant to find aircraft for them. Across the Atlantic in French Guiana are the men of 3 REI. On Mayotte, between Madagascar and Mozambique, is the Foreign Legion Detachment designated DLEM; and in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa is that old war-horse 13 DBLE.

  The Legion has not changed greatly since Messmer’s massive relocation and restructuring. It currently numbers 7,699 officers, NCOs and legionnaires from 136 countries, constituting nine regiments and one independent sub-unit. With the embargo on French citizens enlisting as legionnaires long since lifted, 24% are French.

  Some 10% of officers joined as legionnaires; the others are rotated to the Legion as part of their service in the French army. As to where legionnaires currently come from, at a recent induction session attended by t
he author, a group of thirty would-be legionnaires were ordered in French to sit down if they understood spoken French. Half of them did so. A second NCO ordered those still on their feet to sit down – this time in Russian. All of them sat down with the exception of one African and a solitary Briton. Of the thirty, on average five would make it through basic training and be posted to a regiment. The other twenty-five would fall by the wayside at some point in the six months, before they were eligible to wear the coveted white képi.

  Chapter 33: The Legion reborn

  By the end of 1962, 1 RE was already ensconced in its new HQ at Aubagne, with the memorial installed at one end of the parade ground and the banners and battle honours displayed in the museum and the adjacent hall of honour. At the time, 2 REP was still in Algeria, where the Mers el-Kebir enclave was to remain French under the Evian Agreements until 1968 – rather like the US base at Guantánamo on Cuba. Discipline was waning and morale low among the trained paras digging ditches around the military airfield of Bou Sfer when James Worden met up with his compatriot Simon Murray. Both men were surprised that Legion recruiting continued, although not on a scale to make up for all the desertions: Murray recorded twenty new arrivals and 136 deserters in three months.

  The Bou Sfer runway ended up 80 metres shorter than planned, due to defaulting legionnaires being ordered not to scrub floors or do press-ups, but to exercise instead their night-fighting skills by stealing sacks of cement from the heavily guarded stores of building material. The runway cement was, in their opinion, better employed making concrete bases for the tents that were 2 REP’s sole accommodation that freezing, wet winter until replaced by prefabricated huts erected on the same bases the following spring.

  On 10 December 1962 Gen Lefort presided over the installation of a new colonel for 2 REP and announced the regiment’s new role as an elite fighting arm. Morale began to lift. In between digging ditches and drains, Murray was a member of the morale-boosting regimental shooting team and also much in demand as a pianist for dances in the officers’ mess. The perimeter fence and mines had not yet been installed so he, Worden and other old hands were in the habit of wandering off-base at night to take their pleasures in the immaculately decorated brothel run by two ladies named Janine and Suzanne in the little village of Bou Sfer.

  Anglo-Saxons unaccustomed to the idea of soldiers’ brothels may be unaware that there is no obligation to indulge in sexual activity; many men simply go along for a drink in an atmosphere more congenial than the bar of the foyer du légionnaire. For those who wonder about the mutual attraction of harlots and heroes, Worden suggests that they get on well not just because they represent supply and demand in the same market but because there is an instinctive sympathy between members of the human race’s two oldest professions, both despised until needed.

  The main spectator sport at Mers el-Kebir was rugby, in which 2 REP’s regimental team earned a reputation for seriously damaging visiting players from other French military formations. Fitness training was back on the daily timetable, including jumping into and out of inflatable assault craft in all weathers and being put ashore from submarines on waterless islands to test men’s endurance and initiative in making it back to base before they died of thirst.

  Based at the former penal battalion base of Bechar in the Sahara, 2 RE was guarding the French nuclear testing area. Tests concluded, the regiment moved into Mers el-Kebir until disbanded in 1968 after the base was handed over to Algeria. Meanwhile, 3 RE was posted direct from Algeria to Madagascar, for training in amphibious warfare and tropical operations. Transferred to French Guiana for jungle warfare training and guard duties around the European Space Centre at Kourou, it had an especial role at the Ariane launching site.

  Initially, 4 RE moved from Tébessa way south into the Sahara to guard the oil wells around Touggourt. After its subsequent transfer to France, it became the training regiment, based in the impressive purpose-built Quartier Danjou outside Castelnaudary. Starting in summer 1963, 5 RE began sending men from Bechar to 5 RMP – Régiment Mixte du Pacifique – created for the construction and security of the Centre d’Expérimentation du Pacifique nuclear testing grounds, where among its other jobs have been vehicle maintenance, running power stations and water distillation plants there.

  Despised until needed? Worden should know. Legionnaires rotated back to France from Algeria found their reception by the inhabitants of towns near their bases ranging from indifferent to downright hostile. On his first trip into Aix-en-Provence, impeccably dressed in their Sunday-best uniforms, he and friends were refused service in hotels and restaurants simply because they were legionnaires.[381] The phenomenon is not peculiar to France. Of British soldiers, Rudyard Kipling wrote:

  It’s Tommy this and Tommy that – and Tommy, go away.

  But it’s ‘Thank you, Mr Atkins,’ when the band begins to play.

  Worden’s company was tasked with re-interring the coffins of Rollet, Aage and the Unknown Legionnaire in the Legion cemetery at Puyloubier, the village run for disabled and convalescent legionnaires in the Cézanne country of Provence. He personally volunteered to dig the hole for the Unknown. It is typical of the quirky ethos of the Legion that everyone knows the identity of the Unknown Legionnaire. His name was Zimmerman, and he died in bed after completing twenty years of undistinguished service. The posthumous honour was conferred on his remains to make the point that every legionnaire merits honour, whatever his rank or personal record.

  Reporting to the new HQ of 2 REP at Camp Rafalli, outside the Corsican port of Calvi, Worden announced himself by name, number, length of service and time in present rank. He had flown in the RAF during the Second World War and was aware that he was no longer a young lion. It was nevertheless a surprise to hear his new CO, Col Caillaud – who had himself served in the BEP in Vietnam – mutter to the camp commandant, ‘Where are they digging all these old bastards up from?’

  Under Caillaud’s energetic leadership, 2 REP was transformed from a conventional para regiment into the French equivalent of the British SAS. At the time, Caillaud’s ideas passed for revolutionary in the French army. He believed that every man in the regiment should be equally good at several specialisations. So, the 1st Company trained in anti-tank warfare, night fighting and urban warfare; 2nd Company was for mountain and arctic warfare; 3rd Company had wet feet from amphibious operations with its own combat swimmers; 4th Company were the guys one would not want to meet on a dark night, trained in long-range penetration for intelligence-gathering and sabotage, and expert snipers. In addition, Command and Services Company provided HQ, signals, medical, repair and other facilities. The Recce and Support Company had a reconnaissance platoon, two anti-tank platoons, an anti-aircraft platoon, a mortar platoon and the pathfinder platoon. A number of legionnaires were also trained to make HALO landings in hostile territory for hostage rescue and other tasks you don’t boast about to your girlfriend.

  Already by 1964 Worden noticed that morale, which had suffered much from the politically motivated withdrawal from Algeria that made a mockery of all the deaths, was slowly going up again – as was the number of British legionnaires. From an estimated fifty or so in the whole Legion towards the end of the Algerian war, the figure rose in 2 REP to around 12% after the 1982 Falklands War. Indeed, Worden with Murray and compatriot Bob Wright distinguished themselves as the first trio with the same nationality to serve simultaneously as caporals-chef in the same regiment.

  The Legion’s new role envisaged by De Gaulle continued to grow in importance after his death in 1970. Contingents of varying strength have served over the years in Cambodia, Ruanda, Congo, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Central African Republic, Lebanon and in Iraq during the First Gulf War. They have also been in ‘other places’.

  Two examples of Legion intervention illustrate its modern role. The multi-ethnic Republic of Chad lies in the very heart of the African continent, surrounded by Sudan, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Nigeria, Niger and Libya. With neighbours li
ke that, the Chadian president’s appeal in 1969 for military assistance from France surprised no one. De Gaulle’s reply came in the form of a tactical HQ and two rifle companies from 3 REP commanded by Maj De Chastenet with three Tripacer observation aircraft, an Alouette command helicopter, a Pirate helicopter gunship and six H34 transports.

  Arriving in-country, Chastenet acquired vehicles locally to transform his paras into motorised units, plus a section of horse cavalry for patrolling areas inaccessible to motor traffic. Within the first six months, the task force saw combat against rebel forces three times. The third was most spectacular. Returning in the Alouette from a courtesy visit to Am Tinan in the south of the country, Chastenet noted a rebel group of horsemen below. Instructing his pilot to continue course as though nothing were amiss, he radioed ahead to put his forces on alert. A section of legionnaires was heliportered to the scene, but the rebels took refuge in a wood, where the Pirate gunship came into play. By the end of the operation sixty-eight rebels had been accounted for.

  On 25 October 1969 Col Jeannou Lacaze landed at the capital Abéché[382] with his staff, the regimental colours and reinforcements from 2 REP, plus a motorised company from 1 RE, permitting a rapid expansion in the scale of operations, which reached a peak in 1970 after Maj Malaterre had taken over. That October Capt Wabinski’s Reconnaissance and Support Company was airlifted to the Aouzou region in the northwest, near the Libyan border. Cross-border insurgents had surrounded the Chadian army garrison of Aouzou, which was holed-up in barracks and had lost control of its air-strip 5km south of the town.

  Taking a chance, French pilots touched down on the airstrip, wrong-footing the insurgents by disgorging their loads of combat-ready legionnaires before coming to a halt. Taken aback by the speed of their deployment, the Libyans made little resistance, enabling Wabinski’s men to link up with the relief column approaching by road under cover of darkness. The combined force, guided by local Chadian soldiers, then attempted to cut off the insurgents’ retreat into Libya via the Leclerc Pass, driving the Libyans into some remote caves.