French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  Despite these considerations, on April 13, 1925, Abd el-Krim threw five harkas or war parties comprising a total of perhaps four thousand men, with another four thousand in reserve, at the French lines. Although forewarned of the attack, the French remained confident—with some justification, they attributed Rifian successes since 1921 to Spanish incompetence, and remained firm in the belief that their roughly sixty thousand troops in Morocco, backed by modern artillery and air support and their defense line on the Ouerrha heights, would offer a sufficient deterrent. They learned a hard lesson—by June, less than three months after the beginning of Krim's offensive, forty-four of sixty-six French posts had been cut off and overwhelmed, usually because the French found it difficult to reinforce them over the roadless terrain. At Aulai, the French garrison held out for twenty-two days under sustained mortar fire until it could be rescued. But the rescue came too late for outlying blockhouse Number 7—its thirty-man garrison was overwhelmed, their bodies mutilated and thrown onto the wire of the French position, where they decomposed gently in the Moroccan summer.

  The Legion distinguished itself in the bitter fighting around the post of Biban, which changed hands at least four times, on the third occasion falling to a Legion grenade attack that succeeded at the cost of 103 dead and 300 wounded. But on June 5, the Rifians overwhelmed the garrison and held the post until the end of September.78 At Beni Derkul, a few miles from Biban, Lieutenant Pol Lapeyre blew himself up with his few surviving Senegalese after withstanding a two-month siege. Many posts were abandoned without a fight, while those that held out suffered great deprivation despite the best efforts of Captain Jean de Lattre de Tassigny to organize airlifts of ice and medals, meant to raise morale, for the beleaguered garrisons. Abd el-Krim's offensive drove to within twenty miles of Fez. In the process he captured fifty-one cannon, two hundred machine guns, five thousand rifles and around two thousand prisoners and inflicted numerous casualties on the French.79

  How well did the Legion perform in these wars? It is difficult to know exactly, as many of the accounts of battles are written very much in the heroic style. Also, they tend to reflect the European obsession with seizing positions, which, the post of Biban apart, the Rifians had little interest in defending—their intention was to inflict casualties, not defend ground. This is not to say that there were not heroic moments in the campaigns of 1925, for there certainly were. One of the most celebrated, if catastrophic, fights occurred on June 10 when forty legionnaires of the 6th battalion of the 1er étranger volunteered to lead a night raid to break the siege of the post of Mediouna and return its garrison of Senegalese to the French lines. The Rifians had surrounded the post with two siege lines that had already thrown back two French rescue attempts, and the garrison signaled that they would blow themselves up on the following day if no help arrived. The group, under the command of two officers, left at eleven o'clock at night armed with rifles, grenades and dynamite. Boots had been discarded in favor of slippers or puttees wrapped around the feet. Two lieutenants managed to include themselves by mingling with the group as it filed forward under the silent gaze of the remainder of the battalion, which was to walk forward in close support. The first obstacle was the Wergha River, which the group crossed with difficulty. But in the unfamiliar country at night, the attacking group became separated from the remainder of the battalion.

  The legionnaires crawled forward through the last ravine that separated them from the outer Rifian siege trenches, taking care not to dislodge rocks, which would wake the sentries. What happened next is not clear. Legionnaire A. R. Cooper claimed that the entire party reached the fort undetected.80 But another report stated that the legionnaires had to fight their way through the siege trenches.81 A group of ten under the command of a lieutenant got into the French post, hoping to hold out. But the post commander, warned of the rescue by an air-dropped message, had mined it and was prepared to break out. The French-led soldiers charged out into a swarm of alerted Rifians, but the battle was an unequal one. Small groups exhausted their grenades and munitions before being overwhelmed by the rebels. By the next morning, only three legionnaires had found their way back to base, in an action that earned the battalion a citation in army orders.82

  The Legion together with the remainder of the French army in North Africa had its hands full in 1925. Despite his relatively small force, Abd el-Krim was able to gain and maintain a psychological advantage over his French opponents, who often found it difficult to adapt to the special conditions of warfare in the Rif, conditions very different from those of European war. “This Riff campaign of May 1925 in the Wergha Valley was exceptionally hard,” wrote Andre Beaufre. “Newcomers like myself did not realize this, but Moroccan veterans shook their heads: We were up against trained fighters who manoeuvred skillfully.”83 As noted, the Rifians were not defensive fighters and seldom attempted to hold what they had seized, which made them elusive targets. The searing heat of the summer of 1925, with temperatures reaching 130 degrees Fahrenheit, caused great suffering, especially as Moroccan scouts sometimes sought to make extra cash by refusing to divulge water sources unless bribed.84 The remoteness of the battlefields made them difficult to supply, while the broken, boulder-strewn terrain offered excellent cover for the mobile Rifians and reduced the value of artillery and machine guns. Air power, upon which the French had placed great faith, failed them badly. Planes could not reprovision the isolated posts. Nor was their bombing of great utility—Cooper complained that the planes bombed targets “with the usual lack of cooperation,”85 a complaint echoed by Legion officers in Syria.86 Legion veteran and Notre Dame alumnus Charles Sweeny organized the escadrille Chérifienne out of American flyers, which flew 470 missions during the Rif campaign. However, it was broken up in November 1925, under pressure from the American government.

  One of the results of the enemy's mobility was to force the French to tighten their formations on the march, which lessened their mobility. The “groupe mobile,” developed before 1914 from the mounted companies, and which in the interwar years evolved into mobile formations of Legion or North African infantry, cavalry, artillery and engineers, “moves like a monstrous hedgehog,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Lorillard, evoking the same problems faced by the French in North Africa since Bugeaud and de Négrier. “... The groupe mobile must constantly present a cuirass without a break, constituted by the breasts, bayonets and eventually bullets. All other considerations must give way to the requirement to maintain the block constantly intact, which considerably slows the march of the G.M.”87 Quite naturally, this formation, developed for the open spaces of the ham-mada of southeastern Morocco, was less useful in the mountainous areas (and eventually in Indochina).

  Beaufre, whose tirailleurs campaigned with the Legion in one of these formations, found it a particularly unrewarding way to make war: “This human square, alone in hostile territory, kept its formation up hill and down dale—the baggage following the track while the flank guards plodded on endlessly under a blazing sky,” he wrote.

  . . . We the regulars, plodded on over the uneven ground, through scrub and meager corn and soya fields, worn out by the heat of the sun and the draining of constant perspiration, the men bowed under the weight of their kit and ammunition, their feet agonized in their heavy boots which filled up with water every time we forded a stream. Not in the best of condition to start with, we were soon at the last limits of exhaustion.

  Finally, the enemy was located:

  Then the column halted at the foot of a hill from which the partisans [goums] had just withdrawn. The advance guard had made contact. The hills ahead of us appeared deserted, but soon the air was filled with shrill cries which echoed from rock to rock, and sporadic firing broke out. In front a battalion of the Legion in their white képis deployed as regularly as though they were on an exercise. The artillery (four 65 mm. mountain guns!) opened up. We had to attack through the legionaries. We clambered over rocks and through olive trees, bullets whistling past us; then there
was nothing except a few dead Riffs lying in their holes. We climbed on, out of breath. Then a deserted village—a poor village smelling of rancid oil, the sole sign of life a flurry of scrawny chickens destined for the pot that night. We reached the crest, regrouped and called the roll: a handful of wounded, one man killed.

  After a night of sleep broken by constant sniper fire and cries of “aux armes” in anticipation of an attack, they broke camp just before dawn: “Exhausted, pulling our swollen feet back into our boots, we drank scalding coffee, buckled our equipment, loaded the animals, folded the tents, stowed the kit and, as the day broke, set off on another day just like the last.”88

  Beyond the immense difficulties of the fighting, it also appears that the postwar changes made it difficult for the Legion to adapt to the style of warfare in the Rif, which placed a premium on individual skills. Lieutenant Colonel Buchsenschutz anticipated problems in September 1924 when he noted that

  the present recruitment which brings a large proportion of young foreigners does not give us the same resources as before when we received older men who had exercised a trade. . . . It is absolutely vital that, more than ever, the officers are able to be leaders in all branches, even those which are outside their skills as infantry officers.

  Not only did officers appear deficient in knowledge of road building and fortifications, traditional Legion specialties, but even “practical knowledge” of mortars and mountain guns, grenades, automatic rifles and machine guns eluded some of them, “so that a stoppage does not leave him disarmed, and that he knows not only as much but more than his men. The example of the columns of 1923 prove that this is not always the case.... In a word, one must not have the ‘officer spectator.’ ”89 A. R. Cooper complained that the officers were trained for European war: “If they are obstinate and stand on their dignity, they make terrible and costly mistakes,” he wrote. “If they are sensible, they rely on their sergeants and corporals who know the game.”90 Rollet complained that it was precisely because officers were relying too much on their NCOs that they failed to establish their authority.91

  The poor preparation of officers certainly lowered the combat efficiency of the Legion. Cooper attributed the disaster at Mediouna in part to the fact that the officers lacked experience in the irregular fighting in Morocco. On May 23,1925, he claimed that a surprise attack that broke over his battalion as they were preoccupied helping themselves to oranges created utter panic: “Ordinarily there would have been a steady retreat in echelon formation,” he wrote.

  But we had been taken unawares. Masses of Riffs were already upon us and a wave of panic swept through the soldiers who, moments before, had been happily sucking oranges. “Sauve-qui-peut!” a voice screamed. Men rolled helter-skelter down the steep hill into the river, where they wallowed helplessly as an enfilade attack spat bullets into our ranks from end to end.... It was a desperate struggle to get across the waist-high torrent before we were mown down by the hidden tribesmen. Shots came at us from the front, sides and rear as we fought inch by inch up the wooded slope on the far side. For a hundred yards I played hide-and-seek between the trees with a tribesman who had singled me out. It was a question of who was the better marksman. My Legion training paid its reward, and I turned to see if I was in danger from behind. Far below me about a hundred Riffs emerged from a ravine to pounce upon twenty Legionnaires who were urging mules through the water. It was a terrible sight. The tribesmen were lashing out with long knives, cutting off the Legionnaires’ heads before hacking the bodies to pieces.92

  Major Zinovi Pechkoff, in whose battalion Cooper was serving, gives a less dramatic account of this retreat. While admitting that the battalion's escape was a narrow one, he claimed that the rear guard held its own, and that the situation was salvaged, “Thanks to the solidity and the discipline of the legionnaires.”93

  According to Cooper, on June 14, after fighting bravely but with heavy losses for several weeks, his battalion had exhausted its psychological capital and broke in the face of a Rifian attack:

  The Arabs ... came behind us shouting: “You want some chickens? You want some eggs?” while shooting at us. This is the only time that I saw the Legion run. The men could no longer resist. One had demanded too much of the battalion. I even saw men stay behind deliberately and let the enemy kill them without offering any resistance.... The officers were very prudent and did not breathe a word of the conduct of the Legion on that day. Major Casaban inflicted no punishments....

  That night, a grenade was thrown into the sergeants’ quarters, wounding three of them. “I even believe that some of the officers who died that night were killed inside the post.”94

  The situation in Cooper's battalion was perhaps exceptional, but probably not, as the great success of the Rifians in throwing the French on the defensive in the summer of 1925 with very few troops can be explained only by low French morale, made lower still by fatigue and apparently indecisive fighting. Beaufre's tirailleurs, who appear to have been joined in the same groupe mobile with Cooper's legionnaires, endured the same decline of morale. According to Beaufre, officers in his tirailleur battalion also lost their heads during the evacuation of a post in the summer of 1925, and turned a withdrawal into a headlong flight during which even the wounded were abandoned to the Rifians. Beaufre was left lying on a piece of canvas, stark naked and with a bullet wound in his stomach, only to be rescued by three goumiers who had lingered behind to strip the dead. “What, they are abandoning their officers now!” one of them said. “How low can you get?”95

  It is probable, even logical, that the Legion adjusted with difficulty to the conditions of mountain warfare in Morocco. The commander of the 2nd battalion of the 1er étranger wrote on June 12, 1925, that his men did not use ground well, bunched too closely together and were too slow to fire at a target when one appeared, which was not often. He also urged a more rapid march upon objectives, which were seldom defended tenaciously, better arrangements for securing newly taken ground, including rigorous fire plans, and “as fatigue is great, one should not dream of sleeping without building defenses.”96 In a repetition of the complaints heard before 1914, critics charged that Legion units were too heavy: “Their exterior action is weak—except by artillery,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Buchsen-schutz in September 1924. “It is ‘heavy’ line infantry ill adapted to guerrilla warfare. Besides, its weak effectives oblige it to stay put, and it even suffers rather frequently from losses through ambushes organized by dissidents against the obligatory fatigue parties—water, wood, supply, etc.,” which he argued were expensive, not only in manpower but also in monetary terms.97

  The suggestion was that inflexibility was built into the Legion system, a condition required by the heterogeneous nature of Legion recruitment, the lack of any obvious common bonds of loyalty and by the need to operate by example. This is hinted at by Beaufre's observation that “the Legion deployed as if they were on an exercise.” Beaufre was an outsider. But legionnaire Jean Martin agreed: “It is in these grandes affaires that one discovers the beauty of a Legion combat,” he wrote.

  . . . The most prodigious, the most surprising, was the spectacle of this formidable troop under control, maneuvering under fire as in training, poised, tranquil, concerned only with doing its work well and not to make a mistake, as if the most important thing at the moment was to obey the regulations and not to bring down the ire of the sergeant. We had been well trained! Such an atmosphere makes cowardice impossible.98

  But while the ability to operate with almost machinelike efficiency made the Legion a formidable foe in set-piece operations, and belied to a certain extent the charge that legionnaires were badly trained, it also suggests a weakness and lack of flexibility against an enemy that was expert at infiltration tactics and night operations. Rollet noted that guard and outpost duty was a particularly unnerving experience in Morocco: “Often the dissident throws rocks to oblige the sentinel to show himself,” he warned. “During this time a second Moroccan shoots without
missing.”99 The ability of the Rifians especially to murder sentries and attack isolated parties caused posts to shut up at night, a tactic Legion Lieutenant Lacour blamed for the “half-surprise” at Musseifré in Syria: “If we had not observed so strictly the rules of Moroccan warfare,” he reported, then he would have sent out “advanced sentinels, mobile and fixed patrols, etc.”100

  Abd el-Krim's offensive, while impressive, was condemned to failure once he rejected a Franco-Spanish peace offer that stopped short of complete recognition of an autonomous Rif republic. In June 1925, Paris and Madrid began talks on joint military action, and in July Marshal Philippe Pétain arrived in Morocco to take command. By the end of the summer, the French had concentrated 160,000 troops there, and the Spanish 200,000. Furthermore, the Rifians had been weakened by poor harvests and by a typhus epidemic that swept through the mountains. In mid-September, Pétain launched a drive that recaptured Biban and reclaimed all the territory lost since April. This was coordinated with an amphibious landing at Alhucemas Bay by the Spaniards, which advanced slowly against ferocious Rifian resistance. General advances became easier to organize as the French realized that the Moroccans usually retired at night to caves and villages, leaving positions undefended. Therefore, after losing men to costly daylight attacks, the French soon worked out the technique of advancing at night and throwing up walls of rock and concertina wire around a piece of high ground.

  To prevent sniping and attacks from concealed positions at close range in which the curved Moroccan knives tended to have the better of the cumbersome bayonets of the Legion, swarms of “partisans” or Moroccan irregulars recruited by the French were thrown out to keep the enemy at bay. Sometimes these men preferred to come to some arrangement with the dissidents, which might even go so far as selling them their rifles and ammunition.101 But they were credited for spearheading the French advance in the Taza region under the leadership of the charismatic Colonel Henri de Bournazel.102 “I can still see the partisans wheeling round us, the caïds at their head, uttering shrill cries as they galloped past, then climbing up to the crests of the hills,” Beaufre remembered of the summer of 1925. “They employed the traditional Moroccan tactics, setting fire to the villages after a few shots, looting quickly and withdrawing equally quickly.”103