French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  * * *

  ON SEPTEMBER 16,1939, the war minister decided to form special corps of foreign volunteers independent of the Foreign Legion,12 presumably in an attempt to avoid the sort of conflicts that had occurred in 1914. To make certain that these units of foreign volunteers would be in no way confused with the “real” Legion, which wanted to distance itself from them, they were assigned numbers superior to 20 from February 1940, and so became the 21e, 22e and 23e régiments de marche des volontaires étrangers (RMVE). However, while the Legion in this period considered the RMVE to be entirely separate organizations, to say that the RMVE had no ties to the Foreign Legion would be inaccurate. Some cadres were furnished by the Legion in North Africa as well as Legion reservists recalled to train them, while photographs show the band of the 21e RMVE bearing the Legion crest and colors. The 21st also celebrated Camerone in 1940, a definite attempt to establish a link with the Legion.13 In his after-action report, Major Hermann, who commanded the 22e RMVE, referred to his men as “legionnaires.”14

  The assignment of foreign volunteers, most of whom did not speak sufficient French to understand the distinction between the RMVE and the Legion or who signed their enlistment papers oblivious to the fact that they were signed on for five years or for the “duration of hostilities,” appears to have depended upon the whim, fancy or ministerial directive of the overworked recruitment bureaus. Nor were those sent to the RMVE safe from the long arm of the Legion, for in February 1940, nine hundred men were dispatched from the training camps of the RMVE to the newly created 12e étranger. This action ignited a bureaucratic debate over whether or not they should be required to sign new contracts, which was apparently not resolved when the German offensive of May 10, 1940, ended the period of Phony War.15 Therefore, it appears that around nine hundred RMVE volunteers actually fought in a regular Legion unit. Furthermore, the Legion has since recognized the veterans of the RMVE as bona fide anciens combattants. Last, if the French government could draw fine administrative distinctions between the RMVE and the Legion proper, many foreigners could not. In the minds of many, they had been assigned to the Legion. A ministerial note of October 26, 1939, echoed the concerns of 1914 when it noted that foreigners were “surprised” to be assigned to the RMVE and “showed some apprehension at serving in the Foreign Legion.”16

  The Legion (excluding the RMVE) counted the 1er, 2e, 3e, 4e, 5e and 6e régiments étrangers and the 1er and 2e régiments étrangers de cavalerie (REC) by 1939. However, the Legion in 1940, as in 1914–18, would remain essentially an imperial force. Of course, France had legitimate imperial interests to defend, and as in the past proved reluctant to surrender their security entirely to perhaps untrustworthy indigenous levies. This is not to say that the Legion made no direct contribution to the defense of France—quite the contrary. Merely that the Legion's contribution might have been greater and more effective had constituted Legion regiments been shipped to France and refugees and most other foreign volunteers integrated into French line regiments—all that professionalism, all that tradition carefully nurtured by Rollet, all those celebrities of the popular cinema who “smelled of warm sand,” whose mere appearance on the Maginot Line would have reduced the Wehrmacht to jelly, left to molder in colonial outposts, or split up and showered upon hordes of European exiles for whom the attentions of these mercenary soldiers seemed at best a dubious honor, at worst an insult.

  To cope with the requests by foreigners to enlist in the French army, requests that stood at sixty-four thousand by October 15, 1939, the 6e étranger was organized out of the Legion battalions stationed in Syria and given its own artillery; the 11e étranger was created in November 1939, followed by the 12e étranger in February 1940 to fight in France. A 13th demi-brigade, the Legion unit that eventually emerged as the most celebrated of World War II, was formed in February of 1940 to operate in Finland, later in Norway. Last, a groupe de reconnaissance de division d'infanterie no. 97 (GRD 97) was furnished by the two RECs to fight in France. A December 1939 offer by the ubiquitous Charles Sweeney, veteran of the RMLE and leader of the short-lived escadrille chérifienne during the Rif War, to raise a corps of American volunteers appears to have been taken seriously only in May 1940, by which time all bets were off.17

  Not surprisingly, perhaps, the amalgamation and training of such large numbers of foreigners—by February 1940, eighty-three thousand foreigners, almost double the number to have volunteered during World War I, had asked to enlist18—did not go smoothly. However, the problems were not entirely logistical ones. As in 1914, “Many of these foreigners have manifested a certain apprehension at being placed in the Foreign Legion,” read a January 1940 report, which admitted that many sought naturalization and a transfer to French line regiments. Not to worry, however, for “if certain foreigners pretend that they do not want to serve in the Legion, it is because they do not know the Legion.” They would be swept up by its proud traditions once they had joined. “The foreign volunteers of 1914 would have accomplished nothing had they not been put into the Legion, but, through the Legion, they wrote a most splendid page of history (1914–18) for they became true legionnaires,”19 the report asserted with great confidence.

  If the foreign volunteers were apprehensive about the Legion, the Legion reciprocated with apprehensions of its own. Although many nationalities, including Afghans, Chinese and most South American nations, were represented among the volunteers, Legion officers were deeply suspicious of the two groups that furnished the lion's share of recruits—Spanish Republicans and Jews from Eastern Europe. In some respects, their fears were perfectly justified. Conventional wisdom held that the Legion functioned best when its nationalities were delicately balanced, its leadership suitably Olympian, and when regimental loyalties transcended all others. It was not that Legion methods did not work; merely, it was recognized that they did not work for everyone. And the political turmoil of the interwar years sent into the Legion recruits upon whom its regimental magic might exercise only limited powers. Eastern European refugees especially were middle class, a group traditionally able to distinguish rapidly between the romanticism and realities of Legion life. Older, often very well educated, they were deeply out of sympathy with the culture of the barracks in which social acceptance was earned after a novitiate of bullying, brawling, drinking and womanizing. For them, the Legion offered a marriage between a monastery and a penal colony. The only Legion tradition most were likely to find seductive was that of desertion.

  The deep ideological divisions of interwar Europe of which most were victims also militated against the formation of a regimental spirit on the Legion model. Legion propaganda to the contrary, it was difficult to convince men who often had sacrificed much for nation, religion or political ideology to limit their horizons to the barracks square. To consign such men to the Legion was to invite incomprehension and conflict. These were temporary soldiers fighting for a cause, men with a personal stake in the war's outcome, whose attitudes differed sharply from those of the professionals who had fled into the Legion in part to escape a modern world with which they were out of sync and sympathy. For legionnaires, fighting was a métier, not a crusade, a contest of military skills—cool, detached, impersonal.

  From the Legion's viewpoint, committed ideologists not only made poor recruits, they could also be dangerous. The official harassment of German veterans of the Legion by the Nazi government after 1934 had largely removed the threat from the right. While fears persisted that the Legion might be infiltrated by German spies, and a few German legionnaires expressed great admiration for the accomplishments of the Third Reich, Nazis of conviction were too few to disrupt regimental spirit. The same could not be said of many of the Spaniards and Jews, men of the left whose political convictions, in the eyes of many Legion officers, posed a serious threat to Legion esprit de corps.

  A third category of men whom the Legion discovered assimilated poorly in 1939 was composed of about one thousand reservists, ex-legionnaires, whom the governm
ent recalled to provide experienced cadres for the new Legion formations. Sergeant Georges Manue, reunited with his old corps fifteen years on, discovered that many of his fellow reservists were unsettled by this brutal reunion with a past that had been lived in a long-forgotten spirit of youthful fantasy. The sacred Legion fire had all but died out among those who had acquired wives and children, for whom the mere memories of Legion training made their aging bodies ache, or who, having survived the Legion once, did not feel up to an encore, especially if the Legion experience in World War I were any indication of what awaited them. “ ‘I don't feel ready for this job,’ ” Manue recalled being told, “a hundred times. ‘I'm old, I've wife and child, I've earned the right to a nice, quiet regiment.’ ”20

  The arrival of the Spanish in great numbers with the defeat of the Republican armies in 1939 challenged the equilibrium of the Legion to the point that some have claimed that it altered the personality of the corps in this period. This was probably an exaggeration, as even though 3,052, or 27.7 percent, of the men enlisting in the Legion in 1939 were Spanish, the corps was expanding so rapidly in that year that the Legion only counted 8.2 percent Spaniards overall. 21 Nevertheless, these numbers certainly do not include those assigned to the RMVE, whose combat elements appear to have included 2,709 Spaniards in February 1940, or about 40 percent of combat strength.22 It is also important to note that at the time their arrival caused great consternation. Captain P. O. Lapie of the 13e demi-brigade recorded that his fellow officers were very reticent about accepting the Spaniards, “whom they referred to en bloc as the communists.” 23 In June 1939, the war ministry directed that the Spaniards be sent to Morocco for training, “in the southern regions as far as possible from the Spanish possessions,” and be given regular Legion officers and NCOs so that they can acquire “the spirit proper to the Legion.”24

  This was easier said than done. When Legion corporal Alfred Perrot-White took delivery of a contingent of two hundred Spaniards to train in January 1939, he realized that his work was cut out for him: “We had plenty of trouble in store handling those men,” he wrote.

  They were for the most part sullen and ill disciplined, very sick about joining the Legion in the first place, and with only one thought in mind— that being to desert across the Franco-Spanish border of Morocco. In fact, at one time conditions became so bad that practically the whole garrison at Gerryville was used as a police force to keep the Spanish company in order. There were many fights with knives and guns, and wholesale desertions, but not one was successful. I believe more than ten men were killed in the attempt, but, as always happens in the Legion, the officers and N.C.O.s held the upper hand. Discipline began to show, and before these men finished their training, they had more or less—outwardly at least—settled down to facing the inevitable.25

  The war minister warned against this policy of keeping Spanish recruits together, and in July 1939 called for the Spaniards to be distributed among the various foreign regiments, taking care that they did not exceed 14 percent of strength,26 a policy that was somewhat undermined on October 5 of that year when he ordered that the Spaniards must be kept separate from the others.27 This was the case at the training camp at Vancia, near Lyon, where “We were forbidden to fraternize with [the Spaniards], to train with them, even to speak to them,” wrote Zosa Szajkowski, a volunteer in the 12e étranger.

  They were isolated in restricted areas. They were treated as criminals. They would sit in groups, singing songs that under the circumstances seemed to us to be very sad. They made us feel sick, but we were being watched and had to be careful. Sometimes the Spaniards used to sing the anthem of the short-lived Spanish Republic [“Himno de Riego”), but even this song seemed to be sad . . . whenever we could we threw them cigarettes, candy, soap, razor blades, and other things.28

  Many blamed the problems with the Spaniards on the fact that most had volunteered simply to get out of the dreary internment camps into which they had been forced when they crossed the Pyrenees in 1939, and had no real desire to soldier for France, much less for the Legion. A. D. Printer, a volunteer for the duration who made his way to the United States after the French defeat of 1940, discovered that

  even from their fellow volunteers the Spaniards met suspicion. Most of the others, having been residents or refugees in France, spoke the language and understood the people. The only French contacts the Spaniards had had before they came to the Legion were the Gardes Mobiles or the Senegalese in the concentration camps at Gurs and Le Vernet. In order not to be lonely, they formed “cells,” which were against the spirit of the Legion and which isolated them still more. For the officers and for the noncoms, the Spanish legionnaires were a nuisance. They did not fit in. They had been members of a popular army; now they were subjected to the ironclad discipline of a mercenary unit. They brought with them their typical Spanish individualism. They brought, too, their great sense of personal dignity, which was constantly trampled upon in the units where German sergeants and veteran French colonials had formed the outlaws of Europe into soldiers. Most of the left-wing extremists had preferred to remain in the concentration camps. Those who joined the Legion were loyal young soldiers of the Republic, professionals of the Spanish army, a few intellectuals and tradesmen.29

  However, the problem appears to have laid less in the Spanish attitudes to the Legion than in the inflexibility of the approaches of the “Old Legion” to men of an entirely different stamp. Conventional Legion wisdom held that these volunteers came out of a “democratic” army and needed to be instructed in the ways of professional soldiers. “To the officers of the Legion, brilliant young reactionaries from Saint Cyr and Saumur or old troopers without any political convictions at all, every Spaniard was either a Communist or an anarchist, to be handled with the same affection as a box of dynamite,” wrote Printer.30 However, the Spaniards, many of whom had enlisted in the Legion to fight fascism, must have been disappointed to find fascism in the Legion, especially in the form of German NCOs whom they identified with Nazis, backed by officers who lived in a sort of splendid isolation, far different from their military experience in Spain. “Shaped by their war, closely united by a proven political solidarity, the Spaniards were armed, not only to resist in a quasi ‘syndicalist’ manner methods designed to intimidate but also to rise up resolutely against all attempts to humble their personalities,” wrote Charles Favrel, who served with them in the 13e demi-brigade.

  For them, the Legion had not been a choice but a requirement accepted with a heavy heart, a bad moment to get over by making common cause with their companions. Resolved to remain men, they refused therefore to allow themselves to be poured into the mold of unconditional obedience. In addition to this, their combat experience caused them to reject the traditional conceptions of the Prussian system implanted at Sidi-bel-Abbès for a century. Tenacious and courageous, reluctant to accept sacrificial missions, their idea of war was to kill and not to be killed stupidly! They were not traditional Legion timber, the docile and blind executors of the order given by the superior.

  They also acquired a nasty reputation for organizing reprisals against overly zealous Legion NCOs.31

  The meeting of the Legion and the Spanish Republicans in 1939 was certainly the clash of two military cultures, as well a rerun of the problems the Legion had experienced in incorporating a large number of recruits from another defeated Spanish army in 1839–40. Legion officers who succeeded best with the new breed of recruits had to adapt their leadership style to the personality of the legionnaires, rather than force the “volunteers for the duration” to accept a discipline that at best produced only sullen compliance. One such officer was Lieutenant Albert Brothier, who was dispatched from Sidi-bel-Abbès to take over a company of the newly formed 12e étranger in 1940, composed in large measure of Jewish refugees and Spaniards. “We military professionals were a minority,” he wrote.

  The reserve cadres, who were in a majority, had no intention of transforming themselves into profes
sionals. As for our volunteers, they enlisted with us to fight and not for anything else (and they let us know this immediately). It therefore fell to us cadres to train these individuals to become fighters, give them an individual spirit. We could not, in a few weeks, change their mentalities acquired from groups which remained homogeneous. Therefore, we made the effort to adapt ourselves to this situation to stay in control of our troop and to be the indispensable link and the cement.

  And while this approach differed radically from traditional Legion methods—indeed, it virtually turned them upside down—Brothier claimed great success. “The hierarchy was never challenged,” he wrote, ‘it was less distant, more humane, more familiar.” Indeed, his Spanish batman called him “Papa,” even though they were both twenty-eight years old, a nickname that soon caught on with the other Spaniards. “When I arrived in the company barracks each morning, rather than the traditional ‘Attention!’, I was greeted by joyous ‘buenos dias papa’. And if I needed to make a little speech, the end was always punctuated by a salvo of applause.” Brothier claimed that this informal discipline was accepted by everyone, and that he never inflicted a single punishment in his company.32

  Indeed, it soon became clear that prejudice had caused the Legion seriously to underestimate the military qualities of the Spaniards. Legion Adjudant-Chef Mazzoni wrote from the training camp at Barcarès near the Pyrenees in January 1940 that although their “military background could cause one to doubt their loyalty, [they] seem on the contrary to show up as very good soldiers, and one can testify that, well led, these volunteers would furnish very good combatants.”33

  This is precisely what Captain P. O. Lapie of the 13e demi-brigade discovered during the Narvik expedition of May 1940: “The Spaniards rediscovered on these abrupt slopes the hardness of their sierras,” he wrote. “They jumped about like tiger cats and never tired. Those officers who had been reticent about welcoming Spanish republicans in the Legion ... were delighted to recognize their worth in combat.”34 Printer also wrote that the prejudice against the Spaniards