French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  changed when the officers began to appreciate the soldierly qualities of the men, and later Spaniards were chosen for the hardest tasks. These young Spanish volunteers were famous for their skill as machine-gunners and for their marching ability. They were not, as a rule, good shots with light arms, lacking the phlegm that is essential. They loved the feel of steel in their hands—their great pocket knives and the four-edged bayonets of the French army.35

  If the Spaniards eventually earned the grudging respect of their Legion superiors, the Jews faced greater barriers to acceptance. Unlike the Spaniards, most Jewish volunteers were city bred and lacked the fitness and rusticity that made the Iberians such excellent soldiers. Captain Lapie reported that the 13e demi-brigade was called “la troupe des intellectuels” because it contained so many Eastern European Jews with university diplomas, an observation that, in Legion circles, was not meant as a compliment. “They were excellent in study, in application, in calculations,” Lapie wrote. “They were detestable in drill, in marching, in fatigue duties, and in discipline, always complaining.”36 The future General Jean-Pierre Hallo, a fresh second lieutenant assigned to the Legion in 1939, found his Jewish recruits to be

  men from comfortable backgrounds and most often cultivated. Their average age approached 30 years. Not very athletic in general, their sedentary life style had already caused some to grow a little thick around the waist. They would have great merit and even courage to follow the rhythm of their Spanish comrades, lean, rustic and hardened by three years of tough combat.37

  Like the Spaniards, the Jews were also suspected of left-wing sympathies, the “political mud-scrapers and no-accounts in their own countries” whom Perrot-White's lieutenant told him to avoid.38 While communists were certainly in a minority among Jewish volunteers, Zosa Szajkowski admitted that

  There were, indeed, many Communists among us and they called themselves VF's [volontaires forcés or forced volunteers]. They were always reading newspapers, eager to find some indication of a quick end to the “imperialistic war.” They held meetings and even published a mimeographed bulletin. The anti-Communists tried not to provoke them. They were afraid that the discovery of a Communist organization among the Jewish volunteers would result in arrests, perhaps even executions, most certainly in anti-Jewish propaganda. However, the Communists would constantly provoke their adversaries and even warn them that on the front line a bullet cannot always be traced to the rifle that fired it.

  Quite naturally, such activity undermined attempts to establish a regimental spirit. But when a Jewish adjutant sought the names of the ringleaders, even the noncommunist Jews refused to cooperate. “We told him that as much as we disliked them the very suggestion that we play the role of informers was distasteful to us,” Szajkowski wrote. In his case, however, it almost proved to be a fatal decision. Wounded during the retreat from Soissons, the communist legionnaires refused to come to his aid:

  The legionnaires passed me by. I knew almost every one of them from the times when we were active in the Communist movement. But I had left the movement; I was a former Communist and I knew that they would not help me. They looked at me and continued to run toward the bridge. Not one of them stopped to help me. I could not see; my eyes were closed.

  Finally, he was rescued by a career Legion sergeant who came back to drag him to safety at considerable risk to his own life.39

  The final charge against the Jews was that they served the Legion reluctantly. Adjudant-Chef Mazzoni, who recognized the military value of the Spaniards in January 1940, believed that his Jews, especially those who had lived in France for years, posed no security threat. However, most only sought naturalization and transfer to French regiments. “In any case, with a few exceptions, I do not believe that we can place great hopes in this category of volunteer,” he concluded.40

  When Prince Aage received a consignment of these “volunteers for the duration” in the 3e étranger, he was livid. Most were middle-class Jews resident in France who “were not hot to get into the struggle.... They hardly had the military temperament, while their assignment to the Legion, which had more or less the same reputation as Biribi [the nickname given to the penal companies in Tunisia], did not put them in a celebratory frame of mind.” When Aage saw these men walk into the barracks square looking like “the Burghers of Calais marching to their hanging,” he shouted, “Stick those birds in a corner.... I don't want to see them! They are rotting my battalion.” After receiving some special attention from the German NCOs, most secured transfers to French regiments.41

  Even Szajkowski admitted that the attitude of some Jews toward military service was very ambivalent, especially when it was learned that they were to serve in the Legion. Many were delighted when the military physician at the training camp at Vancia, a naturalized Frenchman active in the Association of Polish Jews in France and thereby keen that all Jews serve, was replaced by an anti-Semite equally keen to eliminate them. “Anyway, the Jewish captain came back and the massive rejections of Jewish volunteers were immediately stopped.”42

  Lieutenant Jacques Ragot discovered a large number of young Jews whose parents had emigrated to France in the 1930s dropped on his mounted company in Morocco in 1940: “Any other Legion unit would have been better for these poor boys than a mounted company,” he wrote.

  In the two mounted companies [of the 3e étranger], the discipline which existed in 1940 was the Legion discipline of 1914. . . . If the legionnaires of the mounted companies were selected for their stamina, the same could not be said for their intellectual and moral outlook. Headquarters and the battalions frequently dumped onto the distant mounted companies elements which could cause problems in the towns . . . among whom were several veterans of the “Bat d'Af” . . . who were difficult cases. I was on leave when the volunteers, young enlistees not even finished with basic training, fell innocently into this milieu.

  The existence of the volunteers was eased somewhat by the fact that their extra sources of income allowed them to buy exemption from fatigue duties with bottles of wine. However, they shocked the veterans in March 1940 when the prize company pig, Adolphe, was slaughtered for Sunday lunch: “Scandale, Mon Lieutenant!” the cook shouted at his commanding officer. “Légion, pas zouaves,” he insisted, a reference to the fact that the zouaves contained many Algerian Jews. “There was no doubt, at least a third of what had been Adolphe lay there, uneaten, among the ashes and debris” of the rubbish heap, Ragot noted. The cook walked away unconsoled when Ragot refused to punish the Jews. “Legion, finished,” the cook muttered. “Scandal. Never seen that Legion.”43

  The influx of large numbers of Jews did not please the Legion. On February 10, 1940, a report stated that the 12e étranger and the 21e, 22e and 23e RMVE counted 300 Jews each, with 400 in training in North Africa and 1,800 in the camp at La Valbonne, also near Lyon. The report stated categorically that the Legion wanted no more Jews, and that they must be refused admission “under diverse pretexts” but in such a way that they did not seem to be “special measures for Jews.” Three days later, a note stated that the Army General Staff and the general commanding North Africa “want to see Jewish candidates absolutely excluded from the Legion.”44 Why? The reluctance of many to serve in the Legion, suspicions about their loyalty, dislike of the middle-class or “intellectual” background of many of the Jewish recruits, and fears that large numbers of Jews would upset the diversity that the Legion sought to maintain probably all played a role. However, in the light of the particularly harsh treatment of what appear to have been Jewish mutineers of 1915, of the decided preference for Germans in matters of recruitment that characterized the “Old Legion,” and the subsequent treatment of many Jewish volunteers after the 1940 defeat, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that anti-Semitism was the principal motivation in the Legion's desire to exclude Jews. This is not to say that in the past individual Jews had not done well in the Legion. But the rise of anti-Semitism in France since the era of the Dreyfus affair, the
strong popular anti-Semitism of North Africa, and the fact that the Legion was obliged to absorb so many Jews at once made them unpopular recruits.

  The elimination of all of these Jews from the foreign regiments was not possible, however. What was possible was their dispersion, some to Syria and Indochina, or to French regiments. Most continued to be suspect by the Legion commanders. However, the future General Brothier, the man who as commander of the 1er étranger in 1960 caused the military feats of the RMVE to be acknowledged fully by the Legion, believed that his Jewish soldiers possessed qualities that simply did not fit into traditional military concepts. “In observing the behavior of our Jewish volunteers,” he wrote, “later I better understood why, in the Israeli army, familiarity and slovenliness went so well with courage and a redoubtable efficiency.”45

  It does appear as if, in the RMVE at least, some efforts were made to accommodate the political sensibilities of these recruits—for instance, when a contingent of NCOs, some of whom were German, was dispatched from the 2e étranger in the autumn to staff the RMVE in France, they were returned to North Africa, presumably because their nationality and command style were ill-suited to the atmosphere of the RMVE.46 And even Szajkowski, embittered by what he saw as a pattern of injustice toward Jews by France and the Legion in both world wars, admitted that anti-Semitism melted away at the front,

  where the officers treated the Jewish volunteers as men. Perhaps the common danger of death weakened any anti-Jewish sentiments they might have had. Besides, the Jewish volunteers fought valiantly, a fact the officers frankly admitted. They often promised that after the war those who survived would be looked upon as equals in the eyes of the French and not be treated as aliens, and that families of the fallen volunteers would be similarly treated.47

  Nevertheless, officers of a traditional stamp had every right to feel pessimistic about the prospects of the Legion making a significant contribution to the defense of France in 1940. Smart money was on the 11e étranger, the first unit formed of 2,500 long-service legionnaires from North Africa and around 500 ex-Legion reservists, and the one that had the pick of the cadres, including its commander, the quasi-legendary Colonel Fernand Maire, which gave it in the eyes of official Legion circles “a potential greatly superior to that of the 12e REI which is 50 percent Polish.”48 It seems fair to assume that most of these “Poles” were Jews, as those from a Catholic Polish background, as the Poles who came to France in the 1920s to work in the mines of the north, could more easily find acceptance in French units or in the Polish army. Although a new formation, the 11e étranger imported the classic personality of the Moroccan Legion into France—the battalion rather than the regiment was the focus of loyalty, a heritage of the mobile columns composed of separate battalions of Legion and tirailleurs, and its commanders enjoyed all of the privileges and rights of the caïdat, the quasi-regal status accorded to officer rank in the Legion. No time was wasted attempting to indoctrinate legionnaires of the 11e étranger in the need to defend France or persuade them of the legitimacy of France's international position. Emotional appeals to the France of the spirit, France the mother of civilization, were left to the leaders of the “volunteers for the duration.” “The theme was simple,” Manue wrote of the 11th's morale-boosting techniques.

  You have the honor, Messieurs, called to France, to represent on the Northeastern front your comrades of the eight regiments of Africa, the Levant, of Tonkin. You are responsible for the honor of the Legion, that is to say one hundred years of the purest glory. Therefore, you must do more than any soldier of France.

  This was usually expressed in the defiant and taunting shorthand of, “Are you worthy to be a legionnaire?”49

  The Legion influence in the other foreign regiments in France ran from pale to invisible. The 12th had a smaller contingent of around four hundred Legion cadres and was composed principally of volunteers for the duration of the war who experienced Sidi-bel-Abbès only vicariously through their regular NCOs. Complaints were also voiced that the 12th contained too many reserve officers recalled from comfortable retirements and thoroughly depressed by the spartan existence of campaign life, and foreign officers “whose military training was almost negligible,” and who in combat led the retreat.50 The military prospects of the RMVE did not appear bright—a reluctant, polyglot soldiery who, outside of a smattering of regular Legion officers and NCOs, were staffed primarily by reservists. Indeed, the only Legion formation that appeared to inspire complete confidence was the football [soccer] team, which officers wanted to hold back from a tour of duty at the front in April 1940 because “at the moment it is capable of defeating easily any French side.”51

  Making legionnaires out of this was not an easy task. At the Legion's main training center at Saïda, the “moral formation” of a number of volunteers who, according to Manue, had been identified by Legion interrogators as “tough cases”52 “proceeded according to ancient tradition”— firing exercises, drill, marches in which the pack loads and the distances were increased each week, classes of “theory” in the shade of the eucalyptus trees beside the Wadi Saïda on the Aïn-el-Hadjar road, assaults of the peaks of the Marabout or the Sergeant, objectives never mentioned in the history books but ones probably as important to the Legion's combat success as Eton's playing fields were to Wellington. “Who does not retain the memory of these re-entries into the barracks under the midday sun,” wrote General Hallo.

  “Direction á gauche deux fois, compagnie halte!” and, one by one, the companies turn, break ranks, align themselves, and present arms in a mass which awaits the verdict of the lieutenant who stands rigidly at attention before them. If all was well, it's the liberating “dismissed” Otherwise, it's another command: “Port arms, by squad, double time, single file behind me!” and it's a half hour run up the slopes of the plateau de la Rencontre before going through the ceremony of the return to the barracks square beneath a blistering sun.53

  However, most “volunteers for the duration,” whether legionnaires proper or RMVE had to forego the total immersion of the Legion's North African baptism and remain content with the sprinkles of admission to the faith provided by the missionary episcopacy in the overcrowded training centers of France. The atmosphere was certainly not the same. Szajkowski confessed that many of the Jews who trained with him at Vancia spent their time awaiting naturalization papers that would allow them to transfer to line regiments, bribing sergeants for an overnight pass to visit their wives installed at extortionate wartime prices in small rooms near the camp, and fretting about bromide in the food that might diminish their performance during these nocturnal forays.54

  In October 1939, a training camp was established at Barcarès near Perpignan close to the Spanish frontier. If Barcarès resembled a minimum-security prison rather than a military camp, that was because it had been designed to quarantine Spanish Republican refugees. Rows of tar-paper huts whose translucent window coverings cast an eerie half-light on the meager furnishings inside stretched along a spit of sand ten kilometers long but only a few hundred meters wide that separated the Mediterranean from the étang de Leucate, a brackish coastal lake. Foreign volunteers mustered, drilled or crouched to wash beneath the few water spigots in the shadeless, windblown, mosquito-infested spaces between the huts.

  The French government obviously expected little of these formations, for they were given extremely low priority in weaponry—surplus Lebels from World War I, some even earlier models, and submachine guns of Rif War vintage. Heavy weapons like mortars and machine guns were either collectors’ items, too few in number to allow adequate instruction, or lacking some essential feature like disassembling instructions or a sight. Regular Legion Lieutenant Georges Masselot, assigned to the 12e étranger as heavy-weapons instructor, found that he had to write his own training manuals and return to antediluvian methods of sighting mortars with a weight on the end of a string because of the absence of sights. The breakage of a part was a major catastrophe, for replacement parts were u
navailable at any price.55 The 12th was never given any antitank weapons, a rather serious oversight given the fact that the Germans tended to rely rather heavily on the offensive strength of their panzer divisions. Only the 13’ demi-brigade appears to have been issued the much-admired infantry rifle the MAS 36 just prior to their departure for Narvik in April 1940.56 An after-action report for the 22e RMVE noted that “the men had hardly seen mortars and 25 mm cannon [antitank guns]—one cannon and two 81 mm mortars to train the three regiments in the camp. The 10th Company had only shot twice at 200 meters with automatic arms.”57 The 12e étranger was lacking so many essential pieces of equipment that many soldiers were obliged to tie their equipment together with string, which earned them the nickname of “the string regiment” from their German opponents.

  The low status accorded the Legion in 1940 meant that, apart from the 11e étranger, which contained the highest percentage of professional legionnaires and which served in Lorraine in the winter and spring of 1939-40, and the 13e demi-brigade, most of the formations remained in the training camps well away from the front almost until the German attack of May 10 forced the French high command to call up all its reserves. Manue confessed that even the 11e étranger was “technically mediocre” and possessed only minimal notions of what modern combat in Europe was to be like—it had only a nodding acquaintance with tracked vehicles and no practice with antitank weapons. And although the regiment had enormous pride, its Moroccan past was almost a liability, for it retained an anachronistic vision of war as a sort of deadly sporting event, duels of men armed with rifles shooting it out in full view of each other, not as a crushing application of firepower and technology in which men struggled almost helplessly to survive.58