French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  Defeat would bequeath a legacy to the Legion almost as bitter as that of France. Like France, the Legion from June 1940 was split between Gaullists keen to pursue the war with the Allies, and those loyal to the Vichy government under the venerable Marshal Philippe Pétain. In this respect, the history of the Legion between the Fall of France in 1940 and the Allied victory of 1945 is that of the French army on a similar and more concentrated scale. But because the Legion relied upon foreign recruits, the conflicts between professional and political loyalties on one hand and ideological commitment on the other were often more acute there. For the next five years, the Legion struggled to maintain its professional equilibrium and military proficiency.

  Chapter 22

  “QUESTION OF CIRCUMSTANCES”— THE 13e DBLE

  WHILE THE FRENCH army was quickly dissolving into chaos as the legions of German panzers cut swathes through its rear, an obscure action was being fought in an apparently improbable place—the fjords of northern Norway. The Narvik expedition of April—May 1940 appears in retrospect to have been a product of the sense of unreality and confused priorities that took possession of the Allied high command during the forced inactivity of the sitzkrieg, as the Phony War was called. The immobility of the northeastern front through the winter of 1939–40 resulted from the absence of any obvious place for the Allies to strike at the Germans. While French Commander-in-Chief General Maurice Gamelin probably exaggerated when he stated that an assault on the Siegfried Line, which covered the common Franco-German frontier on the Saar, would merely have opened the conflict with another Verdun, it is equally true that an attack there would possibly have gained little ground at a substantial cost.1 The obvious route into the German heartland was through Belgium. However, that country had been neutral since 1936, and a premature invasion by the Allies would have upset world opinion, as well as thrown the Belgian army, upon whose support Gamelin eventually counted, into the enemy camp. Therefore, in the north, the initiative was ceded to the Germans.

  This caused the Allied commanders to look for other theaters of action. However, the question of where and against whom they should intervene was muddled by Allied hostility to the Soviet Union. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, which threw France's significant Communist party into the pro-Hitler camp and into hiding, and the treacherous partition of Poland between the two totalitarian powers, followed by Stalin's invasion of Finland on November 30, 1939, had agitated public opinion and led to calls for reprisals against Russia. In retrospect, the idea of adding Stalin to a list of active enemies that already included Hitler, with Mussolini and Franco maintaining for the moment a menacing neutrality, appears foolhardy. Nevertheless, the Allied high command began to hatch plans for retaliation against the Soviet Union, which had been declared an “objective enemy.”

  After considering and rejecting an attack on the Baku oil fields on the Caspian Sea, it was decided in early January 1940 to dispatch a brigade to aid Finland, where the Red Army's winter offensive had been frozen by heroic Finnish resistance. Given the location and the climate, the Alpine troops were naturally designated for this task. In February, with unassailable bureaucratic logic, it was decided to twin a demi-brigade of desert warriors with the half-brigade of chasseurs alpins. But hardly had this rescue force been organized when Finland capitulated to the Soviets on March 12. Casting around for other areas in which to intervene, the French and British generals settled upon a strike in northern Norway. The idea was not a sign of complete lunacy, although at first appearance it might appear to be so. The Allied commanders had correctly identified the lack of raw materials as the Achilles heel of German defense, and as Swedish iron ore reached Germany through Norwegian ports, Norway offered an obvious theater for action. Furthermore, the Allies possessed the naval power to project force into those distant parts. But while French and British commanders dickered over where to invade, Hitler preempted them with an invasion of his own on April 9, 1940.

  The decision to include the Legion, a force whose reputation had been carved out of the sands of the Sahara and the jungles of Africa and Indochina, in an expedition to the Arctic Circle might also count as evidence that the equilibrium of the high command had been severely shaken by the inactivity of the Phony War. However, the Legion was nothing if not versatile—after all, it had contributed a unit to the Allied incursion into Northern Russia in 1918-19. In this case, too, it rose splendidly to the occasion. By March 1, 55 officers, 210 NCOs and 1,984 corporals and legionnaires had volunteered or been volunteered from the Legion regiments in North Africa and organized into two battalions for the new unit, which on March 27 or thereabouts, was designated as the 13e DBLE. On the surface, at least, the 13e DBLE appeared to be a Legion formation in the old style of the régiments de marche of selected professionals, far different from the 12e étranger or the RMVE, or even from the 11e étranger in that it contained only a handful of reserve officers. The average age of the legionnaires hovered between twenty-six and twenty-eight years old, and most counted four to five years’ service, while the NCOs had served for ten years or more. Its commander was Raoul Magrin-Vernerey, a hero of World War I, seventeen times wounded and whose career since 1924 had been spent primarily with the Legion, and its officers were professional legionnaires almost to a man.

  However, despite this traditional “Old Legion” profile, the 13e was not immune from the recruitment changes that had affected the Legion since 1934, for between one-fifth and one-quarter of the regiment was Spanish.2 However, according to Charles Favrel, who served with the 13e, this did not prevent the political refugees from exploiting the myth to the fullest in early March with the women of Marseille: “Despite a few Aryans of impressive stature, our reinforcement could only offer them a selection of average size, Spaniards for the most part, whose Mediterranean type added no spice to their habitual menu,” he wrote. “But these frenzied women wanted to rub up against this bronzed and fabulous myth named Legion, which they now experienced in the flesh.” Indeed, so successful were the legionnaires in cashing in on their myth in the deregulated free market of Phony Wartime France that their now-idle BMC (Bordel Mobile de Campagne—the unit brothel), which had followed them to France, was eventually repatriated to North Africa.3

  The legionnaires of the 13e DBLE found the final approach to Narvik unnerving. The training at Larzac in south central France, the brilliant sendoff at Brest, the tedious voyage via Scotland in the rank holds of troopships had given way to a sense of foreboding as the flotilla of Allied ships glided through the still gray waters of the fjords. The gentle slap of water against the hull, the dull pulsating of the ships’ engines, the smell of salt and grease were all as unfamiliar to legionnaires as the snow-capped peaks that rose majestically from the water's edge. The beauty of the scenery heightened the sense of unreality and the pervasive feeling of vulnerability that came naturally to soldiers out of their element, penned in a collection of slow-moving metal hulks, obvious targets in the twilight of a polar night in May to the wings of fighters that the imagination inevitably conjured up on the horizon. Nor, after two naval battles in the waters off Narvik in early April, could the legionnaires convince themselves that the Germans would be surprised by their visit. Five thousand German troops held Narvik. True, about 1,500 were German sailors marooned from their burning ships in April. But the main force was provided by Austro-German mountain troops commanded by a specialist in mountain warfare, Lieutenant-General Died, the man who had organized the 1936 Winter Olympics. And while the German troops were remote from their base of supply and counted only two artillery batteries, they had more than compensated for this with the capture of the stores of 6th Norwegian Division. A substantial superiority in land-based aircraft also counted heavily in their favor. Against this, the Allies would bring a force of three British battalions from the 24th Brigade of Guards, two Norwegian brigades, the two French half-brigades, and a contingent of Poles.

  Nineteen minutes into the morning of May 13, seven British warships
opened fire on Bjerkvik, a picture-postcard fishing village that lay along a snowy shore eight miles up the Herjangs Fjord from Narvik. The village church, which the Germans had profaned as an ammunition depot, erupted, briefly painting both the snow of the 4,500-foot promontory that dominated the town and the dark waters of the fjord bright orange. More of the wooden houses on shore caught fire, sending fingers of reflected flame reaching toward the spectators on the ships. A single German plane appeared and unloaded a bomb that sent a spout of spray toward the lowering sky, before disappearing behind a mountain pursued by a clatter of antiaircraft guns that erupted from the ships like applause.

  “Hurry up Frenchies! Quickly boys!” the sailors of the Monarch of Bermuda urged the legionnaires, who surrendered their life jackets, donned their combat gear, and climbed fully laden into the English torpedo boats moored alongside. More German fighters flew low over the convoy, ignoring the reverberating antiaircraft fire and turning the surface of the water between the ships into a chaos of geysers and waterspouts. The guns of the HMS Resolution sent ear-shattering volleys into the town. The legionnaires were torn between a desire to burrow for protection into the unyielding deck, and that of getting off the metal targets and onto a more familiar, if enemy-infested, element. The rifles that they had sighted, cleaned and cherished for weeks now seemed derisory elements of protection, as useful as bows and arrows amidst the whistles and screams of much more lethal ordnance, whose din rebounded off the craggy faces of the surrounding mountains. Soon a line of torpedo boats was making for the shore, black spots in the bluish Arctic dawn, drawing troop-laden whalers in their wakes—a rather primitive invasion flotilla if judged by later standards of amphibious attack. At the last minute they veered right and left to avoid the designated landing beaches, where machine-gun bullets rattled over the rocks and rippled the surface beyond.

  Once on shore, the companies deployed and moved to seize the high ground to the north and south of the town, supported by three light tanks, not always an easy task as the snow was still knee-deep in places. The 2nd Battalion overran the German camp at Elvegaarden just behind the town, capturing most of the German medical staff, which had remained with the wounded, while two companies pushed their way through the ruins of Bjerkvik where the Germans fought a skillful rear guard action with carefully sighted machine-gun nests. Favrel quickly became aware that the night attack had killed far more civilians then enemy soldiers,

  a horrible massacre of a humanity surprised half naked in its sleep. Rifle in hand, I had to travel over an atrocious way of the cross scattered with shredded corpses, cribs overturned upon their dead babies, wounded screaming in pools of blood.

  The Germans took almost five hours to vacate the village, taking care to set booby traps as they retired. Favrel also claimed that elements of the 13e DBLE then brought dishonor upon the unit by looting the town, which earned the Legion a denunciation by German radio as a group of “professional bandits.”4

  Narvik proved a far tougher objective to seize. Unlike the picturesque Bjerkvik, Narvik offered a bleak industrial perspective in keeping with the severe landscape that towered above it. Scatterings of spartan houses ran down the spine of a peninsula that stabbed into the water between two deep fjords. A railway line followed the northern shore through several tunnels and looped around the end of the peninsula before it fractured into fingers of track at the harbor on the south shore. Into this small space behind bunkers and walls, the German commander had crammed an estimated 4,500 troops. For this reason, the plan, which called for 1,500 legionnaires and a battalion of Norwegians to jump off from Oijord on the north shore, cross the narrow entrance of Rombaks Fjord, and land smack in the middle of the German positions, was a risky one.

  The operation, postponed several times, finally took place in the opening minutes of May 28. Two Legion companies got ashore and seized their objectives quickly. However, once the Germans recovered from their surprise, the following elements had to fight through German 77s and machine guns vomiting destruction at them from the cover of the railway tunnels and strafing by German aircraft, which obliged the supporting British ships, and therefore most of their fire support, to withdraw. The situation for the legionnaires was that of a man left suspended over a precipice, two hands on the ledge and trying to throw a leg over the top. But they managed it, although it proved a difficult task without artillery support to winkle the small groups of Germans organized around machine guns out of the tunnels and folds of earth. Lieutenant Colonel Magrin-Vernerey came forward, often to within thirty yards of the German lines, stylishly orchestrating the seizure of the German positions by pointing out the direction of attack with his walking stick.

  Once on land, the 1st Battalion pushed along the north shore of the peninsula, while the 2nd moved around the south to link up with Polish troops moving along the southern shore of the Beisfjord. Narvik was in Allied hands by the end of the day, but the Germans conducted a fighting retreat, making use of the abrupt terrain, which favored the defensive. Over the next days, the Allied troops pushed along the railway lines to within ten miles of the Swedish frontier before events in France caused the operation to be cancelled. By June 7, the 13e DBLE was slipping back down the fjords to the open sea and England. Seven officers, five NCOs, and fifty-five legionnaires had been lost, most of them storming Narvik on May 28. Favrel witnessed one legionnaire shot out of hand for looting in Narvik.

  Like the regiments fighting in France, the verdict on the performance of the 13e DBLE in the Narvik campaign must be a largely positive one. The legionnaires provided a constant effort, despite great fatigue caused by almost incessant daylight and the fact that there were few areas available beyond the reach of the Germans, which caused the legionnaires to attempt to sleep—without much success—upon beds constructed out of branches and leaves and laid on the snow-covered slopes. The eviction of 4,500 well-entrenched German troops from Narvik by roughly 1,500 legionnaires supported by a battalion of Norwegians was no small accomplishment. Of course, one may argue that the enemy garrison was composed essentially of shipwrecked sailors and Austrians. Nevertheless, they were well armed and well supported by artillery and air power, and as far as one can tell used natural defenses well. The fighting in some sectors was very bitter indeed, so there is no evidence that the Germans lacked heart. Also, the Legion had to overcome serious handicaps, which included poor functioning of the radios, which slowed and disarticulated maneuvers, and delayed logistical support caused by the problems of unloading the ships.5

  Nevertheless, there was room for improvement. Legion Lieutenant Jouandon noted several defects in the 13e DBLE, some of them classic complaints of the interwar Legion: Poor training, an uneven quality of NCO, especially of many sergeants who arrived at their grade by seniority after having been promoted too rapidly to corporal, and the creaming off of the best legionnaires for specialist positions, “so that the combat sections often received only those who could do nothing else.” He also noted that officers made tactical mistakes because, unlike their German counterparts, they had “neither the sense, nor the curiosity of terrain.” In Jouandon's view, Legion officers required “less formalism, more initiative,” an observation that applied to the French officer corps in general. Nevertheless, if many of the weaknesses of the 13e DBLE were Legion weaknesses, their strengths were also Legion strengths—a combative spirit among the officers that they succeeded in communicating to the troops, and enough experienced NCOs and legionnaires to provide leadership for the combat sections. Like their counterparts in France, the legionnaires in Norway concluded that the enemy was not composed of supermen, but in Jouandan's view they seemed “not very battle hardened.... In sum, for [our] troops the comparison was not unfavorable.”6

  And there the matter might have rested, a minor episode, a happy footnote in the history of the Legion written by a temporary formation amidst the cataclysmic events of 1940 in France. Yet the 13e DBLE was fated to play a larger role in the history of the Legion, and the hi
story of France in World War II, than its obscure genealogy might have indicated. The events that transformed the 13c DBLE from an obscure and temporary formation into a symbol of duty and combative spirit for an entire nation occurred not in Norway, but in England.

  By mid-June 1940, Trentham Park, a manor house near Stoke-on-Trent, hosted a camp of almost 4,500 French soldiers, refugees from Narvik and the celebrated escape from the beaches of Dunkirk, including the 1,619 survivors of the 13th. The morale that had been raised so high by Norway had plummeted when the unit had been put ashore at Brest, to witness briefly in full measure the chaos of the French defeat and to take casualties every bit as high as those of Narvik. Gathered beneath a relentless English rain in hastily erected tents, the legionnaires were asked whether they wished to continue the fight against Germany or to return to North Africa, a decision that effectively meant to stack arms, as immediate prospects for carrying on the struggle from the colonies appeared remote. It was a decision heavy with moral and political implications, and a unique one in the history of the Legion, for unlike in 1835 when the Legion had been given to Spain, each legionnaire was now asked to choose his own destiny. As might be expected, each legionnaire reasoned very much in his own terms.

  The decision by the French government to capitulate to the Germans rather than fight on from North Africa, followed by Charles de Gaulle's call for continued resistance on June 18, 1940, was to disturb profoundly the cohesion of the 13e DBLE, especially as virtually the only troops available for recruitment into the Free French were those marooned in England. Trouble began to brew in the unit almost as soon as it reached Trentham Park, brought on by low morale, which was made lower still by the confused situation in France. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the malaise was most quickly apparent among the volatile Spanish legionnaires, men who retained a mind of their own that any amount of Legion discipline seemed powerless to alter. Mutterings of discontent among the Spaniards finally broke into the open on June 25, the day the armistice between France and Germany went into effect, when twenty-nine of them at Trentham Park refused to muster and as a consequence were delivered to the British police. This provoked a larger strike by many of the remaining Spaniards in the demi-brigade who, responding in part to rumors that the Legion was to be dissolved, feared that they would be turned over to the Franco government. They too were delivered to the British police.7 War weariness must also have been a strong element in their decision, for when on July 1 they were given a choice of repatriation to North Africa or fighting on with the Free French, they preferred internment in Britain.8