French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  The treatment of the Spaniards hastened the collapse of the badly deteriorating relations between many officers and men, which fed upon rumor, distrust and innuendo. To this one might add the Anglophobia that was to bedevil recruitment and serve to discredit the Free French movement in the eyes of many Frenchmen from the beginning. The doubts of Adjudant-Chef Mary about the sincerity of his officers began with his arrival at Trentham Park. There he discovered a clutch of officers whom he had believed lost during a forward reconnaissance in Brittany already installed in the camp, but without their men. He discovered that, cut off by the Germans, the officers had told the men to make their own way to French lines, while they had “decided” to reach England. “These explanations start us thinking and from this moment we have the conviction that we had been led to England knowingly by making us believe that we will go to North Africa,” Mary reported. “We are disgusted by this procedure and this only increases the distaste which we feel for some time, without speaking of it, in the presence of the British and unfortunately of certain French.” The delivery of the Spanish legionnaires, “yesterday's brothers in combat,” to the British police was the last straw for Mary, who reasoned that they had no right to call upon foreigners to “render justice in the name of the Government of their Country [France] which they have renounced.”9

  Given the strong moral and political implications of the decision to fight on or return to North Africa, and the subsequent role played by the 13e DBLE as a symbol of France's, and the Legion's, fighting spirit, it is ironic perhaps that few officers made their decision on political grounds. De Gaulle's brief visit to the unit on June 30 was very low-key, even stiff, and certainly did not electrify the officers of the 13th. Adjudant-Chef Mary claimed that some legionnaires whose minds were already made up boycotted his visit, a futile gesture in the end because he did not seek to speak to the legionnaires,10 some of whom appear to have been on duty outside the camp in any case. Some were perhaps influenced by Lieutenant Colonel Magrin-Vernerey, who swallowed his Anglophobia and sided with de Gaulle. Anglophobia appears to have played a principal part in the decision of Lieutenants Jouandon and Vadot, who had distinguished themselves during the battle for Narvik, to depart for North Africa.11 Anglophobia, stimulated by Dunkirk, which the French saw as a treacherous defection rather than a miraculous escape, not to mention assorted uncomplimentary remarks upon French martial qualities by British civilians around Trentham park, made many men opt for repatriation.

  Some subalterns linked by friendships going back to Saint-Cyr came to collective decisions. Many were “relieved” by the armistice, Gabriel de Sairigné noted in his diary. “Personal questions,” he wrote, decided the issue for “almost everyone”—the desire to see one's family, versus the belief that they would be integrated into the detested British army. By joining de Gaulle they would boost their careers, and perhaps win the war with England, although that prospect was grimly remote, almost unimaginable in June 1940.12 One officer was heard to remark: “I'm staying [in England]. What do you expect me to do in France or North Africa? Nothing, for the only thing I know how to do is to drive an automobile. Once discharged from the army, I would be in civilian life a failure, incapable of supporting a family.”13 Mary complained that discussions between officers who wanted to fight on and legionnaires became increasingly acrimonious, to the point that he and others considered desertion if forced to remain in England. Some officers provoked skepticism among the legionnaires by repeating as fact rumors that the Legion had been disbanded and that groups of legionnaires and tirailleurs were roaming North Africa and had even reached Nigeria and the Côte d'Or, committing the “worst excesses,” and that the “worst reprisals” awaited those who returned to France, including repatriation of German and Italian nationals to their governments.14

  On July 1, at six o'clock in the morning, the regiment split. Some 636 officers and men of the original 1,619 who arrived at Trentham Park boarded five trains headed to Bristol and the ship for North Africa. “Emotion at the station during the Colonel's adieux,” wrote de Sairigné. “Everyone looks to make excuses. Everyone knows full well, however, that Morocco won't fight.”15 “The last minute is truly poignant,” Mary recorded. “The hearts are full of emotion, then ‘he’ [the colonel] offers his hand, for the last time also we salute him.”16 Nevertheless, tension between the two groups mounted when an honor guard of those who had rallied to de Gaulle refused to present arms to their departing colleagues. A final episode remained to spoil the departure of those returning to North Africa—the British police delivered the three hundred Spanish legionnaires to the Bristol docks, but they lay down and refused to board.

  If the 13e DBLE (renamed the 14e DBLE between July 2 and November 4, 1940, after which they reverted to their original number) entertained pretensions of rescuing the honor of France and the Legion, it appeared poorly equipped to do so. Thirty-one of the regiment's 59 officers had departed, and only around 900 legionnaires remained. De Sairigné complained soon after the split that “Discipline is terribly lax. The officers become very hard. One must constantly stay on top of demands and absurd excuses. Generous English hospitality has something to do with it; AWOL and desertions, the police are nervous.” However, by August 25, when they were inspected by George VI, de Sairigné exulted, “Impeccable parade; the Legion is absolutely under control.”17 Part of that control had to do with the quality of the officer corps, which included men who would eventually rise to general rank, such as Captains Pierre Koenig and Jacques Paris de Bollardière, and Lieutenant Bernard Saint-Hillier, to name just a few. Others, like the Georgian emigré Captain Dimitri Amilakvari and Gabriel de Sairigné, certainly would have become generals had they survived long enough. On August 1, the 14th was joined by Second Lieutenant Pierre Messmer, one of de Gaulle's future prime ministers.

  The promised “beaux voyages” began on August 30, when 936 officers and men of the demi-brigade boarded ships at Liverpool for a tour of Africa and a part in the early history of the Free French movement: The failed attempt to win Dakar for the Gaullist camp, the storming of Libreville in the Gabon, and the campaign against the Italians in Eritrea from February to April 1941. The Eritrean campaign, though costing the lives of only eighteen NCOs and legionnaires, recalled those of the 1920s in Morocco, made difficult by poor logistics, heat and lack of water. Poor Italian morale and British support helped to tip the balance in the favor of the Allies. The victorious Legion seized Massaouah on April 8, 1941. When Colonel Magrin-Vernerey, now traveling under the nom de guerre of Monclar to protect his family in France, entered the town, the native population greeted him with fascist salutes, believing this to be a polite European salutation. Monclar immediately made his way to enemy headquarters and arrested the Italian commander, Admiral Bonetti, personally, but not before the admiral had pitched his sabre out of the window into the sea. An Italian admiral, he declared pompously, never surrenders his arm. Fortunately, one of the legionnaires had seen the saber fly into the water, waited patiently until low tide, retrieved it, and gave it to the colonel.18 De Sairigné noted that the surrender and disarming of the Italians, which should have been a great morale booster, had only served to remind him of the confusion of defeat he had witnessed in Brittany on June 18, 1940.19

  This tour of Africa had allowed the 13th to regain its equilibrium and begin to forge an esprit de corps. However, it would face two severe tests over the next years, one moral and the other military. The moral challenge sprang out of a confrontation with fellow legionnaires in Syria in the summer of 1941, one that reopened many of the old and badly healed wounds that resulted from the division of Trentham Park. In many respects, this made the second test, the military one against Rommel's Afrika Korps in the Western Desert, a more straightforward operation.

  The situation in Syria served to point up how far the mentality of the 13e had evolved from the days of decision in June 1940, and demonstrated the full force of the difficult political choices that the 1940 defeat and d
e Gaulle's decision to fight on had imposed upon French officers. Unfortunately, it also demonstrated how poorly equipped many of those officers were to evaluate those choices. The 6e étranger, which garrisoned Syria, was considered a staunchly pro-Vichy unit. French historian A.-P. Comor has contested this view, pointing out quite rightly that there was considerable proresistance sentiment in the regiment in June 1940, which produced a movement to join the British in Palestine. However, this foundered for a variety of reasons, including divisions among the officers, the lack of vehicles to get them to the frontier with British-ruled Palestine, a mutiny among Spanish workers attached to a battalion of RMVE that took two days to suppress, and the influence of the commander-in-chief in North Africa, General Charles Noguès, upon whom the British and Free French initially had placed much hope, but who in the end threw in with Pétain. This convinced the Syrian commander, General Eugène Mittelhauser, to pledge his loyalty to Vichy.

  “Personally, neither I nor most of my officers harbored any animosity against the officers of the 13e BDLE [sic],” Colonel Fernand Barre, commander of the 6e étranger, wrote. “If, like many of them, we had participated in the Narvik expedition, and then regrouped in England, we would have probably, like them, rallied to the FFL [Free French]. Question of circumstances.”20 Nevertheless, Barre had taken care to return any officer suspected of Gaullist sympathies to France. So by the summer of 1941 when “circumstances” offered Barre a choice, his opinions upon Free France were well formed and staunchly negative, in large part because these colonial soldiers continued to see Britain rather than Germany as their primary enemy.

  Colonel Barre's argument that “circumstances” determined who picked which side no doubt held true for 1940. The issues were horribly muddled in that terrible summer, and it is forever to the credit of Charles de Gaulle that he was able to peer through the fog of confusion, anger and recrimination of those months to chart a clear course for the recovery of France's dignity. That more people did not rally to his cause can indeed be explained in part by circumstance—even if his appeal to fight on were accepted (and it is not clear that all of those who rallied to him did so out of idealistic motives), it was not, after all, easy for those who were not championship swimmers to reach England and the Free French camp.

  Yet by the summer of 1941 the reasons for French legionnaires in Syria to fight an Allied invasion in the name of the Vichy government had been reduced to three: loyalty to the established government of France, the honor of the regiment, and the fact that the Germans seemed the odds-on favorite. Loyalty to the government had been enforced by continuing conflicts with the British over their attack on the French fleet at Mers el Kébir, the port of Oran, on July 3, 1940, the Dakar expedition and the British blockade of Djibouti, acts of “piracy” against French shipping, and by indignation over British bombing of mainland France. Coming to some sort of arrangement with Germany still seemed to many French officers the best way to protect the empire. Officers suspected of Gaullist sympathies had been purged or transferred. Furthermore, French opinion was profoundly impressed by the German military successes in the Balkans and Greece in April 1941. All of which serves to demonstrate how lonely the Gaullist position was in the summer of 1941, one which would become even more forlorn with the breathtaking advances of German panzer units against the Red Army from June 22.

  In the aftermath of the Syrian campaign, French officers on both sides attempted to minimize their political differences, advancing the claim that they had not really wanted to fight, and that the whole unfortunate incident might have been avoided by a baroud d'honneur, a sort of military compromise that allows commanders to surrender with their honor intact after a symbolic struggle. However, the conventions surrounding a baroud d'honneur require one side to have a clear superiority, which the Allies decidedly did not, attacking on June 7,1941, thirty well-entrenched French battalions with only twenty of their own. Therefore, regimental pride would not allow the Vichy French to surrender to an inferior force, a fact that did not prevent the commander of French troops in southern Lebanon, General Arlabosse, from claiming subsequently that he had been defeated by a superior force backed by artillery and tanks.21 More's the pity that general Arlabosse did not advance this claim before the battle and ask for terms. Indeed, the baroud d'honneur appears to have been a red herring designed to paper over differences in the French camp and throw the onus for the fight squarely on the shoulders of the British, who were blamed for refusing to commit enough troops to allow the Vichy troops to surrender with a clear conscience.

  From the standpoint of patriotism and political morality, the officers of the 13e clearly believed their arguments irrefutable. By 1941, it was increasingly apparent, at least to them, that the Vichy government had become more than a hostage to Hitler; it was a willing collaborator. And nowhere was this more obvious than in Syria. De Sairigné spoke of the “profound indignation” in the 13e DBLE when it was discovered that the Germans had been allowed free use of Syria as a staging post to supply a revolt by the Iraqi nationalist Rashid Ali-al-Gaïlani against British rule in April 1941.22 “This has a name,” General Georges Catroux, commander of the Free French forces in the eastern Mediterranean, wrote in an appeal addressed to French troops in Lebanon. “It's called aiding the enemy; it's called treason! Assistance and premeditated treason which will debase and dishonor you if you do not oppose it!23

  Catroux was more correct than probably even he realized. The German use of Syria was no flash in the pan, but part of a major agreement signed between Vichy and Hitler on May 28, 1941, which included use of other French bases in north and west Africa, in return for what Vichy hoped— naïvely— would be a major renegotiation of the occupation agreement, and even of a new era of support by France for Nazi Germany.24 This collaboration between Pétain and Hitler in Syria offered an unwelcome distraction to the British, who had been pushed out of Greece and Crete and who were threatened in Egypt. However, the principal advocate for the invasion of Syria was de Gaulle himself, who hoped among other things to recruit a number of troops from the defeated garrison. Therefore, the Allies decided upon an attack, which the hostile conduct of the Vichy government and the collaboration of the French administration there had invited, with a force that included an important contingent of Free French troops. Here were the perfect “circumstances” Barre required to change sides without losing face.

  The participation of the 13e DBLE in the operations against Syria testified to the degree of rising political commitment in the regiment by 1941. If the decision to join de Gaulle in June 1940 had often been taken for reasons of adventure or personal gain, a year of fighting as a self-conscious minority in the Allied cause had convinced many of the bankruptcy of Vichy's policies. Therefore, when it became a question of reneging on the clause in their contract that exempted them from service against fellow Frenchmen, only Colonel Monclar and one company commander refused to take part in the invasion, a selective sensitivity as blood had already been shed in this Gaullist/Vichy civil war by legionnaires of the 13e in Gabon. Unfortunately for the officers of the 13e DBLE, unanimity had also been achieved in the 6e étranger.

  The first shots in the campaign were verbal ones—the Free French scattered leaflets and denunciations of Vichy policies in Syria, while Colonel Barre fired back with a tract entitled, “Why I Am Not a Gaullist,” a diatribe that raised the tone of the debate by several decibels. Among men for whom the tradition of quiet discussion and gentle persuasion was not well developed, this had the effect of hardening opinion in both camps. Political arguments became banners beneath which each Legion regiment rallied. While the officers of the 13th reproached those of the 6th for supporting a compromised collaborationist regime, their propaganda was couched very much in Legion terms—those who had chosen Free France in 1940 had rejected defeat, traveled, found glory and were destined to be victorious over Hitler as troops equipped with the latest weapons, an obvious comment on the antiquated condition of Vichy's “Armistice Army.”
The alternative for legionnaires of the 6th was a return to the barracks life of North Africa, with its steady ration of road mending and cafard. “You are too ‘legionnaire’ to go over to the side of the defeated,” the Free French argument concluded.25

  Colonel Barre countered this provocation by publishing a fairly comprehensive list of grievances against the Gaullists. If in the process he exposed in full the paranoia and political and moral confusion that riddled the ranks of Vichy, not to mention a marked inability to distinguish between Churchill and Hitler, it must be remembered that French officers were still trying to come to terms with their most staggering military defeat since Waterloo. Barre's response also helps to explain why a category of French officers who were prepared to fight the Allies at every opportunity failed to lift a finger when the Germans used Syria in 1941, moved troops into Tunisia and occupied the “free” zone of Southern France in November 1942, and allowed the Japanese to occupy Indochina.