French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  Barre countered that de Gaulle's movement was essentially an insurrection against established authority, that he represented those whose divisive policies and mismanagement had brought France to her present predicament, as spokesman for the “principles of [17]89” and the Popular Front of 1936, for the reign of Jews and Free Masons, for “these secret sects [which] will cause the rebirth of the same disorders and the same calamities.” Barre reproached the Free French for helping to further English designs to take over the French empire, evoking, of all things, the “amputation” of Canada and India by the British at French expense in 1763, together with that of Egypt in 1881, not to mention Mers el Kébir, Dakar and now Syria. For Barre, the Free French were simply a collection of opportunists. “That is why I am not a Gaullist,” Barre concluded.26

  On June 8, 1941, two brigades of British troops under General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson invaded Syria from Iraq, while the 7th British Division moved up the coast from Haifa toward Beirut. The 13e DBLE, as part of the 1er Division Française Libre, crossed the Syrian frontier at Dera with the 5th Indian Brigade and marched for Damascus. For the first few days of the campaign, the 13th remained in reserve. Only on June 19 did they enter the battle for the first time, thrown into an assault upon one of the peaks that dominated the village of Kissoue, key to the southern defenses of Damascus, which it took after a brief, if violent, attack that left thirteen legionnaires dead and several wounded.

  That very evening, the 13th continued the advance toward Damascus. The great fear that the two regiments of the Legion would find themselves locked in head-on combat was realized on June 20, when advanced elements of the 13e clashed with a unit of the 6e étranger that held Kadam, a southern suburb of Damascus. The opening fusillade killed a Belgian legionnaire in the 13e and wounded a corporal in the 6th. To pull in his troops, Major Amilakvari had the bugler blow the “Boudin,” which was answered by the bugler from the defensive positions. Amilakvari ordered a cease-fire and approached the enemy position, which he discovered to be held by a sergeant and several legionnaires from the 6th. When the sergeant told the major that his orders were to hold his position until one o'clock in the morning, Amilakvari agreed not to advance until then.27

  This appears to have been an isolated incident. However, it was not the only one—a report by Lieutenant Baulens of the 6e étranger claims that a patrol of which he was part opened fire on “a column of trucks transporting legionnaires of the Gaullist battalion,” at dusk on the evening of June 10 south of Damascus.28 Therefore, legionnaire did fire upon legionnaire. Otherwise, the 6th fought stolidly, suffering 128 killed and 728 wounded, one-quarter of its strength, most of them battling the Australians in Lebanon. The 13th fought their way into Kadam against stiff opposition put up by the 29e régiment de tirailleurs algériens, and Legion officers had their hands full preventing reprisals against the wounded. The 13th was moved through Damascus and up the road toward Horns. The armistice caught them preparing to move upon Ba'albek. The campaign cost the 13e DBLE a relatively modest 21 killed and 47 wounded.

  The real confrontation between the two units of the Legion occurred not during the campaign, but afterward. According to the terms of the armistice signed at Saint-Jean d'Acre on July 14, 1941, the legionnaires of the 6e étranger were to be offered the choice between repatriation to France or assignment to the 13e DBLE. This “séance d'option” was held a month later, just two days before the 6th was to embark for France. Within a large enclosed square at Camp T2 outside Beirut, the 6th was drawn up with its colonel at its head. Despite the suffocating heat, the ambiance, “more than glacial” according to de Sairigné,29 plunged further toward a polar record when Colonel Koenig, representing the Free French, ordered Barre to leave, realizing full well that his legionnaires might be unwilling to defect in their commander's presence. Barre refused and was upheld by a large British colonel who, de Sairigné believed, appeared to be enjoying immensely this spectacle of dissension among Frenchmen. After a quiet word between the British colonel and Koenig, the legionnaires were ordered to file through a door, turning to the left if they chose to remain with the 6th, or to the right where a long line of army trucks stood ready to transport them to the 13e DBLE. The trucks went home empty: “Oh satisfaction—immense joy—All the legionnaires except one (a very bad subject) turned left, without hesitating (italics in original],” Barre remembered, obviously still deeply moved by a scene that had taken place forty years earlier. “Then all the corporals, the NCOs and the officers did the same. Finally, I went through the door myself and found my regiment reconstituted. The clique played the refrain of the Legion, Le Boudin, as everyone stood to attention. Then the 6e marched away behind its music.”30 De Sairigne grumbled about the “particularly lamentable attitude of Colonel Bar [sic],”31 but the Gaullists could do nothing to stop the departure of the 6th.

  Therefore, the repatriation of the 6e étranger to France appeared to be a political defeat for the Gaullists in general, and for the 13e DBLE in particular. However, the rejection of the Gaullists by the Syrian garrison was less categorical than the final leavetaking between the 6th and the 13th might seem to indicate. Colonel Barre arrived in Marseille with only 1,233 of the original force of 3,344 men listed on the regimental roster on June 8, 1941. In other words, over 60 percent of his legionnaires had been left behind, and not all of them in graveyards and hospitals. Around 3,000 Vichy troops in Syria opted for the Free French. Although the regimental diary of the 13e DBLE claims the defection of 1,400 legionnaires from the 6th,32 more realistic estimates hover between 677 and around a thousand, most of whom had enlisted from Allied POW camps or who had deserted to the 13th before August 14.33 Some of those desertions had been provoked by legionnaires from the 13th operating in groups of four around the camps of the 6th with the mission of persuading isolated legionnaires to come over.

  What all this tells us about the state of mind of the legionnaires of the 6th is not clear. It is possible that political refugees were convinced by the political arguments of fighting on. Barre complained that groups of Gaullist “solicitors” played upon the nationalism or nostalgia of isolated legionnaires, “speaking to them in their maternal language, showing them that it is their duty, now that they have fought loyally for France, to put themselves on the side of the only nation that can and wants to give them back their fatherland.”34 Legionnaires with more traditional motivations could be offered “adventure, new horizons, far off countries, le baroud, well being, distractions, etc.,” which compared favorably with the prospect of the boring life of the barracks at Bel-Abbès.35 The fact that the 13e DBLE belonged to a victorious force imparted the prestige necessary to attract others.

  OFFICERS, HOWEVER, PROVED more difficult to persuade—97 percent of the officers of the 6th elected repatriation to France. A.-P. Comor believes that had officers from the two camps been allowed to meet in the month between the end of hostilities in Syria and the repatriation of the 6e étranger, more might have been won over. This is possibly true. British reluctance to take on board more Free French troops than they could train and equip, and to strengthen a movement whose leader, in their eyes, was already demonstrating a talent for intractability, offers one explanation for the failure to meet until just before departure. However, the fact remains that when officers from the two Legion camps did finally meet, their tête-à-tête was more like a dialogue of the deaf. When representatives from the 13e DBLE appeared to discuss changing sides with their counterparts in the 6th, they were received, according to Colonel Barre, “without friendliness, nor cordiality, but correctly. There was neither friction nor fighting—the discussions were sometimes lively, but without violence.”36

  This hostile reception was no doubt caused in part by jealousy provoked by the rapid promotion of those who had joined de Gaulle. But what the representatives of the 13th discovered was that the propaganda war had served to harden positions on either side rather than to persuade. To this one might add the high casualties suffered by the
6e étranger, which served to make defection appear as an expression of disloyalty and lack of solidarity with dead and wounded comrades.37 This was the argument put forward by the commander of Vichy forces in Lebanon at the end of the campaign when he warned his soldiers that they would soon be “the object of solicitations by misled Frenchmen who will not lack the shame to ask you to change camps, to trample on the corpses of so many of our brave, fallen comrades faithful to their duty as a soldier.”38 But the habit of obedience to superiors was too ingrained, especially among those holding an active command, to be easily broken.

  The propaganda battle between the two sides merely helped to enforce an institutionalized conformity that most officers believed vital to the preservation of discipline, group-think that swathed everyone in the security of majority sentiment and therefore helped to ensure cohesion. This pressure to conform was especially intense among Legion officers, a group with a developed sense of elite status, a self-conscious priesthood of the elect among whom any deviation was treated as heretical and disloyal behavior. The few officers whom the 13th managed to recruit from the 6th were those isolated in POW camps or hospitals, which put them beyond reach of the pressures of hierarchy and the mess, but also removed them from the responsibilities of active command. In this respect, Barre was especially active in assuring that “circumstance” played as small a role as possible in the decisions of his officers. What was more, he was transferred back to Algeria to command the dépôt commun des régiments étrangers (DCRE), its main training center, a post taken up on his departure by his deputy in Syria. In this way, Barre helped to set the political tone, or lower it depending upon one's point of view, of the Legion in North Africa—Syria was added to Mers el Kébir as another example of the treachery of the English and their renegade allies in the 13e DBLE. The division of the Legion had been consummated until the end of the North African campaign on May 1943 and beyond. The 6e étranger would return to its passive collaboration and cafard, while the 13e DBLE would have the far more serious task of measuring itself against Rommel.

  The next test for the 13th was a military one. And like the political test of Syria, it was a performance that earned mixed reviews. Nevertheless, in retrospect, the period between the fall of Syria in the summer of 1941 and the end of the North African campaign in May 1943 might be looked upon as the golden age of the 13e DBLE in World War II. For the first time since 1940, the 13e DBLE would carry the banner of the Legion into battle against the Germans. The fact that its campaign was a solitary one removed any rivals to dispute its glory. Its leadership, under newly promoted Lieutenant-Colonel Dimitri Amilakvari—Monclar was now a general— was more experienced, and possibly higher in quality than ever. The recruits from the 6e étranger, although fewer than hoped for, allowed the 13e DBLE to double its strength to 1,771 men, organized into three small four-company battalions of around 500 men each, redesignated as the 1er, 2e and 3e bataillons de Légion étrangère (BLE). The 2e and 3e BLE would fight in the Western Desert as part of the 1er brigade française libre, attached to the British Eighth Army. The British reequipped these legionnaires as mechanized infantry to fight in the Western Desert, which made it possibly the most modern force in the French army, certainly in the Legion. The fact that equipment was available for only two of the three battalions, so one had to be left behind, was only a slight disappointment in the burgeoning military fortunes of the 13th.

  On January 20, 1942, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel attacked British positions south of Benghazi in Libya, driving them back toward Egypt. To stabilize the front, the British began preparing a series of defensive positions that stretched inland south from El Ghazalah. The southern extremity of that line was anchored by a triangle of moles and pillboxes at a place called Bir Hacheim (Bir Hakeim), an abandoned Italian desert camp that stood beside a dry well at the confluence of several desert tracks. When, on February 14, the Legion as part of the “First Free French Brigade Group” replaced the 150th Indian Brigade at Bir Hacheim, the men looked out over a sand-blown plateau decorated by a few wisps of pallid vegetation that stretched, dry as a bone, to the horizon. If the countryside was depressing, when combined with the weather, it was enough to make one suicidal—the temperature alternated between blistering days and frigid nights, with the occasional sandstorm conjured up for variety. Of more immediate worry, however, was the poor state of the defenses, which would be hard-pressed to hold out against a determined attack of camel-mounted tribesmen, much less the Afrika Korps. For the next three months, the 957 legionnaires who comprised around a third of the garrison improved the fortifications, laid minefields, and experimented with detached motorized reconnaissance formations inspired by British General Jock Campbell, and therefore baptized “Jock Columns.” It was at Bir Hacheim, on this forlorn, sand-blown plateau, that the 13e DBLE would earn its enduring place in history and in the hearts of Frenchmen.

  On May 26, Rommel, feinting a frontal assault, swung his forces in a southward arch to outflank the British positions, and ran into Bir Hacheim. An attack by Italian tanks early on the morning of May 27 was stopped cold, at a cost to the assailants of thirty-two tanks lost and ninety-one prisoners. “All the men and especially the anti-tank [gunners] were terrific,” de Sairigné exulted in his diary. So many tanks were abandoned that several German and Italian trucks drove into the French position, believing it to be an Italian fortress.39 As the enemy had obviously decided to bypass the defenses and strike in the British rear, General Koenig ran slash and burn raids against Rommel's overstretched supply lines as they lapped around Bir Hacheim. Within a few days, the Axis attack was running out of steam and the prognosis for an Allied victory appeared good. But on May 31, the Italians breached the British lines north of Bir Hacheim.

  By June 2 Bir Hacheim was an Allied island in an advancing tide of Axis troops—two Italian officers came to the camp to ask the French to surrender and walked away with Koenig's refusal. For the next few days, the camp was under continual bombardment by artillery and bombers. On June 6, two separate combined attacks by tanks and infantry stalled at the very southwestern edge of the perimeter, mainly due to the effect of artillery and antitank fire. “Very few losses on our side,” noted de Sairigné, “while the medics crisscross the battlefield on the enemy side.”40 However, on the 8th the enemy stepped up his artillery and air bombardment, mixed with an occasional probe with tanks and infantry. On the 9th, an attack that threatened to break into the position was thrown back only by a last-minute counterattack led by half-tracks. Both water and munitions were running low. The 10th opened with an infernal artillery barrage. More seriously, accurate German counterbattery fire was beginning to limit the ability of the French guns, so far the mainstay of the defense, to respond. A determined German attack at three o'clock in the afternoon swarmed over the French pillboxes taking several legionnaires prisoner before it could be repelled.

  Completely out of water and ammunition for the 75-millimeter cannon, Koenig ordered a breakout. Although each battalion was given a definite role to play, the regimental diary admitted that “time was lacking to organize the planned movements, no formation is any longer imposed and some units go forward in a compact mass. The enemy positions, probably intimidated by the imposing aspect of these masses, prudently fall quiet so as not to be localized and only open firing after their passage.”41 In fact, the retreat turned into an unorganized flight, necessary perhaps, but the most costly episode of the battle for the Legion. The legionnaires and other members of the fleeing garrison, which included a small British contingent, charged the enemy positions, the Bren guns on their half-tracks blazing. The Germans lit up the night with flares, and tracer bullets knitted a linear network across the sky. Vehicles exploded into funeral pyres as they drove over mines: “Very impressive,” de Sairigné wrote.

  Big shambles also, and, for a few seconds, I doubt that one can regain control of the men. Finally, it more or less sorts itself out. But the plan was worked out too late, the enemy line having been
revealed closer than one would have believed. Many of the arms have not been destroyed and are going to hamper considerably the vehicles.42

  The breakout dissolved into a series of blind firefights, a “corrida individuelle,” wrote de Sairigné, who became separated from his company in the night, assembled a few isolated soldiers, and made his way as best he could toward the British lines eight miles away. General Koenig and Lieutenant Colonel Amilakvari, together in a car driven by Englishwoman Susan Travers, who had joined the Free French in England and been assigned to 13e DBLE as a driver, also wandered alone in the desert, narrowly evading German positions on several occasions. Miraculously, the flight, which had invited disaster, was only marginally catastrophic. While the days of siege had cost the Legion only 14 dead and 17 wounded, primarily because of the strength of the defensive positions, 11 legionnaires were killed, 32 were wounded, and 37 taken prisoner during the breakout. Worse, however, 152 remained unaccounted for, many in POW camps. The two battalions of the Legion at Bir Hacheim were reduced to 693 men, largely deprived of their artillery and other heavy weapons, which had been left behind in their escape.

  The immediate aftermath of Bir Hacheim was undoubtedly the high point of the history of the 13e DBLE, and for the Legion in World War II. Though Koenig was modest about his garrison's performance, in the hands of Maurice Schumann, future French foreign minister who in 1942 was the voice of the Gaullist Radio Londres, Bir Hacheim became a “rendez-vous d'honneur” and a symbol of the spirit of Free French patriots, on a par with that of Verdun in 1916. There would be other combats, even other faits d'armes, but the solid performance of the Legion during what was called the Battle of El Ghazalah won it praise for its discipline under fire, its aggressive mastery of the Jock columns, and the damage inflicted on the German and Italian tanks by Legion artillerymen. This, like the confrontation with the 6e étranger in the Levant, confirmed and heightened its separate Free French identity.43 The demi-brigade was withdrawn to Alexandria, where it was given what the regimental diary called an “enthusiastic reception” by the French population there. “And even the English soldiers salute them with a certain respect.”44 In fact, the British were annoyed by Gaullist propaganda that portrayed Bir Hacheim holding out despite having been abandoned by the British. The Germans exploited this Anglophobia by quoting POWs seized at Bir Hacheim who complained that the RAF had denied them air support. When, a few days later, Churchill paid a visit to the troops in the Western Desert, he neglected to call on the Free French, which Koenig considered a snub.45