French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  This is not to say that the conversion to American methods did not cause problems, foremost of which perhaps was that the unaccustomed American emphasis upon logistics forced the Armée d'Afrique, after much grumbling, to break up combat units for use in support roles. For the 13th especially it was a less than happy reorganization, for they exchanged their British-inspired desert mobility for a more plodding American-model battalion of 850 men organized into three rifle companies, a heavy weapons company and a machine-gun company.48 The unit priorities for reequipment also provided yet another issue over which supporters of de Gaulle, who argued for the old Free French units, and Giraud, who championed the ex-Vichy forces, could clash, a dispute that helped to delay the arrival of the 13e DBLE in Italy until April 1944.

  Italy did not prove to be one of the happiest proving grounds for Allied skills in World War II. Professor Sir Michael Howard once suggested that the Allied problems were inevitable once they decided to conquer Italy by beginning at the bottom. While the Italian campaign was a strategic success for the Allies because it tied down German divisions that Hitler might have employed more usefully elsewhere, the mountainous terrain offered the Germans ample opportunity for defense, while the limited communications network provided the largely roadbound Allied forces few attack options. Because the Allied advance in Italy was a slow and frustrating one, and because so little was expected of the French for reasons already mentioned, what British Brigadier K. W. D. Strong described as “the good French performance in Italy” came as an agreeable and welcome surprise to American and British leaders.49

  There are several explanations for this. First must be the quality of the commander of the French Expeditionary Corps, General (later Marshal) Alphonse Juin. A veteran of North Africa, Juin possessed the diplomacy and patience to work effectively with his Allied counterparts, as well as a firm grasp of the strengths of his troops and the best way to employ them. In this way, he was able to engineer the eventual breakthrough of the Gustav Line, a series of virtually impregnable defenses that ran east to west across the peninsula through Monte Cassino. The second factor in the French performance was the troops themselves, especially, but not exclusively, the Moroccan regiments. The rusticity and backwardness of the Armée d'Afrique, which was initially much derided by Allied officers in 1942, in fact proved a great advantage in the rugged terrain of central Italy, which so resembled that of North Africa. Juin made certain that his men were well supplied with mules, which allowed them to move off the roads and pierce German lines at thinly defended points where attacks were least expected. The aggressive professionalism of these men often contrasted starkly with the lax, even timid, performance of British and American conscripts, although on the negative side of the ledger the Moroccans especially were often accused of being more dangerous to Italian civilians than to German soldiers.

  A final factor in this superior French performance was the quality of its leadership. “Of course every division, of no matter what nationality, had its heroes ...,” British historian of the Italian campaign John Ellis writes.

  Yet one cannot but feel that the French Corps had more than its share. That there was a style of leadership there and a spirit of authentically patriotic self-sacrifice that would have seemed almost indecent in other units, particularly in the more prosaic, sometimes cynical American, British and Commonwealth ones.50

  While Ellis is not speaking particularly of the Legion, this type of leadership was to be found there in abundance. And while this helps to explain the aggressive performance of the 13e DBLE in Italy, leadership in itself could not make Italy an entirely successful venture for the Legion.

  In April 1944, when the 13th arrived in Italy, the campaign that had begun in Sicily in July of the previous year was approaching its first anniversary, and an unhappy one it would be if the Allies were still stalled before the Gustav Line. The battalions of the 13th designated as the 1er and 2e bataillons de légion étrangère (BLE), were part of the 1e division de marche d'infanterie (1e DMI), the old 1e division francaise libre. The attack plan was Juin's, and he assigned the 1e DMI the task of moving along the southern banks of the Liri towards San Giorgio à Liri in a move to outflank and penetrate German defenses while two divisions of Moroccans and Algerians stormed the mountains to their front.

  The 13th was initially held in reserve as the attack jumped off on May 11, and immediately ran into difficulty when the failure of the Moroccans to seize the mountains opened the roadbound DMI to plunging fire from German positions above and well-laid minefields along its line of march. Only on the 17th was the 13th brought to the front lines, where it was almost immediately hit by an air attack that cost it 102 casualties. On the 21st the legionnaires joined the slow advance along the Liri, but they were thrown back by a German counterattack. Fortunately, a breakthrough by the Moroccans and Chasseurs d'Afrique to the south allowed the legionnaires to be placed in trucks and join the pursuit toward and around Rome, which resulted in a hard fight between legionnaires and German panzer and parachute regiments at Radicofani north of Rome on June 18. For its actions, the 1st battalion of the BLE was awarded a croix de guerre. In all, the Italian campaign, though brief, cost the 13th 466 casualties, or one-quarter of its strength, a severe blow when one considers the difficulty of finding replacements.51

  Neither the Legion nor the 1e DMI of which they were part were content with their slow progress against what they conceded to be limited German strength. There were several reasons for their slowness. First, of course, one must place the difficulties of the campaign in context. The line of advance along the Liri that it had been assigned, cut by hedgerows and overlooked by steep slopes covered with boulders, thorn bushes and German bunkers, was an extremely difficult one. The rugged terrain combined with stiff German resistance had defeated the Americans and British for several months. However, that said, the 1e DMI appears to have performed less well than the other French divisions, admittedly a high standard to match. Perhaps some of the problems stemmed from the fact that all of its previous combat experience had been in the free-flowing conditions of the Western Desert. The Free French veterans were clearly less comfortable, and understandably so, cast in the role of heavy infantry slogging it out with the Wehrmacht in the narrow mountain valleys of Italy.

  Criticisms of the DMI, though not specifically of the Legion, were that the NCOs, brave enough in the attack, failed to protect their men during the lulls in the fighting so that “we do not camouflage ourselves enough; we do not dig enough, we do not manoeuvre enough.”52 Certainly some of the blame for the failure to advance can be laid at the feet of the American armored units with whom the 1e DMI worked, soldiers often out of sympathy with its aggressive professionalism, and who often demonstrated a preference for survival over attack. But all of the unit's problems could not be blamed on the Americans, for it was supported by French tanks as well. A major problem had been the poor response to German counterattacks, and here Legion Major de Sairigné blamed the lack of depth in the French attack formations and the dispersion of antitank weapons. In the pursuit, he believed 180-man companies too cumbersome and recommended that subordinate commanders should be allowed more initiative, a criticism of the highly centralized French command structure heard since World War I.53

  THE LEGION'S LAST CAMPAIGN in the European theater of World War II was, appropriately, the liberation of France. For the 13e DBLE, this justified the stand that they had taken in 1940, and marked a fitting climax to a five-year journey over three continents. As in 1915–18, Sidi-bel-Abbès resurrected the RMLE, three battalions of mechanized infantry organized like the American infantry, into combat commands composed of tanks, mechanized (Legion) infantry and light artillery. The REC was also included in these arrangements. These units landed on France's south coast in the late summer of 1944, broke through a thin crust of German resistance, and raced up the Rhone Valley behind retreating Germans. However, German resistance began to stiffen in the late autumn as the Allies approached the Rhine
. The fighting in Alsace was bitter in the hard winter of 1944–45, and only in the spring were the French able to drive into Germany. These final campaigns earned the praise both of contemporaries and historians, especially for their defense of Strasbourg against a formidable German counterstroke in January 1945. The combats against Germans fighting from well-fortified positions were remarkably hard, and the legionnaires sometimes demonstrated commendable creativity in dealing with their opponents.

  For instance, on the night of January 11–12, 1945, a group of legionnaires surrounded in the Alsatian village of Herbsheim by a German offensive unleashed three days earlier were ordered to withdraw to French lines after an attempt to rescue them failed. Destroying their heavy weapons, and carrying their wounded on stretchers, they filtered through the first line of German defenses covered in part by the noise of a German tank operating on the road. As they approached the second line, a German-speaking legionnaire announced to the sentinel that they were the reinforcements sent to prevent the French breakout. After the sentinel obligingly answered all of the questions put to him about the number of German troops and their disposition, the legionnaires dispatched the unfortunate guard and charged through the German position, sowing death on their way to a safe escape.54

  More than any other of its actions in World War II, perhaps even than those in World War I, this winter campaign in eastern France appeared to justify the often-repeated belief that the Legion was used as a troupe de sacrifice by the French high command. As early as October 1944, even before the really difficult conditions of the winter campaign set in, the ex-Free French reported that

  The impression of the systematic sabotage of our units is more and more evident. . . . Cadres and soldiers are beginning to be tired of fighting in bad conditions, to liberate people who are not thankful for it. Morale is low, very low, and the responsibility for this must be laid at the feet of the high command.55

  For its part, the high command reacted against the continual carping of the 13e DBLE and of the old Free French 1e DMI, which “pretends that their action alone saved the French army from disaster and liberated Belfort and Mulhouse. . . . Not only is this order of the day in great part in opposition with the facts, but also it testifies to a complete lack of respect and fighting comradeship toward the other large army units, which will certainly be deeply resented by all the units.”

  Discontent finally boiled over in the 13e DBLE in early February 1945, after taking 1,026 casualties, or 42 percent of their effectives, in the January fighting in Alsace, when two officers traveled to the war ministry in Paris to accuse de Lattre de Tassigny and their enemies at Sidi-bel-Abbès for “looking to destroy it through its perpetual engagement in new actions, [and by] filtering recruits.”56 The complaint caused the division to be shifted to the Alps in March 1945.

  How justified was the accusation that the 1e DMI in general and the 13e DBLE in particular had been singled out for annihilation by ex-Vichyites bent upon revenge? Not at all, according to A.-P. Comor. All units serving in the 1st French Army under General de Lattre de Tassigny appear to have borne the burden of carnage with a commendable equality, including the RMLE, which lost 2,204 men between November 1944 and April 1945, or 70 percent of its average strength.57 There may be several explanations why the French took such heavy casualties. The first was that de Lattre relentlessly drove his troops forward, as if attempting to compensate for his manpower shortages and for all the other intangible but potent feelings of lost prestige that flowed from the 1940 defeat. For instance, de Gaulle's decision to hold on to Strasbourg against the wishes of the Allies in the face of the January 1945 German offensive may have made political sense, but it was a logic that French troops had to pay for with a minor Verdun. The shortage of replacements has already been mentioned. In practical terms, this meant that units had to be kept longer at the front, which increased wear and tear, and consequently casualties, dramatically.

  Lack of training was also a problem linked to the thirst for recruits. In practical terms, this meant that replacements were tossed into combat, often after the most perfunctory training. The complaints were that Legion units were wooden, lacked maneuverability, were unaccustomed to infiltration tactics, especially in heavily wooded terrain, and had little practice operating in conjunction with tanks.58 A report for the RMLE complained that the legionnaires in the attack collected around the tanks, where they drew dense German fire, “absorbed losses out of proportion with the numbers placed against them, and lost part of their offensive capacity.” German defensive positions were well organized, and their defensive techniques sought to disassociate the infantry from their accompanying tanks, often with success. An example was cited of an incident in the Bois de Sand in eastern France when one German tank held twelve French tanks and accompanying Legion infantry in check. Legion Captain Grand d'Esnon reserved his greatest indictment for French army training: “I saw legionnaires with more than ten years service and very adequately courageous throw their grenades in combat without pulling the pins out, because in training they had never utilized real ones,” he wrote. The same was true of smokescreens, never used although all the equipment had been provided, because they had never practiced the techniques. Seldom had legionnaires ever trained with tanks, although tank/infantry combat was their raison d'être. “8/10ths of losses, and I do not exaggerate, come from poor training,” d'Esnon believed.

  Why was training not made more realistic, d'Esnon asked? In part, this was due to “lack of character and a spirit of routine” that reigned in the French army. But in his view, the malaise ran deeper—the French were the victims of their own pride, especially where the Americans were concerned. They had been invaded by the Americans, upon whom they were dependent for arms, a tributary position many French officers accepted with difficulty. More, the price of American bounty had been paid in the form of the deep modification of a military system that was in many respects very different from that of the Armée d'Afrique, at least. It must have also been obvious to many French officers that the Americans especially held them in barely veiled, and unjustified, contempt, a contempt reciprocated in full measure by French africains, for whom an American army that relied more on firepower than personal courage, and that appeared obsessed with their creature comforts, reminded them all too much of the French conscripts whose alleged lack of fighting spirit had cost them the Fight for France in 1940. Because of all this, d'Esnon believed, the French army was quite prepared to toss out the baby with the bathwater: “It is extraordinarily humiliating to think,” he wrote,

  that certain particularly useful combat exercises which subsequently will prove themselves such by the need to approximate real conditions will not be carried out during the preparation for the campaign for France, because they were imposed by the Americans. The lack of military experience of [the Americans] was often generously compensated for by an exact and honest vision of the goals which made them construct an army and the results that they expected.

  Therefore, the French had paid for their pride with the blood of their troops, including that of legionnaires.59

  WHAT CAN BE the verdict on the Legion in World War II? The first thing that might be said is that much of its best military performance was turned in by units, and by legionnaires, who were not motivated by a traditional Legion outlook, especially the 12e étranger and the RMVEs of 1940. But even the 13e DBLE, whose commander was fond of explaining that “La Légion, c'est le détachement,”60 evolved in ways that increasingly distinguished it from the “old Legion.” While the decision to fight on in June 1940 was often taken from a mercenary desire to continue to fight, conflict with “loyal” Vichy troops quickly provoked a politicized, even a democratic, outlook within the 13th. Its officers for a period in 1941–42 were selected by a vote of the other officers, while recruitment remained “for the duration of the war plus three months,” unlike the “old Legion,” which continued to insist upon a five-year commitment.

  Therefore, while military th
eorists like S. L. A. Marshal are perhaps correct to point out that soldiers do not fight for patriotism, but out of loyalty to their comrades, the sentiment of serving a cause or a national purpose does provide a cement of regimental cohesion and fidelity. The sentiment that they were fighting on the wrong side also affected the “old Legion,” at least in Morocco, where some units put up only a halfhearted resistance to the Allied invasion of November 1942. Therefore, part of the Legion was very much engagée in World War II, despite its “traditions.” But Legion versatility has allowed it to assimilate the heroic actions of these units into regimental “tradition.”

  It was its continued insistence upon its mercenary character, however, that consigned the Legion to an eclipse in postwar French opinion. Major de Sairigné believed that “the French will never understand what they owe to these foreigners who fight for them with an extraordinary spirit, in unbelievable conditions.”61

  This was also the verdict of the RMLE, which complained that they had been pulled back too quickly from Germany, where they would have preferred “to profit a little longer from the legitimate satisfactions which fall to the victor,” and expedited to North Africa, in part because of the revolt in the Constantinois of May 1945. France had left a bad impression, for French men and women did not appreciate the Legion, and everywhere the legionnaires had encountered “Meanness, pettiness of spirit and of acts, lack of respect for a victorious army.” In the view of French officers, not the least those of the 13e DBLE, French honor had been salvaged by her colonial army, with legionnaires in the vanguard. But an ungrateful population seemed to be preparing for “a national army profoundly linked to the people.”62 Perhaps it was slightly embarrassing for the French people to be reminded that salvation and honor had been purchased in large measure by the blood of foreigners, North Africans and mercenaries. In the first place, the professional army had been too closely associated with the now-discredited Vichy regime. Second, the inundation of British and especially of American troops, not to mention the heroic resistance of the Soviet Union, had made the French participation in the victory over Hitler appear an interesting but rather minor contribution in the grand scheme of things.