French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  Nevertheless, the French, including the Legion, were becoming progressively weaker as the Viet Minh gained in strength. One must make clear at the outset that the Foreign Legion furnished troops that were among the best in the French camp. The Legion's faith in their military worth was never seriously shaken, even at Dien Bien Phu: “The Legion regiments know that in Indochina they are the last purely European troops,” the commander of the 3e étranger wrote in the aftermath of the Cao Bang defeat. “They consider themselves a little like the old guard, they willingly accept that the high command demands the utmost of them ...”2

  Yet there were certain unmistakable signs of decline that began to affect even the Legion. The French government made the political decision to exempt French conscripts from Indochina, not surprising given the tradition of reserving colonial wars for specialized corps of professional volunteers. Unfortunately, in this age when formal imperial ties were being called into question, a decline in enthusiasm and morale was apparent in some sections of the colonial army, notably the Senegalese and North African troops, who had ceased to fight with the vigor they had displayed in World War II. And with the exception of a few units, the French never managed to instill the same fire into their Vietnamese troops as the Viet Minh were able to do. Therefore, the burden of combat increasingly fell upon the Legion and the French colonial infantry. At the height of the war in 1954, the French Expeditionary Corps numbered 235,721 officers and men, of whom 18,710, or 7.9 percent, were legionnaires. To this number can be added the 261,729 men from the “Associated States” of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, forces of dubious value. Therefore, while it must be kept in mind that the Legion was the cutting edge of the French expeditionary force in the Far East, it was beset by many of the same problems that reduced the effectiveness of the French forces generally.

  The first perception of the Legion in the Indochinese War put forward by such misleading and inaccurate, but quite widely read, books as George Robert Elford's The Devil's Brigade or John Ehle's The Survivor was that it was composed of ex-Wehrmacht, and especially SS, men whose wartime formation on the Eastern Front transmitted a personality of brutal efficiency into the Legion. Certainly Germans were in the majority in the Legion—up to 60 percent of the Legion was German during the Indochinese War. How far the Legion became a refuge for war criminals or even ex-Nazi soldiers is unclear, however. Attempts by the Legion to recruit among German POWs appear to have met some success in 1945.3 But the 3e étranger noted in 1946 that most of its recruits were very young, barely twenty years old, far less drunken and often willing to trade their daily half-liter wine ration to an ancien for food,4 no great sacrifice in Indochina after the real thing was replaced with powdered “vinogel,” which even veterans whose palates had turned to wood after years of drinking Algerian plonk hesitated to touch. But it does appear to undermine the general image of the Legion flinging its doors open to seasoned veterans of the Wehrmacht and SS.

  In fact, French policy was to exclude ex-SS soldiers, although as in many recruitment matters this may have been ignored on more than one occasion. “The physical examinations were very thorough,” wrote Janos Kemencei, a Hungarian who enlisted at seventeen out of a displaced persons camp in 1946.

  . . . They made us raise our left arm to reveal on the armpit the tattoo which denounced the veterans of the Waffen SS, and the blood group to which they belonged. Several among us had curious little superficial wounds precisely under this left armpit. Certain of these volunteers were rejected, others accepted. I never knew why. As for me, having no tattoos, and my scar on the neck of apparent unimportance, I passed these first tests.

  In Kemencei's view, the motivation for most of the enlistees was not to find a political refuge in the Legion, but rather escape “this incredibly inhumane life of the post-war period.”5

  The shift in the military balance in 1950 came at a very bad time for the Legion. Many of its experienced soldiers began to depart once their enlistments began to run out from late 1949 on, at the very moment when Giap's forces were beginning to acquire real bite. Their replacements, while often Germans, were also young men without any previous military experience, but who lacked the guiding hand of the veterans of World War II. The Englishman Henry Ainley, who enlisted in 1950 to fight communism, discovered that “my 32 years ... [were] ten years above average.”6 In 1951, the 5e étranger noted that the replacements sent from Bel-Abbès were young, while the following year an inspection of Legion units noted that recruits were “Generally young with an average training.” Forty-three percent of the Germans recruited in 1953 had yet to attain their majority, a cradle-snatching policy that was a constant irritant between Paris and Bonn in the early 1950s, as it had been between Paris and Berlin thirty years earlier. But as the Legion depended upon Germans for 60 percent of their recruitment in that year,7 they could hardly honor West German requests that these minors be released without creating serious vacancies in the ranks. But what they gained in quantity, they might have lost in quality. The 5e étranger was fairly scathing about its 1953 intake, which it described as “Young and poorly developed, without previous service, badly trained, badly prepared technically and physically, the recent enlistees are seldom interesting, their morality is doubtful, their honesty suspect and their loyalty does not appear assured.”8 Adrian Liddell Hart, who enlisted in 1951, discovered many of his fellow recruits to be a trifle tender for the unit's hard-boiled image: “A great many legionnaires are surprisingly well-behaved and conscientious—perhaps too well-behaved for the taste of some traditionalists,” he wrote. “ ‘Demoiselles in képis blancs,’ the colonel commandant used to remark.”9

  The Legion appears to have found it increasingly difficult to transform these men into efficient fighters after 1950. In 1946, Janos Kemencei's basic training course at Saïda lasted a grand total of thirty-five days.10 Raised to nine weeks, the training course was reduced to as little as six weeks by 1951, when Giap's assaults on the Tonkin delta caused a great demand for replacements.

  The training instruction itself was a mélange like everything else in the Legion, corresponding to the diverse and imperative needs of the Indo-China War, to the variety and inadequacy of our equipment, and above all, to our own differences [wrote Liddell Hart]. On most days we marched in open order to the fringes of a small wooded valley half a mile from the barracks. We were supposed to look as though we were looking out for Viet-Minh.

  After a half-hour or so of gymnastics whose exercises were carried out to the accompaniment of cries of “Vive le sport!,” the men separated into groups that rotated through stations where they learned to break down and reassemble a machine gun, toss grenades, or write French words and their German equivalent in notebooks smudged with dirt and sweat. “AH training instructions were translated into German—and when officers were not present, they were often given straight in German,” Liddell Hart reported.11 Lieutenant Basset, training with the 2e étranger in Saïda in 1951, found it far less complicated to give his instructions in German.12 The blowing of whistles signaled a change of station or a break, during which the recruits gathered around one or two Arabs who sold sweets, soda, sandwiches and even beer out of sacks that straddled the backs of moth-eaten donkeys. Quite a bit of time was also spent on the firing range. Second Lieutenant Pierre Sergent remembered that training centers were equipped with a “Poste E(xtrême)-O(rient),” replicas of Indochinese outposts where legionnaires practiced laying mines, opening roads and generally becoming familiar with the routines of camp life.13

  Many new legionnaires went straight from basic training to Indochina, rather than serve in a North African garrison for a few months to perfect their instruction, probably because the Legion could not afford the luxury of holding back men desperately needed at the front. As early as 1949, commanders in Indochina were complaining that legionnaires lacked adequate training, “tactical training in particular,” and that the demands of service and of manning many small outposts made it very difficult to organize c
lasses to equip those selected for promotion to corporal and sergeant with “the knowledge indispensable for future NCOs.”14 The 3e étranger reported in 1950 that the new replacements, “hardly trained,” were absolutely at sea in a variety of armament “which they are not used to.”15 In early 1952, Lieutenant Colonel Raberin, commander of the 5e étranger, railed against the recruits provided by Bel-Abbès, who “don't know anything.” The majority had never shot a mortar or thrown a live grenade. What he needed was men trained in small-unit operations, able to cope in situations where they were “often isolated from their leaders and their comrades [he] needs to know what he is doing—act by reflex—and to demonstrate initiative.”16

  The REC seemed on the verge of despair in the same year when it noted of its recruits that “their training is weak, very weak ... [they] only seem to have learned how to shout out their matriculation number.”17 Legion deficiencies reflected those in the French army generally—lack of physical fitness, inadequate indoctrination and inability to use weapons effectively in combat. French infantry, including legionnaires, were not given enough live-fire exercises or training in close combat to develop self-confidence, and virtually no training in night fighting. This resulted in a progressive deterioration in the quality of French forces, while the Viet Minh became progressively better trained and armed, maneuvered more easily, and were lighter and more agile. In other words, Viet Minh regular formations were increasingly able to outfight the French in small-unit operations after 1950, which meant high losses, for half-trained French infantry were tossed into battle virtually right off the boat, and essentially acquired their training on the job. Those who survived the first three months had the best chance of coming out alive.

  A sign of the deterioration of the fighting ability of the French infantry was the enormous increase in their dependency upon the artillery— expenditure of artillery shells doubled between 1952 and 1954. As the maneuverability of French forces declined, they increasingly relied on artillery or air support to handle situations that could have just as easily responded to small-unit tactics. Certainly, one reason why the French employed their artillery more from 1952 was because, thanks to the Americans, they actually had more artillery to fire. However, an increased dependency upon artillery did not translate into greater destructive capacity for the French. Requests were made for centers in Indochina to perfect training received in North Africa and to create specialized courses. But while commanders constantly complained of poor training, they were equally adamant that they could not fight and train at the same time. Only in the last year of the war were four such centers created, by which time even the faintest hope of victory had slipped completely from the French grasp.

  Poor training might have been less important had the Legion been able to count upon solid leadership. However, as with its soldiers, the quality of the cadres was declining as the war progressed, especially after 1950 when the departure of many Germans meant, more seriously, the departure of experienced German NCOs. In some respects, the Legion was better placed to provide quality NCOs than other corps, both because they selected the best recruits for further training as élèves caporaux and then as élèves sous-officiers in North Africa, and because they maintained a regimental structure that made it easier to organize courses than could other units whose highest echelon was a battalion. But this potential was not always realized. Henry Ainley and three other legionnaires “were delighted to have a crack at getting our corporal's stripes and felt very keen and confident about our futures,” when, at the end of basic training, they were selected for the corporals’ training squad. But after a four-month course that made basic training look like child's play, he balked at the offer of the sergeants’ training squad and requested a posting to Indochina.18 Often a commander refused to assign his best man to special NCO training sections because they could not be spared from the day-to-day duties of the unit.

  This problem was not a uniform one across the entire Legion, but varied from unit to unit, depending essentially upon the place the unit held in the unofficial Legion hierarchy. The best NCOs tended to be creamed off for the BEPs, the groupes mobiles, and also to a certain extent for the REC. The infantry units were least well served. In 1949, the 2e étranger complained of the “glaring shortcomings of overall quality” in its NCOs. There were “still too many drinkers” among the veteran NCOs, while the young ones lacked experience “and sufficient authority to command with desirable firmness.”19 “The quality of the cadres of the Legion is no longer what it used to be, qualitatively or quantitatively,” wrote Colonel Vallider, commander of the zône sud du plateau in central Vietnam, on March 15,1951. “NCOs hastily promoted, without real training, officers who never served in the Legion and who have not volunteered to serve there. Worthwhile cadres are more and more rare, and at the same time the quality of the troops diminishes because of the needs of the Legion and the intensive recruitment of these last years which do not allow a severe selection.”20 Near the end of the campaign in 1953, the 5e étranger lamented, “Radical measures must absolutely be taken to reconstitute the quality NCO cadres which the Legion possessed until 1946.”21

  One of those measures might have been to utilize more efficiently the talent that did exist in Legion ranks in the form of ex-NCOs and even officers from foreign armies. The 5e étranger complained in 1953 that they were prevented from doing this by regulations that required eight years’ service before promotion to sergent-chef.22 The story was the same in 1954: The NCOs had “more bravery and good will than real competence,” the third battalion of the 5e étranger noted in June. “50 percent of the junior NCOs and soldiers have everything to learn: French first of all, next the techniques of the profession, and last, how to give orders without making speeches.”23

  The problem in Indochina was that there were simply not enough NCOs to go around. This was caused in part by the fact that there was also a serious deficit in the number of officers, so that NCOs often had to fill their jobs too. Commanders constantly cited their shortage of officers and their general level of fatigue, especially as the war dragged on and those who survived returned for their second and even third tours of duty. For instance, the average age of second lieutenants at the beginning of their tour of duty in early 1954 was thirty-one years old, while it was thirty-five for lieutenants, thirty-eight for captains and forty-three for battalion commanders. While there is no evidence that the Legion escaped the age problem, they do appear to have suffered less from an officer shortage than some other infantry units—for instance, on August 17, 1953, the army noted that the officer deficit in the Legion was only 12.8 percent, while it ran almost 19 percent in North African, Senegalese and Vietnamese units, which was a factor in the lower morale and sometimes poor combat performance of those units.24 The Legion did not always appreciate this relative advantage, for it continued to complain that it was sent officers who had no Legion background, who did not understand how to lead legionnaires because they did not appreciate their special mentality. Too many were sent against their will, were not physically up to the job, and arrived “with a melancholic air, sad not to have secured their last reprieve.”25 The 5e étranger found that its draft of officers in July 1951 were all very young and could not be given weighty responsibilities.26

  This placed immense pressure upon Legion NCOs, especially in those areas where small posts gobbled them up. An inspection carried out in the last months of 1952 noted that it was not uncommon to find a Legion company with only one officer whose men were scattered over the countryside in small posts under the command of very young sergeants who had been promoted without any additional training, and who simply could not provide the quality leadership normally furnished by a junior officer.27 At the beginning of 1951, to note but one of many examples that fill the Legion war reports, the 5e étranger wrote that they were short seventeen adjudants-chefs , thirty-five adjudants, and seventy-one sergents-chefs. The result was that the units were run by very young lieutenants who “lack experie
nce and administrative training when they command the companies,” and young sergeants.28 “Where are they, the adjudants-chefs and adjudants of the Legion?” the commander of the second battalion of the 5e étranger asked on June 2, 1953.29

  How did these training and manning problems affect Legion performance in the final four years of the war? Following the collapse of Cao Bang, Giap concluded that the French were on the ropes and that the time for the final “counteroffensive” in the north had arrived. It proved a desperate miscalculation, for in Maoist terms he had skipped a stage. On the R.C. 4, he had been able to take advantage of French command mistakes to mount what was in effect a mammoth ambush. His army had begun to achieve an equilibrium of force with the French, at least in Tonkin. They had yet to achieve superiority, especially when he placed them within range of French artillery, air attacks and counteroffenses expertly orchestrated by General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, certainly the best commander the French side produced in the war, who was dispatched in the wake of Cao Bang to salvage the situation. But even “Roi Jean” —King John, as his troops called him more in awe than affection—although he was able to inflict serious losses upon the troops that Giap threw at him in the Tonkin delta for much of 1951, was not strong enough to attack the Viet Minh in their highland bastions, although he attempted it by throwing a force at Hoa Binh in the mountains to the west of the Tonkin delta in late 1951 on the theory that this would cut Viet Minh north—south communications. In short, Giap, the ex-professor of history at the Lycée Thang-Hong in Hanoi, had moved from apprentice to journeyman in his new trade. He was not yet a master of the military craft.