French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  The second consequence of the debate over torture was that it was one more issue that contributed to the alienation of the paras from the government and from important sections of French public opinion. “After this brutal and difficult episode followed by the quasi-general disapproval of The Ladies of Public Opinion and the safeguard committee,’ the press stepped up its campaign of systematic denigration of the soldiers and their action in Algiers,” wrote the 1er REP's Antoine Ysquierdo.

  Each one could spit its venom upon the army with impunity with nothing being done to limit this campaign of defamation, cleverly supported and orchestrated to achieve a definite goal. This was the only resource which the rebellion and its sympathizers possessed to thwart as far as possible, that is morally, the consistent and intolerable pressure of the parachutists. There were no more assassination attempts, the happiest escapees from the network were in prison or fleeing toward the refuges in the maquis where they had not seen the last of us!16

  The War in the Bled

  This, however, was not apparent in the autumn of 1957. Forced out of Algiers, the FLN had to do battle with the French army in open country, where they proved no more of a match for the Legion and paras than they had been in the city. The first threat posed by the French to the FLN was the Morice Line. Completed in September 1957, the Morice Line threw up a barrier between the FLN sanctuary in Tunisia and Algeria. The barrier was a stretch of electrified barbed wire running some two hundred miles from the Mediterranean to the erg or sea of sand dunes that separated Algeria and Tunisia further south. A similar barrier separated Algeria and Morocco. Captain Charles Hora, who served with the 3e étranger on the Morice Line, categorized it as no more than a glorified cow hedge. But no cow could survive its five thousand volts of electricity, even if it managed to negotiate its concertina wire and deep minefields to either side of the fence. In fact, despite its rather fragile and primitive appearance, the Morice Line was a fairly sophisticated piece of military technology. A series of electrical stations were able to detect instantly any attempt to breach the line, which brought down a hail of preregistered artillery fire followed by the arrival of assault groups, at first along the road that paralleled the line, and eventually by helicopter. Nor were attempts to go around it to the south successful, for air reconnaissance would invariably pick out the groups of fellouze slogging over the dunes at first light and strafe and bomb them, leaving the méharist, or camel, units, or in some cases paras eager to practice their airborne skills, to clean up the rare survivors.

  The Morice Line posed a serious threat to the FLN, for it cut off their ability to resupply and reinforce their wilayas—regional commands—in Algeria from their growing army in Tunisia. On occasion it was possible for isolated groups to slip through a depression beneath the line caused by a wadi, to tunnel under the line, or even to slip concrete pipes beneath the wire. But the breach would be discovered by patrols on the following day. This caused the FLN to mount ever-larger assaults upon the line, massing their groups near the frontier while specialists cut a path through the wire with insulated wire cutters or even blew their way through with bangalore torpedoes. As many of their soldiers would rush through as could before the inevitable arrival of the intervention group, often Legion or paras. They tried diversionary tactics, such as feinting a crossing in one area to draw the intervention group, and then mounting their major breakthrough elsewhere.

  One of their most successful devices was a rubber sheath placed over the wire, which insulated it but did not alert the electrical stations to the crossing because the current continued to flow. Nevertheless, the crossing was detected by patrols at first light, and as the rebels were on foot and therefore could not travel far, French forces would begin to comb the hills looking for them. Once located, a bitter battle would ensue at point-blank range with submachine guns, grenades and even knives, against rebels well-hidden in the boulders and crevices of the arid hills and resolved to faire Camerone, which caused high casualties on both sides. It was in one of these confrontations between legionnaires and fellouze on the Morice Line in 1958 that Colonel Jeanpierre of the 1er REP was killed—many believe unnecessarily and in typical Legion fashion—when he ordered his helicopter to assault an FLN position in an attempt to neutralize its fire upon his advancing legionnaires.17 But despite heavy Legion losses, the result, Legion critics assert, of neglect of elementary caution and a traditional Legion delight in frontal assaults unsupported by artillery or air strikes, those of the FLN were infinitely worse, especially after they elected to mount a major assault on the Morice Line just east of Souk-Ahras on April 27–30, 1958, in a desperate attempt to get reinforcements to their wilayas in Algeria. In the resulting battle, one of the largest of the war, the FLN suffered crippling casualties.

  Nineteen fifty-eight proved a very successful year for the Legion in another respect—it was awarded a Certificate of Merit for Distinguished Service by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and a similar recognition from the RSPCA in London, after a legionnaire of the 13e DBLE rescued a starving donkey and returned it to his base where, renamed Bambi, it served the unit as a mascot. Interest was pricked among the “Anglo-Saxons” after London's Daily Mail carried a photo of the donkey being carried on the back of a legionnaire. Attempts to award the Certificate of Merit to the generous legionnaire foundered upon the anonymat. However, the Chief Secretary of the RSPCA was informed by the Legion that numerous mascots, “running from the bear to the lizard, passing through monkeys, sand foxes, storks and other birds, hedgehogs, without forgetting of course the multitude of dogs and cats follow each unit in its movements. In certain [units], the number of animals is greater than the strength in manpower.” Especially gratifying was the knowledge that Bambi “at the present time is enjoying an enviable destiny and that he is sharing the life of our legionnaires and even . . . their beer.”18 In light of these considerations, the award became a collective one.

  In any case, Bambi's fate was certainly more enviable than that of the mule discovered by Murray's section of the 2e REP in September 1961. “We had been out all day and the rain had not ceased for a second, and as the light was failing and we were coming down into a valley, there was the mule,” he wrote.

  It looked like the loneliest thing in the world. Benoit tried to kill it with his pistol and Hirschfeld joined in with his sub-machine-gun. I was seventy yards away and yelled at them in vain to shoot it behind the ear. Stupid ignorant bastards—they just kept firing at it, and a guffaw of laughter went up as each burst of bullets hammered into the poor brute's side. It staggered around in bewildered agony, groping for life and stubbornly refusing to die. Finally it fell and with a little twitch it breathed its last and lay still—food for the jackals that night. We continued on our way leaving behind a little incident that left a monument of something shabby and dirty in my mind.

  Nor were the beloved mascots invariably safe—Murray stared in disbelief as a drunken legionnaire in a cold rage strangled, bayoneted and crushed the skull of his pet cat with the heel of his boot after it had eaten his dinner.19

  The Morice Line proved to be one of the most successful strategies followed by the French during the war, for it forced the FLN to operate in conventional, large-scale units before they were ready,20 a tactic that cost them an estimated six thousand casualties and 4,300 weapons. Unfortunately, as in the Battle of Algiers, the soldiers tended to mar this impressive and hard-earned military victory with a political defeat when they mounted an unauthorized raid upon an FLN training center at Sakiet in Tunisia. The resulting international outcry and political prevarication in Paris and Algiers added further to their growing disenchantment with the way the war was being handled by their political leaders. Therefore, when pieds noirs in Algiers and other cities began a series of massive strikes in March and April 1958 that culminated in open revolt on May 13, fueled by Paris's plan to push through reforms to benefit the Moslem population and set the stage for some sort of negotiated set
tlement, the government discovered that its soldiers were no longer prepared to defend it.

  The actual occasion for the revolt was the execution by the FLN of three French POWs, an event that put the army in a filthy mood, and offered further proof to pied noir intransigents that Paris was intent on doing a deal with criminals. Ceremonies to honor the dead soldiers escalated into riots and then to revolution. Led by Massu, officers throughout Algeria “boarded the moving train” of pied noir resistance to Paris. The paras looked on indulgently as the offices of the governor-general were sacked by a pied noir mob. In France, there was little public enthusiasm outside the parties of the left to preserve a republic that was perceived to be geriatric and incompetent. Hurried negotiations in Paris and Algiers produced the only political solution that seemed acceptable to all sides— the recall of Charles de Gaulle out of retirement to preside over the dismantling of the IVth Republic and the inception of the Vth.

  With the border effectively sealed from FLN incursions and a new government in Paris allegedly committed to Algérie française, the army moved to place victory out of reach for the FLN. 1959 would be hailed as the “brilliant year” of the French army in Algeria, when the wilayas of the interior, already struggling for breath, would be reduced to the status of military quadriplegics. Ironically, perhaps, as this was primarily an army operation, its impresario would be an air force general, Maurice Challe, who replaced General Raoul Salan as commander-in-chief in Algeria. An airman who had achieved fame in the French resistance for having purloined the Luftwaffe order of battle just prior to the Normandy invasion of 1944, Challe combined an outspoken frankness with good sense and solidity, an impression fostered by his round, good-humored face and bourgeois habit of smoking a pipe. Challe was set the task of mounting an offensive that would reduce the wilayas to isolated bands of ragged fugitives.

  For de Gaulle, the political objectives of the Challe offensive were twofold: convince the FLN that military victory was impossible and that they must come to terms with Paris, and get the army out of the cities like Algiers where Massu and others had become too closely involved in the pied noir political games and occupy them with the sort of healthy outdoor activity for which they had been trained. De Gaulle's critics claim that the Challe offensive came a year too late to finish off the FLN when they had been knocked seriously off-balance by their defeat on the Morice Line, by the near self-destruction of several wilayas provoked by the bleuite, and by the political confusion into which the surprising emergence of de Gaulle had momentarily cast them. One might also add that the Challe offensive came too late to entice a section of the army, notably the 1er REP, away from their interest in politics.

  Despite the military successes against the FLN, Challe believed that the French strategy of spreading its static forces thinly across Algeria while hitting the rebels with its mobile troops of legionnaires and paras had proved a haphazard and wasteful one. The French could not be strong everywhere, and with up to eighty thousand troops concentrated on the Morice Line in 1957–58, this gave the katibas a great degree of freedom of movement to blow up electricity pylons, assassinate Moslems loyal to France, attack isolated farms, mine roads and ambush French patrols. The intervention forces contained no more than fifteen thousand men, were often employed on the frontiers, and were simply too few, too badly informed and too ponderous to operate effectively over the length and breadth of Algeria. Through the system of quadrillage, Algeria had been divided into seventy-five different sectors. As operations were seldom coordinated between neighboring sectors, when pressured in one area the katibas had merely to slip into another sector to find relative calm, leaving the French to comb, shell and strafe the now empty djebels, or hills. When the French departed, the FLN returned.

  Challe's new tactics included two components. The first was to create commandos de chasse, to be accompanied by scout units of Moslem harkis. The job of these units was to live in the djebel, to mark and pin down the FLN units and then call in the paras, legionnaires and other units of the new, concentrated general reserve, which formed his second innovation. These troops were ferried into an area by helicopter to set up a perimeter often as large as ten miles in diameter, which was gradually contracted to corner the rebel units. Sometimes a unit of paras might be helicoptered into the center of the perimeter to draw out the enemy. When this was done, air and artillery strikes would be called in, after which the “general reserve” forces would move in to finish the job. However, now, rather than move on after having inflicted heavy casualties, the units would continue to track and harass FLN units until they had been destroyed as effective forces.

  Challe first tried out his new techniques near the old Legion stronghold of Saïda. There the countryside was less broken than in the Aurès or the Kabylia, although it had been dominated for years by the katibas of wilaya 5. Using the 10th Para Division and legionnaires as his general reserve, in a matter of weeks he managed to kill over 1,600 FLN and capture 460 more. Although the FLN had not been destroyed in the Saïda-Mascara sector, he felt that the garrison forces could maintain control. “Opération Courroie,” which took place in April 1959 in the more difficult terrain of the Ouarsenis in the Algiers hinterland, enjoyed less success because the FLN forces there proved to be more elusive. Part of the French problem was that they were only beginning to work out their helicopter tactics. Although the first French helicopter raid dated from 1955, helicopters became available in quantity only from 1957, and only gradually were they released from the command echelon to be used by assault forces. The French soon learned to move their intervention forces as far forward as possible to the battle zone by motor transport, and then use helicopters to shuttle troops to the objectives and blocking positions. At first the helicopters landed directly upon the enemy position. But as soon as the rebels recovered from their surprise and began to shoot back, it was found more prudent to land four hundred to eight hundred yards from the objective. The absence of armaments as heavy as even a 50-calibre machine gun in the FLN camp, together with the rebels’ ignorance of such defensive techniques as lead firing, left the helicopters fairly safe so long as they maintained their distance. Nevertheless, the French did develop a more heavily armored helicopter, the Pirate, for use in close in fighting.21

  As spring turned to summer, the harkis units, which Challe had expanded from a handful to fully sixty thousand men, were beginning to come into their own. In July, Challe concentrated twenty-five thousand troops in the FLN stronghold of the Kabylia for “Opération Jumelles,” using all of his new techniques including a strong dose of bleuite to instruct local villagers in the dangers of aiding the FLN. While “Jumelles” did not destroy the FLN, it caused it to break up into small bands, and substantially loosened its hold on the population. For legionnaires, these operations, carried out at altitudes as high as six thousand feet, were exhausting, much like that undertaken by Simon Murray in November 1960. Gasping for breath in the oxygen-thin atmosphere, legs and back aching after days of clambering over jagged faces of mountains, baked by the heat in the day, yet too frozen to sleep at night, they gradually accumulated fatigue until the hours passed in a daze of careless exhaustion. The sergeant's nerves were perpetually on edge, which caused him to kick and swear at laggards. Finally, shots were heard as a company of Legion paras stumbled into an FLN position, losing twenty men in an instant.

  The “fells,” though still invisible, were located on a ridgeline to the front. The sky suddenly filled with helicopters that tried to land on the rebel position but swooped away when the first helicopter to touch down was riddled with fire. The air rippled with heat as the paras pounded the position with their mortars and machine guns, to no apparent effect. But fast-moving “Pirates” moved back and forth over the ridge, raking it with bullets and causing a net diminution in the rebel rate of fire. “Sacs à terre! Montez à l'assaut!” It was four o'clock. Two companies of paras moved in a line up the side of the ridge, the legionnaires bobbing and darting from bush to bould
er, pausing quickly to catch their breath and then moving forward again, their bodies bent against the slope, as fire from supporting companies made the fellagha position look like an erupting volcano. The first legionnaires in their green berets crested the ridge, squirting clips of bullets into trenches and dropping grenades into holes. Fifty-three “fells” lay dead in a matter of minutes. There were no prisoners.

  Hardly had the bodies been aligned and counted, however, than the paras charged off down the hill in pursuit of another group of “fells” signaled by a helicopter. As they struggled cautiously through the valley, each legionnaire feeling extremely alone as the men in the line to the left and right were usually invisible among the bush and stones, someone suddenly shouted “Attention!” Bullets flew overhead as the legionnaires, flat on their stomachs, poured rounds into the gray-green foliage to the front. “Grenade!” The firing stopped, heads went down with eyes covered, and in an instant there was a tremendous explosion. “En avant! En avant!” The charge overran three dead “fells” as riddled as Swiss cheese, equipped with two British Enfields, a Sten gun, binoculars, compasses, good boots, shaving kits, toothbrush and a blanket each.

  When they reached the bivouac they were to share with the 13e DBLE, which had acted as the blocking force, a Deuxième bureau officer ordered Murray and another legionnaire to return to the cadavers and retrieve their heads for identification as possible harki deserters. It was grisly work severing the heads in the fading light with a penknife. They placed two dripping heads in their sacks and headed back to camp, Murray covering his equipment and rations with blood in the process. “The third head we left, because it was no longer recognizable behind the mask of bullet holes.” The intelligence officer took photographs of the heads, and then told Murray to dispose of them, which he did by grabbing them by the blood-soaked hair and tossing them into the bushes. Later that evening, some of the Spaniards in one section had pooled their rations to make a soup.