French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  They were the lucky ones. What the soldiers who had witnessed the final agony of Indochina had predicted actually came to pass. As the FLN government moved in from Tunis to take over from the departing French and their katibas flocked down from the djebels, the barely veiled splits within the FLN burst into the open. Throughout the summer of 1962, factions of the victorious FLN engaged in a civil war that raised the war's death toll substantially. However, the most intense retribution was reserved for the harkis and other Moslems who had fought with the French. About fifteen thousand of the quarter-million who had served in French ranks escaped to France. Between 30,000 and as many as 150,000 of the rest—as well as their families—were massacred in the most atrocious and brutal fashion by the FLN. In France, retribution was more measured. Captured, Salan and Jouhaud were retried. Jouhaud was again condemned to death but escaped the firing squad after Salan, immaculate in his uniform, drew only a life sentence from a jury swayed by the purity of his motives and his prior service to the state, much to de Gaulle's anger. Only Degueldre of the leaders, dressed in his Legion para uniform and singing the “Marseillaise,” paid for the crimes of the OAS, although it took the sergeant of the firing squad fully five coups de grâce to finish him off.

  France could now turn a new page. So could the Legion. “The oldest veterans of the Legion who have for 40 years traversed with it many depressing periods, are still able to see beyond the present situation and believe that the Legion will find its place by having the necessary resilience to cross over a difficult period,” wrote Colonel Vaillant of the 1er étranger in November 1961.38 It had been extremely difficult for the Legion to remain true to its professional character, to maintain its mercenary “detachment” in the face of the successive crises of defeat and division that had stalked France, and the Légion, since 1940. That some Legion units succumbed to the temptation of rebellion was due in part to the narcissism of the corps, its sense of a separate, elite status fostered by a generation of myth making, and the betrayal of the strictly professional outlook of the Legion by some of its officers, too long exiles from French political realities. At least some of its leaders now realized that to survive, the Legion must rebuild its professional character. In December 1962, the inspector general of the Legion informed the légionnaires of the 2e REP that the Legion was to diversify its combat skills and clean up its public image to become a crack multipurpose force. “The message has been well received,” Murray recorded. “Morale has in one stroke been given a gigantic shot in the arm. We're back in business. Somebody thinks we can do more than just build bloody roads all day. Suddenly the mountain of the next two years diminishes, there is a feeling of moving forward again.”39 There would be, after all, life after Algeria.

  Chapter 30

  THE BALANCE SHEET

  THE HISTORY OF the Legion is a remarkable story, both of survival and success. While the Legion's most impressive victories in the twentieth century have been scored on the battlefields of public relations, the cinema and popular fiction, its achievements are neither contrived nor illusory. There can be few, if any, units that have produced such a sustained record of combat performance, in which its members have every right to feel a legitimate pride.

  That reputation was upheld on May 19, 1978, when 650 paras of the 2e REP dropped over the copper-mining town of Kolwezi in Zaire's Shaba province. A week earlier, Cuban-supported soldiers of the Congolese National Liberation Front (FLNC) had invaded Kolwezi, ejected the Zairian garrison and seized a large number of hostages from among the population of European technicians and their families. President Joseph Mobutu appealed for foreign aid, a call answered by France, Belgium and the United States, which provided 18 C-141 Starlifters to support the operation. At the last minute, however, the Belgians hesitated to commit their paratroops, leaving the Legion to parachute alone into the rebel-held town against odds estimated at ten to one.

  The rebel soldiers appear to have been taken completely by surprise, largely because they were busy running amok in the town. While some made a tough stand at the Kolwezi police station, most fled in panic back toward Angola in civilian cars looted from the town. But the battle, while one-sided, gave little cause for celebration—the FLNC troops left behind the bodies of 190 massacred whites and 200 black civilians, some of them horribly mutilated. Another 40 white hostages taken by the retreating soldiers were later found murdered. For their part, the paras killed an estimated 250 rebel soldiers at a cost of five légionnaires dead and 25 wounded.

  This goes a long way toward answering one of the questions posed by this book—has the Legion performed efficiently as a military organization? The answer must be yes, although not an unequivocal yes. Its exemplary combat record was based upon its generally superior cadres and upon the practice of selecting out its best troops, those men with a genuinely military vocation, for regiments or bataillons de marche. While this practice was often criticized in forces engaged in major conflicts because it shattered the personal relationships built up in the sections upon which loyalty and combat efficiency depend and deprived units of their best combatants, it seems to have worked well for the Legion for at least two reasons. The first is that most of the campaigns of imperial conquest required only periodic bursts of energy from which the entire Legion did not suffer because some of its best légionnaires had been selected out to fight.

  Second, while the Legion tends to blame any blemish on its record upon poor or substandard recruitment, and attribute its successes to its unique esprit de corps, this explanation does contain an element of truth. The Légion, like any army or military subgroup, counted a number of men whom it was just as well to leave behind in rear areas because they would have performed poorly. This was obvious to Simon Murray even when he reported to the elite 2C REP in Algeria in 1960: “The quartier is occupied by the base company, which is apparently full of the most worthless members of the regiment,” he wrote. “The appearance of those present here would seem to confirm this.”1 This was in part because it had only limited control over its recruitment and was obliged to take men whom French police or politicians desired to expedite to North Africa, or because, once it had enlisted a man who proved unsuitable, during a large portion of the Legion's history it was virtually impossible to get rid of him. The requirement to keep the Legion up to strength to occupy numerous small and scattered garrisons caused it to enlist a number of men, especially French denied enlistment in regular units, who made poor soldiers. Nor were enough experienced and motivated cadres capable of commanding légionnaires always available.

  This helps to explain in part the contradictory image of the Légion, on the one hand praised as among the steadiest soldiers in the pre-1914 campaigns of imperial conquest such as Tonkin in 1885, Dahomey, Madagascar or Morocco, or even in World War I when only relatively limited numbers of its troops were employed outside of North Africa after 1915. And on the other hand, it was decried as an assemblage of jail bait. The point is that it was both. Nor did it always prove possible to leave the poorest soldiers behind, for the Legion's relatively high dropout rates on the march, especially compared to North African units, were often put down to “bad characters” who lacked motivation or who preferred to hobble into the hospital to avoid a punishment. The problem for the Légion, as for any mercenary force, has been that the numbers of men with a truly military vocation have been limited. The Legion's ability to transform into elite soldiers many of its other recruits, especially young ones who enlist with naively romantic ideas of soldiering or who join simply to earn the years necessary for a pension, has been limited. For this reason, combat performance diminished when the Legion was forced to fling open the doors of the recruitment bureaus and actually use a large percentage of its légionnaires, as in Mexico or in Indochina after World War II. And even there the image of success could be maintained by selecting out mounted, mobile and para formations, or by placing légionnaires in situations where they could faire Camerone. Nevertheless, these periods also reveal weakn
esses in training, a defect the Legion shared with the French army generally, but that was intensified by the reluctance of the best officers and NCOs to be assigned to troop training. Indeed, complaints that the Legion spends more time teaching its members to sing than to develop individual combat skills are still heard in the modern Legion.2

  A final element of Legion success has been its high degree of unit loyalty. That a polyglot, multinational force whose members have almost nothing in common, including a language or a sense of humor, would be able to form a coherent unit appears at first sight to pose an enigma. However, in this as in other areas, the Legion has proved able to transform its apparent liabilities into assets. Morale and motivation were maintained by competition among nationalities, with the Germans usually setting the pace in the race not to be outdone in skills or courage by légionnaires from other countries. Regimental loyalty was also nurtured by “sacred” rituals that revolved around the regimental standard and the celebration of Camerone. The fame of the Légion, its romantic, even cutthroat reputation, has meant that many légionnaires, especially those who were disenchanted with life or who in some other way failed to find satisfaction outside the Légion, draw a large amount of their psychological capital from their membership in the corps.

  The Legion was usually able to maintain its morale with great success. But morale in a mercenary force is often very fragile, vulnerable to, among other things, the erratic and unstable nature of its recruitment. The evolution of the political situation in Europe on occasion brought an influx of a large number of men from one country, as with the Germans after World War I or the Spaniards in 1939. Such conditions might eliminate the delicate national balance that stimulated emulation. It could give rise to a feeling (real or supposed) among a large mass of men cocooned in their own language and who had often developed parallel hierarchies of their own beneath German former officers and NCOs of being exploited by the French military system. Indeed, one of the characteristics of légionnaires historically is that they have often been anti-French—contemptuous of France's army and her political system. “Take the French for what they are, a bunch of Frogs,” American légionnaire William Brooks was told in 1973 by a fellow légionnaire, demonstrating that this attitude continued into the post-Algerian Legion. “Hang out with the Germans or the Francos [Spanish fascists]. They won't let you down. The French Foreign Legion is only as good as its worst German Legionnaire.”3 This situation might seriously compromise discipline, especially if Legion officers and NCOs reacted to it with a lack of understanding and diplomacy, which was sometimes the case.

  It was just such a breakdown of morale in the Légion, encouraged in large part by the influx of Germans after World War I, that caused Rollet to place the revival and even creation of regimental ritual and “tradition” on the front burner of his concerns. This did not prove a sure-fire guarantee of success, however. “Tradition” and regimental loyalty were not like a vaccination that, once administered, warded off all infection for the lifetime of enlistment. Rather, they required a slow process of indoctrination that presupposed a psychological need on the part of the apprentice légionnaire, a void in his life that could be filled by inculcating a strong sense of regimental loyalty. In the view of the Légion, this transformation was best realized in the arid open spaces of North Africa and in the shadow of the maison mère at Sidi-bel-Abbès. When the Legion was not at home, not chez eux, as during the Mexican campaign when most of its recruits were trained at Aix-en-Provence, or during both world wars, then the vaccination was liable to be less successful.

  While the development of tradition was an important element in fostering unit cohesion and especially in projecting a positive image of the Legion as an elite fighting force before the general public, it was also a double-edged sword. Men attracted by the romantic image of the Légion, especially the young and the middle-class, could be destined for disappointment when confronted by the hard realities of Legion service. Tradition, especially as defined by Rollet and others in the interwar years, also froze out several categories of men. This was done quite intentionally. The outlaw image of the Légion, its racism, anti-Semitism and anti-intellectualism, its aggressive, hard-drinking and brothel-crawling culture were attractive to many and formed a common basis for sympathy among men of different nationalities. Therefore, the heterogeneity of the Legion was more apparent than real, for légionnaires shared a common background and attitudes, even certain psychological traits. Again, it must be stressed that the panoply of Legion attitudes and prejudices was not exceptional, but was fairly common in French right-wing and military circles generally, as well as reflecting North African and many working-class social realities. But they did contribute to make assignment to the Legion purgatory for some who found its atmosphere and traditions unsympathetic or even disreputable.

  This was especially true of those foreigners sent there in the two world wars. Because many were middle-class, Jewish, politicized or men who out of patriotic devotion to France wanted integration into regular French regiments, not confinement to a military ghetto whose supervisors were outspokenly unsympathetic to their sensibilities, their religion or their opinions, the Legion assimilated them badly. These may be considered small imperfections in a long Legion record of military success. Indeed, one of the reasons for the Legion's survival and remarkable cohesion was that it obstinately refused to allow politics and ideology, even sentiment, to compromise its personality as an elite, professional force. Nevertheless, it was unfortunate that the Legion proved to be so inflexible on these occasions, both because France, twice invaded, especially required the goodwill and the manpower that these volunteers represented, and because these men fought as bravely for France and for their ideals as did any “real” légionnaires, in 1915 and 1940 winning battle honors that contributed to the Legion's martial reputation.

  Indeed, the Legion's preferences in recruitment were put succinctly by Captain Fiore of the 8e compagnie mixte montée of the 3e étranger in 1943, when a shortfall in enlistment caused him to suggest signing up Axis POWs in Tunisia: “Avoid all intellectuals, argumentative people, persuasive speakers able to influence opinion,” he wrote on June 28.

  Give preference to farm workers, day laborers and all other manual trades, men with little education, hardly able to read and write, even better if they are illiterate, in general those who appear to have no political opinions, simple men.4

  In these conditions, no wonder educated, patriotic, politicized recruits found the Legion atmosphere uncongenial.

  Beneath the decorations, the lists of battles won, the history of imperial conquests, the Legion did demonstrate weaknesses in the eyes of some of its commanders. The first complaint against it was that, though solid and courageous, the Legion was sluggish and lacked maneuverability. This stemmed from the polyglot character of the Légion, which deprived it of the ability to respond rapidly to commands, and a general inertia and lack of initiative beyond a literal obedience to orders, which required exceptional officers to animate it in action. This translated into a preference for last stands and frontal assaults, which, although costly, were acceptable because the Legion was made up of foreigners who did not vote. While one may assume that the officers who commanded the Legion knew what they were about, it is also apparent that légionnaires did prove capable of performing roles beyond which some of its leaders thought it capable. Even some of the Legion's most avid supporters like Lyautey and Rollet believed it futile and even dangerous to use the Legion as anything but heavy infantry. Once this view became accepted as gospel, it discouraged, but did not prevent, more imaginative use of légionnaires as cavalrymen, artillerymen, or paratroops, even though they performed more than adequately in all of those roles. This prejudice against more diversified specialties sprang in part from a tendency to assign qualities to troops in the colonial army and the Armée d'Afrique according to the role each was expected to play. There was also a fear that a multiplicity of Legion specialties would compromise its abil
ity to carry out its basic infantry role.

  A final objection that prevented experimentation with Legion formations was concerns over their ultimate loyalty. Few aspects of Legion life have been more notorious, and perhaps more open to misinterpretation, than desertion. Desertion was endemic in the Légion, as it had been in the mercenary armies of eighteenth-century Europe. Outside of the Légion, and especially outside of France, desertion has been interpreted as an indictment of the brutal and barbarous life of the Légion, an impression that Legion deserters themselves have been in no hurry to correct. Some could convince themselves that they had been treated unjustly, because the Legion had failed to live up to their expectations or because leadership there was often very negative. Once disillusion set in, it became easy to interpret an event that would before have been taken in stride as sufficient reason for desertion.

  In reality, however, desertion from the Legion has had a far more complicated set of motivations. The Legion defense that desertion had nothing to do with brutality or injustice but stems from the psychological instability and picaresque outlook of many légionnaires has much to recommend it. Desertion is characteristic of mercenary forces, whose troops often lack an overriding sense of loyalty to the unit. Recruitment patterns could also influence attitudes and provoke desertion, especially in an atmosphere of national and political tensions, which inevitably rose to the surface when a large percentage of légionnaires were of one nationality or were politically motivated. Simple homesickness or depression accounted for a number of desertions. But the most important point is that desertion became institutionalized as part of Legion life. Many légionnaires saw desertion as a challenge, a gesture, a personal statement that was part of the process of becoming a légionnaire. It was usually impulsive. The point was not that the desertion should succeed, but that it should be dramatic. One can suppose that many deserters were actually perplexed by the unexpected success of their enterprise, which is why some of them took the first opportunity to reenlist under another name. Despite all this, desertion was seldom a problem that seriously eroded combat performance. In most cases, the Legion campaigned in areas too remote or the enemy was simply too ferocious to make departure from the unit a viable option. Nor was desertion, especially in small doses, necessarily a bad thing, as it allowed the Legion to shed discontented or marginal elements. Unfortunately for the Légion, the soldiers it most needed to get rid of—poor French recruits— proved to be the most loyal.