A Savage War of Peace

by Alistair Horne

  As far as Algeria was concerned, the impact of Suez was immense. On the one hand, F.L.N. morale soared; now they could reckon on getting real assistance from a victorious Nasser, and in fact a large consignment of British and French arms abandoned after the cease-fire would soon be flowing in to them. On the other hand, the French contingent returning to Algeria felt mortally discouraged. One of Lartéguy’s para officers explains in The Centurions, “It’s specially bad for our men. They thought they had escaped from prison. Now they’re going to be taken back to their cells under police escort.” Indeed, in the French news films of the time the contrast between the tough, confident professionals setting off for Suez and the broken men shambling from their ships at Algiers spoke volumes. Although there was a band waiting to greet them in the cold rain, Pierre Leulliette recalls feeling on his return that “the shame, ridicule and ignominy of a winner who has to run away like a pathetic loser was heaped on our backs….” When the instant resentment against the British had passed, it was replaced by something far more bitter against their own civil leaders: “Even in Indo-China, said the veterans, where you were betrayed daily by everyone, they wouldn’t have dared do anything like that,” recorded Leulliette. Many of the seeds of revolt that were to sprout eighteen months later were sown among the paras at Suez. If acquiescing to Bulganin’s threat had meant a fundamental change in the rules in the international game from 1956 onwards, it also guaranteed independence for Algeria — eventually. But, like other international realities, this was invisible to the French military in Algeria, for whom the Suez humiliation only reinforced their determination to win in Algeria.

  For Guy Mollet the Suez debacle meant the torpedoing of his hopes of a military victory in Algeria, while the Ben Bella episode, at least temporarily, closed all doors to a negotiated peace. His whole policy lay in ruins; yet he was allowed to linger on in power, a lame duck, if for no other reason than that no other French politician was willing to relieve him of his burdens at this invidious time. So, after a year in which almost everything had turned out as a net gain for the F.L.N., the war ground on — with Simone de Beauvoir complaining: “My serenity was destroyed. The government was going to persist with this war. Algeria would win its independence; but not for a long time.”

  [1] Literally “elected office-holders”.

  [2] For an international parallel one is reminded of those good American Democrats, Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy, rushing into the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam respectively, where a Republican President might have feared to tread.

  [3] Over seventeen years later he admitted: “I am now anti-Israel, because the Right is triumphant.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Why We Must Win”:

  1956–1958

  We want to halt the decadence of the West and the march of Communism. That is our duty, the real duty of the army. That is why we must win the war in Algeria. Indo-China taught us to see the truth.

  Colonel Antoine Argoud, November 1960

  France’s “new revolutionary army”

  OBSERVING the disembarkation in Cyprus of the French contingent bound for Suez, a British correspondent and a former paratrooper noted a certain embarrassment on the part of the British reception committee. The British airborne “brass”, tidily arrayed on the tarmac according to rank and staff function, had difficulty identifying their opposite numbers among Massu’s men in their “leopard” battle kit still dusty from operations in the bled. In fact, the French turned out to have no “staff” as such and paid little deference to rank and, compared with their British counterparts, seemed more closely to resemble the revolutionary forces they had been combating. Those who saw them about their business at Suez, however, were at once impressed by their hard-hitting mobility and sheer ruthless professionalism. As Le Monde was to remark: “Few armies in the world possess a generation of officers who have fought so much.”

  In purely military terms at any rate, the French army had come a long way since its first fumbling operations in 1954. At that time it had begun by repeating the early errors of the Indo-China war, of hitting back with tanks and heavy equipment, 1945-style, against will-o’-the-wisp guerrillas. Now the increase in manpower ordained by Mollet, a steady flow of American helicopters to land them swiftly where they could hurt the rebels most, new units, new leaders, new tactics, and a whole new structure and morale within the army itself, had radically improved its striking power. The new commanders studied local circumstances more closely and tailored their security actions to suit. For instance, in Kabylia General Olié had noted the central importance in Berber life of the djemaa, or council of elders, and wherever possible set about boosting the responsibility of the reliable djemaas and backing up their authority by the S.A.S. detachments so successfully fathered by Soustelle, which, in turn, could rely on speedy and massive intervention by an ubiquitous army presence.

  His neighbour, General André Beaufre, promoted to command the Constantine East area in April 1956 in the wake of the bloody massacres of the previous summer, and one of the most formidable military intellects of his generation, tackled his problems quite differently.[1] Noting that there was no parallel djemaa tradition in the Arab Constantinois, and critical of the army’s prevailing strategy (or lack of one) of attempting to be strong everywhere, Beaufre divided his area into different zones of varying priority. Sparsely populated regions were ordained zones interdites, their inhabitants resettled elsewhere and the army permitted to fire on any person observed there, thus physically denying the F.L.N. all access to food or supplies. Fertile and populous centres were dubbed zones de pacification, where to assure total security Beaufre concentrated the mass of his conscript and reservist forces (aiming for a minimum physical presence of one company per 100 square kilometres), accompanied by a major effort in economic advancement, education and propaganda indoctrination. Finally, there were zones d’opérations — “killing-grounds” where F.L.N. bands were relentlessly pursued and harried by Beaufre’s élite mobile forces. It was consciously part of his “psychological warfare” technique to draw pointed comparisons between conditions there and the security of life in the zones de pacification. If one may disregard for a moment the psychological consequences of the more ruthless aspects of Beaufre’s policy — such as in the zones interdites — it is undeniable that, up to his translation to Suez, he was the first senior commander in Algeria to show tangible success in beating the rebels on the purely military level.

  Beaufre had been trained in the hard school of Indo-China and it was natural that this theatre, where most of the French regular army had spent nearly the whole of the first post-war decade, should become its prime conditioning factor in Algeria. The new leaders coming to Algeria had been profoundly affected by the disastrous lessons of the Indo-China campaign; particularly of Dien Bien Phu, after which a number had spent humiliating months as prisoners of the Viet-Minh. This experience had provided them with the opportunity to make an intimate study of the victors’ technique. They had returned well-versed in Maoist principles and strategy, as adapted by General Giap, and persuaded of the cogency of fighting revolutionary warfare with its own weapons. If the function of the guerrilla was to move like Mao’s “fish in water” among the uncommitted masses, then that must be the technique of the counter-revolutionary soldier too; if the Viet-Minh could bend the minds of the populace to their will and extract vital information by resort to subtle — or less subtle — forms of pressure, then so must the security forces. It was no use, says Colonel Roger Trinquier, one of the leading Indo-China hands, merely destroying dispersed armed bands; one had to seek out, crush and eradicate the whole of the clandestine political organisation behind them. If Indo-China had turned its French pupils into superb warriors, it had also made them highly political animals — a fact that was to have as potent an impact upon the French republic as it did on the Algerian war.

  The paras and the Legion

  The Indo-China record could be played to excess; some
veterans constantly referred to the F.L.N. as les Viets, while sceptics like Jean Servier felt that there were various headquarters where Maoist doctrines had been “poorly digested”. If they had studied the lessons intimately and intensely, were the conclusions they reached always profound? Could they see the problems but not the answers? But perhaps, more than the lessons, what really counted most were the leaders produced by the Indo-China school. These were to become the legendary para colonels of Algeria; loved by their men and venerated by the pieds noirs, dreaded almost equally by the F.L.N. and French politicians. Ducournau, Trinquier, Bigeard, Brothier, Meyer, Jeanpierre, Fossey-François, Château-Jobert, Romain-Desfossés and Coulet: magnificent combat leaders all, their names read like a record of honour of French arms from the post-1940 resurgence onwards. Before Indo-China most had distinguished themselves in the Liberation and the final battles of the Second World War, and several had been deported to concentration camps for their work in the Resistance. They were to bestride the Algerian scene like demigods until the tragic peripeteia of 1961, and even such a pro-F.L.N. film as the remarkable Pontecorvo—Yacef production, La Battaglia di Algeri, comes reluctantly close to vesting its French para colonel, “Mathieu” with heroic qualities.

  Ducournau, the first to arrive in Algeria, has already been mentioned, but two others, Roger Trinquier and Marcel Bigeard, emerged outstandingly at this period in the war. Born in 1908, Trinquier had served in China from 1938 to 1945, and had become perhaps the expert on Far Eastern subversive warfare. In 1947 he helped create the 1st Battalion of Colonial Parachutists (B.P.C.), the famous bérets rouges, and had spent most of the succeeding years inside Viet-Minh territory.

  A rather more romantic figure was the legendary Bigeard, who, a century and a half earlier, would probably have soared to stardom as a Napoleonic marshal, and who — jointly with Ducournau — formed the model for “Colonel Raspeguy” in The Centurions. Born in 1916, Bigeard rose from the ranks without the benefits of either St Cyr or the école de Guerre. Rather undashingly he was captured in June 1940 as a sergeant in the Maginot Line, but escaped the following year to join a colonial infantry unit. Commissioned in 1943, he joined the paras to be dropped in France in 1944, ending the war as a captain. Like Trinquier, he spent most of the ensuing years in Indo-China, and in 1954 he was parachuted at the head of his 6th B.P.C. into the encircled fortress of Dien Bien Phu. There he had led one of the most inspired counter-attacks to regain the captured bastion of Eliane 1, for which he was promoted lieutenant-colonel. After the fall of Dien Bien Phu he spent three months as a captive of the Viet-Minh under constant brain-washing, returning to France with a bad case of the mal jaune and full of contempt (which he never bothered to disguise) for the defeated army commanders who had come back from Indo-China promoted and laden with medals.

  For Bigeard, like the others, the “discovery” of subversive warfare had been a turning-point in his career, and he had arrived in Algeria in 1955 inculcated with the belief that Indo-China had been one battle in the Communist struggle for global domination of which this new present campaign was probably a further instalment. In Algeria Bigeard received command of the 3rd Regiment of Colonial Parachutists (R.P.C.), more than half of whose 1,200 men were reservists of very mixed quality. Immediately he weeded out a score or two of stragglers and misfits and offered any others who so desired voluntary transfers to a different unit. The remainder he led off into the bled for two months of back-breaking training. When they returned they were clad in bizarre-looking camouflaged caps with long visors, designed by Bigeard himself and a little reminiscent of the Chinese revolutionary army, and which caused the pieds noirs to nickname them, with a touch of ridicule, the “lizards”. But “Bigeard’s boys” were also on their way to becoming a crack force; one of the most effective in the Western world. Bigeard himself practised a Rommel style of leadership, always leading an operation from the front, jumping with the first wave, knowing exactly what kind of conditions he was taking the regiment into, carrying out his own reconnaissances. He seemed to bear a charmed life but in 1956 he was wounded, thereby missing Suez. Tall and powerful, with a beaked nose that imparted a look of a bird of prey, Bigeard had that particularly French quality of allure essential to an outstanding commander. He seldom did anything without panache. Instead of arriving by staff car, or even helicopter, his favourite manner of inspecting a unit was to drop by parachute, arm at the salute as he touched down.[2]

  Bigeard’s 3rd R.P.C. soon became something of a model for the other para regiments in Algeria, and altogether they were to constitute the spearhead of French offensive operations there. They exerted a powerful attraction upon French youth, and some fifteen thousand a year were then qualifying for their plaque à vélo, as the para insignia was irreverently called. Next, primus inter pares among the élite formations, came the Foreign Legion, “La Légion”, with all its romantic connotations still only somewhat dimmed by the modern age. Though it had fought everywhere the tricolour had ever waved, from the Crimea to crushing the Commune in 1871 to Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the Legion had always had a “special relationship” with Algeria. Out of necessity caused by the conquest, Louis-Philippe had created it in 1831 and the following year it established itself at Sidi-Bel-Abbès, the Beau Geste depot on the fringe of the desert where it remained until the loss of Algeria. Through the parade-grounds of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, dominated by a vast bronze globe bearing the motto Honneur et Fidélité, passed 340,000 Legionnaires, of whom one in ten would fall. Here, or wherever it found itself every 30 April — resplendent with white kepi and scarlet epaulettes, its sapper sergeants with magnificent beards — the Legion would celebrate the solemn Fête de Camerone: the battle in Louis-Napoleon’s ill-starred Mexican campaign of 1863 when sixty-four Legionnaires had held out against 2,000 Mexicans, with only three survivors. Camerone had nearly been repeated at Dien Bien Phu, where the Legion alone had lost 1,500 men including 576 from its 1st Para Battalion, which had been wiped out twice over. During the Indo-China campaign a total of more than 10,000 Legionnaires had died, the majority of them Germans, who still (in 1955) provided forty-seven per cent of the Legion’s complement, followed by the French themselves (renouncing their nationality) at twelve per cent and Italians at eleven per cent.

  As an élite body it still enjoyed the best food in the army and was accompanied wherever it went by its own mobile brothels — “le puff”. But discipline was rigid, and punishments — with refractories made to kneel hours long in the beating sun — almost as savage as in the days of Beau Geste or Ouida. On the other hand, extraordinary tolerance could be shown when a Legionnaire, suffering from a bout of the notorious cafard, took a shot at an officer (provided he missed). By the end of 1955 the Legion already had 20,000 men, two-thirds of its effectives, in Algeria. Supreme among its élite were perhaps the green beret paras of its 1st R.E.P. stationed at Zéralda, just west of Algiers. Since Dien Bien Phu recruitment for the Legion had fallen off; nevertheless there was still no shortage of volunteers for the glamour of its para units.

  Although the discipline was tougher, in the free and easy atmosphere and relaxation of the old caste system within them the para formations as a whole exemplified post-1945 trends throughout the French army. While seventy-two per cent of all serving colonels were still St Cyriens, the percentage fell to twenty-five per cent among captains and twenty-three per cent for lieutenants. Few officers had come from the Polytechnique or any of the socially “smart” schools. The result was that the army had become a much more democratic, more representative, force than it had been for many a year. As J.-R. Tournoux remarked, “It is no longer the army of the Dreyfus Affair, of the blue line of the Vosges, of the charge in white gloves. It is an army of Valmy.” In one respect, however, the development of the para regiments was to become distinctly atavistic. Tournoux adds pointedly: “certain colonels gladly regarded themselves as proprietors of their regiments, as under the monarchy”. The trend towards “private armies” among the paras undoubte
dly carried with it at least two pronounced disadvantages; because of this elitism, morale in the more humdrum units of the army tended to suffer correspondingly; and, when the two big challenges of military versus civil authority came, the colonels of Algeria were to prove too powerful by half.

  “… another square on the map”

  Through 1956 and into 1957 the overall military picture of the war did not improve for the French. It may have looked rosier in some areas (notably General Beaufre’s command), but it worsened in others; while all the time those blotches on the “smallpox chart” were spreading. With the arrival of Mollet’s reservists and national servicemen numbers on the ground increased, and so did the efficiency of the paras; but at the same time the numbers of the F.L.N., and their expertise and equipment, were also on the upward path. Security operations were interrupted by the withdrawal of the paras for the Suez adventure, succeeded by the serious jolt to morale caused by the debacle. From the point of view of the ordinary French combatant, if there was any change in the “war that was not a war”[3] it lay in its ever-increasing brutality, perhaps especially marked since the Philippeville massacres and Abane’s subsequent espousal of total terror.