Concrete Hell: Urban Warfare From Stalingrad to Iraq
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Hue was a turning point in Vietnam War despite being a tactical defeat for the PAVN. The battle was an indicator of an important trend in city fighting: strategic victory in urban combat may not be directly related to tactical victory on the street. In Hue the US Marines and ARVN won the battle on the streets, but the strategic battle of perceptions was won by the PAVN. Hue demonstrated that controlling a major population center, a city, for any significant period of time can be strategically decisive for a weak adversary and may lead to strategic victory even when combat power is insufficient for achieving that end.
CHAPTER 6
WAR IN THE CASBAH
The Battle of Algiers, 1956–57
The challenges of city fighting faced by the US military in Korea and Vietnam were difficult and tested the valor and ingenuity of soldiers and commands; yet, they were a confirmation of the type of urban combat that had originated in World War II. The veterans of conventional urban combat in Stalingrad and Aachen would have been very familiar with the combat environment in Seoul and Hue. However, the decades after World War II saw the rise of a relatively new type of war, “people’s revolutionary war,” and its application in urban centers around the globe. One of the first examples of revolutionary war practiced in an urban environment was in Algeria in 1956. There, the National Liberation Movement (FLN) was fighting a nationalist insurgency against the French government. In 1956 the insurgent leadership determined to move the main focus of the insurgency into Algeria’s capital and largest city, Algiers. The battle of Algiers, between the FLN and the French army in 1956 and 1957, was one of the first large-scale attempts by an insurgency to overthrow an existing government through operations inside a large city.
“People’s revolutionary war” was a theory of warfare formally developed by the leader of the Chinese Communist movement, Mao Tse Tung. Mao’s Chinese Communist movement began a struggle for power with their opponents, the Kuomintang under Chiang Kia-shek, in the 1920s. The Kuomintang was a powerful organization with a competent military arm and in the late 1920s it forced the Communists from China’s urban areas. For the next 20 years Mao organized and planned the return of the Communists as they nurtured their strength in China’s isolated mountains and rural areas. During the Japanese occupation of China (1933–45), the Kuomintang focused on China’s war with Japan. Mao and the Communists were given a respite to regain their strength. After World War II, the Communists led a revolt against the Kuomintang and ultimately defeated them in the Chinese Civil War in 1948.
During his decades-long struggle with the Kuomintang, Mao developed a theory of revolutionary war which guided his strategy. Mao’s theory of people’s revolutionary war was based on a political base of popular support. The strategy had three major lines of effort: political agitation, guerrilla warfare, and conventional warfare. These phases of the revolution also may be called the strategic defense, when a political base was established; the strategic stalemate, when limited military operations occurred; and the strategic offense, when the revolutionaries could revert to mobile conventional war. The goal of revolutionary warfare, the end state, was the replacement of the reigning government system with that of the revolutionary. In the first political phase of the theory the revolutionary force worked among the people establishing a base of popular support. This was the main effort of the revolutionary movement, and though the immediate priority of the revolution may later shift, Mao maintained that the revolutionary must always have the popular support of the people and thus political considerations and the political end state always guide operations, regardless of short-term priorities. Violence may occur during this initial phase but the aim was to support the buildup of popular support. After a political base was established, the revolutionary shifted to the guerrilla warfare phase. In this phase the revolutionary attacked the instruments of government power on a small scale without decisive engagement. Guerrilla operations had several objectives but the most important was to delegitimize the government and demonstrate its ineffectiveness. Secondary objectives in this phase included continuing to build popular support, train military members and commanders, and erode the military capability of the government. Once the military power of the revolution was sufficient the revolutionaries entered the third phase of the revolution, the strategic offensive, and directly challenged the military forces of the government on the battlefield. The final phase would result in the overthrow of the government and its replacement by the revolutionary leadership. This theory guided Mao’s strategy in his confrontation with the Chinese Nationalist government. Mao’s theory of revolutionary war inspired the strategy adopted by the Vietnamese revolutionaries under Ho Chi Minh, and it was the strategy that the Vietnamese pursued successfully against the French in Indochina. Many in the French military were thus very familiar with the writings of Mao, and some had even been exposed to the revolutionary war strategy while prisoners of war of the Vietnamese after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
After World War II, as most European powers were divesting themselves of their foreign colonial holdings, the French were interested in reasserting their traditional control over their overseas possessions. French policy was in sharp contrast with the aggressive nationalism that became popular in the former colonies during the war. The French compromised and bowed to independence movements in many of the colonies, most notably Morocco and Tunisia. However, the French government thought that it was in their interest to retain their colonial investment in Indochina, and the French believed that Algeria was not a colonial holding but rather an integral part of France. Therefore, the French government made a stand against nationalistic movements in both Vietnam and Algeria. In Vietnam the French faced a sophisticated Maoist insurgency that ultimately led to their military defeat at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. By 1955, French military forces were withdrawing from Vietnam and based on the Geneva Agreement of 1954, the temporarily independent states of North and South Vietnam were established by the United Nations.
At the same time that the Vietnamese were fighting the French in Indochina, unrest was occurring in French North Africa. Soon after the end of World War II, a political movement began among the Muslim population of the French province of Algeria to win autonomy from France. Because of its proximity to the French Mediterranean coast, Algeria had been established by the French not as a colony, but as an integral part of France. The major problem with this arrangement was that, though Algeria was a province of France, Muslims – who comprised 90 percent of the population – did not enjoy the full rights of French citizens. A small minority (about 10 percent of the total population) of European colonists in Algeria, known as Colons, did have full citizenship rights, and this minority ruled the province. Because of their position of power, the Colons had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
Violence began in Algeria in 1945 and continued with increasing frequency and force for almost a decade. In late 1954 the FLN was in open revolt against French rule, and the capabilities of the FLN insurgents were too sophisticated and powerful for the French police to handle. In 1954 the French government began to employ the French army against the insurgents. For the first two years of the insurgency, the FLN fought the French army primarily in the hinterlands of the country. This strategy was classically Maoist. The rationale of the FLN was that insurgent forces could lose themselves in the difficult mountainous terrain and survive with the support of the friendly Muslim rural population. However, the problem with that strategy was that conducting hit and run raids against mostly military targets in isolated areas of the country had little or no political, military, or economic effect. In 1956 the political leadership of the FLN determined to change their strategy. They decided to move the focus of the insurgency nto Algiers, Algeria’s largest city, the center of the economy, and the capital of the province. The strategy envisioned attacking prominent public targets that French politicians, the French population, and the international community, particularly the United Nations, could n
ot ignore.
The city of Algiers was the most important in the province. It was captured in 1830 when the French invaded Algeria, and became the center for all French operations in the region. In the 1950s the city had a population of about 900,000, of which two-thirds were Muslims and about 300,000 were Colons. The city was divided into a large new colonial city, and the Casbah. The modern city comprised perhaps 80 percent of the city area and was designed in a southern European architectural style. The Casbah was the old Muslim quarter of the city. It was positioned on the heights above the port and was small, covering approximately 1km2 (0.4 square miles), but housing over 100,000 residents. The buildings of the Casbah were stone, brick, and concrete, tightly packed next to each other, and three to five stories tall. Each building housed an extended family unit, and other relatives often lived in the neighborhood. Most of the Casbah was inaccessible to vehicles, the buildings being separated by steep narrow cobblestone lanes. The Casbah became the center of the FLN movement in Algiers.
The FLN organization in Algiers mirrored the larger FLN national organization and followed a classic insurgent cell structure. The FLN was organized in three-man cells with only one person having any knowledge of the larger organization and that person’s knowledge being limited to a single contact in the next higher organization. The FLN political leader in Algiers was Larbi Ben M’Hidi. Ben M’Hidi was also part of the national executive leadership of FLN. He was assisted by Saadi Yacef who was his executive for operations. Before the campaign against the French began in Algiers, Yacef took charge of preparing the Casbah as a base. His network of 1,400 operatives included bomb experts, masons, and numerous other special experts. Yacef purged the Muslim population within the old city of known French sympathizers. He also supervised the building of a network of hides and caches throughout the district. These positions were built into residences by creating false walls and tunnels that facilitated the storing of weapons and explosives, and the hiding and escape of insurgents during French army search operations.
A chain of events precipitated the initiation of hostilities in Algiers. On June 19, 1956, two known FLN operatives were executed by the French for their involvement in the murder of several French civilians. The prisoners were executed by guillotine, and were defiant to the end. In sympathy with the executed prisoners, mobs of Muslims rioted throughout Algiers and randomly killed Europeans. This violence was encouraged by M’Hidi and the FLN. On orders from Yacef, FLN operatives roamed around Algiers and gunned down 49 French civilians in retaliation for the executions over a three-day period. This action was designed to build popular Muslim support for the FLN. The Colons themselves responded to the Muslim violence with a terrorist bombing of a suspected FLN home in the Casbah, which killed over 70 Muslims, most of them not associated with the FLN. The FLN then made a decision to begin a deliberate campaign of violence against the French civilian population in Algiers. The campaign had several purposes: to bring international attention to the grievances of the Muslim population of Algeria, to establish the FLN as the legitimate authority representing the Muslim population, and to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the French authorities.
The Battle
The campaign began at the end of September 1956 with the most famous attack, the Milk-Bar bombing. The Milk-Bar attack was an unprecedented intentional assault on the civilian Colon community. The attack occurred on September 30, 1956, and consisted of three closely spaced bombings at businesses that catered to the young wealthy Colon population. Yacef used three female bombers to carry out the attacks. Two were 22-year-old law students at Algiers University. They were specifically chosen because they were all generally attractive, and most importantly somewhat European in appearance so could easily blend in with the European Colon population. Dressed in typical European style, the three left the Casbah separately. They met Yacef’s bomb-maker outside the Muslim quarter and were each issued their bombs. The explosions were planned to occur in rapid succession. The first occurred at the Milk-Bar, which was a youth hangout, and which was filled with mothers and young children drinking milkshakes at the time of the bombing. The second detonation followed within a minute, at the Cafeteria club, another favorite spot of young Colons. Together these two bombs killed three and wounded over 50, including numerous children. The third bomb, emplaced at an Air France travel agency, failed to go off because of a faulty timer.
Map 6.1 Major Events in Algiers, 1956–57
The bombings terrified the Colon community and received international attention. Yacef and B’Hidi determined that the bombings had achieved the type of success they desired: the European community distrusted and feared any Muslim as a potential terrorist. The Muslim community was on its guard against rampaging European mobs. The FLN determined to increase the terror campaign to further separate the two populations and in December they followed up the September attacks with the assassination of the civilian mayor of Algiers. The Colon community was outraged, and further angered when a FLN bomb exploded at the mayor’s funeral. Though this bomb did not cause any casualties, the funeral procession turned into a mob which rampaged through the city, attacking and killing any innocent Muslims they encountered. The FLN responded with more assassinations, and this finally drove the civilian governor-general of Algeria, Robert Lacoste, to take desperate measures.
In January 1957, due to the inability of the civil authorities to make any progress toward defeating or arresting the bombers and assassins, French officials turned government authority in Algiers over to the military commander of French forces in Algeria, General Raoul Salan. Salan promptly deployed the elite 10th Parachute Division to Algiers and gave the division commander, General Jacques Massu, the task of defeating the FLN organization in the city. Effectively, the civilian administration of the city was replaced by the military command of Massu.
The 10th Parachute Division was a relatively new organization in the French army but one superbly manned, and experienced in the ways of counterinsurgency warfare. The division consisted of four parachute regiments, each about a thousand men strong: the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Régiments de Parachutistes Coloniaux (RPC), made up of French colonial troops, and the 1st Régiment Étranger de Parachutistes (REP), the Foreign Legion parachute regiment. The total strength of the division was 4,600 paratroopers. The division’s subordinate commanders and staff were some of the foremost counterrevolutionary experts in the French service, with extensive experience in the art of resistance fighting. Leading the 10th Parachute Division was General Jacques Massu, one of France’s foremost soldiers. He graduated from St Cyr and served on colonial duty in western Africa before World War II. During World War II he joined the Free French 2nd Armored Division and participated in the liberation of Paris. He was a founding member of the first French army parachute unit, and he served with the paras in Indochina. In 1956, at the age of 47, he was the first commander of the 10th Parachute Division and led it during the Suez Crisis in Egypt.
Massu’s staff were exceptionally experienced counterinsurgency experts. They were also ruthless fighters who recognized few limits in their efforts to defeat the FLN. Massu’s right-hand man was his chief of staff, Colonel Yves Godard. Godard was 44 years old at the time of the Algiers battle. In 1940, he had been captured by the Germans. After escaping German captivity on his third attempt, in 1944, he returned to Paris and then joined the French Resistance. Godard returned to the regular army in 1948, and was assigned to a secret intelligence unit, the 11th Shock Unit. He later led that unit to Indochina.
Godard had two outstanding assistants. One was 48-year-old Major Roger Trinquier. Trinquier was one of the originators of the “Guerre Revolutionnaire” doctrine, the French army’s answer to insurgency. He served in China from 1938 to 1945, and there became an expert on revolutionary warfare. Later, he formed the first battalion of colonial paratroopers, 1st bataillon de parachutistes coloniaux (1st BPC). He spent most of the years 1948 to 1954 in Vietnam, and most of that time he spent gathering intelligenc
e and leading pro-French guerrillas against the Viet Minh deep in enemy-controlled territory. During the battle of Algiers he was a special deputy to Massu, and chief of the informant system in Algiers. Later he commanded the 3rd RPC and was subsequently recalled from Algiers for involvement in political agitation.
Massu’s other intelligence chief was Major Paul Aussaresses. Aussaresses served with Free French special services in World War II. During World War II he was imprisoned briefly in Spain, and participated in Jedburgh operations in occupied France and Germany. After World War II he formed the 11th Shock Unit, a secret intelligence and direct-action unit. He served in Indochina with the 1st RPC and conducted intelligence operations behind Viet Minh lines. He served in Algeria as an infantry brigade intelligence officer, in the 1st RPC, and as Massu’s special deputy for “action implementation.” Aussaresses was in charge of French interrogation efforts. Aussaresses left Algeria in 1957 and continued an uneventful military career in the army, eventually retiring as a general.
The four regimental commanders of the 10th Parachute Division were as impressive in their experiences as the staff. Colonel Georges Mayer commanded the 1st RPC. He was a graduate of St Cyr and one of the original members of the two airborne companies created by the French Army in 1937. He fought in World War II in Alsace and also in Indochina. Colonel Albert Fossey-Francois commanded the 2nd RPC. He was a literature student before World War II and joined the special services during the war. He had commanded his regiment, the 2nd RPC, in Indochina. Perhaps the most impressive of the parachute commanders was the 3rd RPC commander, Colonel Marcel Bigeard. Bigeard enlisted in the army before World War II, and was captured as a sergeant in the Maginot Line defenses in 1940. He escaped from the Germans and joined a colonial infantry unit. The army commissioned him as a lieutenant in 1943, and he joined the paratroopers and jumped behind German lines in 1944. As a major and battalion commander he jumped with the 6th BPC into Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel during the battle and became a prisoner of the Vietnamese when the command surrendered. Probably because of his reputation, the 3rd RPC was responsible for operations in the Casbah. The last of the para commanders also had a very impressive record. Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Jeanpierre commanded the Foreign Legion Parachute Regiment, the 1st REP. He served in the French Resistance during World War II, was captured by the Germans and spent the last year of the war in the Dachau concentration camp. Jeanpierre went to Indochina with the French Foreign Legion 1st REP and fought with them there until 1954. He was second in command of the 1st REP until March 1957 and was then appointed commander. During the battle of Algiers his regiment captured Yacef, and he was wounded during that action. Jeanpierre was killed in action leading his regiment in Algeria in 1958. Combined with Massu and his experienced staff, the officer leadership of the 10th Parachute Division was a formidable group. Their combined experiences and leadership made the 10th Para one of the most experienced, and most effective, counterinsurgency forces ever fielded.