The man who had the covert assignment of identifying and eliminating the FLN in Philippeville was Paul Aussaresses. He was a Special services intelligence officer and a veteran of clandestine operations in World War II and Indochina—in other words, an experienced, discreet officer perfectly at ease with following orders and keeping his mouth shut. He had killed men and had participated in interrogations but up to this time never tortured anyone. That was about to change.
The Philippeville police, whose ranks composed exclusively pieds-noirs and “assimilated” Muslims, told him that the terrorists were up to something but that no one knew precisely what. They matter-of-factly stated that the only way to extract information from unobliging prisoners was torture. They asserted that torture was legitimate to obtain information that would save lives. Specifically, if they arrested a suspect who was involved in preparing a terrorist act such as setting a time bomb in a French grade school, a forced confession could foil the plot. Their logic persuaded Aussaresses and men like him: it was better to torture a suspected terrorist, to make a single person suffer, than to allow scores of innocent people be killed and maimed.
Aussaresses patiently assembled a list of FLN members and sympathizers. Many were common criminals, which made his job easier. When they refused to talk the police took charge. Often a beating was enough. For particularly stubborn suspects the police used a field radio as a power source and attached electrodes to the ears and testicles, the infamous gégène. Regardless of outcome, when the interrogation was over Aussaresses ordered the prisoners executed. He justified summary executions on the basis that the regular justice system was suitable for a peacetime situation in metropolitan France but this was Algeria, where a war of terror was under way.
In spite of Aussaresses’ efforts, FLN guerrillas goaded the civilian population in and around Philippeville into indiscriminate acts of violence. Some of the worst atrocities came in the mining town of El-Halia, where Muslim workers who had seemed to enjoy a rare degree of equality with the French mine managers brutally turned on the small European community. The village constables were conveniently absent, so the attack came as a complete surprise. Guided by mineworkers, guerrillas first isolated the village by cutting telegraph lines and disabling the emergency radio transmitter. Then attackers went house to house, slaughtering Europe ans without regard to age or sex. The terrorist mob entered homes and used billhooks and pitchforks to commit acts of unspeakable savagery, including ripping open the bellies of nursing mothers and hurling their infants against the wall until their brains spilled out. Thirty-seven settlers including ten children under fifteen years of age perished.
Elsewhere, purportedly urged on by chants from mobs of Muslim women and muezzins’ broadcasts from the minarets exhorting the attackers to slaughter Europeans in the cause of “holy war,” similar scenes of savagery played out. The victims of August 20, 1955, included seventy-one Eu rope ans and fifty Algerians killed and scores of others maimed. What was particularly notable about the butchery was the careful planning that took place involving so many Muslims whom the French community regarded as friendly. The sense of betrayal coupled with the many sites of blood-soaked horror produced a brutal French retaliation.
When paratroopers belonging to a crack French regiment arrived in Philippeville, they beheld the mob continuing the slaughter. Under such circumstances the paratroopers had little interest in separating the insurgents from the civilians, a difficult task under any circumstance. They fired on whoever ran. Later, they rounded up prisoners, lined them up against the wall, and opened fire with machine guns. There were so many killed that burial teams used bulldozers to inter the corpses. French sources acknowledged killing 1,273 “insurgents.” The actual figure is unknowable.
What is certain is that the Philippeville Massacre, as it became known, had profound consequences for the war. The rebel atrocities implacably hardened the hearts of the pieds-noirs and forever altered the behavior of many members of the French army and security forces. But it was the retaliation that mattered most. It handed the insurgents a victory and provided confirmation going forward for their strategy of indiscriminate terror. All the terrorists needed to do was to create an incident and await the predictable French overreaction. The greatest threat to the FLN strategic goal of full independence had been French political reform such as the measures proposed by Governor Soustelle that led to Muslim integration into a French political entity. The French reprisal at Philippeville caused moderate Muslims to repudiate integration. Guerrilla recruitment soared.
When he first heard the news, Soustelle flew to the scene of the massacre. The savagery inflicted on French women and children, the suffering of the mutilated in the hospitals—fingers hacked off, throats half slit as a warning—sickened Soustelle. From this time on his ideal of liberal reform became a remote priority, superseded by his determination to crush the rebellion. Nonetheless, Soustelle was wise enough to understand that the massacre was a victory for the FLN because it created an abyss separating the European and Muslim communities “through which flowed a river of blood.”3
ON THE INTERNATIONAL front, the Philippeville Massacre caused the United Nations to address the Algerian problem for the first time. This was an important political victory for the FLN. The insurgents received material and propaganda support from the Communist bloc, from Iraq and Egypt, and most importantly from neighboring Morocco and Tunisia. At the United Nations it was easy for France’s enemies to portray Algerian terrorists as nationalists striving to depose their colonial oppressors. An examination of a graph showing FLN activity since the start of the insurgency revealed regular peaks in November-December for the years 1955 to 1957. French intelligence called these peaks “United Nations fever” since they corresponded to the time the UN General Assembly met to discuss the situation in Algeria.
In France, the Philippeville Massacre also led to a new Socialist government in January 1956, headed by Premier Guy Mollet. Mollet’s policy toward Algeria was first to win the war and then to implement reforms. Mollet and like-minded French politicians understood the vital importance of national will in murky counterinsurgency warfare. He acceded to the army’s request for reinforcements by taking the important step of calling up a large number of reservists and extending the term of service for conscripts by 50 percent, from nineteen to twenty-seven months. These measures effectively nationalized the war by putting more citizens, instead of exclusively the military professionals, in harm’s way. By so doing, Mollet hoped to engage the French people, to make it really matter to them who won in Algeria. He explained his calculation to a French newspaper in April 1956: “The action for Algeria will be effective only with the confident support of the entire nation, with its total commitment.”4
Mollet also appointed Robert Lacoste, a popular veteran of both world wars, to replace Soustelle as governor-general. The strength of the army in Algeria swelled from around 50,000 in 1954 to more than half a million men by 1958, the largest overseas military commitment in French history. Mollet’s emphasis on military action before political action notably shackled Lacoste. Nonetheless, Lacoste raised the Algerian minimum wage, pushed land redistribution for Algeria’s land-hungry peasants, improved education, and decreed that half of all vacancies in public service go to Muslims.
Had these measures been implemented a decade earlier they might have changed history. Instead, coming in the wake of the Philippeville Massacre, most Muslims saw them as a tardy response to FLN pressure. By the summer of 1956 the rebels had won over a majority of previously uncommitted political leaders. These were the men France had depended on to help them win the battle for the hearts and minds of the Muslim masses. Then in October 1956 came an electrifying French intelligence coup.
France had decided to grant full independence to Morocco and Tunisia while concentrating its resources on retaining Algeria. In an effort to find an acceptable compromise for Algeria, the Moroccan sultan and Tunisian premier invited five principal FLN leaders, in
cluding most notably Ahmed Ben Bella, to fly to Tunis for a meeting aboard a plane chartered by the Moroccan government. In a flagrant breach of international law, French intelligence officers diverted the plane to Algiers.
Aboard the plane, the FLN leaders were totally deceived. As the plane descended, one Algerian saw the large crowd on the tarmac and exclaimed, “Why, they’ve organized a very handsome reception for us!” Instead the “crowd” was composed of French security forces, including tanks and armored cars. Although Ben Bella carried a pistol, he realized resistance was futile. The French arrested the leaders and confined them to prison in France. In Algeria the pieds-noirs rejoiced. In France one radio commentator said with deep approval, “At last France has dared!”5
However, the capture of the FLN’s senior leaders had little effect on the direction of the rebellion. Quite simply the movement was too diffuse, too loosely organized, to crumple from this blow. Within the FLN the loss of senior leadership merely eliminated obstacles in the path of ambitious junior leaders and allowed them to climb toward the top. Still, although few realized it, a turning point had occurred. This supreme demonstration of French perfidy eliminated the possibility of a negotiated compromise. Henceforth only the military option remained.
Confronting Revolutionary Warfare
Although political instability in metropolitan France led to an erratic military response to the insurgency, 1955 witnessed a gradual military buildup in Algeria as veterans returned from Indochina. For the French Foreign Legion it marked a return to its birthplace. Because service in Algeria had been unpopular among soldiers of the regular army, in 1831 the French government designated Algeria the home base for the newly created Foreign Legion. The government’s intention was to put a disruptive element of society—failed revolutionaries, criminals on the run, soldiers of fortune—to useful work for the benefit of France. During its first years in Algeria, “useful work” meant the most remote and dangerous assignments in bandit-infested mountains and Saharan oases. As the decades passed, the Legion bonded around its motto—“The Legion Is Our Homeland”—and became an elite fighting organization composed exclusively of volunteers. The coming years of service in Algeria would forge a new bond between the Legion and those who resisted the insurgents and ironically lead to the Legion participating in a rebellion against the French government.
The year 1956 saw the Foreign Legion joined by a massive deployment of reinforcements as three entire divisions, including the Seventh Mechanized Reserve and two marine infantry divisions, transferred from France to Algeria. At first neither the Indochina veterans nor the regulars and conscripts from France adapted well to Algeria. For the Legionnaires and the veterans, the experience of Indochina, both a conventional war against regular Communist units and a counterinsurgency at the village level, had formed the veterans’ thoughts and habits. They took their resentments, memories, and lessons from Indochina and initially refused to recognize that many aspects of the war in Algeria were different. On the other hand, the regulars and conscripts fresh from France had no notion how to wage a counterinsurgency. Not only were many soldiers ill-suited to Algerian operational requirements but the grand tactics imposed by senior leadership were flawed. In sum, the first two years of French military response to the insurgency featured inappropriate, conventional large-scale operations. In the words of David Galula, at the time an infantry company commander operating against insurgent strongholds in the Aurès mountains, “We encircled, we combed, we raided, with little result.”6
The standard army pacification method utilized the so-called quadrillage (framework or grid) approach. The term referred to the neatly ruled map grids that divided Algeria into seventy-five sectors. Security forces entered each grid sector and secured the major towns, garrisoned lesser communities with small forces, actively patrolled the region between the garrisons, and worked to expand the number of places held. The military had the particular duty of defending the European farmers and their labor force from terrorist strikes. The static garrison forces also had the responsibility to eliminate the embedded insurgents and convert their sympathizers. Because the static forces remained in one place for an extended period, they developed considerable local knowledge, an indispensable feel for how a small community operated in the presence and absence of guerrillas.
To identify and root out the embedded infrastructure, garrisons needed to work closely with civil affairs officers called Specialized Administrative Sections (SAS). As part of his comprehensive reform efforts, Governor-General Soustelle had established the SAS in May 1955. Soustelle described their mission as bridging “the yawning gap between the administration and the poorer inhabitants.”7 One hundred ten years earlier the commander of the first French conquest of Algeria, Marshal Thomas Bugeaud, had established a similar Organization, the Bureaux Arabes, for the same purpose, to act as liaison officers between the French army and the native population. In 1844 the officers’ mission was to assist ongoing military operations by collecting political and military intelligence. Thereafter, they turned to pacification duties with the specific focus on bringing the benefits of French government to the natives. The duties of the SAS were remarkably similar.
The SAS officers were all Arabic-speaking volunteers. The best of them had spent their careers in the colonies working as native affairs officers. Like the American Special Forces or Green Berets, the SAS officers, called the képis bleus after their distinctive hats, operated in remote villages where there was no French presence. Here they taught schools, helped farmers, and provided basic health care as well as a military presence, both to keep the rebels from dominating the village and to prevent the French army from wrecking it.
An SAS team consisted of an officer (usually a lieutenant), a secretary, an interpreter (the Kabyles, for example, spoke a Berber language), a radio, a vehicle, and a small security force, to be replaced by native auxiliaries as quickly as possible. The first twenty-six teams went out into remote outposts in the Kabylie with instructions to pacify their zone. Naturally, they quickly became the special targets of the insurgency. From time to time came chilling accounts of their native security details turning on them or of formed guerrilla units overrunning an SAS outpost and wiping the team out. Because the SAS had the extra assignment of collecting intelligence, there were reports that they engaged in torture.
Working in isolated regions, in command of predominantly Muslim units, the SAS officers became the only concrete representative of the central government. Gradually they shifted from an advisory role and assumed most civilian administrative functions and became responsible for their village’s health and well-being. The SAS officers assured Muslims that France would protect them always from FLN reprisals, a statement made more powerful by the fact that the officers truly believed it. They formed cooperative and sometimes even friendly relationships with the villagers in their area while building health clinics, markets, and schools where, to ease the natives’ future assimilation, children learned French history and its heroes such as Joan of Arc and Napoleon rather than Arab history and Abd-el-Kadr and Abd el-Krim.
Although their ultimate goal was to promote French bureaucratic control, at the time the SAS was seen by many to be a beacon of light in a dark war. A British journalist described them as attempting “to tidy up the mess of war before the war is over.”8 Later analysts suggested that had this approach been performed on a large scale, the war’s outcome would have been different. Eventually the SAS expanded to some 5,000 personnel, but in 1955 there were too few and it took precious time for the program to get up to speed.”9
In time the French military adapted to the special requirements of war in Algeria. To combat what the theorists called revolutionary warfare required new thinking that reversed the conventional emphasis on purely military action. Military action had to take “a back seat to psychological action.”10 This was a new way of thinking, and one widely resisted throughout the French military hierarchy. That hierarchy wanted to focus on wag
ing conventional war. Indicative of this bias were the attitudes of the instructors at the prestigious École de Guerre, who routinely criticized their officer-students whose service in Indochina had “deformed” their military judgment.11 In the “deformed” minds of the reformists, psychological action—which they understood to include propaganda, the collection and exploitation of political as well as military intelligence, police measures, and personal contact with the local people, as well as social and economic programs—trumped purely military action. What was needed was a unified strategy featuring both destruction and construction. As General Jacques Allard explained, “These two terms are inseparable. To destroy without building up would mean useless labor; to build without first destroying would be a delusion.”12
To help put these new ideas into practice the army established a special counterinsurgency school in 1956. During its first year of operation the school stressed marksmanship, detection of booby traps and mines, and combat communications. In the summer of 1957, Lieutenant Colonel Bruge, an officer who had served in France’s colonial army and spent time as a prisoner of war after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, reformed the curriculum. Bruge’s experiences at the hands of Communist interrogators and propagandists had given him a deep understanding of revolutionary warfare. He believed that persuading “the future leaders of the pacification effort that regaining the population’s adherence to France constitutes the ultimate stake” was the school’s true mission.13 Toward that goal the new curriculum focused on the psychological foundations of guerrilla warfare, the destruction of insurgent infrastructure, pacification, psychological action and psychological warfare, and knowledge of Algerian and Muslim sociology. During the time of reform, more than 7,000 French officers passed through the school. A graduate of the Arzew Training Center observed, “I discovered here that to be victorious in the Algerian war, the vital battles that we have to win are those to be won with the head and heart, and not with a machine-pistol.”14
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