EIGHT
The Question of Morality
Paths to Victory
IN THE FRENCH ARMY, LIKE ALL OTHERS, the accepted path to promotion was combat experience. Ambitious officers did not want to be shunted off to backwater assignments dealing with civil affairs and pacification duties. Consequently, in Algeria pacification became the dumping ground of the second-rate, elderly, drunken, or simply dumb. Such men all too often filled staff positions in civil affairs, propaganda, and even intelligence. One exception was David Galula.
That Galula marched to a different drummer was hardly surprising. A graduate of Saint-Cyr, the prestigious French military academy, Galula was purged from the officer corps in 1941 according to the “Statute on Jews of the Vichy State.” After living in North Africa, he joined the Free French Army in time to be wounded while participating in the liberation of France in 1944. Thereafter, he served as a French military attaché and traveled widely in nations experiencing rebellion and insurgency. His life’s experiences informed his theories of counterinsurgency.
Galula’s company occupied a guerrilla-dominated region of the Aurès mountains. Galula perceived that the true battle was for the population and he understood that insurgent terror dominated the rural villages. When he interrogated civilians they candidly described their situation. They were not afraid of the French because, as French citizens, the worst fate that could befall them was jail. The insurgents, on the other hand, would cut their throats. Consequently, even the potentially pro-French chose not to cooperate. Thus Galula described the challenge: “Under what conditions would our potential supporters emerge from their present silence? How much risk were they prepared to take?”1
Galula concluded that the only way to make progress was to eliminate the insurgents’ political and Administrative Organization (OPA). At the village level, the OPA consisted of a Communist-style three-man cell. One military affairs member provided intelligence for the guerrillas. Another member dealt with administration and justice, while a third collected taxes to support the insurgency.
Identifying members of the village cell proved very difficult. In one village it seemed that an army-sponsored school was making a favorable impression until one day a soldier-teacher asked a young student if everything was all right. The boy responded positively but added that things would be much better if they had guns and ammunition because then they could drive the French out.
Extracting information from prisoners became an overarching challenge. A stroke of good fortune brought an elderly and disgruntled Kabyle who informed on his nephew, a village cell boss. A dawn raid caught the nephew and several other suspects. Over a period of days, Galula reduced the suspects’ food until they received water only. Still, patient interrogation revealed nothing until a sergeant reported that one of the suspects was ready to talk. The sergeant had put the suspect in a bakery oven and threatened to light a fire under the oven if the suspect failed to cooperate. Ten minutes of being shut inside the oven broke the suspect. Thereafter, Galula authorized harsh interrogation methods and acknowledged he felt no more moral compunction than if he had been a World War II bomber pilot carpet-bombing a city.
Confessions led to the capture of new suspects and their confessions, in turn, had a cascading effect, allowing Galula to compile a list of OPA operatives. The reward came after a successful “purge” of an entire village OPA cell. The elimination of this cell produced a sea change in villagers’ attitudes and behavior. They began to volunteer intelligence. A sure sign of success was the fact that villagers dared, in violation of the FLN ban, to smoke in public.
With experience Galula systematized his pacification approach into three steps. The first step involved intelligence collection utilizing threats and harsh treatment in order to identify OPA agents. Next came their arrest. Then an army garrison occupied the village to prevent the terrorists from recruiting new agents. Although it alarmed his conventional-minded superiors, Galula widely dispersed his company into small garrisons while keeping a reserve as a reaction force. And it worked. Galula converted a guerrilla stronghold into one of the quietest regions in all of Algeria. But, to his immense frustration, the blueprint for victory that he believed he had drawn proved of limited value. In Algeria, the French military declined to promulgate his policy. In France, political instability thwarted bold policy changes. Consequently, “no matter how much effort was devoted to pacification locally, we would find sooner or later that we had reached a plateau above which we could not rise.”2
Moreover, Galula’s success proved fragile. When military authorities redrew areas of responsibility, new units and new commanders took over villages that Galula’s unit had pacified. The new commanders, having ignored the population in their previous assignments, continued their policy of neglect. Because all seemed quiet they did not continue Galula’s policy of regular nocturnal ambushes. Soon the terrorists returned and the villages reverted. As Galula viewed the situation, “we were caught in the classic vicious circle of an insurgency: because of the repeated and costly operations, the Kabyle population was solidly against us; because of the attitude of the population, our soldiers tended to treat every civilian as an enemy.”3
BY THE END OF 1956 the French military presence in Algeria surpassed the 400,000 mark. There was a clear division of labor among them. The real fighting fell to only 10 percent of the army, the elite professionals in the paratroops and Foreign Legion units, who regularly conducted field operations. Designated as “units of intervention,” this elite chased the guerrillas through mountain and forest, relying increasingly on he licopters to carry them into battle. Celebrated by the French press and most importantly by the pieds-noirs, the elite—who already carried bitter memories of abandoning their native allies in Indochina—reciprocated by identifying with increasing fervor with the settlers’ plight. In the minds of elite Indochina veterans, defeat in Algeria could come only from political failure on the home front. When they looked at the shaky coalition governments in France they saw “the embodiment of irresolution.”4 For this reason many veterans grew to resent their own national government.
The draftees, reservists, and less capable regular forces mostly served in static roles. They guarded important national infrastructure: roads, railroads, ports, power stations. Many guarded settlers’ farms or provided security for “pacified” villages. A domestic political calculation influenced how and where troops served. The French government calculated that it could regulate combat casualties by assigning its draftees and reservists to duties that seldom exposed them to losses. It did not anticipate that these men would refuse to witness silently army atrocities and that instead they would inform the French public through letters to their families and published accounts in the popular media.
Most officers expected the draftees to be poor soldiers uncommitted to a colonial war, particularly given that 25 percent of the French population voted Communist. The Parisian draftees who composed the majority of the 228th Infantry Battalion were of this sort. As a train conveyed them south across France, the unhappy draftees vandalized a train station. Thereafter riot police accompanied them until they landed in Algeria. Sent to the remote south deep in the Sahara desert, the men seethed with resentment and continued to wreck army property and loot civilian stores. They seldom ventured outside of their camp, which became an island in an alien environment. The high command finally sent a seasoned professional, Major Jean Pouget, to deal with these demoralized, poorly disciplined men.
Pouget addressed the troops: “Neither you nor I had a choice. We are [on] the same team and the match has started. I hate losing.”5 By force of character, insightful man management, and energy, Pouget restored the battalion’s military effectiveness.
Pouget was another of the celebrated paratrooper heroes of Dien Bien Phu. Formed by his experience as a prisoner of war at the hands of the Viet Minh, Pouget, in contrast to most French veterans, insisted on treating prisoners decently. He firmly believed that it was both the
right thing to do and the best way to obtain intelligence. He extended his notion of “soft” war to the task of pacifying his region. However, he fully understood that the first requirement was security: his battalion had to show it could protect the people, and particularly his SAS officers, from the terrorists. Toward this goal he ordered his battalion to flood the inhabited areas of his sector with frequent patrols. But he knew that these patrols would fail to contact the insurgents unless they had timely intelligence. To obtain this intelligence he worked hard to cooperate with the SAS officers and to treat the local population respectfully.
When one of his SAS lieutenants put his arm around the waist of the daughter of a local dignitary, Pouget publically rebuked him and sentenced the lieutenant to fifteen days of menial labor. He also paid a reparation to the offended father to help restore his daughter’s honor. Pouget insisted that everyone in his battalion deal honestly with civilians, thereby eliminating the payment of bribes, the Arab’s traditional baksheesh. Pouget also authorized economic assistance measures, such as acquiring chemical washes to disinfect the local flocks of sheep, and social programs, including starting schools.
The way Pouget treated Ain Melah, the largest village in his district, showed him to be completely different from most French officers. Everyone knew Ain Melah was dominated by the insurgents. Pouget met with the village elders, who assured him that the village was devoid of insurgents. Pouget told them that they were liars but that he completely understood their motives; all they were doing was trying to preserve peace in the village. All Pouget asked of them was to allow him to send a medical team once a week and to restart an irrigation project. The elders agreed.
Even when the terrorists killed a French soldier who taught at a school in Ain Melah, Pouget forbade retaliation. After this seminal event, the village elders requested a French garrison to help protect the population. Thereafter, the villagers provided a wealth of intelligence and thirty-five of them volunteered for the village militia, or harki (literally, Arabic for “movement”). For a time it appeared that Ain Melah was successfully pacified. The French intelligence lieutenant who managed the village’s pacification program walked about the village unarmed. A captured enemy report acknowledged that the village had turned against the insurgents. The insurgents sent a team to assassinate the French lieutenant. They succeeded, but the villagers assisted the French in hunting down the killers.
Pouget and his battalion created an island of stability in a region of instability dominated by the insurgents. He practiced an approach to pacification enormously different from that of most French officers. It was not a systematic program like the one conceived by David Galula, but rather one inspired by a strongly held code of personal ethics. Like Galula’s approach, it depended hugely on one man’s personal leadership. Because neither Galula’s nor Pouget’s policies fit well within the French army’s conventional mind-set, their successes remained isolated exceptions.
FRENCH MILITARY CAPACITY throughout Algeria improved dramatically. Veterans of the Indochina War assumed important command positions. These leaders substituted innovative, flexible tactics for the clumsy large-scale operations of the past. Reinforcements flowed to Algeria, including numerous crack paratroop and Foreign Legion formations. They possessed new equipment, including American-supplied he licopters. French morale soared.
However, conventional operations brought French soldiers face-to-face with two grim realities. The first was that an area remained secure only as long as French forces were present and vigilant. When the French sentries turned their backs, honorable old men, their chests laden with decorations earned while fighting for the French during two world wars, would grab their weapons and open fire against the French. A second realization was that rebel intelligence always seemed to be a step ahead of French intelligence. Superior intelligence allowed the guerrillas to evade battle and melt into the urban population or the remote interior. The French could not reliably separate the guerrillas from the general population. Conventional interrogation revealed nothing useful.
The Indochina veterans understood Maoist principles and strategy. In particular, they appreciated the notion that guerrillas had to swim like Mao’s fish in the water of the uncommitted masses. One prominent Indochina veteran explained that it was little use merely destroying dispersed guerrilla bands. Instead, the French aim had to be to find and eradicate the entire clandestine political organization that supported the guerrillas. More ominously, the Indochina veterans appreciated how guerrillas used force to influence the civilian population. They believed that counterrevolutionary forces had to employ the same methods and so they did.
This produced military results. By the end of 1956 FLN leaders understood that they could not contend in open battle with the French. There would be no war-winning Algerian version of Dien Bien Phu. But they believed that by maintaining a military presence—even if that meant small guerrilla bands scattered in remote mountain hiding places—and continuing their domination of the people by terror tactics, they could avoid losing. And, in spite of French efforts, the FLN had made some notable achievements. They had recruited and armed some 20,000 men from a population largely uninterested in revolutionary rhetoric. They had established a political-military infrastructure across a vast area. They had impressively increased the number of violent actions—ranging from cutting down a telephone line to shooting a Muslim constable to ambushing a French patrol—from 200 a month in April 1955 to 2,624 in March 1956. Their major target continued to be Muslim “traitors,” civilians known to have cooperated with the French or suspected of having done so. For the first thirty months of the conflict, terrorists killed an estimated 6,353 Muslims against 1,035 Europeans.
Having regrouped from their earlier mistakes, FLN leaders again showed their strategic impatience by seeking decisive results in the country’s capital city, Algiers.
The Battle for Algiers
The FLN judged the capital city as the decisive battle zone. If they could routinely conduct terror operations inside Algiers, then they could discredit or perhaps even paralyze French rule. Ever since March 1956, Algiers had experienced occasional terrorist incidents. In August 1956 the FLN leadership decided to change the war’s focus and inflict on the capital an orchestra of terror, featuring a steady drumbeat of detonating high explosives. It ordered its commander in Algiers, Yacef Saadi, to begin a relentless campaign of urban terrorism to undermine France’s capacity to provide public order and security.
Yacef coordinated welders who made bomb casings, explosive experts who had learned their trade in the French army, and drivers to convey the bombs to secret depots. Then Yacef dispatched the bomb planters to targets he had personally selected. The planters typically were young, educated, stylish Algerian women who easily passed as Europeans as they deposited their bombs at Popular nightspots frequented by young pieds-noirs. On September 30, bombs detonated inside the Milk-Bar, just across from French army headquarters, and at La Cafétéria. On November 13, terrorists hurled a bomb into a bus, inflicting thirty-six casualties, and planted another in a department store and a third at the rail station. A well-coordinated attack on November 28 detonated three large bombs simultaneously in downtown Algiers. Just before Christmas a school bus bombing killed or maimed several children. The terrorists followed this up by assassinating two prominent political leaders.
Europe ans who ventured onto the streets carried concealed firearms and saw a possible assassin in the face of every Muslim. Terrorist violence produced brutal reprisals, the infamous ratonnades (Arab-bashings). Intimidated by the possibility of random pied-noir reprisal, cowed by Yacef’s long arm of terror, the city’s Muslim population also lived in fear. Exposed to frequent and seemingly unstoppable terror bombings and assassinations, Algiers quickly descended into chaos.
French authorities concluded that it was impossible to prevent urban terrorism through normal police and judicial procedures. On January 7, 1957, Governor-General Robert Lacoste summoned Ge
neral Jacques Massu to his office. He told Massu that since the city’s 1,500 police could neither prevent terrorist outrages nor control retaliation by pied-noir mobs, he was giving Massu carte blanche to use the his 4,600-strong Tenth Paratroop Division to restore order in the capital. General Massu was like the Napoleonic marshal Michel Ney: a man of action who responded to resistance by conducting a head-down charge. Events in Algiers immediately tested his command style.
Massu’s paratroopers entered the city just in time to confront a nationwide strike the FLN had called to begin on January 28, 1957, the opening day of the United Nations debates on Algeria. The FLN goal was to discredit the French assertion that the rebellion enjoyed little popular support. As the sun rose, it appeared that the FLN was correct. Algiers was dead. Muslim schoolchildren stayed at home. Shops did not open for business. Muslim employees who worked in essential services at power plants and water pumping stations failed to report. Massu responded by ordering his paratroopers to open shops by force and compel workers to report. Soldiers attached cables to the steel shutters securing the closed shops and armored vehicles dragged them from their hinges. Paratroopers rounded up public workers and conducted them to the power plants and telegraph offices. Within forty-eight hours Massu’s men had broken the strike.
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