Jungle of Snakes
Page 14
On the day a new cabinet was scheduled to present its program to the National Assembly, pied-noir activist groups in Algiers began widespread demonstrations in an effort to influence the vote. They feared that the new French government would abandon them and denounced the government for plotting “a diplomatic Dien Bien Phu.” By the evening of May 13, 1958, they controlled Algiers and had established an emergency government. The French army in Algeria realized that it held enormous political clout and supported this new government. France teetered on the edge of revolution.
Into the ensuing leadership void stepped Charles de Gaulle. The settlers’ revolt found the sixty-seven-year-old war hero in rural retirement working on his war memoirs. But he had been closely following political developments and was far from displeased when a new opportunity presented itself. In a memorable speech on May 19, 1958, de Gaulle deployed his brilliant rhetoric to reassure the nation. Alluding to events in Algeria, de Gaulle said that France confronted “an extremely grave national crisis.” But he also told the nation that it could “prove to be the beginning of a kind of resurrection.”4 The National Assembly voted de Gaulle full powers for six months, thereby ending the Fourth Republic. De Gaulle, in turn, judged Algeria a “millstone round France’s neck.”5 In his view the era of European colonialism was coming to an end and there was no longer any alternative for Algeria except self-determination. But it was of crucial importance that France grant Algeria this right. It could not be forced upon any self-respecting French government at the point of a gun or the detonation a terrorist bomb. As the new leader phrased it, prior to negotiations the insurgents had to check “the knives in the cloakroom.”6
De Gaulle knew that to arrive at an acceptable solution he had to appeal to diverse political constituents and consequently had to handle the situation with extreme circumspection. Thus, he moved slowly and cautiously, and with calculated vagueness. By so doing he failed to capitalize on the opportunity created by military success in Algeria.
FLN leaders would later say that the weeks following de Gaulle’s rise to power marked a low ebb for their cause. Their military forces had hurled themselves against the Morice Line and been badly defeated. Their troops were demoralized and when de Gaulle spoke about true equality for all Algerians within the French republic the great mass of Algerians appeared receptive to compromise. FLN leaders knew that they had to do something before de Gaulle’s government could consolidate power. They responded brilliantly with a diplomatic offensive designed to take advantage of Cold War rivalry between the East and West by proclaiming a revolutionary Provisional Government of the Republic of Algeria. Arab nations hastened to recognize the new government. The Communist bloc, except for the USSR, followed. FLN spokesmen hinted at a new flexibility regarding a negotiated settlement and the international press enthusiastically endorsed this notion. Yet even as they won an important victory on the international front, military events in Algeria again threatened to defeat the FLN.
The Challe Plan
When de Gaulle assumed power he began to replace the command team in Algeria with his own loyalists. He chose General Maurice Challe to command the military. It proved an inspired choice. Still vigorous at age fifty-three, Challe had served with distinction in the Resistance during World War II. He had provided the British with valuable intelligence on the eve of the Normandy Invasion and earned both a British medal and a personal citation from Winston Churchill. Although trained as an airman, Challe possessed a keen appreciation for land tactics. Unlike his predecessor, he did not dabble in politics but rather was an open and honest leader with a surpassing ability to forge an interservice, team approach to problem solving. De Gaulle ordered Challe to deliver a crushing blow to the already reeling insurgent cause by a series of offensives designed to reduce the rebel pockets one after another. In de Gaulle’s mind this offensive was like a preassault strategic bombardment designed to create a receptive environment for what ever he decided to do next.
Challe, in turn, believed that too many French soldiers, about 380,000 by his count, had been assigned passive roles guarding the Morice Line, securing the country’s infrastructure, and protecting its villages. Only 15,000 remained in the General Reserve to conduct active operations. The result was that the French military had designated vast swaths of Algeria as “no-go zones,” which effectively ceded these areas to the FLN. Indeed, the French had ruefully labeled one such zone the “FLN republic.” Unwilling to remain passive and reactive, Challe planned to concentrate overwhelming force against each traditional insurgent stronghold. After eliminating the rebels and inserting pacification teams to take control of the population and prevent the insurgents from re-forming, Challe intended to move against another stronghold. He introduced his strategy to the army in Algeria with a simple catch phrase that everyone could understand: “Neither the djebel [hill] nor the night must be left to the FLN.” He made sure that he had the right sort of tactical commanders to realize his vision by sacking nearly half the sector commanders and replacing them with more aggressive colonels.
The first offensive took place in the rolling country southeast of Oran. Although this area had long been controlled by the FLN, it presented less daunting terrain than the traditional insurgent strongholds in the Aurès mountains and the Kabylie. The elite paratroopers spearheaded the ensuing Operation Oranie, followed by mechanized columns issuing out of Oran to flood the countryside. It was essentially a giant search-and-destroy operation conducted with more technical sophistication than ever before. Using an integrated communications net that permitted command coordination between ground and air units, officers in airborne command posts managed a fast-paced series of moves for which the insurgent foot soldiers had no answer. American-supplied giant heli copters, the famous Piasecki H-21 “flying bananas,” provided the capacity to land two entire battalions in five minutes. Three hundred slow, propeller-driven training aircraft were converted to ground attack roles. At first, pilots who had trained to fly modern supersonic jets complained bitterly. The former airman Challe ignored them and the complaints ceased when the pilots discovered, as would a future general of American airmen flying A-10s in Iraq, that slow was good for ground support missions. French mechanized columns cornered the guerrillas and the converted trainers allowed pilots to deliver bombs and rockets with pinpoint lethality.
During Operation Oranie, Challe also inserted into action numerous newly recruited harki units. The expansion had required de Gaulle’s authorization. During a face-to-face encounter, Challe had insisted and de Gaulle had replied with characteristic haughtiness, “One does not impose conditions on de Gaulle!”7 Challe refused to be overmastered and told de Gaulle to either give him the men or he would resign. Thereafter Challe had select harki units form specially trained “hunter-killer” teams complete with experienced trackers to search the interior for enemy presence. They marched light, living off the land, and tracked small guerrilla bands through remote regions that heretofore had been inaccessible to the French. They carried radios, so if they contacted a large insurgent band they could summon reinforcements. Helicopters rapidly delivered elite fighters from Challe’s General Reserve to surround and trap the enemy. Moreover, the French benefited from accurate intelligence, much of it extracted by torture, but also numerous useful windfalls obtained from a very successful radio-interception service.
The two-month-long Operation Oranie proved an outstanding success. The French claimed to have killed more than 1,600 guerrillas while capturing another 460 along with large quantities of weapons and ammunition. Challe estimated that the campaign had eliminated fully half the ALN manpower in the area. While the casualty claims may have been inflated, there was no doubt that the French had delivered a staggering blow.
Proof of success came when pacification teams, left behind after the mobile forces departed, were able to work without significant interference from the insurgents. Army engineers built roads to link formerly isolated villages with the outside economy and the insu
rgents seldom were able to thwart them by laying mines or blowing up culverts and bridges. SAS teams moved into villages, raised self-defense forces, built more schools and clinics than at any time since 1954, and worked hard to show the people the benefits of remaining French.
Encouraged by these results, and having built up his mobile reserve to 35,000 crack troops, in mid-April Challe shifted his forces east to the mountains behind Algiers to begin a new offensive. Here the terrain was more rugged and results less outstanding. The ALN fighters dispersed quickly when the French appeared and thereafter successfully evaded contact. Challe tinkered with his tactics and pressed on through November 1959. The climactic offensive of the so-called Challe Plan was Operation Jumelles, directed against the Kabylie, where the FLN had first raised the banner of rebellion. From his command helicopter, Challe personally directed 25,000 men in a multiprong assault against the guerrilla stronghold. Marines conducted amphibious attacks along the coast, mechanized columns penetrated remote valleys, harki hunter-killer teams searched the forests while the paratrooper reaction forces waited on the airfields to board their helicopters when called. Overhead, the ground attack aircraft loitered, waiting to swoop down against any target.
Even in Challe’s opinion the results were disappointing. The ALN had learned from Challe’s first campaign and again dispersed rapidly and gone to ground. Although the French claimed to have killed, wounded, or captured 3,746 Kabyle insurgents, how many of these people were merely civilians caught in the war’s crossfire is unknowable. On the positive side of the ledger, the FLN acknowledged heavy losses. The French had lost several hundred killed, but compared to the insurgents the ratio was a very impressive one to ten. Particularly encouraging from a French standpoint was the fact that more insurgents surrendered than ever before and many of them volunteered to serve in harki units. To the French soldiers on the ground it appeared that the insurgency was in its death throes.
An experienced war correspondent toured Algeria and wrote, “From a purely military point of view, it could be said that the FLN has been beaten. Its last hundred-man katybas [organized combat companies] have taken refuge in the impregnable rocky highlands where they are contained. In other places . . . local fellagha [guerrillas] stay in the brush and the katybas, broken up into little groups of a dozen fighters each . . . change their hideouts every night. The only purpose of their operations is to maintain a feeling of insecurity.”8 Along the fortified frontier barriers, all the larger ALN units were reduced to harassing the barrier guards from their sanctuaries in Tunisia and Morocco. They could neither breach nor outflank the high-tension wires, barbed-wire entanglements, and floodlit minefields. Citing his campaign maxim to deny the guerrillas sanctuary in the hills, Challe proclaimed, “The rebel is no longer king of the djebel, he is trapped there . . . The military phase of the rebellion is terminated in the interior.”9
How true was this assertion? If statistics cited by Challe were accurate, namely that half the FLN fighters in the operational areas had been eliminated, obviously the other half remained. If Challe’s claim that the insurgents’ logistical base had shrunk by 20 percent in the past year was correct, a substantial base was still present. Challe’s assessment also overlooked the fact that by this time a new ALN chief of staff, Houari Boumedienne, had made the decision to cease supporting the katybas inside Algeria and instead rest, refit, and recruit a powerful new force in Tunisia. There they would be in a position to return to Algeria when the time was favorable.
Moreover, Challe’s large-scale search and destroy operations did not occur in a political vacuum. The question remained: to what extent had these “victories” persuaded the Muslim population to support the French and turn against the insurgents?
TEN
The Sense of Betrayal
Victory and Defeat
A FRENCH WAR REPORTER AND World War II hero, Jules Roy had been born in Algeria. As a pied-noir, he had special credibility. Roy visited a Kabyle village after a search-and-destroy operation had passed through. In some ways, apart from the tremendous number of battle-scarred or completely ruined structures, normality seemed to have returned. A French garrison provided sufficient security for there to be bus service to the distant city three times a week. The reporter saw fig and olive trees. The villagers harvested a potato crop four times a year. But as Roy probed deeper he uncovered the costs of pacification. One sixth of the population was dead or had disappeared, and most of them were men. Virtually every family had lost a male member to the French repression.
Military might had not converted these people to the side of the French. Most peasant families simply wanted to be left alone. They knew that if they chose to be “faithful servants of France” they faced insurgent denunciation as traitors to the Algerian homeland. Obligated to deal with the French and the insurgents, the peasants tried to take a stance straddling both sides. Roy discovered that many families had one man in the FLN and one serving with the French. The mayor’s father had been assassinated by the FLN. The mayor’s brother had been an officer in the French army but had deserted to the FLN. The mayor’s uncle was a local FLN leader. Sixty women in the village had husbands serving with the FLN. Another sixty had relocated to live closer to their menfolk who served in the resistance. There were four women for every one man in the village. Too few able-bodied men remained to prune the fruit trees, so nearly 90 percent of the fig trees were neglected and no longer bore fruit. Likewise, the villagers had abandoned cork cultivation. In sum, the village’s agricultural staples were gone.
In July 1959 the conservative French newspaper Le Figaro exposed to the French public a heretofore ignored aspect of pacification: population regroupment on a massive scale with associated abuse and neglect. Back in 1957, when military engineers had constructed the frontier barriers, the French initiated a population regroupment program that moved people away from the borders into new villages and towns. In the interior, near insurgent strongholds, there were other regroupments designed to isolate the people from the guerrillas. Thereafter, the French razed the abandoned villages and entire regions became free-fire zones. Lastly, as part of the Challe Plan, there were more large regroupments away from remote areas, again in order to move people outside the range of the insurgents. The population shifts eventually relocated at least 1 million people, or 11 percent of the Muslim population.1 An approving French colonel observed, with unconscious irony, “In effect, we are reestablishing the old system of medieval fortified villages, designed to protect the inhabitants against marauding bands.”2
Supposedly, the French army provided medical care, education, and employment for the relocated people. Le Figaro reported anything but. At a camp near Philippeville, for two years families had crowded into exposed tent cities where summer temperatures reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Children were emaciated stick figures dressed in torn rags. And the Philippeville tent city was not an isolated example. Roy wrote for L’Express about shantytowns near Algiers where refugees lived in “shacks in which even animals wouldn’t live in France.” Roy continued his inspections and encountered tens of thousands of wretched refugees living in squalid urban slums: “They have fled relocation and war, out of terror, and have become beggars and public charges . . . Without water, without sewage or sanitation of any kind, without land to cultivate and for the most part without work.”3 Even the paratroop general Massu found the scene at a regroupment camp outside of Algiers deplorable, with people living in miserable squalor below levels he had seen in the most destitute parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
The Figaro report and subsequent similar accounts in other newspapers shocked the French public. The depictions of the regroupment camps were too close to well-remembered scenes of German concentration camps. Such accounts, along with continuing and disquieting reports of torture, demoralized the French public.
Yet from a strictly military perspective, Algeria looked entirely different. By the end of 1959 the combination of fortified barriers and the Challe Plan ha
d dramatically shifted the war’s military momentum in the French favor. Urban terror attacks had diminished to a tolerable level, with an average of only four incidents a month occurring in Algiers. In the hinterland, Challe’s offensive had inflicted irreplaceable losses. The offensive had also driven the ALN out of many of their traditional strongholds. Like wild African animals forced during the dry season to congregate around water holes, the ALN concentrated in their remaining sanctuaries, where they presented the French hunters a more vulnerable target.
For one last agonizing time, French soldiers believed that the army’s blood sacrifices had brought victory. This belief would heighten their sense of betrayal when de Gaulle concluded that the war was being lost because of waning domestic support and international opposition to colonialism.
IN SPITE OF all military successes, the French could not devise a political formula to end the conflict. De Gaulle dreamed that historically close cultural, commercial, and sentimental ties would preserve a union of Algeria and France. Toward that union he crafted new policies granting Algerians the full rights of French citizens. De Gaulle went to Algeria to announce plans to provide better education and medical services, to create jobs for Muslims, and to admit them into the highest ranks of public service. These were variants of the reforms that had been promised in the past. By now, the spirit of nationalism was too strongly entrenched among the Muslim population to admit any compromise. When de Gaulle visited a model resettlement town in the traditional insurgent stronghold of Kabylie, villagers greeted him with cheers while schoolchildren chanted “La Marseillaise.” Just before he departed, a Muslim town clerk stopped him to murmur, “Mon général, don’t be taken in! Everyone here wants independence.” Such encounters confirmed de Gaulle’s belief that “in spite of our crushing superiority in military means, it would be a futile waste of men and money” to try to retain the status quo.”4