by Douglas Boyd
After dawn the absence of any other vehicle in sight convinced Koenig that his entire force must have been either wiped out or taken prisoner. Exhaustion, survivor guilt and his commander’s responsibility for the men under his command all combined to crush his spirit. Travers, at the wheel, heard him decide his duty lay in leaving her somewhere safe and turning back to give himself up, to be with his men. Happily, Amilakvari convinced him that he could not possibly give the Axis such a propaganda coup.[344]
Finally swinging east and then north, they were reasonably sure they had broken through all three siege lines, but missed cairn B837 altogether and stumbled by chance on the field workshop of a British armoured company, from where they were directed to 2nd Free French Brigade HQ. Larminat was not there, having left at dawn with two trucks and six ambulances to rendezvous with the breakout party at the cairn. With Amilakvari and Koenig stunned that they appeared to be the only successful escapees, Travers took the car to the MT section for makeshift repairs to the shock absorbers.
Her job done, she fell asleep in the shade of the car – and awoke to see a dream come true. Ambulances and vehicles of all descriptions were arriving separately and in convoys, suspensions groaning under the load of filthy, hungry, thirsty men, sitting, standing and hanging on all over them. The final cost to the Free French forces of the fighting breakout was seventy-two known dead, with twenty-one wounded and 736 missing in action, but by 1900hrs that day Koenig knew his gamble had paid off: he had managed to bring some 2,500 men of the Free French Brigade safely through the lines. Others continued to trickle in from the desert for the next three days. The Legion suffered worst. Tasked with securing the flanks of the breakout, it had least chance of getting clean away. Both battalion majors were taken prisoner. Maj Puchois of 3 BLE was captured, hemmed in by twenty Germans, whose officer courteously invited him to hand over his empty pistol after an exemplary fight.
Withdrawn to Alexandria for refitting, Koenig and his men were hailed by the large French-speaking population. High on their heroic performance at Bir Hakeim, some officers voiced unwise criticism of the RAF, whose support they thought inadequate. Since the Desert Air Force had many other commitments, this was another irritation for the British, including one very important visitor. Winston Churchill, on a morale-raising tour of hard-pressed Commonwealth troops in the Western Desert, ignored the French totally, which Koenig took as a personal snub.[345]
Nor did Gen Bernard Montgomery, the new C-in-C appointed in August to replace Auchinleck, have much affection for his French allies. However, in the autumn of 1942 as he prepared to push Rommel all the way back into Tunisia, Koenig’s men, regrouped and re-equipped in two battalions totalling 1,274 men, were tasked with carrying out a diversionary raid on El Himeimat, a strongly fortified ridge dominating the Qattara Depression – a basin of salt lakes and marshes below sea-level straddling the Egypt-Libya frontier, which was impassable to military traffic and therefore formed the southern end of Rommel’s line extending from the coast at El Alamein. The position was held by 400 Italian paras, well dug in and protected by minefields.
It was, as someone remarked at the time, not a job one would give to one’s best friends. Because El Himeimat could only be approached across an open plain, exposed to the defenders’ artillery, the decision was to attack by night, starting at 1930hrs on 23 October. Everything went wrong. Intelligence was badly out of date. As they moved into the radio shadow of the escarpment the command communications net failed, making coordination impossible.[346] Sappers cleared a path through the minefields, but when the first half-tracks of 1st Demi-Brigade stalled in the soft sand Axis artillery laid down a bombardment and German tanks appeared on the flanks. Bogged down and a sitting target, Maj Paris de Bollardière abandoned the attack, but with the radios out was unable to communicate his decision to Lt Col Amilakvari, who continued to attack with 2nd Demi-Brigade.
At dawn, more German armour counter-attacked and the Luftwaffe also showed up to strafe the Legion positions. The 2nd Demi-Brigade was under such heavy pressure that Amilakvari withdrew it into a defensive perimeter on a small rise. At 0900hrs Koenig ordered the withdrawal. On the Jock column safaris, it was normal for legionnaires to wear their white képis,[347] which were cooler than tin helmets, but Amilakvari refused even in battle to replace his black, gold braided colonel’s képi with a helmet. At some point on the retreat, he caught a 105mm shrapnel fragment in the head and was killed outright. His body was wrapped in the torn green cloak and carried away by his legionnaires to the unrestrained grief of Travers and all the men who had known and admired him.
Made cynical by all the hype and PR distortion in the media, one tends to doubt the wartime adventures of Susan Travers, the girl who always wanted to be a boy. They do seem incredible – as does her military career after the war when a change of gender, on paper only, allowed the fiercely masculine world of the Legion to take her formally on its strength as an adjutant-chef or Warrant Officer, First Class. Among the medals she was awarded for war service was the Croix de Guerre. Early in 1956 she was also awarded the Médaille Militaire. In the courtyard at Les Invalides, standing within a few steps of Napoleon’s tomb, she had it pinned to the lapel of her coat by the aging general who had been her lover years before. Out of respect for his and his family’s feelings, she never told her story until long after his death in 1970. In 1996 she was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur as her father had been, making them the only father and daughter to have been so honoured.
These, France’s highest awards for bravery, are not awarded for inventing fantasy.
Chapter 31: The stormy re-marriage
North Africa, 1942 - 1943; Europe 1944 - 1945; Vietnam 1945 - 1949
Although El Himeimat had only been a diversionary attack and the offensive as a whole was successful, Montgomery was not impressed by the Legion withdrawal after losses of only eleven killed and sixty-nine wounded, which he deemed to indicate a lack of determination. In reply, Gen De Larminat, an unhappy man who committed suicide in 1962, blamed all the problems on poor intelligence and alleged lack of British air and artillery support. Not he, but Bollardière was sacked by Koenig in an unsuccessful effort to appease Montgomery, who sent the Legion into reserve on 14 November.
This was six days after Operation Torch, the Anglo-American landings at Casablanca in Morocco and Oran and Algiers in Algeria which gave Rommel the ultimate headache of a war on two fronts in North Africa, where his Italian and German armies were now trapped between the predominantly US forces to the west and British 8th Army to the east.
The Allied landings met comparatively light resistance, with some pro-Gaullist units of the Vichy forces going through the motions but deliberately firing wide, not that this saved them from being bombed and strafed by American pilots, who could not tell the difference from the air. A squadron of Spaniards with 1 REC went further in surrendering without firing a shot.[348] Around Casablanca, resistance developed under the Pétainist Resident-General Charles Noguès when the invading forces tried to expand their initial beachheads. However, on 10 November the fighting eased and on the following day the French authorities in Morocco concluded an armistice.
In Algeria the situation was not so clear-cut, with some French troops remaining loyal to Pétain while others backed the anti-Vichy French general whom the Allies were sponsoring in North Africa, the tall, aristocratic Henri Giraud, whose reputation was unsullied by allegations of collaboration because he had been in a German POW camp until managing to escape in 1942 and making his way clandestinely to Algeria.
With Vichy C-in-C Admiral Darlan being in Algiers at the time of the invasion, the US timetable was put out of sync on 9 November by a French counterattack on the Arzew beachhead near Oran. On 11 November German and Italian commanders fearing an Allied invasion of the south of France overran the Free Zone that had been sovereign French territory governed from Vichy. They could hardly have done otherwise, but this breach of the Armistice agreement re-aligned
most Pétainists in North Africa, inducing Noguès and others to assent to Darlan's proposals for a working agreement with the Allies. Brokered by American diplomats, it recognised him as political ruler of French North Africa with Gen Giraud as C-in-C of all Free French forces. On 13 November, this arrangement was endorsed by Eisenhower against considerable local opposition but with the backing of President Roosevelt. De Gaulle was furious, but the deal with Darlan reflected his low popularity with the Armée d’Afrique, where fewer than 10% of officers and men recognised his authority. In any case, the Americans cared little for his feelings, given that their politically astute manoeuvre made allies of the 120,000 men of the Armée d’Afrique who might otherwise have continued fighting for Rommel.
Although the move brought the whole of French West Africa also over to the Allies, Darlan was unable to persuade Adm Laborde in Toulon to sail for North Africa while there was still time. Anti-German to the core, Laborde nevertheless understandably refused to bring his crews and vessels over to the side that had killed his friends and comrades at Mers el-Kebir. His one word reply to Darlan’s signal ordering him to do so was, ‘Merde!’ No less than 171 ships that could arguably have shortened the war were thus denied to the Allied cause by Churchill’s ghastly miscalculation of 3 July 1940. On 27 November 1942 the Luftwaffe mined the exits from the harbour of Toulon to prevent Laborde having any second thoughts, whereupon he implemented Darlan’s previous standing orders given in August 1940. Every ship in port was scuttled to frustrate German plans to take them over.[349]
For a month, everyday life carried on much the same in Darlan’s North Africa. Informers informed; people were arrested. Anti-Semitic laws remained in force. Deserters, including men who had fought for De Gaulle, were sent to disease-ridden desert punishment camps. Legion officers continued to display portraits of Marshal Pétain in their messes.
On 24 December Darlan was assassinated in mysterious circumstances by 20-year-old Fernand Bonnier, who had been given small arms training by undercover American or British officers. A coffin was ordered for Bonnier before his court martial, at which he confidently expected his controllers to extricate him. Instead, he was conveniently shot at 0730hrs on 26 December and buried in an unmarked grave, after leaving only a scribbled and ambiguous note on the back of a visiting card bearing the name of a prominent Gaullist.[350] His controllers have never been revealed but from this moment De Gaulle showed a flair for politics that amazed both his many enemies and his few supporters in the Allied camp, repeatedly outmanoeuvring his rival Giraud to become the leader of all Free France.
At the beginning of 1943 Rommel was being squeezed in the nutcracker of which the eastern claw was the British 8th Army – not including 13 DBLE, where morale crumbled again while it was held in reserve training in Tripolitania until the final stages of the Afrika Korps’ retreat into Tunisia in April/May 1943. Drafted belatedly to the front during the finals stages of the German collapse because they spoke the second language of the country and knew it better than any other Allied troops, they fought their way westwards. The other claw of the nutcracker, comprised of the predominantly American forces moving in from the west, had its southern flank secured by the six demoralised Legion battalions[351] of the Armée d’Afrique, given the miserable job of fighting their way eastwards in foul winter weather through the hilly and mountainous country inland.
The first to see action were the remnants of 1 REC, formed into one armoured car squadron and an infantry company which attacked at Foum el-Gouafel on 11 January, capturing 200 prisoners and thirty 47mm guns.[352] After handing over command to Gen Jürgen von Arnim, Rommel was recalled to Germany on 6 March, a sick man. On 23 March, 1 RMLE – or 1st Legion Marching Regiment – was formed from troops at bel-Abbès, including men who had opted for repatriation rather than join the Free French in 1941, plus 4 DBLE arriving from Senegal.
At the beginning of May they suffered heavy casualties at Djebel Mansour against German armoured units. Tunis was captured on 7 May and Bizerta almost simultaneously. With Hitler refusing to allow any German forces to be evacuated from North Africa, von Arnim was driven to surrender on 13 May. However, at the victory parade in Tunis on 20 May Koenig and his men were obliged to march with British 8th Army[353] because French 19th Army Corps – to which the Legion ‘belonged’ organisationally – not only included Barre and his men of 6 REI from Syria but, more importantly, was pro-Giraud and anti-De Gaulle. The divisions within the Legion were not over yet and the partners in this uneasy remarriage had to be dragged to the altar step by step, even after the official re-integration of 13 DBLE on 1 August 1943.
An honour guard of officers and men from 13 DBLE, sent from Tunisia to escort De Gaulle, was placed under open arrest once inside Algeria and escorted back to the frontier under armed guard. Gaullist officers ran an underground railway to enable deserters in Algeria to reach 13 DBLE in Tunisia. In reply the Legion’s internal Intelligence known as Bureau de Sécurité de la Légion Etrangère, or BSLE for short, infiltrated informers among the men involved. The first official transfer of seventeen officers, twenty NCOs and 180 legionnaires was given a very cold reception on arrival at 13 DBLE. Several of the officers who had sat out the war in North Africa decided to transfer out again rather than put up with the hostility of the more aggressive Gaullists.[354]
Morale in all Legion formations suffered during the ten months after the end of hostilities in North Africa. While being completely re-equipped with modern American materiel, it was also being milked of so many trained soldiers transferring to British, American and other Allied forces that Lt Col Gaultier echoed Rollet’s fears after the First World War that the Legion would dwindle away to nothing.[355]
Although latecomers in the long drawn-out Italian campaign, arriving in April 1944 as part of De Gaulle’s 1 DFL under Gen Diégo Brosset, 13 DBLE fought at Pontecorvo and San Lorenzo while redesignated 1st and 2nd BLE of 1 Free French Division. It also distinguished itself at Radicofani in the Val d’Orcia, where three Tiger tanks guarding the approach to the medieval castle on a high rocky spur were engaged by the machine-guns of 2/Lt Marcel Guillot as a distraction while Lt Julian and five volunteers climbed the sheer rock-face and cleaned out the company of German infantry inside the walls with a generous helping of hand grenades.
Withdrawn from Italy in August for Operation Anvil – the Allied invasion of the South of France[356] – 13 DBLE at last traded its Cross of Lorraine shoulder patch for the Gallic cockerel, in common with the rest of the Legion, although continuing to favour the Narvik commando-style beret over the traditional white képi until the final victory parade in Paris in May 1945. On landing at 1800hrs on 16 August at Cavalaire-sur-Mer, they passed from US command to that of Gen Jean-Marie De Lattre De Tassigny, consolidating De Gaulle’s position as leader of all French forces.
His determination that his troops should not be sidelined in the re-conquest of France placed heavy demands of them all, including 13 DBLE. Reaching Lyons on 5 September, they took severe losses in the fighting for Autun before linking up with RMLE and 1 REC after one unorthodox answer to the manpower shortage was negotiated in August 1944 by American OSS officers, who conducted through the lines an SS unit of 650 Ukrainians. They were enlisted en masse in the Legion, where they continued to fight under their own officers in defiance of the usual practice of breaking up national groups.
The change of allegiance did the Ukrainians no good. They may have thought the Legion was now their fatherland, but the following summer they were forcibly repatriated by De Gaulle under the terms of Yalta agreement, and shot.[357] Close to a million Cossacks and other Eastern Europeans who had been fighting not for Hitler but against Russian military domination of their homelands were similarly deprived of their rights as POWs and handed over by the US and Britain, together with their wives and children, to be executed or sent to the Gulag.[358]
Meantime, as an example of dirty tricks for a dirty campaign, during the bitter winter of 1944-45 a Legion detachmen
t carrying its wounded on stretchers was surrounded 20km south of Strasbourg. It succeeded in returning to the French lines after a German legionnaire convinced a sentry that they were Wehrmacht reinforcements, sent to prevent the escape of the encircled French! After divulging his comrades’ whereabouts, the sentry was the first to die.
Once across the German frontier, one of the German NCOs who had been shielded under a false name from the Armistice Commission – Sgt Maj Moulin’s name had been Porschmann – posed as a superior officer, interrogating by telephone the Wehrmacht and SS units about to be attacked in order to determine their strength and dispositions. In another company, the young captain allowed one of his German-Jewish legionnaires half an hour to finish his own private war. Given permission to infiltrate the village where he had been born and whose inhabitants had betrayed the rest of his family to the Gestapo, the legionnaire crawled off into the darkness with ten grenades and thirty minutes’ grace. The civilian inhabitants were hiding in their cellars. Ten muffled explosions were heard before he returned within the time limit, job done.[359]
Despite all the dirty tricks, casualties in what had been 13 DBLE were heavy, but no worse than in other French forces, hard driven by De Lattre to justify De Gaulle’s post-war political ambitions. So it was essentially paranoia and combat fatigue that drove two 13 DBLE officers to accuse the ‘other Legion’ in Sidi bel-Abbès of deliberately trying to wipe them out by making sure the Gaullist units were given the most dangerous assignments. Whatever the truth of the allegation, 13 DBLE was withdrawn from the German front in March 1945 and transferred to the Alps.
When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, France had not originally been allocated a zone of occupation in Germany, so one had to be carved out of the British and US zones. There, between October and the end of the year, the Legion sent recruiting teams into POW cages, offering a choice between donning Legion uniform and staying put at risk of being tried for war crimes. Most Wehrmacht soldiers had had enough of war, but men from the Länder within the Russian zone of occupation and former SS men who had reason to fear prosecution if they stayed in Europe, did volunteer to the tune of 12,000.