The French Foreign Legion Read online

  From the west, Huguette was the next to be assaulted. There, the surgical station was overwhelmed with more than 1,000 men needing attention. Such was the stench of unburied corpses, rotting body parts removed during surgery, the maggots pastured on wounds in place of unobtainable antibiotics and the excrement everywhere underfoot that many walking wounded preferred to return to their companies, where at least they could breathe the air.

  Between 2,000 and 3,000 Thai, Algerian, Moroccan, Vietnamese and European soldiers deserted. Since North African and European would-be deserters could not hope to pass through the lines, they dug holes in the banks of the river where they were unlikely to be shelled, and lived there on food scrounged from the daily drops. Known as the rats of the Nam Youm, they even organised a brothel for non-European troops without any interference because nobody had the energy or time to police the area. The Legion too had its deserters. 13 DBLE recorded seventy-seven during the siege. If they could make it through the lines without getting shot or blown to pieces, those who were Germans stood a good chance of being repatriated by the Viets to Communist East Germany.

  Re-supply was way below critical level. Due to the ring of anti-aircraft batteries, the drops were made from a not-always-safe altitude of 8,500 feet, so that frequently men, ammunition and food landed in Viet territory. Many of the 105mm shells that landed in the valley to telling effect had been acquired by the Viets in this way. C-119 Flying Boxcars dropped six-ton loads of napalm on the Viet trenches. Had this been the dry season, the hills would have been alive to the sound of crackling flesh, but in the monsoon conditions only local damage resulted, as Giap had foreseen.

  On 23 April the last counter-attack was made by 2 BEP as State Department counsellor Douglas MacArthur II was listening in Paris to a plea that US Navy planes be painted in French colours, with their pilots temporarily enrolled in the Legion, to bombard the Viet positions around DBP for two or three days without formally involving the USA.[34] The Pentagon, in response to French pleas for aid, also worked out Operation Vulture involving the use of Arclight bombardments by eighty B-29s flying out of the Philippines to drop conventional HE bombs and also nuclear weapons.[35] Given the intermingling of French and Viet positions by this stage, let alone the political implications, nothing came of either plan.

  On the night Huguette 1 was overwhelmed, Castries came to life and ordered 2 BEP to lead the counter-attack, crossing the exposed main landing strip in small groups. A snafu with the battalion commander having his radio tuned to the wrong frequency left the legionnaires unable to ‘turn off’ a friendly bombardment, in which they took 150 casualties. The survivors were subsequently merged with 1 BEP.

  On 29 April Geneviève de Galard was ordered to report to Castries, who personally invested her with the Légion d’Honneur and Croix de Guerre, the citation describing her as ‘a pure incarnation of the heroic virtues of French nursing’.[36] The following day the Legion made her an honorary legionnaire first class – as they did Col Bigeard at the same time. Paris Match called Geneviève the only woman at Dien Bien Phu, omitting to mention the score of Vietnamese prostitutes from the BMC who also nursed the wounded.[37]

  One day later, with the monsoon in full, drenching power, the French positions had been reduced to parts of Huguette, Dominique and two high points of Eliane. Active combatants were down to fewer than 2,000, mostly wounded at least once. On Huguette, Col Guiraud had a total of 500 legionnaires from 1 BEP and 2 BEP, plus 140 Moroccans. A stranger mixture was holding the outpost Juno on the banks of the Nam Youm: 150 White Thais and twenty aircrew, marooned there since their planes had been destroyed on the strip by Viet guns.

  The French artillery had enough shells left for twenty-four hours. Malnutrition and dysentery were taking their toll. One tank was still in running order and a few guns still firing. At Isabelle, the southern strongpoint, another 1,000 men in similar condition were defending a quarter of a square mile. De Castries kept muttering that a twelve-hour break would mean a relief column could be got through to them.

  That evening the Viet radio operators monitoring the French frequencies were surprised to hear, not terse orders and pleas for support or ammunition in code or the legionnaires’ slang that passed for a code, but a message in clear grammatical French, delivered in the measured tones of the senior Legion officer Col Lemeunier. Speaking into a 300 military communications set, he read a story for all to hear: ‘The French army was besieging Puebla in Mexico. The Legion was ordered to patrol and make secure 20km of roads used by supply convoys. . . .’

  All the legionnaires listening knew by heart this story of a battle at Camarón in Mexico that ended, ‘The Emperor Napoléon III decided that the name of Camerone should be inscribed on the flag of the Foreign Regiment and that in addition the names of Danjou, Vilain and Maudet should be carved in gold on the walls of Les Invalides in Paris.’

  Clean-shaven for the first time in weeks, legionnaires able to hear the message toasted the Legion in whatever was still drinkable. Had all their comrades in misfortune been fellow-legionnaires, many would have been tempted to faire Camerone and go down fighting as their predecessors had done in Mexico. But that would have been to condemn also all the other men in French uniform. Many wondered whether the Viets would be as gallant victors as the Mexicans at Camarón had been.

  They were not to know, but the siege had only lasted so long because Giap too had his problems: he was short of even untrained conscripts and running out of ammunition for the artillery. The huge losses of men and materiel were worrying Ho and the Party Central Committee. To raise morale, commissars gave rousing lectures on agrarian reform, promising that every peasant would be the master of his own land after the French were driven out.

  The international Communist holiday of 1 May was the day chosen by Giap to launch the final push. After a heavy bombardment from Katyusha rocket-launchers and guns now sited well within what had been the French positions, suicide volunteers threw themselves on the wire to make a human bridge for the men following. Wave after wave of Viets pressed relentlessly into the shrinking camp. Too late, Navarre considered implementing Operation Albatross – a last-ditch breakout, which would have meant leaving the wounded and medical staff for the able-bodied to escape through the Viet lines. But eastwards that was out of the question and lately Giap had deliberately increased the depth of the siege lines to the west, between DBP and friendly Laos.

  On 4 May the combined Legion paras on what remained of Huguette went down under a final human wave attack by Giap’s so-called Iron Division that had taken Dong Khe. On the evening of 6 May, with the French holding only part of the central area and Isabelle, the final assault was launched as overhead five Dakotas carrying the last 100 men to volunteer for DBP turned back, unable to make it through the anti-aircraft fire.

  Dominique and Eliane finally fell on 7 May. With the Viets within grenade-throwing range of Castries’ HQ, he finally ordered a cease-fire for 1730hrs, which was communicated to Giap. Those still able to do so destroyed any serviceable weapons and ammunition, burying parts like mortar base plates that could not be destroyed. The two M-24 tanks still working had their oil drained and the engines run until they seized up. An unaccustomed silence assaulted the ears. Men crawled out of holes and collapsed bunkers to enjoy the forgotten pleasures of standing up bare-headed or urinating in the open air. Others refused to emerge until a shouted warning was followed by a burst of automatic fire into whatever hole was their refuge. Despite the thousands of armed male and female Viet Minh soldiers rounding them up, some soldiers were so deep in denial that one MP threatened to place on a charge a Nam Youm rat he recognised as having filched medical supplies during an air drop – until forcibly reminded by a French-speaking can-bo commissar that he had no authority over anyone, including himself, from then on.

  A relatively small number of prisoners were shot, bayoneted or beaten to death, some for a linguistic misunderstanding or threatening gesture. Given the bitterness of the fighting and
the scale of casualties suffered by the Viet Minh, it is a tribute to their discipline that more prisoners were not summarily executed. Vietnamese prisoners in colonial regiments were immediately segregated for re-education.[38] Those in French regiments were treated as French. Most, if not all, of the whores who had helped Geneviève to nurse the wounded were killed. Some, it is true, had borne arms at the end, but they were killed because they were women and thus the natural target of angry men with weapons in their hands.

  Only Isabelle held out until 0800 on 8 May, to allow a party from 3rd Battalion of 3 REI to get away through the lines in darkness. About 600 men managed to escape, but the price was high: many of the wounded manning weapons to cover their leaving were afterwards shot for having contravened the cease-fire arrangement. That day at Legion HQ in the Quartier Viénot of Sidi bel-Abbès Col Paul Gardy ordered every man to present arms in honour of the lost colours: 2nd and 3rd Battalions of 13 DBLE, 2nd and 3rd Battalions of 3 REI, 1st battalion of 2 REI, 1st and 2nd BEP. That was not the full list, because the volunteers had come from many other units, but it was enough.

  Ho and Giap had gone all out to end the siege by 8 May, aware that it was the ninth anniversary of VE Day – the Allied victory over Nazi Germany – and that a major French defeat on such a date would be taken in Asia and many other parts of the world as a sign that the days of European colonialism were over.

  Red Cross Dakotas evacuated 858 severely wounded men and brought in medical supplies. As the long columns of POWs were herded out of the valley, even those with leg and foot wounds had to ford the Nam Youm because the still intact Bailey bridge across the river was a filming location. An East European film unit was recording a dramatised re-enactment of the last assault. Offered cigarettes to play the parts of themselves, the prisoners refused – although later they would take part, waving white flags as they shambled past the cameras near their prison camps, for reasons that can be guessed. Leaving DBP, some men were not fully dressed or lacked head covering or shoes; others had prudently packed food and toilet articles and changes of underwear in kitbags. One surprise punishment was to find that shaving was forbidden because their Vietnamese captors considered it a sign of intention to escape, no natives having facial hair.

  One small group of legionnaires from Isabelle fought their way out and walked through the jungle into friendly Laos, only to find that it was not so friendly. At the first French post they encountered, they were accused by the Deuxième Bureau major in command of being deserters because they were not properly dressed in uniform with clean weapons, their clothes and footwear having been torn to pieces on the journey. Stunned to be locked up behind bars after all they had been through, they learned that the real reason he wanted them out of the way was in case they had seen too much of a drugs cartel he was running. Killing their guards with their bare hands, they grabbed their confiscated weapons and walked back into Vietnam.

  Geneviève de Galard refused both indoctrination and repatriation offers, saying that she preferred to stay and nurse the wounded. Against her will, she was liberated on 24 May. Dressed in para fatigues with sandals on her bare feet, coming down the steps of the Red Cross Dakota at Luang Prabang in Laos, she showed less emotion at being released than three of her fellow-nurses who had come to greet her. Besieged by astronomical offers from French and American press agencies for her exclusive story, she refused, saying that her job was to nurse the men, not make money out of their suffering.

  A one-on-one personal war was still ongoing. Aged ten, Eliahu Itzkowitz was the sole survivor when his family and 53,000 other Jews of Kishinev in Rumania were massacred after the German occupation of Moldavia in 1941. In 1945, still an adolescent, Itzkowitz tracked down the son of the man he blamed, an Iron Guardist named Stanescu, and killed him. After serving five years in prison, Itzkowitz immigrated to Israel and joined the IDF paras. From a French immigrant who had served in the Legion he learned of a Rumanian NCO who answered to Stanescu’s description. Applying for a transfer to the Israeli navy, Itzkowitz jumped ship in Genoa and made his way to Marseille to enlist.

  Choosing his time, for he had no wish to spend more time in prison, he was in 3 REI during June 1954 patrolling Highway Three northeast of Hanoi when an ambush forced the patrol to take cover. Alone with his corporal, Itzkowitz asked him in Rumanian during a lull in the firing, ‘Aren’t you Stanescu?’

  Caught off-guard, the corporal admitted that he was, and asked, ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m one of the Jews you missed in Chisinau [the old name for Kishinev].’

  Nobody noticed that the wounds which killed the corporal had come from a French weapon. Itzkowitz finished his service with a certificate of good conduct, and returned to Israel.

  The defeat at DBP brought down the government of Joseph Laniel on 12 June. Pierre Mendès-France became Prime Minister with the brief to end the war and get the POWs home, cost what it may. By now few voters wanted anything to do with Vietnam. A producer who wanted to make a film of Geneviève’s story with Leslie Caron as lead got the same brush-off she had given the glossy magazines, but government pressure forced her to undergo a ticker-tape welcome on 26 July in New York and a visit to the White House in an attempt to fan the dying embers of US support.

  They call it the art of the possible. Mendès-France ordered the French spokesman at Geneva not to raise problems by trying to protect the non-French anti-Viet guerrillas and racial minorities who had sided with France. They had to be written off – for the same reasons that nobody asked the Viet Minh delegation why, if they had taken 11,721 prisoners on 8 May, they were returning only 3,290 in August.

  What happened to the other 8,431? A comrade of Cabiro’s who had been in the camps for four years since the debacle of Highway Four was only returned in September because fellow officers bombarded the French armistice commission with specific enquiries about him. A few incredibly tough individuals trickled back to France over the years with stories of their suffering that no one wanted to hear. Others returned smeared with the stigma of having become indoctrinated, whether by political conviction or in the hope of better rations or other favourable treatment. Outsiders who expected the men who had suffered under these turncoats in the camps to attack them physically or in print were disappointed. They simply said, ‘We’re the only ones who can judge them, and we’re not going to.’ No outsider had any idea what the pressures had been in this war that had cost the lives of so many legionnaires.

  Erwan Bergot, commanding the heavy mortar company of the combined BEP, was comparatively lucky. Taken prisoner on 8 May, he was placed in a POW column designated Convoi 42 which left Dien Bien Phu 400-strong. During the 700km march to Re-education Camp 42, eighty-three men died of wounds and disease. A further 250 succumbed to malaria, dysentery and malnutrition in the camp. He and seventy-two others survived to be liberated.[39]

  Chapter 3: Terrorism and torture

  Algeria, 1954-1957

  The lucky legionnaires who survived the Viet Minh POW camps soon had reason to recall the can-bos announcing during obligatory political ‘education’ classes that the banner of worldwide anti-colonial revolution would next be raised in Algeria. Like much of what they had to listen to in these sessions, the idea seemed preposterous: Tunisia and Morocco were protectorates with increasing internal autonomy, but Algeria was administratively French territory, as well as being the home of the Legion. It was unthinkable that an insurgency could wrest away control of the three départements of Oran, Algiers and Constantine, which had been part of France for thirty years longer than mainland Savoie – and never been annexed by a neighbour, as had Alsace and Lorraine from 1871-1919.

  That it all happened so bloodily was partly because, whereas the French colonial administration had governed Morocco, like the Romans, through the existing power structure, Algeria had not been a homogeneous nation before the French conquest, during which all traditional authority had been eradicated. There was thus no curb on the generation of political activists wh
ose violence was directed 1954-1962 not only against Europeans but also other factions in the revolutionary camp.

  To be exact, the violence started on 8 May 1945 when the VE Day[40] parade in Sétif – a market town in eastern Algeria – was disrupted by a demonstration of young Muslims waving independence banners. The heavy-handed Gendarmerie riposte, in which several demonstrators were shot dead, led to two days of rioting, rape and arson that left 100 Europeans dead and many more wounded. Before detachments of legionnaires and other military units succeeded in completely restoring order three weeks later, at least 1,500 Muslims had been killed.[41] When military governor Gen Duval afterwards warned the European diehards that their attitudes would have to change, he foreshadowed a three-way war between the army, the settlers and the Arabs, in which each side fought both the others.

  It seemed for several years of sporadic violence that Duval had been pessimistic. Then, exactly as prophesied by the can-bos in the camps, the violence broke like a storm a few months after their warnings. Between midnight and 0200hrs on 1 November 1954 thirty synchronised terrorist attacks on police and military installations woke people all over Algeria to the realisation that they were living in a war zone. Responsibility was claimed by Le Front de Libération Nationale.

  Most of FLN’s 20,000 members – from a population of nine million – were hesitant about their extremist leadership. Later that day, a couple of French teachers from an Arab school were dragged off a bus in the Aurès Mountains and machine-gunned, together with the caïd or local official they had been sitting with. The wife survived her wounds after lying beside her dead husband on the mountainside for several hours.