The French Foreign Legion Page 6
The idea of two European civilians being randomly murdered like this sent a shiver through peoples’ spines. With only 37,000 troops in Algeria – before the end of the emergency, half a million soldiers would be sent or raised there – Paris played down the events of All Saints Day, so that they made only two columns in Le Monde and even less in L’Express. On 12 November Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France stated categorically that, whereas the secession demanded by the FLN was impossible, reforms would be introduced to improve living and political conditions of Muslim Algerians. To this end, the new liberal governor Jacques Soustelle was prepared to talk with all sections of the population. Yet, less than two months after his arrival in February, a state of emergency was declared on 31 March 1955, placing the Aurès Mountains under military law, with the army authorised to destroy villages and move the inhabitants into ‘resettlement areas’.[42]
[SEE MAP D: ‘The Algerian War 1954 – 62’ below.]
The reply of the Armée de Libération Nationale – ALN was the armed wing of FLN – came on 20 August with attacks all over eastern Algeria claiming the lives of seventy-one Europeans and fifty-two Arab ‘collaborators’. As in May 1945, the forces of order reacted with speed and savagery, assisted by armed settlers’ vigilante groups. At the end there were so many corpses that nobody could seriously contradict the FLN’s claim of 12,000 Arab deaths.[43] On 24 August the government began calling up thousands of reservists. The war was on.
Where was the Legion in all this?
To avoid reporters tracking them down for interviews, the surviving POWs had been discreetly flown from Vietnam to North Africa in aircraft chartered by SDECE – French Intelligence. Few were fit enough for light duties, let alone patrolling. The discovery that a ration allowance had been docked from their back-pay, on the grounds that the Viets had fed them during their captivity, was hardly calculated to restore discipline and morale in men who had lived through the nightmare of Dien Bien Phu and eaten only rice for three months, let alone those who had been in Viet hands for four years since the fiasco on Highway Four.
Ostensibly to check them out for tropical infections, they were confined to barracks and given lectures on how to behave in North Africa in case they had become infected with the easier way of life, living with wives and children during their years in Vietnam. Those sent out on missions too soon simply collapsed. Only 1 REI was combat-ready in November 1954, to be joined by 3 REI on its return from Indochina, with 13 DBLE returning in May 1955 and 2 REI shipped back to Tunis, then posted to Morocco, where it remained until the country received its independence. The newly formed 4 REI did not arrive in Algeria until 1957.[44]
In December 1955 the para battalions expanded to become regiments designated 1 REP and 2 REP. There had been talk of making 3 BEP into 3 REP; instead, its officers and men were absorbed into 1 REP, which was commanded by Pierre Jeanpierre, promoted colonel. After fighting the Allies with 5 REI in Syria, he had been repatriated to France, was caught with the Resistance and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp before rejoining the army after the war and serving two tours in Vietnam with distinction. In Algeria until his untimely death he exhausted himself and his men constantly in the effort to beat the guerrillas at their own game. His story epitomises that of 1 REP during the next six years, not that he was alive to share its final disgrace.
After independence was granted to Morocco in November 1955 and to Tunisia in March 1956, Algeria’s new tough-line Resident Minister Robert Lacoste divided the country into ‘pacification areas’ where the army was to protect the civil population; ‘operational areas’, where it had carte blanche to crush the rebels known as les fells[45] and ‘forbidden areas’ whose population was forcibly resettled elsewhere, turning them into free-fire zones.
Four days later on 16 March the first series of explosions rocked Algiers itself. Since the ALN bombers had their caches of explosives and bolt-holes in the casbah or native town, on 27-28 May the first ratissage or manhunt took place there, with troops and police literally combing every street. So many buildings were centuries-old with intercommunicating passages and tunnels that the manpower required was massive.
The ALN’s riposte was a wave of individual assassinations. In case anyone was wondering why France was so intent on hanging onto Algeria after freeing its neighbours, the reason sprang for the first time from beneath the sands of Hassi Messaoud on 26 June. The oil pipeline to the coast was patrolled by 1 REI in rapid-response units aboard GMC trucks. On 10 August the first outrage of the nascent settlers’ secret army was an ‘anti-terrorist’ bomb that killed scores of Arabs and maimed many more in the rue de Thèbes. On 30 September the FLN launched a wave of bombings, to which French Intelligence officers of SDECE replied by using fighter aircraft to force down in Algerian territory a Moroccan aircraft, on board which Ahmed Ben Bella and other FLN leaders were returning to their base in Cairo after a conference in Morocco with ALN leaders. Ignoring international protests, Paris kept them imprisoned for six years.
It gives an idea of what life was like for civilians that Thierry and Geneviève Delannoy – a girl aged ten and a boy of twelve – sat up on one of these nights of violence with their uncle, listening to the explosions coming nearer and nearer their home. Their father, an army officer, was with his unit. Their mother was visiting a sick relative in France. And the uncle was more than a baby sitter. He had been entrusted not just with his brother’s loaded service revolver, but the sworn duty to shoot his nephew and niece in the head, should les fells break into the apartment.
In Biskra, teenager Hélène Auclair said goodbye to a boy in her class one Friday afternoon. Forty-eight hours later she was being driven in a long convoy to the farm on which he and his father had been murdered while working their fields. All his classmates were made by their parents to look at the burned bodies, and told, ‘This is the work of ALN. This is what they want to do to us all.’[46]
Pieds noirs were not the sole victims of the ALN terror campaign. Arab teachers and civil servants who worked with the French authorities received the same treatment. Interpreters had their tongues and upper lips routinely hacked off, while the harki interpreters who accompanied the French military on operations suffered sexual mutilations when captured, allegedly in punishment for the rapes inflicted on women in lonely mechta farmhouses, whose menfolk were away or had been taken prisoner. The level of terror escalated until the violent but legal ratissages turned into lynch-law ratonnades, meaning rat-hunts, where armed European civilians killed Muslims on mere suspicion.
The political and financial support which the ALN derived from Cairo and the anti-French broadcasts of the Voice of the Arabs radio station in Cairo were the main reasons why France joined the Suez invasion in November 1956. The joint UK-France-Israel operation was qualified by Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden as not a war, but just an armed conflict.[47] On 6 November 1 REP landed at Port Fuad with 2nd Squadron of 2 REC in AMX 13 tanks to take part in operations along the Canal Zone until the withdrawal. After the fighting was over a young para lieutenant by the name of Jean-Marie Le Pen – later to be famous as the founder of France’s Right-Wing Front National party – was put in charge of burying Egyptian dead, which he did with respect, insisting on all the bodies being lined up with heads towards Mecca.
Whatever the hopes of French Intelligence, the Suez invasion did nothing to calm the situation in Algeria. To stamp out the urban terror, on 7 January 1957 Gen Jacques Massu was ordered by Lacoste to restore order in Algiers using 10th Parachute Division, which included 1 REP. Patrols of paras in full battle order became a part of the everyday urban scene. On 26 January three ALN bombs killed twenty people and mutilated many others in downtown Algiers as a warning to obey FLN instructions for a general strike in two days’ time. Opening shops by crowbar, sitting in classrooms to ensure teachers taught and ordering bus drivers at gunpoint to choose between getting behind the wheel or ‘coming along for a chat’, the paras broke the strike after three days.
> Introducing a programme of quadrillage intensif, Massu divided the casbah into grid squares with files for every person. Heads of families and landlords were made answerable for the actions of those in their households. The files were used to check out every unemployed bricklayer by interrogations poussées – in other words, torture – until one of them was driven to admit he had bricked up the secret bomb factory. Thus located, it was destroyed on 19 February.
Because it saved French lives, Chaplain Delarue of 1 REP called torture in Algeria a necessary evil, like the Allies’ terror bombing in the Second World War.[48] At the other end of the moral spectrum, Gen Paul Aussarès, a shadowy figure in the universally feared Action Service, claims to have been explicitly ordered at the start of the emergency by François Mitterand – as Minister of the Interior, he was responsible for Algeria – to use every means legal and illegal to obtain information from ALN/FLN suspects.[49]
In colonial Vietnam it had been accepted that torture was used to extract information from prisoners, but Deuxième Bureau officers distanced themselves by claiming that it was applied by their interpreters in their absence. In Algeria torture became normal practice. Faced with the atrocities of FLN terror, few on the French side objected. On 28 March 1957 Gen Jacques Paris de Bollardière – veteran of Narvik, 13 DBLE throughout the Second World War and Vietnam – resigned, rather than sanction more torture. He received sixty days’ imprisonment for supporting the allegations on the subject made by his former subordinate Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, editor of L’Express.[50] In September of the same year Paul Teitgen, a Catholic Resistance hero appointed Secretary-General of the Algiers police, resigned after being sickened by the sight of prisoners who had patently ‘been subjected to the same tortures that I suffered in the cellars of the Gestapo at Nancy’.[51]
Which side began first to torture its prisoners is impossible to untangle, but it became such a normal way of exacting information that the French army issued the Code of Humane Torture. There had to be ‘reasonable grounds’ for suspicion, but what constitutes ‘reasonable grounds’ for torturing another human being? Often people known to be personally innocent of any act of violence were tortured because they might have some useful information, which could only be pried out of them by a fear greater than that of being murdered as a traitor by les fells. Other rules were that children must not be tortured and that an officer must be present at each session to halt the torture immediately suspects started to talk.
Whether it was used by a particular unit or not depended, it seems, on the officer in command. Sensible legionnaires who had learned early on to keep their noses out of other people’s business did not ask what happened to prisoners handed over to Deuxième Bureau officers and their harki interpreters for interrogation.[52] The practice was so widely known that journalist Henri Alleg published a book in January 1958 entitled simply La Question and everyone knew to which question he was referring. Before the book was withdrawn by the publishers under pressure from the government, 60,000 copies were sold
So many torture sessions were witnessed by 19-year-old conscript Pascal Chauvin that he had no idea of the number. The method, he explained, was simple. After a ratissage, a mixed bag of ‘suspects’ including innocent men who had had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time were brought back to the MT section at the rear of his barracks, where there was a large metal workbench, which was so hot under the afternoon sun that it burnt his hand on contact. Stripped naked, the ‘suspects’ were handcuffed and thrown bodily onto the scorching metal. A moment of relief came from the cold water with which they were hosed down – to make a better electrical contact, as Chauvin explained. Then crocodile clip electrodes were attached to the moist skin of scrotum and lips and the para whose turn it was to operate the gégène field generator started it up. As the current flowed, sphincters loosened and more water was hosed over the writhing bodies until someone could take it no more.
Asked by the author thirty years later, ‘What did you feel, doing that?’ Chauvin did not bat an eyelid. ‘Fallait qu’ils parlent,’ he shrugged. We had to make them talk …[53]
Jean-Marie Le Pen spent some months with 1 REP in Algiers in 1957 as a reservist lieutenant. Accused by the newspaper Libération in October 1984 of having tortured terrorist suspects, he was acquitted on appeal, the Court accepting that he had not personally tortured anyone. This was in line with the claim by one young officer attached to Massu’s staff that electric shock and water ‘treatment’ was not administered by officers, but in their presence by harkis and ex-fellouzes who had themselves cracked under torture and changed sides.
Whatever the truth of that, the paras’ victims were not only Arabs. A particular malevolence was reserved for les porteurs de valises – European Left-wing sympathisers of the FLN who took the voluntary subscriptions, the blackmail and the protection money collected in cash by activists in mainland France and brought it to North Africa in their personal baggage, hoping not to be searched. Some also carried weapons and explosives in Algeria for the ALN, believing they could talk their way through police and military cordons. When these men and women were caught, the sadism, sexual abuse and gang-rapes they endured meant that they could not be allowed to walk free and talk about it. As with Maurice Audin, a Communist lecturer at Algiers University who disappeared off the face of the earth after being arrested in his home on 11 June by paras of 1 RCP, the bodies were never found.
In April 1957 C-in-C Gen Salan cut the ALN’s supply routes from the training bases in Tunisia by erecting La Ligne Morice. Named for the Minister of Defence, the barrier consisted of lines of barbed wire carrying 5,000-volt and 12,000-volt current running along the frontier, back up by tangles of wire, minefields and ground-sweeping radar linked to batteries of remote-controlled artillery, which theoretically could wipe out any border-crossing group without a single soldier’s life being risked. This was not incursion-proof, but anyone cutting the wire risked electrocuting himself and also triggered a signal to rapid-response units of 2 REP, detachments of 3 REI and the tanks of 1 REC, who tracked the reinforcements coming from the training camps across the border and called down air strikes on them before they could get far.
On one typical operation, British Legionnaire James Worden thought that his company from 3rd Battalion of 3 REI was the only unit chasing a column of fells. Without, as usual, any clear knowledge of where he was, he saw a group of men in what appeared to be Legion camouflage fatigues running in a bleak and rocky valley below him, one of them carrying an AA 52 light machine gun, the rest with rifles and machine-pistols. Only when the three men with the machine gun were mown down by a Legion sergeant who had cut them off, did Worden realise they were the enemy.
Other legionnaires appeared over the skyline and advanced into the valley. Worden was so startled when an ALN officer with stars on his shoulder straps emerged from a bush thirty paces away with his carbine held above his head in a gesture of surrender that he would have shot the man, had not his captain pushed down the barrel of his machine-pistol in time.
After the bodies of the dead fells were arranged in rows for photographing by Deuxième Bureau officers, Worden noticed that their uniforms and boots were brand new, and found the ammunition in their pouches shining, straight from the factory, and the soap and toothpaste in their packs unopened, proving that their column had not travelled far before being wiped out.[54]
Back at the trucks, he had a further shock on finding several thousand men from regular regiments who been blocking parties in the operation. By early afternoon, he was back in camp eating his lunch, kept piping hot by the German cook. As he says, no legionnaire had any idea what part he played in the war, or even how effective 3 REI was. His world was not even 3rd Battalion, but restricted to its 2nd Company, outside of which he knew only a handful of legionnaires in 5th and 6th Companies.
He described without any emotion the normal way of dealing with prisoners. In mountainous country where every litre of water and s
poonful of coffee had to be carried on one’s back, no one was prepared to share his carefully hoarded provisions. So, on one occasion a group of fells were told to clear off by the section sergeant, while his men were enjoying a well-earned coffee break. Casting anxious glances behind them, the Arabs shuffled away, breaking into a run after twenty or thirty paces. Only then did the legionnaires cut them down with automatic fire, without even bothering to stand up. The report on the incident noted that they had been shot while trying to escape.[55]
Similar treatment was occasionally meted out to the Legion’s own, as when a young sergeant deserted near the Tunisian frontier. Had he gone without his rifle, it is probable that the Legion would not have wasted time looking for him, but to avoid it being used to kill other legionnaires, he was hunted down by his own section. Foolishly, he opened fire on them as they neared his hideout, and was shot dead. His pack contained not only family photographs, but also bars of chocolate and a spare water bottle, indicating that his desertion was not the result of a momentary impulse. The men shared out the chocolate, only Worden refusing his share.[56]
A more serious case involved a legionnaire who had deserted from 12 DBLE and spent six months with the fells as a weapons instructor. Taken prisoner alive, he was court-martialled by a captain who acted as his defence and prosecution. The trial was over in less than thirty minutes, with sentence immediately following: the captain ordered the deserter to kneel in the dirt, gave him two minutes to make his peace with God and fired a bullet from his revolver into the back of the man’s head. The only concession made was burial of the body; the bodies of dead fells were left where they died, and the places are now marked by monuments all over Algeria.[57]