The French Foreign Legion Read online

  Occasionally a female fell was captured in the field. For obvious reasons, Worden does not name the captain involved when a wounded ALN paymaster was taken prisoner. The captain ordered her wound dressed by the company medic before she was delivered to his tent ‘for interrogation’. Intent on his own pleasure, he overlooked until it was too late what was happening to her satchel of notes in various currencies, of which Worden’s share was $2,000 and £800.[58] So he says …

  As in the east of the country, so in the west. During 1958 half-tracks of 1 REI patrolled the minefields and three-metre high wire tangle along the Moroccan frontier for 260 consecutive nights.

  War in the mountains, war in the cities . . . At close quarters in the casbah of Algiers the Legion paras were in an alien world where everyone was the enemy. Through ‘information received in the usual way’, legionnaires from 1 REP captured local ALN commander Yacef Sa’adi and his chief bomber Zohra Drif there on 23 September 1957. After Col Jeanpierre and Sgt Maj Tasnady were wounded by a hand grenade thrown by Sa’adi, he climbed out of the hideaway choking from the smoke of all the paperwork on fire behind him. The French-educated FLN leadership had a bureaucratic obsession with minutes of meetings, lists of membership and copies of written orders that came in very useful for the Intelligence analysts when found intact.

  On 8 October a notorious ALN assassin with the Runyonesque name of Ali La Pointe was run to earth in another casbah hideout, allegedly by Tasnady dressed as an Arab woman. La Pointe refused to emerge, his comrades-in-arms Larbi Ben M’Hidi having been ‘suicided’ in a French prison at the same time as Ali Boumendjel by Gen Aussarès – allegedly on orders from François Mitterand, then Minister of Justice.[59] Still bandaged from his grenade wound and in no mood to risk his men’s lives, Jeanpierre ordered the neighbouring properties evacuated so that the hideout could be blown up. Lt Simonot, two German legionnaires and Cpl Ray Palin from Liverpool set charges against the false wall behind which La Pointe was hiding. Unaware that the terrorist’s store of plastic explosive was on the other side of the wall, they found out when the entire block blew up with them inside. Palin lost an eye, but La Pointe lost his life, along with seventeen Muslims in neighbouring houses.

  Massu never apologised for the incidental deaths, nor for the torture, instead justifying the acts of his men by saying that if they had used conventional means of fighting the ALN every suspect would have been killed, whereas the victims of torture were still alive decades later. The body count of 1 REP in this dirty seven-and-a-half-year war ran to about 2,000 killed or captured, in the course of which the regiment lost 123 dead and 350 wounded. Given a regimental strength of about 850 superbly fit trained soldiers, the casualty figures testify that they were not fighting only innocent civilians.

  Chapter 4: Dare call it treason

  Algeria 1957- 62

  Always leading from the front, Jeanpierre broke with Legion tradition by inventing what he called le rouleau compresseur. This particular steamroller minimised French losses by a drill of ‘movement by sections’ using massive concentrations of artillery, automatic fire on the ground and a liberal employment of grenades. After 1 REP installed itself in the strategic market town of Guelma in an ALN no-go zone near the Tunisian border on 21 January 1959, the steamroller’s first run three days later accounted for ninety-two border-crossers killed before breakfast. Day after day, buzzing around in his Alouette personal command helicopter and heliportering his men in Shawnee H-21 Flying Bananas to where they were least expected, Jeanpierre carved up the enemy.

  A latter-day crusader who never let up the pressure on himself or his men, his end was inevitable. By Camerone Day of 1958, his hard-driven 1 REP had been in action almost continuously for eight months. It may be that the ALN chose 1 April to launch a major offensive in the hope that all the Legion regiments would be hung-over after their annual Camerone celebration. Jeanpierre at least was one jump ahead, having trucked and heliportered his men overnight to Souk Ahras, one day’s walk from the Tunisian frontier, to reinforce 9 RCP under Col Buchoud, tasked with surrounding and wiping out a large group of border-crossers hiding in the network of underground Roman cisterns near there, whose exact locations were unknown to Europeans – not that there were many of them left in that part of Algeria.

  Some legionnaires had consumed a fair amount nevertheless. As Pierre Sergent described the battle, Jeanpierre’s paras did not bother to take cover, but lurched into battle singing their marching song Le Boudin at the top of their voices. The jollity ended with bullets, blood and knives one-on-one. Only eight prisoners were taken for interrogation, but the haul of six MG 42s, thirty-seven sub-machine guns and seventy-five rifles is a fair indication how many were killed.

  Living at that pace, something had to give. On 19 May Jeanpierre – in his habitual, but then revolutionary, way of directing a battle – was over-flying an engagement in mountainous country in his Alouette. On the ground, Capt Ysquierdo decided that the substantial force of fells hiding in caves could not be dislodged without wasting lives. After artillery had failed to penetrate the interior of the caves, he wanted to call in an air strike with napalm to asphyxiate them.

  Jeanpierre fell victim to the we-can-do-it syndrome and made another extremely low pass over the enemy positions out of stubborn pride and with his judgement impaired by exhaustion. An ALN bullet cut the Alouette’s fuel lead. In the brief comparative silence, the legionnaires on the ground could hear the last rounds of the burst of automatic fire that had done the damage. The Alouette vanished from sight behind a ridge, whence came the sound of a crash. Reaching the site to find several fells about to loot the wreck, Ysquierdo and Lt Simonot drove them off, to find their colonel and his pilot dead. The news was broken to the Legion by Ysquierdo’s terse radio message, ‘Soleil est mort.’ It was almost poetic: the sun is dead.

  The massive turn-out of 30,000 people at the funeral on 31 May in the presence of generals Salan and Massu honoured not only the man in the plain coffin with the colonel’s gold-braided képi on it, but also the 111 legionnaires killed and 272 wounded in four months of combat around Guelma.[60] There were too many funerals, but the war was going well and the enemy were losing far more men and supplies than they could afford.

  In July 1 REP was posted to Algiers, where Massu himself was made an honorary corporal and downed the regulation quarter-litre of pinard before singing the sixteen rather monotonous verses of Le Boudin. Replacing Salan as C-in-C Algeria, the amiable pipe-smoking air force officer Gen Maurice Challe decided that with 80,000 highly trained men very effectively blocking the frontiers it was time to mop up the ALN in the interior. An all-out offensive spearheaded by the paras claimed 1,600 dead and 460 prisoners in the Saïda region alone. On the other side of the coin the Legion also contributed to the SAS. Unlike the British forces known by that acronym, the Sections Administratives Spécialisées was a hearts-and-minds operation, sending teachers, medics, midwives and other social workers into remote villages without even running water. Sometimes this backfired, as when an ALN unit cut off the arms of all the children who had been vaccinated. The cost was high for SAS personnel also, with seventy-three officers, thirty-three NCOs, forty-two civilians and 612 Algerian home guards being killed during the emergency.[61]

  Laslo Tasnady had learned the lessons of soldiering with the Legion in Vietnam and put them to good effect in Algeria. ‘Tunnel rats’ were not invented by the Americans in Vietnam. Tasnady used an Arab boy nicknamed Ouled, who would go into any hole with a torch and yell, ‘No one here,’ if he found signs of life. As soon as he was out, legionnaires blocked the entrance after throwing in one or more chlorine gas grenades. This was not Geneva Convention territory.

  A marksman who once coolly took out six running targets with six bullets, Tasnady volunteered on 14 May 1959 to be lowered head-down on a rope over a cliff as the only way of reaching an FLN cave refuge. Into it he swung a basket of explosives including a primed grenade, which gave at most seven seconds for his co
mrades on the cliff-top to haul him clear of the blast.[62]

  Tasnady’s upside-down exploit was his last. Minutes before climbing into the trucks waiting to take them back to base that afternoon, his men heard a single shot. With a home-moulded shotgun pellet lodged in his neck vertebrae, the soft-spoken Hungarian was dead. His body was carried back to bel-Abbès and lay in state alongside two other Hungarian sergeant-majors from 3 REI and 5 REI who died the same week.

  All the Legion regiments were in it together. Infantry, cavalry, para – the routine on operations was much the same for all: long days of scrambling up and down mountains with everyone, including the officers, carrying heavy Bergens when too far from a road for clothing and sleeping bags to be transported by truck.

  In August 1959, ordered to relinquish command of 1 REP, Col Dufour joined a hard core of deserters planning to kidnap or assassinate President De Gaulle on his imminent tournée des popotes – a whistle-stop tour of officers’ messes in Algeria to remind the army that it existed to enforce his will. Nothing came of the assassination plan, but hostility to the president rose when 1 REP learned while on operations in the Aurès that the green-and-white star and crescent ALN flags they seized in the packs of dead fells were to be flown publicly in Algiers during a universal suffrage referendum on the country’s political future. The regiment went on strike, refusing to leave its quarters. The strike was broken by the simple but tactless expedient of posting all the senior officers to other regiments. Many deserted instead.

  On 16 September 1959 De Gaulle, the champion of the army that had brought him back to power and the great hope of the European settlers, was hinting openly at the possibility of independence for Algeria. As a gesture 7,000 ALN prisoners were released and promptly went underground again. They had no choice, for refusal meant execution by their erstwhile comrades. Many voters in France would have given Algeria away at the first chance, had they been asked – including every farmer who could not compete with the cheap Arab labour of his competitors there – but the Gaullist officers of 1 REP were sure that their president would never abandon the pieds noirs. Had he not voiced their much-chanted slogan Algérie française many times?

  They had yet to learn that, like the utterances of the Pythia at Delphi, De Gaulle’s could be construed in many ways. For telling a German journalist what he thought of the amnesty, Massu was summoned to Paris and sacked. The European inhabitants of Algiers rose in support of their man and barricaded the town in a citizens’ revolt. De Gaulle ordered the forces of order to crush them, with the result that 1 REP was hauled in from the field and ordered to restore order in the capital.

  Traditionally, the army in North Africa was not greatly respected by the settlers, and the Legion with its history of welcoming all-comers least of all. Certainly no pied noir wanted his daughter to marry a legionnaire. But the times, they were a-changing: welcomed as saviours by the settlers who had just killed fourteen over-zealous gendarmes, the legionnaires fraternised freely, accepting flowers and kisses from the pretty girls and feeling naturally good, for these were, after all, the people they were in Algeria to protect. Beneath the overt bonhomie on the streets many of the officers were privately making last-ditch promises, from which the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) was later born.

  On 1 February 1960 the very Gaullist commander of 2 REP, Col Darmuzai, was furious at the arrival in 2 REP’s camp at Chefka of men from 1 REP who had been arrested on the barricades in Algiers. He had no objection to running a work camp for mutineers, but feared the prisoners might ‘infect’ with partisan sympathies his officers and men, especially the few married to local girls. In fact, their stay of one month would have passed off without incident, had not the government broken its word that no one would be singled out for especial punishment. Ten days after their arrival, the new colonel of 1 REP Maurice Guiraud arrived by helicopter to take two of them away for trial, and even the more Gaullist officers saw this as a breach of honour.

  Against the background of political manoeuvring in preparation for the government’s volte-face, the war in the mountains continued, its goals becoming as muddy as the hillsides on which the legionnaires slipped and slid and died for the rest of that winter. As 1 REP’s padre said at a funeral, speaking in front of ten coffins, each bearing a képi, ‘We no longer know what we are dying for.’

  In his second tournée des popotes during March 1960, with De Gaulle talking openly of Algérie algérienne – Algeria for the Algerians – the listening officers knew that independence would mean a mass exodus of the settlers or a bloodbath with a million European victims. Only by constantly changing his itinerary did their president escape four assassination attempts in the space of a few days. Intelligence officers of SDECE were meanwhile turning one ALN faction against another. When Si Salah, the commander of willaya IV, was received with two of his adjutants by De Gaulle at the Elysée Palace on 9 June, the talks came to nothing, but SDECE made sure the ALN high command got to hear about them, which resulted in the would-be go-betweens being purged by their own comrades in Algiers.

  Maj Elie Denoix de St-Marc was named acting CO of 1 REP after Guiraud left on sick leave, of which the main cause was seeing too many of his men die in a war that was as good as won militarily for a government that was turning the achievement into a defeat for political reasons. Yet the military machine went on turning nevertheless. British legionnaire Simon Murray joined up in February 1960 and fortunately kept a day-by-day diary of his experiences. At the time there were probably no more than fifty British legionnaires, whose ‘club’ was the Foot Bar – ‘foot’ meaning football – in bel-Abbès, where several of them regularly drank and used the notice board to keep in touch with compatriots based elsewhere.

  After parachute training, Murray was posted in November to 2 REP at Skikda,[63] just over 100km from the Tunisian frontier. At first sight, the immaculately kept beachside depot with its flower beds and sports facilities looked like a Club Med resort, apart from the barbed wire perimeter, but this was no holiday camp. For what seem trivial offences, or simply getting on the wrong side of an NCO, a man spent eight days’ in taule, during which his pay went into company funds. Nor did the days count for service, so that a frequent recidivist risked finding his demob date extended again and again.

  Heads shaven, dressed night and day in the same stinking fatigues, for the slightest infringement of the draconian rules, prisoners were awarded ‘musical’ press-ups with the hands clapped in front of the body on each ‘up’. The bruises to the face each time it collided with the concrete floor accounted for the rumour that the prison NCOs beat up prisoners. The worst of the punishment was not the physical hardship, but being unable to keep clean. Cleanliness was so dinned into every recruit that spending a week in the same dirty clothes, without being allowed to wash or even clean his teeth, was the strongest deterrent.

  There were eight companies in 2 REP, four rifle companies, one for transport, an assault company, the compagnie d’appui with its mortars and the rejects and skivers in the depot company back in base. On joining 3rd Company in the Aurès Mountains, Murray was surprised to find the whores of the company brothel toughing it out under canvas for the same rates as their sisters back at base: £1 for a quickie or £5 for the night. At the funerals of 2 REP, Cabiro records the madam of the BMC and her girls standing side-by-side with the officers’ wives, their presence offending no one.[64]

  Under an ex-SS sergeant-major and two German sergeants, Murray was on patrol next day. A three-hour truck drive into the mountains of the Djebel Chélia was followed by a climb of 1,000 metres for an operation with 1st Company combining dive-bombers, artillery and helicopters. His Christmas holidays were spent on ops with 13 DBLE high in the Djebel Chélia, which he described as being as bleak and cold as Dartmoor in winter, with the German legionnaires singing Stille Nacht and everyone getting drunk to fight the sub-zero wind.[65]

  New Year saw him right on the other side of the country, patrolling the fortifications along
the Moroccan frontier. In March 1961 all four companies were back in the Aurès with 13 DBLE and 3 REI after an overwhelming endorsement by plebiscite of De Gaulle’s plans for Algeria caused hard-line settlers and officers in Algeria to form the underground Organisation Armée Secrète, together with Legion deserters of all ranks, their numbers swollen by comrades who had deserted from regular regiments in France and clandestinely returned to North Africa. The most important returnees were generals Challe and Zeller, who were smuggled aboard an air force flight from France to Algeria in the evening of 20 April.

  St-Marc’s hesitation about joining the growing anti-government movement vanished next morning when he met them in a suburban villa, flanked by all the officer-deserters of 1 REP. Suspecting that the civilians of OAS would use an uprising as cover for settling personal scores, St-Marc’s condition for supporting their coup was that it be executed under military discipline, and not as a popular uprising. It has been suggested that 1 REP and 2 REP became the most ‘political’ regiments in Algeria because they were never rotated back to France as regular army regiments were, but the true reason for their prominence in the putsch lies in the unqualified loyalty of most legionnaires toward their commanders. Legally, too, it could be argued that the legionnaires were not guilty of treason, since France was not their country.

  Whatever the niceties, towards midnight 1 REP was paraded in full combat gear at the magnificent base it had built for itself at Zeralda on the coast 20km west of Algiers. Openly joined by their officers who had been underground for three whole months, they sped off in a convoy of trucks to occupy downtown Algiers almost without bloodshed. It was a tribute to 1 REP’s training and discipline that the only casualty was an over-zealous infantry sergeant at the radio station. Prisoners loyal to De Gaulle included Délégué-Général Morin, Prefect of Police Jannin and the C-in-C Gen Gambiez. The military commander of Algiers district, Gen Vézinet, was arrested by Lt Godot of 1 REP, who bluffed his way into HQ with a handful of men and overrode Vézinet’s protests that protocol forbade him to surrender his sidearm to a lieutenant. So polite in every case were the paras that the Minister of Public Works Robert Buron was confined to his room at the Palais d’Eté, but allowed to use the telephone, by which he immediately advised Paris what was going on.