The French Foreign Legion Page 8
Generals Salan, Challe, Jouhaud and Zeller persuaded Gen Gouraud to bring two of the colonial para regiments over to the side of the putsch. Next morning, the legionnaires and men of 14 RCP and 18 RCP were the idols of every European in Algiers. Oran came over to their side immediately, although Constantine declared for De Gaulle. In Paris, he condemned the leaders of the putsch on television as a quartet of superannuated generals out of their depth. Although the rest of the Legion had made no move, he was facing the nightmare of every French government since 1831: that the entire mercenary army of Louis-Philippe would get out of hand and blindly follow its officers in a new revolution.
At the naval base of Mers el-Kebir outside Oran, Admiral Querville was hostile to the putsch and stationed a cruiser offshore with its heavy guns trained on Zeralda camp. At Blida air base, just outside Algiers, men refused to obey their officers and hoisted the Red Flag. At the same time, aircrew loyal to De Gaulle ignored appeals by their former master Gen Challe and flew twenty Noratlas transports empty to the mainland, so that they could not be commandeered. In France, commanders of several fighter bases made it known that they would shoot down the paras, should they attempt to fly into French airspace in the remaining planes.
A measure of the confusion among officers and men of the other Legion regiments is conveyed by Cabiro’s account of the heated debates that day in 2 REP’s officers’ mess at Camp Pehau. As a staunch Gaullist, Col Darmuzai was 100% convinced that the president would never actually give independence to Algeria after a war that was all but won militarily. He was however unable to calm his subordinates who argued for joining their brother-officers in 1 REP while the iron was hot.
Cabiro, whose wife had just had their second child, was given permission to collect mother and daughter from the hospital and take them back to their married quarters. When he returned to the mess, confusion reigned, with the majority of the other officers in favour of joining the coup. His wife was relieved to see him return for dinner, but at 2230hrs a jeep arrived in front of their apartment with an invitation from his brother officers to take command of the regiment, en route without Darmuzai’s knowledge to join the rebellion in Algiers.
This, Cabiro agreed to do after asking his wife to tell his colonel in the morning what had happened and reassure him that the regiment was still his to command, should he chose to rejoin it in Algiers. Not seeking to usurp his authority, Cabiro was furious with the other officers when he caught up with them at Sétif for placing him in this position. He had no wish to mutiny, but they were metaphorically marching their NCOs and men into great danger, and his place was with them to calm the more belligerent officers. He thus became a mutineer out of loyalty to the men he commanded.[66]
At that stage, the legionnaires still had no clear idea what was going on. They were obeying orders, as usual. Simon Murray recalled 2 REP’s progress in soft-topped trucks from the Aurès to Algiers on 23 April, greeted along the way by cheering crowds of Europeans. Once again, the legionnaires enjoyed their popularity. In the capital, they were hailed as heroes by the ecstatic population in the streets to the exuberant accompaniment of motor horns beeping the rhythm of the slogan Al-gé-rie fraaaan-çaise. Murray and his comrades still had no idea which side they were supposed to be on because their NCOs had not passed on the gist of the officers’ deliberations.
Cabiro, the reluctant acting colonel, went from office to office seeking news. Everybody welcomed him with open arms, regarding 2 REP’s arrival as presaging a wholesale support for the coup. It did not come. From Sidi-bel-Abbès there came not a solitary signal indicating what the rest of the Legion was doing, but as the day wore on it became apparent that the paras stood alone. In vain, Challe worked the telephones from his temporary HQ in Algiers, to find all the promises of support he had received from other regiments fading away in the hour of need.[67]
On 24 April 2 REP was ordered to take over the Maison Blanche civil airport from the Gaullist marines occupying it, but without using violence! Murray recalled being issued with pick handles, with which the marines were, none too gently, shoved out of the way and rounded up without a shot being fired. At the time, he and his fellow-legionnaires thought they were at the airport preparatory to being dropped on Paris in a nationwide revolution.[68]
Confusion in the French capital was such that Prime Minister Michel Debré was panicked into asking the population to go to the Paris airports ‘on foot or by car as soon as the sirens sound’.[69] What they were supposed to do once there, except lie down and prevent the paras landing by covering the ground with their bodies, he did not say. More to the point were De Gaulle’s orders to ring the airports by armoured units. The president who had started his political career with the famous broadcast from London on 18 June 1940 calling on all French men and women to rally against the German invaders now used the microphone again to forbid every citizen to have anything to do with the mutineers.
By Tuesday 25 April, it was all over. Challe announced that he was surrendering himself to De Gaulle. Aghast at the implications for the men who had followed him and their other officers in rebellion, Capt Sergent went to the radio station and begged all military personnel to defy orders from Paris and live up to their moral responsibilities and the memory of all their comrades who had died. Nobody listened.
When Challe gave himself up, Salan and others were changing into civilian clothes for a clandestine life. Col St-Marc was driven back to Zeralda, there to await his fate. His officers clambered into a bus heading for prison. Their men threw away their berets and képis to the crowd as souvenirs and departed under guard on open trucks, firing their weapons in the air and singing Edith Piaf’s hit Non, je ne regrette rien – I regret nothing.
Among units tasked with sorting out this mess was 3 REI. James Worden recalled being detailed off to guard 1 REP’s brothel. The expected ‘favours’ did not materialise. That was business and had to be paid for, but the girls did press the men’s uniforms and cook for the ones they liked.[70] By then, 2 REP was back in its trucks, heading for the depot at Skikda. Summoned into Darmuzai’s office, Cabiro and the other officers found their colonel refusing to speak to them. Instead, he played them a carefully worded pre-recorded message, lecturing them on their duty and requiring them to make a full report of their actions.
After the others had left, he turned to Cabiro and spat at him, ‘You will be shot! D’you hear me? Shot! Whatever got into your head, to do such a thing?’
Cabiro replied, ‘If you don’t understand that, there’s no point in me telling you. I’ll write you a letter before I am shot.’[71] At that moment, it seemed almost certain that he would be.
Camerone Day 1961 was a sad feast. The story of the heroes of the battle at Camarón was read out at every Legion base and camp, but with none of the usual festivities. Col Guiraud of 1 REP was recalled from sick leave by Minister of the Armed Forces Pierre Messmer – himself a former legionnaire – and obliged to watch his political master issue the order dissolving the regiment for good, together with the two other para regiments directly involved in the mutiny: 14 RCP and 18 RCP.
On 3 May Cabiro and four other officers of 2 REP were arrested at Skikda and flown to Paris, where they found the officer core of all the rebellious para regiments locked up in the military prison at the Fort de l’Est. After seeing De Gaulle finally announce on television that Algeria was shortly to be given its independence, their anger was not that of the settlers losing their homes and livelihood, but of officers who had spared neither themselves nor their men, watching them die day after day, month after month, in obedience to orders from a president who had now made all the suffering and the deaths pointless.
Transferred to the Santé prison the following day and expecting to be shot after his trial, Cabiro asked for a typewriter and a teach-yourself typing manual, so that he could leave a full explanation of his actions for his children. His defence was undertaken free of charge by the celebrated barrister Maître Bondoux, a former chef de cabinet of
Gen De Lattre at 1st Army. The hardest thing for Cabiro was to be visited by his wife, 6-year-old son and baby daughter, whose mother had told the boy that their father was in the prison to work on some very secret papers. Faced with the near-certainty of execution or at least a long prison sentence for ‘unauthorised abuse of command’, Cabiro asked her not to bring the children again.
The enforced inactivity was hard on men of action, who had literally been working day and night for years. The high of rebellion swiftly faded into depression tainted by bitterness against the comrades who had ‘gone sick’, taken leave or otherwise welched on promises of support, and then covered their arses one way or another. Yet, so impeccable was the discipline of the imprisoned officers that they were well treated by the prison staff, allowed to take their meals together and exceptionally not even handcuffed on the journeys through Paris for interviews with the examining magistrates.
Brought back to prison on the evening after their trials, Challe and Zeller knocked on all the cell doors in turn to announce their sentences of sixteen years apiece. ‘If they don’t shoot us, they won’t shoot you,’ was the message. Other sentences ranged from fifteen years down to five or less. When his turn came, Cabiro stood wearing all his many medals before the highest judges and generals in the land at the High Court, gazing out of its windows at the stunning view of the Sainte Chapelle, unable to credit his ears when he heard the verdict: a suspended sentence of one year.[72]
By an irony that caused few smiles, those still in prison in May 1968 were released thanks to a section of the community for which the military traditionally had scant respect – the Left-Wing students under ‘Red Danny’ Cohn-Bendit who tore up the cobble-stones of Parisian streets to use as missiles against the tear-gas and fire hoses of the CRS riot squads and took De Gaulle to the brink of the Fourth Revolution.
In the immediate aftermath of the failed Algiers coup, with OAS mounting thirteen ‘near miss’ assassination attempts on De Gaulle’s life, every Paris policeman on traffic duty carried a loaded sub-machine gun. Tourists were warned not to ask them for directions in case they got shot accidentally by officers unaccustomed to handling anything more lethal than the service-issue pistol. Whose side the armed flics were on was made clear when thousands of North Africans and Left-Wing sympathisers took to the streets of Paris on 17 October. Several hundred of the demonstrators were deliberately drowned in the Seine or killed and then dumped into the river by CRS and other police units under Prefect Maurice Papon, who later faced trial not for this but for sending Jews to their deaths while Under-Secretary of the Gironde département during the German occupation of France. In Algeria the OAS was committing outrages against Muslims, but its victims also included some defeatist army officers.
For 2 REP and the rest of the Legion, the war continued right up to the very last day. Murray recorded living permanently under canvas during those last months, the regiment being forbidden entrance to its barracks at Skikda in case they blew them up as the men of 1 REP had done at Zeralda. In November 1961 he was with 2 REP inside Tunisian territory, driving the border-crossers back into the training camps and killing them there, where they had formerly been safe from pursuit except in a few rare cases that caused international repercussions. A freezing Christmas was spent under canvas near Sétif, with the German legionnaires making and decorating cribs with home-made papier maché figures of the Infant, Mary and Joseph and the three wise men in attendance, singing carols while suspects were being tortured elsewhere in the same camp.[73]
By February Murray noted a distinct rise in the rate of desertion as more and more officers, NCOs and men went underground to adopt the lost cause of the settlers, their lethal military skills being welcomed by the OAS, which was threatening to kill any European who tried to leave the country, and had spies in travel agencies to finger the would-be runaways. On one day there were 300 plasticages in Algeria, some committed by ALN, others by OAS,[74] whose most murderous arm was Delta Force, commanded by Lt René Degueldre from Belgium, a Legion deserter who had sworn an oath on Jeanpierre’s coffin that he would die rather than let the FLN have Algeria.
Whatever their motivation, his group of around 100 mainly German fellow-deserters committed over 300 sordid murders in the month of February 1962. On one day they targeted postmen. The next day cleaning ladies were killed. It was a campaign of pure terror using an arsenal of plastic explosives, automatic weapons, mortars and anti-tank grenades stolen from army stores. De Gaulle’s riposte was to unleash Gen Aussarès’ Action Service, which despatched teams of equally ruthless assassins known as barbouzes to wipe them out. The result was an undercover street war worthy of Chicago in the Thirties – with men, women and children machine-gunned from passing cars, or maimed and killed by booby-trapped parcels.
The defiance of the European civilians turned to despair. Pro-OAS graffiti on the walls were reduced to one: La valise ou le cercueil. A suitcase or a coffin, was indeed the choice for the Europeans of Algeria. A million civilians were forced into exile from what had been their homeland for four or five generations, leaving behind them everything except what they could carry in two suitcases per adult. They departed in bitterness and hatred of the president and government that had reneged on its promises to them, with traders destroying family businesses inherited from their grandparents and farmers setting fire to their crops and homes rather than leave them. Although promised a derisory compensation for their homes and businesses, they never received it all.
The country they had thought theirs continued tearing itself apart until a ceasefire was announced on 18 March 1962 to take effect at noon the following day after seven and a half years of war. When the Legion marched out of its headquarters in Sidi bel-Abbès, it left a town of 102,000 inhabitants, completely laid out and partly built by Legion architects and engineers. The newly appointed Inspector General of the Legion, Gen Jacques Lefort closed the hall of honour. The bronze Monument aux Morts had already been dismantled and removed by the pioneers. The banners and standards were taken down, and the black banners from the siege of Thuyen Quang ceremonially burned in compliance with the oath sworn by Capt Borelli, who had brought them back from Vietnam. The other precious relics – the ashes of US legionnaire William Moll; the wooden hand of Capt Danjou, hero of the battle of Camarón in Mexico; three coffins containing the remains of the Father of the Legion Gen Rollet, Prince Aage and the Unknown Legionnaire – were all transported on a special flight to Aubagne, the Legion’s new HQ near Marseille.
The official statistics compiled by the Bureau d’Etudes et de Liaison record 24,614 army and police deaths during the emergency against 141,000 fells killed. Officially 3,663 European civilians went missing or were known to have been killed during the war and 7,541 seriously injured.[75] An estimated 50,000 Algerian civilians were incidentally murdered by the ALN for alleged or real political reasons that included collaboration.[76]
Before one judges the manner in which the French forces including the Legion fought the Algerian war, it is worth reflecting that immediately after the French expulsion, the Arab liberation movement split in two with bloody results for supporters of both sides. Ahmed Ben Bella, the first president of Algeria, was not only ousted by his rival Houari Boumoudienne, but imprisoned by him for fifteen years. Released in 1980 after Boumoudienne’s death, he lived in exile fearing for his life for another ten years. Of the other wartime leaders, Hocine Aït Ahmed and Mouhammed Boudiat also lived in exile, with Mohammed Khader murdered in Madrid in 1967 and Krim Belkacem strangled in a Frankfurt hotel room in 1970. These men and their killers were the enemy the Legion had been fighting.[77]
As though to balance the equation of misery, set against the tragedy of one million pieds noirs refugees forced to abandon their property, homes and businesses after a century and more in North Africa, the French departure unleashed a country-wide groundswell of violence among the descendants of the native Algerians who had been dispossessed by the European influx. Apart from a small minorit
y of University-educated doctors, lawyers, teachers and pharmacists like the revolutionary leader Farhat Abbas, who was now President of the Constitutional Assembly, Algerians had been repressed as second-class citizens in their own country.
Five generations of hatred fuelled the violence latent in North Africa. Between 12,000 – 15,000 people fell victim to the internecine power struggles of the several armed political factions,[78] during which 1,800 Europeans were murdered and approximately 150,000 Algerians ‘executed’ for collaboration by their fellow-citizens.[79] Mayors who had done nothing more than accept office and negotiate for roads and schools and medicine for their constituents were attached to four tractors and pulled limb from limb in front of their families; policemen were disembowelled, kneecapped, blinded or had limbs amputated.
The worst fate was reserved for 25,000 harkis who had served in the Algerian regiments or as interpreters with the Legion and other French forces in the fight against the ALN. Whether guilty or not of torturing suspects or the rapes of women and girls living in unprotected mechtas, whose menfolk had already been arrested or were in the maquis with the ALN, they died most often with their penises and testicles stuffed into their mouths. Three years later the Red Cross counted 13,500 other harkis still languishing in Algerian prisons. In 1964 Algeria and Morocco were at war, each claiming it was the other’s fault.[80]
The people of France heaved an enormous sigh of relief that their Algerian war was over. Reservists in the regular army, navy and air force were demobilised to pick up the pieces of their interrupted lives. Conscripts and regulars were posted back to France where, typically, the 21st Marine Regiment numbered only 700 men. The question being debated by the politicians in chauffeur-driven cars shuttling along the embankment of the Seine between their ministries and the Elysée Palace was what to do with the Legion.