With the mass commitment of French ground units to Algeria in 1956 came a new phase of the Algerian War. Along with the troops came more aircraft, armored fighting vehicles, and naval support. Numbers of helicopters were introduced into Algeria and the French began to use airmobile tactics on a large scale. With 1956 it became impossible for the FLN to consider taking actual physical control over the portions of Algeria, especially along the Moroccan border, which they had wanted.

The FLN dreams of capturing Tlemcen, a city of 50,000 on that border, and declaring it capital of a provisional government were destroyed. Perhaps in response to the French mobilization order, the ALN staged a massive raid into the Sournan valley, a pro-French area on the Tunisian border, on 22 April 1956.

But increasingly, in order to outflank the intensified French efforts against the rural willayas, the FLN began to penetrate the Algerian cities. By 1956 the security situation at Algiers was so desperate that the French erected barricades and inspection points at all the entrances to the Moslem quarter of the Casbah in order to trap ALN terrorists in the French-patrolled downtown section of the city. FLN strength in Algiers alone was estimated at 4,000 men with numerous supporters and sympathizers.

The French Command initially regarded mobilization as a panacea. For the first time the French would have sufficient forces to conduct extensive ground operations. Much was expected of the new French commander, General Raoul Salan, who was one of the few French generals in Indochina to come in through that experience with his reputation untarnished.

In Algeria, Salan joined the many Paratroop, Legion, and Colonial Corps officers who were back from Indochina and had very strong ideas on how the Algerian War should be fought. The ability of Salan rested upon his willingness to allow these officers freedom of action while at the same time incorporating their activities into the framework of a pacification system for all Algeria. Salan developed this pacification system to an unprecedented degree of sophistication.

The French system was organized at the lowest levels of Algerian society and then worked its way up. At the village level, or perhaps the ward level in the cities, functioned the SAS/SAU. SAS/SAU was an organization of military personnel (and civilians under contract) which specialized in civil affairs. In many villages, SAS officers constructed the first schools or market places that the villages had ever had. By 1959, over 4,000 SAS pesonnel operated 660 sections throughout Algeria.

The SAS program of civil-military relations was combined also with a more conventional program of military self-defense. In essence, villages which pledged their loyalty to the French could receive weapons with which to equip local villagers as village guards. The French, for their part, made strenuous efforts to ascertain the real loyalties of a given village before distributing arms to it.

While this program started very early in the war, before Salan took over the command, only about 3,200 rifles had been given to villages (thus there were probably less than a hundred villages participating). It was under Salan, and his successor General Maurice Challe, that 1,840 villages were armed (66-75% of the number the French considered necessary for the total pacification of Algeria).

Combined with these programs of civil affairs and village self-defense was a massive resettlement campaign. Of the Algerian population of 9,500,000, about one million lived in the urban areas along the Mediterranean coast. The population of the bled, or mountains and deserts far to the south of the coastal plain, was relatively small, largely loyal to the FLN, and relatively impervious to French penetration because of the lack of roads and airfields. These Moslems were largely ignored. There remained about eight million people in the rural areas of the north coastal plain in which the French concentrated their operations.

The French considered that small villages could be moved, concentrated into much larger settlements, and placed in French security zones so as to eliminate FLN influence in the villages. In the course of the Algerian War this resettlement effort moved upwards of two million people, or a fourth of the entire rural population. At the same time, the population, both urban and rural, was further controlled by the institution of new indentification methods and constant identity checks designed to prevent FLN infiltration into the villages and cities.

Salan combined these methods of controlling the population and winning its loyalty with a more conventional system of military pacification. The first consideration was to eliminate effective outside support for the FLN. In this connection the French blocked off both the Moroccan and Tunisian borders, placing three full Army divisions on the Tunisian border and building a defense line, the Morice Line, along the Tunisian frontier. Naval vessels patrolled the Algerian coast in order to prevent steamers from slipping in and unloading supplies.

Within Algeria, taking off from the attempt to isolate the ALN from outside support, the French used the famed 'oil slick' (quadrillage) method. The newly mobilized regiments coming to Algeria in 1956 were used to occupy the main towns and communication routes. Since, in many cases, these same routes marked the boundaries of the ALN willaya command zones, the quadrillage system had the effect of making communication between willayas more difficult, as well as posing an additional obstacle to ALN troops infiltrated across the border and trying to reach their operational areas.

French troop requirements for this system of territorial occupation were quite large. On the Tunisian border, the Morice Line tied up some 80,000 soldiers. The Moroccan border was occupied by another 60,000 men. Nonetheless, it was the quadrillage which used up the majority of French manpower, for use of the quadrillage required about 200,000 troops, in effect every additional soldier of whom the French disposed after the 19S6 mobilication. It was the units left over after these requirements had been met, typically the best Legion, Paratroop, and Naval Infantry units, which were used as intervention forces for ground operations against the FLN. For most of the war the intervention forces constituted about one tenth of the total French manpower in Algeria.

TABLE 2: ESTIMATED MANPOWER LEVELS IN ALGERIA
Year	French Troops	Algerian Regulars	Auxiliaries	Total
1954	45,000	8,000	-	53,000
1955	105,000	18,000	-	123,000
1956	385,000	26,000	9,000	420,000
1957	420,000	33,000	35,000	488,000
1958	420,000	33,000	c53,000	506,000
1959	365,000	35,000	66,000	466,000
1960	365,000	30,000	85,000	480,000
1961	365,000	30,000	NA	480,000(?)
1962	340,000	28,000	NA	453,000(?)

Even more important than regular French forces in the formations of the intervention forces was the strength level of native Algerians serving with the French. Salan had realized the value of native troops in his last year in Indochina (1953) and in Algeria he was the first French commander to make an extensive, sustained effort to organize Algerian auxiliary units for service with the French.

Aside from special Algerian units serving particular areas or particular French units, there were three main types of Algerian auxiliaries. First were the harkas, regarded as field troops, who numbered 58,000 by 1960. Then there were the makhzan, Algerians who worked directly with the SAS/SAU on town and village security and numbered 19,000 by 1960. Finally there were the mobile security groups (GMS) which worked along police lines and had 8,500 men in 1960.

Yet, even at peak strength and including all the Algerian regular regiments with the French Army, Algerian manpower never numbered more than 115,000 soldiers. In the end the French, conscious of the necessity of recruiting Algerians to the French cause and using sophisticated propaganda and information techniques to do so, motivated only a little over one per cent of the Algerians to fight for them. This compared unfavorably with Indochina, in which the French were served by 1.5% of the Indo-chinese, and it is generally conceded that in Indochina the French were unsuccessful in motivating natives to fight for their cause.

Much of the French failure to get Moslem loyalties in Algeria could be traced directly to the French aim of retaining Algeria as part of France. In this context, the French could not promise Algerians independence if France won the war, and French efforts to convince the Moslems that the FLN were communists, were largely unsuccessful.

Thus, in a depressed, overpopulated country, many Algerians undoubtedly served for the sake of regular pay and rations; their presence facilitated FLN infiltration, and they complicated the overall picture. Their reliability was not above suspicion, and planning had to take this into account. Though many auxiliaries distin guished themselves in combat, the ten dency was to use them rather for recon naissance, for guard, supply, and transport duties. (Paret, 41)

The inability of the French to raise Algerian units of high combat value placed limitations on the number and types of units which the French could utilize for intervention forces. This gave the French few choices in the selection of tactics for use in ground operations. Essentially, the French sought to compensate for lack of manpower by using intervention units of high quality combined with extensive supporting firepower and mobility. The monthly level of air sorties, by March 1957, had increased to 10,000, and through to the end of the war the French maintained about 400 combat aircraft in Algeria.

In the quest for mobility the French began to use airmobile tactics extensively. In fact, the airmobiles assault replaced the reliance the French had put in parachute drops during the Indochina War. By 1960 the French had some 380 troop-carrier (H-14 and Vertol-21), 25 medium (S-55 and H-19), and over 200 light (Alouette) helicopters in Algeria. It was quite common for a paratroop unit, for example, to spend several days fighting FLN incursions along the Tunisian border and then to be immediately shifted 950 kilometers to rectify a deteriorating situation along the Moroccan side of Algeria.

However, the French could not concentrate forces for divisional and corpssized operations without withdrawing their quadrillage net in some other part of Algeria, and the slowness of concentration almost always tipped off the ALN to what was going on.

Consequently, few such operations were attempted, and the French persisted in using their intervention forces in reaction operations and search and destroy missions against reported ALN forces. Yet in spite of their deficiencies in native forces and offensive tactics, the French strategy in Algeria managed to combine fairly effectively most of the techniques then considered necessary to combat a guerrilla movement.

Theory and Reality

Many of the procedures instituted by Salan, while effective in theory, were not quite as effective in fact. The most obvious example is that of the Morice Line along the Tunisian border. The Morice Line was not actually a defensive line, but more accurately might be described as an alarm bell. The Line stretched 330 kilometers from La Calle, on the Mediterranean coast, to Negrine, southeast of the Aures-Nementchas mountain range,

It consisted of a doublebarrier of electrified wire, with the two individual barriers seperated by a minefield. Periodically along its length the barrier was backed by a fortified base equipped with floodlights, anti-personnel radar, artillery and armor. During the daytime the line was overflown by artillery spotter planes, and at night the wire was patrolled by armored units.

Each time an ALN band was sighted crossing the electrified barriers, artillery concentrations were called in on the ALN force, and ground units were dispatched to contain the ALN force and destroy it. While the Morice Line was fairly efficient, this efficiency was purchased at the cost of an 80,000-man garrison. Even this large number of troops, itself larger than the total ALN regular force at any period in the war, was not sufficient to seal off the border completely.

Early on in the war, the ALN formed a special 'commando' of 1,600 men under Colonel Laskri Amara whose sole mission was to enable other ALN units to successfully infiltrate the Morice Line. The ALN was favored by the terrain north of Souk Ahras, for here the border was crossed by a whole series of ridge lines which ran perpendicular to the Morice Line. The ALN was also favored in that the Morice Line ended far enough to the north to simply send units south of the line and into the AuresNementchas chain, which, under Willaya No. 7, was an ALN stronghold.

The key to ALN attempts to cross the Morice Line was speed. Amara's troops would break the barriers with insulated wire cutters and then drive herds of cattle across the mines to detonate them. If the infiltration were particularly important, it would be preceded by a feint attack on the fence in an entirely different location, drawing away French attention.

Once through the line, whether discovered or not, an ALN unit would have to get away before the French could deploy ground units against it. The ALN could not allow themselves to become pinned down by artillery or airstrikes. As quickly as possible they would seek either to disappear in the mountains, or to submerge themselves in the heavily populated coastal area.

In one particularly fierce intrusion battle, during January 1958, the 1st REP (Legion Parachute Regiment) was thrown in to catch an ALN katiba, or company, that penetrated the barrier. The ALN unit was caught near Guelma by 1st REP, and destroyed. But the 1st REP's commander was shot down in his command helicopter and his unit suffered moderate casualties. As late as the spring of 1958 the French estimated that the ALIN still managed to infiltrate numbers of men, along with 2,000 weapons a month, through the Morice Line.

In March 1958 the French decided to increase the effectiveness of the line. They declared a 'forbidden zone' immediately behind the line in which anyone seen would be assumed to be ALN and would be killed. To activate this zone, which varied in width from six to 30 kilometers, the French resettled some 300,000 Algerians who lives in the area. The barriers of the line were reinforced, and at particularly dangerous points they were tripled or quadrupled. Finally, the troop strength was increased with the addition of the 3rd Legion Infantry, posted to Guelma, and the 4th Legion Infantry, deployed south of the Morice Line to catch ALN convoys. French deployment of scarce intervention units for permanent operations along the Morice Line is a demonstration of the seriousness with which the French viewed this situation.

During 1959 and 1960, in the period of the Challe Plan, the French managed to keep 30 ALN battalions bottled up in Tunisia by operation of the Morice Line. This gave French maneuver forces inside Algeria an additional edge over the ALN, but the failure of these ALN battalions to cross into Algeria was due almost as much to the ALN's refusal to make a coordinated attack on the French positions, which were not designed for the defense of the border, as to the effectiveness of the Morice Line itself.

Colonial Twilight The French War in Algeria

Introduction
Origins of the Algerian War
War Comes to Algiers
The Year of Mobilization
The New War Strategy
Battle of Algiers
Challe's Campaign of 1959
Jaws of Victory