Three months after the first war in Indochina was settled, France
was plunged into another colonial blood-bath, this time in Algeria. It
would last eight years and kill over a million Europeans and Arabs.
The European colonists were Algeria's elite class. Numbering over a million by 1954, they held the best land, virtually all the available capital, and a lock on the professions and white collar occupations. The nine million Arabs supported the Europeans' position with forced labor and special taxes. They had no political representation.
The only advantage of French occupation, improved public health, created an Arab population expanding at a rate of three percent a year: the highest birthrate in the world at the time. This growing population eked out a tenuous living on the less arable fringes of the European holdings, and in a country which had exported a surplus of wheat prior to the arrival of the French, famine was now a recurring problem.
While Parisians rejoiced on VE day hundreds of Arab protesters
marched on the town of Setif in eastern Algeria. The police fired on the
demonstration, killing several and sparking a night of rioting in which
Moslems killed about a hundred Europeans. The French reacted by
sending troops into the area. The reprisals included bombing Arab
towns and shelling them from naval vessels. The official estimate of the
Arab death toll was fifteen hundred, however, figures in the range of 20-
30,000 are probably closer to the mark. [1]
In response to Setif the most extreme of the Arab political
parties, the North African Star, formed its own terrorist branch called
the Secret Organization (O.S.). It staged a number of terrorist incidents,
including the successful robbery of three million francs from the Oran
Post Office.
In 1950, the French police broke up the O.S., scattering its
membership. The veterans, however, gradually coalesced around nine
luminaries of the old O.S., and after a series of meetings in Switzerland
during the first half of 1954, created a new organization dedicated to
Algerian independence: the F.L.N. or National Liberation Front. The
F.L.N. executive committee divided Algeria into six Wilayas or military
districts and set the date for their first offensive as 1 November 1954,
All Saints' Day.
Of the one thousand guerrillas available to the F.L.N. on All
Saints' Day, only four hundred were armed. The results were meager: a
few abortive raids on arms depots and short-lived sieges of two isolated
police posts. The one success came from the F.L.N.'s sole veteran of
guerrilla warfare: Belkacern Krim and his band of three hundred in the
Aures mountains. Krim and his men destroyed millions of francs worth
of economic targets on All Saints' Day, and this shifted French attention
to the Aures. General Cherriere, commander of French forces in Algeria,
assessed the situation as a tribal uprising, and deemed that a show of
French military strength, a la. Setif, would bring the outbreak to heel.
There were fifty thousand French soldiers in Algeria on All
Saints' Day, and a quarter of these in four mechanized regiments charged
into the Aures to suppress the "local" rebellion. Road bound by their
heavy equipment, they were subject to ambushes and unable to follow
the guerrillas into the surrounding mountains.
The obvious need for lighter units caused the transfer of the 10th
Paratroop Division from France in early November. By the end of
winter, Krim had lost two-thirds of his force. Meanwhile, activity was
picking up elsewhere, especially in the neighboring Kabylie mountains
and around Constantine.
The French now realized they faced a general insurrection across
an area four times the size of France. Troop levels were raised to
123,000 by funnelling units which had served in Indochina directly into Algeria.
In response to the French reinforcements, F.L.N. strategic
emphasis shifted away from ambushing military targets to a deliberate
policy of terrorism against the Arab populace. The main objects in this
new campaign were Moslem functionaries in the colonial government.
Eighty-eight were killed in April 1955. The cycle of activity pursued by
Belkacem Krim in July 1955 was typical of guerrilla actions at this time.
Krim spent the first ten days of July destroying communications
and European crops, usually with the help of the local Moslem
peasants. The next ten days he attacked villages directly to deal with
those who were wavering in their support. The last third of the month
was given over to ambushing French patrols. The guerrillas then
withdrew so that the inevitable French retaliation would fall on the local
peasants.
The principle of "Collective Responsibility" was introduced by
the French in April 1955. It held that an entire local area was
accountable for the guerrilla activity occurring there; fines, and forced
labor to repair the damage done by the guerrillas did much to arouse anti-
French sentiment. In an effort to expand this wedge between the
Europeans and Arabs, the commander of Wilaya 2,
engineered an uprising at Philipville on 20 August. One hundred and
twenty-three Europeans died, many hacked apart by mobs, including
several pregnant women.
The French were outraged, and initiated a new wave of reprisals
similar to those levied after Setif. They also gave in to pressure to
distribute arms to European civilians. These "Territorial" units, with
little or no training, were of limited military value, but the vigilante
actions of the territorials combined with the actions of police and army
to bring a new wave of enlistments into the F.L.N; from their base of
one thousand at the beginning of the insurrection, the number of F.L.N.
regulars increased to six thousand by the end of 1955.
The lack of results indicated a need for new methods and the
most promising was the concept of the Special Administrative Sections
(S.A.S.). Created by the chief civilian authority in Algeria, Governor-
General Soustelle, in 1955, the S.A.S. was intended to bring French
government to rural areas where it had been notably lacking.
Each section was headed by a captain or lieutenant who spoke
Arabic. He had a small staff composed of civilian administrators and
gendarmes, seldom more than a dozen altogether, with which he was to
handle such diverse needs as justice, health and education for the Arabs
of the surrounding area. Referred to as "Kepi Bleaus" for their blue hats,
the S.A.S. officers established a firmer control over the old system of
ruling through Moslem intermediaries. The "Kepi Bleaus" were in the
unique position of combining civilian government with strong ties to a
military on whom they could call for support.
Six hundred Special Administrative sections were set up in
villages all across Algeria by the end of the war. While many more S.A.S. teams were
needed, it's questionable how many more could have been created. The highly skilled and
specialized Arabist required for the position was not in endless supply, and as the war went on, the organization became diluted by casualties (over three hundred
were killed and another five hundred wounded during the course
of the war), and candidates of lesser ability. Not a few of these
inadequate replacements ended up turning their headquarters
into interrogation and torture centers.
On a purely military level, French manpower tripled again in
1956 - this time to over 400,000 - by sending conscript troops from
Metropolitan France. It was an extremely unpopular move. One
artillery regiment staged a sit down strike for twenty-four hours before
being forced onto troop trains. Others went grudgingly, and in light of
the political effects of draftee casualties, the conscripts were delegated
to tedious garrison work. This allowed the institution of the
Quadrillage where mobile forces spread out from secure bases to mop
up guerrillas in the surrounding area. It was a repeat of the "ink spot"
technique used to conquer the country in 1830, but in 1956, it merely
drove the guerrillas deeper into their mountain fortresses.
The paratroopers and the Foreign Legion provided the majority
of troops for offensive operations against the F.L.N. As elite
formations they had spearheaded operations in Indochina as well, and
many had come into contact with the military precepts of Mao Tse-
tung.
The Algerian insurrection was believed to be communist
inspired, led, and supplied, and that notion gained widespread
acceptance, particularly in the ranks of the Legion and the paratroops.
As one "para" colonel put it: "We want to halt the decadence of the
West and the march of communism ... That is why we must win the
war in Algeria."
This almost missionary zeal found its greatest expression during
the Battle for Algiers in 1956. Due to internal political pressures,
F.L.N. strategy changed from its previous campaign of rural terrorism
to one centered almost exclusively on the capital city of Algiers. In a bid
for international recognition, F.L.N. agents fanned out from the Arab
quarter of Algiers each day, intent on placing plastic explosives in
places patronized by Europeans. One such device, planted under the
bandstand at the Algiers Casino, killed seventy. The police were unable
to handle this concentrated effort by the F.L.N., and the situation was
turned over to the 10th Paratroop Division.
After sealing off the Arab quarter of Algiers, the 10th engaged in
an eight-month campaign of mass arrests and torture, crushing the
F.L.N. inside the city. As in the case of Philipville, the ultimate political
cost proved to be very high.
Indiscriminate executions and the use of torture offended many on
both sides of the Mediterranean. A wave of new recruits entered
F.L.N. ranks, intellectuals, like authors Albert Camus and Simone De
Beauvoir, issued public statements protesting the excesses.
Militarily, events seemed to be turning in favor of the French.
French intelligence pulled off a coup in October 1956 by hijacking five
of the top leaders of the F.L.N. The blockade of Algeria, Morocco and
Tunisia was yielding large numbers of smuggled arms, and another
70,000 troops were arrivin& or being raised in Algeria, for 1957.
Even more encouraging was the completion of the Morice line on
the border between Algeria and newly-independent Tunisia. The line ran
two hundred miles from the coast into the Sahara and consisted of an
electrified fence surrounded by mine fields. It was watched by 80,000
French troops stationed at regular intervals along the line, and helicopter-
borne reaction forces could arrive at any breach in the line in less than an
hour. A similar line was constructed facing Morocco and was manned
by 60,000 more troops. Despite the formation of special guerrilla units
to deal with these obstacles, whole F.L.N. companies were sacrificed in
trying to pierce them.
Operation Pilote
With the infiltration from the flanks reduced, the French turned
their attention to the enemy forces still in the interior. Typical of this
effort was Operation PILOTE. the operation was launched in an area
eighty miles east of Oran after French troops dislodged the F.L.N. from
Mediouna in May 1957. The area was topographically representative of
Algeria, as its 700 square miles contained everything from coastal
lowlands to high mountain valleys.
The two primary thrusts of Operation PILOTE were to provide
security, and to create the image of an improving standard of living
under French rule.
The first aim was achieved in three steps. First, military pressure
on the F.L.N. was increased by stationing five mechanized infantry and
one armored battalion in PILOTE area. They remained there through
March 1958.
The second step was the addition of a mobile police detachment
(made up of native Algerians) and the issuance of twenty-four thousand
photo-I.D. cards to the entire male population between the age of 18
and 65. This was accomplished through the various S.A.S. headquarters,
and because strangers to the area would not be carrying cards, it made
F.L.N. infiltration that much easier to spot.
The last step, and ultimate goal of PILOTE, was to organize the
local population to resist the F.L.N. on their own. The villagers were
concentrated in "self-defense" hamlets, although no one was moved
more than two miles from his old place of work, and the new housing
was provided by the government.
The self-defense hamlets were surprisingly successful. Of the
four hundred rifles issued the Moslem militiamen, only two were lost to
desertion and all the armed villages repulsed at least one F.L.N. attempt
to re-infiltrate them. They were bolstered by an equally successful drive
to recruit 500 Harkis, or local irregulars, who were parceled out in
groups of twenty to the most threatened villages.
The security effort shielded the all-important psychological
operations. The French started their work at the top by giving forty
village chieftains a fifteen-day course in basic civics, and, needless to
say, a healthy dose of French propaganda. This was supplemented by
"turning around" a hundred F.L.N. deserters and placing them back into
their old villages to act as intelligence agents.
Two propaganda teams using army trucks equipped with
loudspeakers circulated constantly through the area. Their effectiveness
is hard to gauge, as the French army's position at this time was that
Algeria should be integrated into France. This is undoubtedly what the
trucks broadcast, but it was not a popular position among Moslems,
even among those who were not committed to the F.L.N.
In addition to the psychological programs, concrete aid was
provided by building schools, clinics and roads. Army medical teams
saw 150,000 patients in the year between the start of PILOTE and July
1958, and four teams of paramedical personnel were raised from the
local populace to replace the military doctors who
would be leaving at the end of PILOTE. A permanent French
presence was fostered by increasing the number of S.A.S. posts from
three to five, and 100 million francs was disbursed by the district
commander in various civil projects.
The F.L.N. now had 10,000 men in training across the border in
Tunisia, and would periodically try to force the Morice line with five
and six hundred regulars at a time. All of these attempts cost heavily,
and the F.L.N. expected to lose half to 90% of each unit it tried to
infiltrate in this manner.
There were, however, fifteen thousand F.L.N. regulars remaining
in Algeria, and they produced an ever rising scale of individual terrorist
incidents. The political pressure of fifty assassinations, bombings and
cases of sabotage every week combined with the expense and continuing
presence of conscripts to create a severe political strain in both Algeria
and France.
This pressure exploded into an open revolt by colonists and
the army in Algeria calling for the return of Charles De Gaulle. The
army threatened Paris with airborne invasion if De Gaulle were not
placed in power and seized Corsica to underscore their point. At the end of a tense week in May, President Coty invited De Gaulle to form a new government.
DeGaulle
De Gaulle was viewed by the army as a man intent on keeping
Algeria under French control. As to what De Gaulle himself intended,
no one is very sure; between his accession to power in May and the
beginning of 1959, he issued a dizzying array of contradictory
statements.
On one visit to Algeria he proclaimed "Long Live French
Algeria!", while to his close political confidants, he intimated that the
war was unwinnable. In any event, he began to eye the army with
suspicion. De Gaulle ordered the transfer of those officers who had
been involved in the coup to less sensitive posts in France and
Germany. Several elite units were disbanded permanently. From 1958
on, the number French troops in Algeria would decline, reducing the
army's ability to threaten another coup.
De Gaulle tipped his hand by offering the F.L.N. a cease fire in
October 1958. When this thinly veiled invitation to negotiate was
rejected, De Gaulle replaced Salan with an air force general of excellent
strategic ability: Maurice Challe. Challe was the most aggressive French
commander of the war, and he set about stripping the Morice line and
its western counterpart of their paratroops and legionnaires to use in
large scale operations. Offensives now contained divisions, not
regiments, and in the largest operation of the war, Operation Binoculars,
Challe moved three divisions into the Kabylie mountains. Challe's
operations punished the F.L.N. severely; by the end of 1959, there
were less than 12,000 F.L.N. regulars inside Algeria.
De Gaulle's speech of 16 September 1959, offered Algeria a
referendum on "self-determination". The colonists, sensing
abandonment, were the first to react by staging a bloody uprising in the
streets of Algiers in January 1960. Five days after it started, it
collapsed, but not before dozens of police had been killed in a
confrontation with the colonists. The Army in Algeria seethed with a
sense of betrayal. Insubordination rose as officers refused to commit
their men to what they viewed as futile combat.
The revelation of peace talks between the F.L.N. and the French
government inspired a second army revolt in April 1961. This time,
however, it was led by ex-generals who had been removed after the coup
of 1958. Standing outside of the existing army hierarchy, either because
of forced retirement or courts-martial, they were unable to rally
sufficient troops to their cause. On 26 April, their revolt disintegrated,
carrying with it the careers of hundreds of officers suspected of participation.
De Gaulle was now determined to get out of Algeria. The army
was a shambles of divided loyalties and suspicions, and the French
economy was being drained by the war at the rate of a billion francs a
year. Neither condition could be repaired until the issue of Algeria was settled.
An agreement was signed at peace talks in March 1962, and the
country was declared independent in August. In the intervening five
months, 1,380,000 Europeans fled, many leaving everything behind that
couldn't be carried in a suitcase.
How Did France Lose?
In view of France's military superiority over the F.L.N.,
especially in 1958-59, it may be difficult to see how France lost. The
answer is that the F.L.N. did not have to overwhelm the French
militarily, only exhaust them by continuing to exist. Despite their
crippling casualties, the F.L.N. mounted an ever increasing number of
terrorist incidents intended to disrupt the day-to-day life of Algeria. In
order to win, they French had to create an atmosphere of security
conducive to normal life.
PILOTE had the greatest potential to achieve this, but it was
very expensive. The security that PILOTE gave its area, took away
from others as troops were stripped from those sectors, and the 100
million francs allotted to social services alone represented one tenth of
the war budget for that year. Throughout the war, this kind of massive
effort was only delivered to some 300,000 Arabs out of a population of
nine million. In this case, however, the area remained reasonably quiet
well into 1960, over a year and a half after PILOTE's end. Had the
French been able to make the same effort everywhere, they might had
won the war, but they were fatally hamstrung by their limited resources.
[1] The French signaled the start of the First Indochina War against the
Viet Minh by shelling the city of Haiphong on 20 November 1946,
causing some 6,000 Vietnamese deaths. ed.
Collective Responsibility
Nineteen-fifty-eight was the high water mark of the French army
in Algeria. Sixty-seven regiments containing over a half million men were
available to then commander Raoul Salan. [2] The paratroops and
legionnaires began to employthe kind of airmobile tactics which were to
become so familiar to Americans during the Vietnam war, but there were
only enough helicopters to transport part of a regiment in any one
operation. This meant that a regiment could be spread over an area of
some twenty square miles or more, and large portions of the target unit
would slip through the holes in the net. Losses to the F.L.N. remained
severe, and it was estimated that they had suffered 6,000 casualties up
to 1958: a number equivalent to their entire field strength in 1955. Most
of these casualties were incurred in trying to infiltrate the Morice line.
Notes
[2] General Raoul Salan was Henri Navarre's immediate predecessor as French Commander in Chief in Indochina. He was the architect of the
French "victory" at Na Son, that led to Navarre's decision to occupy and
fortify Dien Bien Phu. ed.
Back to Table of Contents: CounterAttack # 3
To CounterAttack List of Issues
To MagWeb Master Magazine List
© Copyright 1991 by Pacific Rim Publishing Company.
This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com