A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (67 page)

With his curiously gaunt, high-cheekboned face, reddish hair, harshly intense green eyes and wispy moustache, to some Western journalists Boumedienne looked “more like a starving Irish poet than a guerrilla veteran”. The fact that it was a face seldom seen smiling (“Why should I smile just because a photographer is taking the trouble to photograph me?” he asked an Egyptian interviewer when President) underlined the salient characteristic of Boumedienne: his deadly seriousness. It was a seriousness that permitted him no time for the frippery of rank, uniform or decorations; no time for the foibles of personal ambition or boasting; and no time for the petty feuds with which the F.L.N. was riven. All of this made him much revered by the men under him. He was deeply serious about the study of war, particularly in its organisational aspects. Dedicated to one cause only, an independent Algeria, he had no Marxist leanings yet had closely studied the revolutionary teachings of Mao. He was an utterly unromantic revolutionary, with a coldly searching intellect, of whom it was said that he only emerged from his withdrawn taciturnity to ask a question—and his thirst for information was insatiable.[
5
] One English newspaper pen-portrait of Boumedienne (David Leitch in the
Sunday Times
of 6 August 1967) describes him as having no known vices “except chain-smoking Gauloises, and apparent total indifference to human relationships”. His spartan headquarters were enlivened only by a large portrait of Abdel-Kader, the national hero. A tremendous worker, he had the eye and memory for detail of a staff officer of genius, and his organisation left a mark on both Wilaya 5 and the Western Front that was exceptional within the A.L.N.

Following the execution of the rebel colonels, Boumedienne was given the Herculean task of restoring discipline and organisation to the army in Tunisia. Soon his efforts began to show results, one of his early tactical innovations being to halt the costly frontal assaults on the Morice Line. As 1959 progressed, it was also clear that Boumedienne had become the most influential soldier in the A.L.N.; for, having called him in to crush the insurgent colonels, the G.P.R.A. would find it difficult to check his growing influence over the “exterior” army in both Morocco and Tunisia. At the third C.N.R.A. congress held in Tripoli during January 1960, Boumedienne was confirmed in the all-powerful post of chief-of-staff of the whole A.L.N.—which he had, in effect, already been filling for some months past. Under pressure from the French army, he adopted a decisive new strategy: instead of attempting to back up the Wilayas at appalling cost across the Morice Line, the A.L.N. would be regrouped and reorganised inside the Tunisian sanctuary, and held there in readiness for future military and political opportunities. It was a strategy that would, to some extent, deceive the French Army Command into believing the military successes of the Challe Plan were greater than in fact they were—with consequences that will shortly be seen.

Thus a new star had been born with an import for the future which, at the time of writing, remains still incalculable. In general, however, 1958–59 had been a thoroughly bad and dangerous time for the F.L.N. Both politically and militarily it had been caught off balance by the coming of de Gaulle. If de Gaulle could have followed up the momentum of his first weeks with a concerted peace drive, or if the Challe offensive had begun in 1958 instead of 1959, the prospects would have looked incomparably bleak. But, as it happened, the long build-up to the referendum and the November legislative elections, followed by the run-down from the
paix des braves
olive-branch, had given the F.L.N. an invaluable respite in which to regain its breath. And when in 1959 the A.L.N. was confronted with the gravest military threat to its existence, it was already moving in—and under—a new direction.

[
1
] Though he was to outwit his captors and make good his escape at a later date.

[
2
] The decamping of Azedine was humiliating for French pride to swallow, but the damage may not have stopped there. A year and a half later a genuine peace offer was made by the then commander of Wilaya 4, Si Salah, perhaps one of the most important “breaks” of the whole war. But it was turned down by a mistrustful de Gaulle, no doubt in part influenced by the Azedine debacle.

[
3
] It is worth noting that, while fulsome tributes were paid to Amirouche and Si Haouès by Krim and others in succeeding issues of
El Moudjahid
, no reference was made to the execution of the four A.L.N. colonels.

[
4
] He was in fact married in 1973.

[
5
] According to one of his close entourage at the time of his flying visit to Moscow during the “Ramadan War” of 1973, Boumedienne taxed his staff to the limits by demanding almost hourly bulletins of news from home, “and you know how difficult that is to obtain in Moscow…!”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Neither the Djebel nor the Night:
1959

We have pacified the country so well…that the
fellagha
have almost disappeared. Nowadays, almost no one joins the guerrillas….

French captain’s report, quoted by Edward Behr

The Challe Plan

WITH the end of fighting in Cyprus, 1959 revealed a world with only one major active battle front: Algeria. Despite all the problems besetting it, the A.L.N. of the interior was still making its presence felt. In small packets they would descend from the
djebel
, blow up power pylons, mine a train or an army convoy, murder a pro-French
caid
or shoot up the isolated outpost of one of the heroic corps of French S.A.S. officers; and then vanish again whence they came. Existing as they did under terrible conditions of cold, hunger, and constant pursuit by the French army, that they could still act at all must of itself be a testimony to the remarkable stoicism, tenacity and dedication of the individual
moudjahid
. Revisiting his
pied noir
brother, a small farmer at Ménerville less than forty miles east of Algiers, Colonel Jules Roy found him and his wife placing flimsy metal trays (“such as you find in bakery ovens”) over all the windows, like Kenya settlers in the Mau-Mau era. “We’ve had to do this every night for the last four years,” the brother explained: “they don’t kill because they have anything against you. These days they kill for the sake of killing.” He added gloomily: “They’ll never stop, that’s for sure. We kill one whenever we manage to catch him, but the next day another starts all over again. They want us to get out.” Year after year, night after night, the nervous tension among the European
colons
in the outlying
bled
must have become almost intolerable. There was virtually no corner of the country where, in the fifth year of the war, they could feel totally secure. The truth was that, for all the massive injections of men and material, the security forces were just too thinly spread to meet every possible threat everywhere.

In appointing General Maurice Challe as Commander-in-Chief, says de Gaulle, “I expected operations to take a dynamic turn which would result in our undisputed mastery of the field.” Conversely, in political terms, “Nothing could have been more disastrous than some untoward incident in which we came off worst.” This sense of urgency was reinforced by de Gaulle’s newly appointed Prime Minister, Michel Debré, in his first visit to Algeria early in the new year. To Challe he insisted that there be swift “military successes” before the spring, and that “We must be able to put out a victory bulletin in the month of July; for France is beginning to get bored with the war.” There was also a looming problem of manpower; France was entering into the “hollow classes” of the young men of military age who should have been born during the Second World War. Beyond an aim of improving security for
pied noir colons
, like the Roy family (which was never one of his highest priorities), and the more conventional one of pressing the F.L.N. into accepting a
paix des braves
, de Gaulle may have had more complex psychological motives for intensifying military operations. As Raymond Aron had noted perceptively, that deep ingrained sense of past humiliations had to be exorcised, and “If the army could achieve an incontestable success, it might be less hostile to the creation of an Algerian state.”

No sooner had he arrived in his new post than Challe set to work enthusiastically to devise a new, winning strategy. He analysed carefully the shortcomings of the past. Under the established system of
quadrillage
, the army had endeavoured to be everywhere at the same time, a system that had succeeded in limiting the free movement of A.L.N.
katibas
and their infiltration into the populated centres. But it had also resulted in there not being enough troops to go round for the army to have a powerful, mobile, offensive force with which to go out and destroy the A.L.N. in its mountain strongholds. In fact, at the time of Challe’s appointment this force, composed chiefly of paras and the Legion, seldom amounted to more than 15,000 men, or roughly the same strength as the total of A.L.N.
moudjahiddine
available for operations in the interior. Scattered across the four corners of Algeria, it was employed rather in fire-brigade fashion—or, indeed, like the penny-packet handling of the French armour which had brought such disaster in 1940. Algeria was divided into no less than seventy-five separate sectors—which meant there were “seventy-five ways of making war”—and offensive operations tended to be carried out haphazardly, without any co-ordinated plan. “Mounted several days in advance,” noted Challe, “they often struck nothing but emptiness.” The blows were too ponderous:

They achieved success when they cornered one or two
katibas
, but this was a rare act…. The populace was warned not to remain in the area and would be regrouped in the plains or the plateau, then, by plane or artillery, the area would be bombarded or fired at on sight. The results, as one could verify, were nil for a veritable orgy of ammunition.

The “stirred-up” rebels would simply slip over into the neighbouring sector, which had rarely been synchronised with the operations; then, as soon as the attacking troops withdrew, the A.L.N. would return to become “master of the mountain” once more. As Challe described it to Delouvrier, in the past the war in Algeria had been fought as “a succession of blows, sometimes spectacular, but without any political or military follow-through. In the eyes of the people, the F.L.N. remains master of the country.”

In contrast to this, Challe adopted as his guiding principle the slogan “Neither the
djebel
nor the night must be left to the F.L.N.” Once hit, a rebel unit must be hit again, and remain hit; the army must penetrate the
querencia
where—like a fighting bull—it was at home, and stay there, driving it out into unknown and unfriendly territory. Life must be made enduringly unendurable for the
moudjahiddine
. The hunter must become the hunted. “The
katibas
retreated into the
djebel
,” Challe told the author; “so I decided to go into the
djebel
after them.” The two essential components of the Challe Plan were his Commandos de Chasse, accompanied by specially trained “tracker” units of Muslim
harkis
, and a new concentrated Réserve Générale. An area for an all-out offensive having been decided upon, the Commandos de Chasse would be sent into it to identify and pin down the main A.L.N. units. In line with good rugger tactics in which Challe was well versed, each
katiba
would be “marked” by its opposite number; then the massive weight of the mobile Réserve Générale, mustered from every part of the command, would be thrown in to strike overwhelmingly at the critical point. Challe, though an airman, claims that here he was influenced by the principles of concentration developed so triumphantly in Napoleon’s first Italian campaign. The attacking force would not leave, as in the past, after inflicting heavy casualties, but would continue to pursue the rebel formations until they had been so broken up that they could readily be controlled by the limited, static effectives of the local sector. Disruption, not annihilation, which he considered to be unattainable, was Challe’s objective; above all, the rebel O.P.A. (Organisation Politico-Administrative) had to be so smashed that it could not reestablish itself once the offensive wave had receded.

This was all the “negative” function of the Plan; its “positive” side represented an intensification of the philosophy of past French administrators from Soustelle onwards, constructive reforms designed to make the
présence française
more palatable to the Muslim population, and to strengthen their ability to defend themselves once the immediate terror of the A.L.N. had been eradicated. Among all this was included the controversial policy of “regroupment”.