Jungle of Snakes (12 page)
Authors: James R. Arnold
France had decided to grant full independence to Morocco and Tunisia while concentrating its resources on retaining Algeria.
In an effort to find an acceptable compromise for Algeria, the Moroccan sultan and Tunisian premier invited five principal
FLN leaders, including most notably Ahmed Ben Bella, to fly to Tunis for a meeting aboard a plane chartered by the Moroccan
government. In a flagrant breach of international law, French intelligence officers diverted the plane to Algiers.
Aboard the plane, the FLN leaders were totally deceived. As the plane descended, one Algerian saw the large crowd on the tarmac
and exclaimed, “Why, they’ve organized a very handsome reception for us!” Instead the “crowd” was composed of French security
forces, including tanks and armored cars. Although Ben Bella carried a pistol, he realized resistance was futile. The French
arrested the leaders and confined them to prison in France. In Algeria the
pieds-noirs
rejoiced. In France one radio commentator said with deep approval, “At last France has dared!”
5
However, the capture of the FLN’s senior leaders had little effect on the direction of the rebellion. Quite simply the movement
was too diffuse, too loosely organized, to crumple from this blow. Within the FLN the loss of senior leadership merely eliminated
obstacles in the path of ambitious junior leaders and allowed them to climb toward the top. Still, although few realized it,
a turning point had occurred. This supreme demonstration of French perfidy eliminated the possibility of a negotiated compromise.
Henceforth only the military option remained.
Confronting Revolutionary Warfare
Although political instability in metropolitan France led to an erratic military response to the insurgency, 1955 witnessed
a gradual military buildup in Algeria as veterans returned from Indochina. For the French Foreign Legion it marked a return
to its birthplace. Because service in Algeria had been unpopular among soldiers of the regular army, in 1831 the French government
designated Algeria the home base for the newly created Foreign Legion. The government’s intention was to put a disruptive
element of society—failed revolutionaries, criminals on the run, soldiers of fortune—to useful work for the benefit of France.
During its first years in Algeria, “useful work” meant the most remote and dangerous assignments in bandit-infested mountains
and Saharan oases. As the decades passed, the Legion bonded around its motto—“The Legion Is Our Homeland”—and became an elite
fighting organization composed exclusively of volunteers. The coming years of service in Algeria would forge a new bond between
the Legion and those who resisted the insurgents and ironically lead to the Legion participating in a rebellion against the
French government.
The year 1956 saw the Foreign Legion joined by a massive deployment of reinforcements as three entire divisions, including
the Seventh Mechanized Reserve and two marine infantry divisions, transferred from France to Algeria. At first neither the
Indochina veterans nor the regulars and conscripts from France adapted well to Algeria. For the Legionnaires and the veterans,
the experience of Indochina, both a conventional war against regular Communist units and a counterinsurgency at the village
level, had formed the veterans’ thoughts and habits. They took their resentments, memories, and lessons from Indochina and
initially refused to recognize that many aspects of the war in Algeria were different. On the other hand, the regulars and
conscripts fresh from France had no notion how to wage a counterinsurgency. Not only were many soldiers ill-suited to Algerian
operational requirements but the grand tactics imposed by senior leadership were flawed. In sum, the first two years of French
military response to the insurgency featured inappropriate, conventional large-scale operations. In the words of David Galula,
at the time an infantry company commander operating against insurgent strongholds in the Aurès mountains, “We encircled, we
combed, we raided, with little result.”
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The standard army pacification method utilized the so-called quadrillage (framework or grid) approach. The term referred to
the neatly ruled map grids that divided Algeria into seventy-five sectors. Security forces entered each grid sector and secured
the major towns, garrisoned lesser communities with small forces, actively patrolled the region between the garrisons, and
worked to expand the number of places held. The military had the particular duty of defending the European farmers and their
labor force from terrorist strikes. The static garrison forces also had the responsibility to eliminate the embedded insurgents
and convert their sympathizers. Because the static forces remained in one place for an extended period, they developed considerable
local knowledge, an indispensable feel for how a small community operated in the presence and absence of guerrillas.
To identify and root out the embedded infrastructure, garrisons needed to work closely with civil affairs officers called
Specialized Administrative Sections (SAS). As part of his comprehensive reform efforts, Governor-General Soustelle had established
the SAS in May 1955. Soustelle described their mission as bridging “the yawning gap between the administration and the poorer
inhabitants.”
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One hundred ten years earlier the commander of the first French conquest of Algeria, Marshal Thomas Bugeaud, had established
a similar Organization, the Bureaux Arabes, for the same purpose, to act as liaison officers between the French army and the
native population. In 1844 the officers’ mission was to assist ongoing military operations by collecting political and military
intelligence. Thereafter, they turned to pacification duties with the specific focus on bringing the benefits of French government
to the natives. The duties of the SAS were remarkably similar.
The SAS officers were all Arabic-speaking volunteers. The best of them had spent their careers in the colonies working as
native affairs officers. Like the American Special Forces or Green Berets, the SAS officers, called the
képis bleus
after their distinctive hats, operated in remote villages where there was no French presence. Here they taught schools, helped
farmers, and provided basic health care as well as a military presence, both to keep the rebels from dominating the village
and to prevent the French army from wrecking it.
An SAS team consisted of an officer (usually a lieutenant), a secretary, an interpreter (the Kabyles, for example, spoke a
Berber language), a radio, a vehicle, and a small security force, to be replaced by native auxiliaries as quickly as possible.
The first twenty-six teams went out into remote outposts in the Kabylie with instructions to pacify their zone. Naturally,
they quickly became the special targets of the insurgency. From time to time came chilling accounts of their native security
details turning on them or of formed guerrilla units overrunning an SAS outpost and wiping the team out. Because the SAS had
the extra assignment of collecting intelligence, there were reports that they engaged in torture.
Working in isolated regions, in command of predominantly Muslim units, the SAS officers became the only concrete representative
of the central government. Gradually they shifted from an advisory role and assumed most civilian administrative functions
and became responsible for their village’s health and well-being. The SAS officers assured Muslims that France would protect
them always from FLN reprisals, a statement made more powerful by the fact that the officers truly believed it. They formed
cooperative and sometimes even friendly relationships with the villagers in their area while building health clinics, markets,
and schools where, to ease the natives’ future assimilation, children learned French history and its heroes such as Joan of
Arc and Napoleon rather than Arab history and Abd-el-Kadr and Abd el-Krim.
Although their ultimate goal was to promote French bureaucratic control, at the time the SAS was seen by many to be a beacon
of light in a dark war. A British journalist described them as attempting “to tidy up the mess of war before the war is over.”
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Later analysts suggested that had this approach been performed on a large scale, the war’s outcome would have been different.
Eventually the SAS expanded to some 5,000 personnel, but in 1955 there were too few and it took precious time for the program
to get up to speed.”
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In time the French military adapted to the special requirements of war in Algeria. To combat what the theorists called revolutionary
warfare required new thinking that reversed the conventional emphasis on purely military action. Military action had to take
“a back seat to psychological action.”
10
This was a new way of thinking, and one widely resisted throughout the French military hierarchy. That hierarchy wanted to
focus on waging conventional war. Indicative of this bias were the attitudes of the instructors at the prestigious École de
Guerre, who routinely criticized their officer-students whose service in Indochina had “deformed” their military judgment.
11
In the “deformed” minds of the reformists, psychological action—which they understood to include propaganda, the collection
and exploitation of political as well as military intelligence, police measures, and personal contact with the local people,
as well as social and economic programs—trumped purely military action. What was needed was a unified strategy featuring both
destruction and construction. As General Jacques Allard explained, “These two terms are inseparable. To destroy without building
up would mean useless labor; to build without first destroying would be a delusion.”
12
To help put these new ideas into practice the army established a special counterinsurgency school in 1956. During its first
year of operation the school stressed marksmanship, detection of booby traps and mines, and combat communications. In the
summer of 1957, Lieutenant Colonel Bruge, an officer who had served in France’s colonial army and spent time as a prisoner
of war after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, reformed the curriculum. Bruge’s experiences at the hands of Communist interrogators
and propagandists had given him a deep understanding of revolutionary warfare. He believed that persuading “the future leaders
of the pacification effort that regaining the population’s adherence to France constitutes the ultimate stake” was the school’s
true mission.
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Toward that goal the new curriculum focused on the psychological foundations of guerrilla warfare, the destruction of insurgent
infrastructure, pacification, psychological action and psychological warfare, and knowledge of Algerian and Muslim sociology.
During the time of reform, more than 7,000 French officers passed through the school. A graduate of the Arzew Training Center
observed, “I discovered here that to be victorious in the Algerian war, the vital battles that we have to win are those to
be won with the head and heart, and not with a machine-pistol.”
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Paths to Victory
IN THE FRENCH ARMY, LIKE ALL OTHERS, the accepted path to promotion was combat experience. Ambitious officers did not want
to be shunted off to backwater assignments dealing with civil affairs and pacification duties. Consequently, in Algeria pacification
became the dumping ground of the second-rate, elderly, drunken, or simply dumb. Such men all too often filled staff positions
in civil affairs, propaganda, and even intelligence. One exception was David Galula.
That Galula marched to a different drummer was hardly surprising. A graduate of Saint-Cyr, the prestigious French military
academy, Galula was purged from the officer corps in 1941 according to the “Statute on Jews of the Vichy State.” After living
in North Africa, he joined the Free French Army in time to be wounded while participating in the liberation of France in 1944.
Thereafter, he served as a French military attaché and traveled widely in nations experiencing rebellion and insurgency. His
life’s experiences informed his theories of counterinsurgency.
Galula’s company occupied a guerrilla-dominated region of the Aurès mountains. Galula perceived that the true battle was for
the population and he understood that insurgent terror dominated the rural villages. When he interrogated civilians they candidly
described their situation. They were not afraid of the French because, as French citizens, the worst fate that could befall
them was jail. The insurgents, on the other hand, would cut their throats. Consequently, even the potentially pro-French chose
not to cooperate. Thus Galula described the challenge: “Under what conditions would our potential supporters emerge from their
present silence? How much risk were they prepared to take?”
1
Galula concluded that the only way to make progress was to eliminate the insurgents’ political and Administrative Organization
(OPA). At the village level, the OPA consisted of a Communist-style three-man cell. One military affairs member provided intelligence
for the guerrillas. Another member dealt with administration and justice, while a third collected taxes to support the insurgency.
Identifying members of the village cell proved very difficult. In one village it seemed that an army-sponsored school was
making a favorable impression until one day a soldier-teacher asked a young student if everything was all right. The boy responded
positively but added that things would be much better if they had guns and ammunition because then they could drive the French
out.
Extracting information from prisoners became an overarching challenge. A stroke of good fortune brought an elderly and disgruntled
Kabyle who informed on his nephew, a village cell boss. A dawn raid caught the nephew and several other suspects. Over a period
of days, Galula reduced the suspects’ food until they received water only. Still, patient interrogation revealed nothing until
a sergeant reported that one of the suspects was ready to talk. The sergeant had put the suspect in a bakery oven and threatened
to light a fire under the oven if the suspect failed to cooperate. Ten minutes of being shut inside the oven broke the suspect.
Thereafter, Galula authorized harsh interrogation methods and acknowledged he felt no more moral compunction than if he had
been a World War II bomber pilot carpet-bombing a city.
Confessions led to the capture of new suspects and their confessions, in turn, had a cascading effect, allowing Galula to
compile a list of OPA operatives. The reward came after a successful “purge” of an entire village OPA cell. The elimination
of this cell produced a sea change in villagers’ attitudes and behavior. They began to volunteer intelligence. A sure sign
of success was the fact that villagers dared, in violation of the FLN ban, to smoke in public.
With experience Galula systematized his pacification approach into three steps. The first step involved intelligence collection
utilizing threats and harsh treatment in order to identify OPA agents. Next came their arrest. Then an army garrison occupied
the village to prevent the terrorists from recruiting new agents. Although it alarmed his conventional-minded superiors, Galula
widely dispersed his company into small garrisons while keeping a reserve as a reaction force. And it worked. Galula converted
a guerrilla stronghold into one of the quietest regions in all of Algeria. But, to his immense frustration, the blueprint
for victory that he believed he had drawn proved of limited value. In Algeria, the French military declined to promulgate
his policy. In France, political instability thwarted bold policy changes. Consequently, “no matter how much effort was devoted
to pacification locally, we would find sooner or later that we had reached a plateau above which we could not rise.”
2
Moreover, Galula’s success proved fragile. When military authorities redrew areas of responsibility, new units and new commanders
took over villages that Galula’s unit had pacified. The new commanders, having ignored the population in their previous assignments,
continued their policy of neglect. Because all seemed quiet they did not continue Galula’s policy of regular nocturnal ambushes.
Soon the terrorists returned and the villages reverted. As Galula viewed the situation, “we were caught in the classic vicious
circle of an insurgency: because of the repeated and costly operations, the Kabyle population was solidly against us; because
of the attitude of the population, our soldiers tended to treat every civilian as an enemy.”
3
BY THE END OF 1956 the French military presence in Algeria surpassed the 400,000 mark. There was a clear division of labor
among them. The real fighting fell to only 10 percent of the army, the elite professionals in the paratroops and Foreign Legion
units, who regularly conducted field operations. Designated as “units of intervention,” this elite chased the guerrillas through
mountain and forest, relying increasingly on he licopters to carry them into battle. Celebrated by the French press and most
importantly by the
pieds-noirs
, the elite—who already carried bitter memories of abandoning their native allies in Indochina—reciprocated by identifying
with increasing fervor with the settlers’ plight. In the minds of elite Indochina veterans, defeat in Algeria could come only
from political failure on the home front. When they looked at the shaky coalition governments in France they saw “the embodiment
of irresolution.”
4
For this reason many veterans grew to resent their own national government.
The draftees, reservists, and less capable regular forces mostly served in static roles. They guarded important national infrastructure:
roads, railroads, ports, power stations. Many guarded settlers’ farms or provided security for “pacified” villages. A domestic
political calculation influenced how and where troops served. The French government calculated that it could regulate combat
casualties by assigning its draftees and reservists to duties that seldom exposed them to losses. It did not anticipate that
these men would refuse to witness silently army atrocities and that instead they would inform the French public through letters
to their families and published accounts in the popular media.
Most officers expected the draftees to be poor soldiers uncommitted to a colonial war, particularly given that 25 percent
of the French population voted Communist. The Parisian draftees who composed the majority of the 228th Infantry Battalion
were of this sort. As a train conveyed them south across France, the unhappy draftees vandalized a train station. Thereafter
riot police accompanied them until they landed in Algeria. Sent to the remote south deep in the Sahara desert, the men seethed
with resentment and continued to wreck army property and loot civilian stores. They seldom ventured outside of their camp,
which became an island in an alien environment. The high command finally sent a seasoned professional, Major Jean Pouget,
to deal with these demoralized, poorly disciplined men.
Pouget addressed the troops: “Neither you nor I had a choice. We are [on] the same team and the match has started. I hate
losing.”
5
By force of character, insightful man management, and energy, Pouget restored the battalion’s military effectiveness.
Pouget was another of the celebrated paratrooper heroes of Dien Bien Phu. Formed by his experience as a prisoner of war at
the hands of the Viet Minh, Pouget, in contrast to most French veterans, insisted on treating prisoners decently. He firmly
believed that it was both the right thing to do and the best way to obtain intelligence. He extended his notion of “soft”
war to the task of pacifying his region. However, he fully understood that the first requirement was security: his battalion
had to show it could protect the people, and particularly his SAS officers, from the terrorists. Toward this goal he ordered
his battalion to flood the inhabited areas of his sector with frequent patrols. But he knew that these patrols would fail
to contact the insurgents unless they had timely intelligence. To obtain this intelligence he worked hard to cooperate with
the SAS officers and to treat the local population respectfully.
When one of his SAS lieutenants put his arm around the waist of the daughter of a local dignitary, Pouget publically rebuked
him and sentenced the lieutenant to fifteen days of menial labor. He also paid a reparation to the offended father to help
restore his daughter’s honor. Pouget insisted that everyone in his battalion deal honestly with civilians, thereby eliminating
the payment of bribes, the Arab’s traditional baksheesh. Pouget also authorized economic assistance measures, such as acquiring
chemical washes to disinfect the local flocks of sheep, and social programs, including starting schools.
The way Pouget treated Ain Melah, the largest village in his district, showed him to be completely different from most French
officers. Everyone knew Ain Melah was dominated by the insurgents. Pouget met with the village elders, who assured him that
the village was devoid of insurgents. Pouget told them that they were liars but that he completely understood their motives;
all they were doing was trying to preserve peace in the village. All Pouget asked of them was to allow him to send a medical
team once a week and to restart an irrigation project. The elders agreed.
Even when the terrorists killed a French soldier who taught at a school in Ain Melah, Pouget forbade retaliation. After this
seminal event, the village elders requested a French garrison to help protect the population. Thereafter, the villagers provided
a wealth of intelligence and thirty-five of them volunteered for the village militia, or
harki
(literally, Arabic for “movement”). For a time it appeared that Ain Melah was successfully pacified. The French intelligence
lieutenant who managed the village’s pacification program walked about the village unarmed. A captured enemy report acknowledged
that the village had turned against the insurgents. The insurgents sent a team to assassinate the French lieutenant. They
succeeded, but the villagers assisted the French in hunting down the killers.
Pouget and his battalion created an island of stability in a region of instability dominated by the insurgents. He practiced
an approach to pacification enormously different from that of most French officers. It was not a systematic program like the
one conceived by David Galula, but rather one inspired by a strongly held code of personal ethics. Like Galula’s approach,
it depended hugely on one man’s personal leadership. Because neither Galula’s nor Pouget’s policies fit well within the French
army’s conventional mind-set, their successes remained isolated exceptions.
FRENCH MILITARY CAPACITY throughout Algeria improved dramatically. Veterans of the Indochina War assumed important command
positions. These leaders substituted innovative, flexible tactics for the clumsy large-scale operations of the past. Reinforcements
flowed to Algeria, including numerous crack paratroop and Foreign Legion formations. They possessed new equipment, including
American-supplied he licopters. French morale soared.
However, conventional operations brought French soldiers face-to-face with two grim realities. The first was that an area
remained secure only as long as French forces were present and vigilant. When the French sentries turned their backs, honorable
old men, their chests laden with decorations earned while fighting for the French during two world wars, would grab their
weapons and open fire against the French. A second realization was that rebel intelligence always seemed to be a step ahead
of French intelligence. Superior intelligence allowed the guerrillas to evade battle and melt into the urban population or
the remote interior. The French could not reliably separate the guerrillas from the general population. Conventional interrogation
revealed nothing useful.
The Indochina veterans understood Maoist principles and strategy. In particular, they appreciated the notion that guerrillas
had to swim like Mao’s fish in the water of the uncommitted masses. One prominent Indochina veteran explained that it was
little use merely destroying dispersed guerrilla bands. Instead, the French aim had to be to find and eradicate the entire
clandestine political organization that supported the guerrillas. More ominously, the Indochina veterans appreciated how guerrillas
used force to influence the civilian population. They believed that counterrevolutionary forces had to employ the same methods
and so they did.
This produced military results. By the end of 1956 FLN leaders understood that they could not contend in open battle with
the French. There would be no war-winning Algerian version of Dien Bien Phu. But they believed that by maintaining a military
presence—even if that meant small guerrilla bands scattered in remote mountain hiding places—and continuing their domination
of the people by terror tactics, they could avoid losing. And, in spite of French efforts, the FLN had made some notable achievements.
They had recruited and armed some 20,000 men from a population largely uninterested in revolutionary rhetoric. They had established
a political-military infrastructure across a vast area. They had impressively increased the number of violent actions—ranging
from cutting down a telephone line to shooting a Muslim constable to ambushing a French patrol—from 200 a month in April 1955
to 2,624 in March 1956. Their major target continued to be Muslim “traitors,” civilians known to have cooperated with the
French or suspected of having done so. For the first thirty months of the conflict, terrorists killed an estimated 6,353 Muslims
against 1,035 Europeans.