Jungle of Snakes (15 page)
Authors: James R. Arnold
The first offensive took place in the rolling country southeast of Oran. Although this area had long been controlled by the
FLN, it presented less daunting terrain than the traditional insurgent strongholds in the Aurès mountains and the Kabylie.
The elite paratroopers spearheaded the ensuing Operation Oranie, followed by mechanized columns issuing out of Oran to flood
the countryside. It was essentially a giant search-and-destroy operation conducted with more technical sophistication than
ever before. Using an integrated communications net that permitted command coordination between ground and air units, officers
in airborne command posts managed a fast-paced series of moves for which the insurgent foot soldiers had no answer. American-supplied
giant heli copters, the famous Piasecki H-21 “flying bananas,” provided the capacity to land two entire battalions in five
minutes. Three hundred slow, propeller-driven training aircraft were converted to ground attack roles. At first, pilots who
had trained to fly modern supersonic jets complained bitterly. The former airman Challe ignored them and the complaints ceased
when the pilots discovered, as would a future general of American airmen flying A-10s in Iraq, that slow was good for ground
support missions. French mechanized columns cornered the guerrillas and the converted trainers allowed pilots to deliver bombs
and rockets with pinpoint lethality.
During Operation Oranie, Challe also inserted into action numerous newly recruited
harki
units. The expansion had required de Gaulle’s authorization. During a face-to-face encounter, Challe had insisted and de Gaulle
had replied with characteristic haughtiness, “One does not impose conditions on de Gaulle!”
7
Challe refused to be overmastered and told de Gaulle to either give him the men or he would resign. Thereafter Challe had
select
harki
units form specially trained “hunter-killer” teams complete with experienced trackers to search the interior for enemy presence.
They marched light, living off the land, and tracked small guerrilla bands through remote regions that heretofore had been
inaccessible to the French. They carried radios, so if they contacted a large insurgent band they could summon reinforcements.
Helicopters rapidly delivered elite fighters from Challe’s General Reserve to surround and trap the enemy. Moreover, the French
benefited from accurate intelligence, much of it extracted by torture, but also numerous useful windfalls obtained from a
very successful radio-interception service.
The two-month-long Operation Oranie proved an outstanding success. The French claimed to have killed more than 1,600 guerrillas
while capturing another 460 along with large quantities of weapons and ammunition. Challe estimated that the campaign had
eliminated fully half the ALN manpower in the area. While the casualty claims may have been inflated, there was no doubt that
the French had delivered a staggering blow.
Proof of success came when pacification teams, left behind after the mobile forces departed, were able to work without significant
interference from the insurgents. Army engineers built roads to link formerly isolated villages with the outside economy and
the insurgents seldom were able to thwart them by laying mines or blowing up culverts and bridges. SAS teams moved into villages,
raised self-defense forces, built more schools and clinics than at any time since 1954, and worked hard to show the people
the benefits of remaining French.
Encouraged by these results, and having built up his mobile reserve to 35,000 crack troops, in mid-April Challe shifted his
forces east to the mountains behind Algiers to begin a new offensive. Here the terrain was more rugged and results less outstanding.
The ALN fighters dispersed quickly when the French appeared and thereafter successfully evaded contact. Challe tinkered with
his tactics and pressed on through November 1959. The climactic offensive of the so-called Challe Plan was Operation Jumelles,
directed against the Kabylie, where the FLN had first raised the banner of rebellion. From his command helicopter, Challe
personally directed 25,000 men in a multiprong assault against the guerrilla stronghold. Marines conducted amphibious attacks
along the coast, mechanized columns penetrated remote valleys,
harki
hunter-killer teams searched the forests while the paratrooper reaction forces waited on the airfields to board their helicopters
when called. Overhead, the ground attack aircraft loitered, waiting to swoop down against any target.
Even in Challe’s opinion the results were disappointing. The ALN had learned from Challe’s first campaign and again dispersed
rapidly and gone to ground. Although the French claimed to have killed, wounded, or captured 3,746 Kabyle insurgents, how
many of these people were merely civilians caught in the war’s crossfire is unknowable. On the positive side of the ledger,
the FLN acknowledged heavy losses. The French had lost several hundred killed, but compared to the insurgents the ratio was
a very impressive one to ten. Particularly encouraging from a French standpoint was the fact that more insurgents surrendered
than ever before and many of them volunteered to serve in
harki
units. To the French soldiers on the ground it appeared that the insurgency was in its death throes.
An experienced war correspondent toured Algeria and wrote, “From a purely military point of view, it could be said that the
FLN has been beaten. Its last hundred-man
katybas
[organized combat companies] have taken refuge in the impregnable rocky highlands where they are contained. In other places
. . . local
fellagha
[guerrillas] stay in the brush and the
katybas
, broken up into little groups of a dozen fighters each . . . change their hideouts every night. The only purpose of their
operations is to maintain a feeling of insecurity.”
8
Along the fortified frontier barriers, all the larger ALN units were reduced to harassing the barrier guards from their sanctuaries
in Tunisia and Morocco. They could neither breach nor outflank the high-tension wires, barbed-wire entanglements, and floodlit
minefields. Citing his campaign maxim to deny the guerrillas sanctuary in the hills, Challe proclaimed, “The rebel is no longer
king of the
djebel
, he is trapped there . . . The military phase of the rebellion is terminated in the interior.”
9
How true was this assertion? If statistics cited by Challe were accurate, namely that half the FLN fighters in the operational
areas had been eliminated, obviously the other half remained. If Challe’s claim that the insurgents’ logistical base had shrunk
by 20 percent in the past year was correct, a substantial base was still present. Challe’s assessment also overlooked the
fact that by this time a new ALN chief of staff, Houari Boumedienne, had made the decision to cease supporting the
katybas
inside Algeria and instead rest, refit, and recruit a powerful new force in Tunisia. There they would be in a position to
return to Algeria when the time was favorable.
Moreover, Challe’s large-scale search and destroy operations did not occur in a political vacuum. The question remained: to
what extent had these “victories” persuaded the Muslim population to support the French and turn against the insurgents?
Victory and Defeat
A FRENCH WAR REPORTER AND World War II hero, Jules Roy had been born in Algeria. As a
pied-noir
, he had special credibility. Roy visited a Kabyle village after a search-and-destroy operation had passed through. In some
ways, apart from the tremendous number of battle-scarred or completely ruined structures, normality seemed to have returned.
A French garrison provided sufficient security for there to be bus service to the distant city three times a week. The reporter
saw fig and olive trees. The villagers harvested a potato crop four times a year. But as Roy probed deeper he uncovered the
costs of pacification. One sixth of the population was dead or had disappeared, and most of them were men. Virtually every
family had lost a male member to the French repression.
Military might had not converted these people to the side of the French. Most peasant families simply wanted to be left alone.
They knew that if they chose to be “faithful servants of France” they faced insurgent denunciation as traitors to the Algerian
homeland. Obligated to deal with the French and the insurgents, the peasants tried to take a stance straddling both sides.
Roy discovered that many families had one man in the FLN and one serving with the French. The mayor’s father had been assassinated
by the FLN. The mayor’s brother had been an officer in the French army but had deserted to the FLN. The mayor’s uncle was
a local FLN leader. Sixty women in the village had husbands serving with the FLN. Another sixty had relocated to live closer
to their menfolk who served in the resistance. There were four women for every one man in the village. Too few able-bodied
men remained to prune the fruit trees, so nearly 90 percent of the fig trees were neglected and no longer bore fruit. Likewise,
the villagers had abandoned cork cultivation. In sum, the village’s agricultural staples were gone.
In July 1959 the conservative French newspaper
Le Figaro
exposed to the French public a heretofore ignored aspect of pacification: population regroupment on a massive scale with associated
abuse and neglect. Back in 1957, when military engineers had constructed the frontier barriers, the French initiated a population
regroupment program that moved people away from the borders into new villages and towns. In the interior, near insurgent strongholds,
there were other regroupments designed to isolate the people from the guerrillas. Thereafter, the French razed the abandoned
villages and entire regions became free-fire zones. Lastly, as part of the Challe Plan, there were more large regroupments
away from remote areas, again in order to move people outside the range of the insurgents. The population shifts eventually
relocated at least 1 million people, or 11 percent of the Muslim population.
1
An approving French colonel observed, with unconscious irony, “In effect, we are reestablishing the old system of medieval
fortified villages, designed to protect the inhabitants against marauding bands.”
2
Supposedly, the French army provided medical care, education, and employment for the relocated people.
Le Figaro
reported anything but. At a camp near Philippeville, for two years families had crowded into exposed tent cities where summer
temperatures reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Children were emaciated stick figures dressed in torn rags. And the Philippeville
tent city was not an isolated example. Roy wrote for
L’Express
about shantytowns near Algiers where refugees lived in “shacks in which even animals wouldn’t live in France.” Roy continued
his inspections and encountered tens of thousands of wretched refugees living in squalid urban slums: “They have fled relocation
and war, out of terror, and have become beggars and public charges . . . Without water, without sewage or sanitation of any
kind, without land to cultivate and for the most part without work.”
3
Even the paratroop general Massu found the scene at a regroupment camp outside of Algiers deplorable, with people living
in miserable squalor below levels he had seen in the most destitute parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
The
Figaro
report and subsequent similar accounts in other newspapers shocked the French public. The depictions of the regroupment camps
were too close to well-remembered scenes of German concentration camps. Such accounts, along with continuing and disquieting
reports of torture, demoralized the French public.
Yet from a strictly military perspective, Algeria looked entirely different. By the end of 1959 the combination of fortified
barriers and the Challe Plan had dramatically shifted the war’s military momentum in the French favor. Urban terror attacks
had diminished to a tolerable level, with an average of only four incidents a month occurring in Algiers. In the hinterland,
Challe’s offensive had inflicted irreplaceable losses. The offensive had also driven the ALN out of many of their traditional
strongholds. Like wild African animals forced during the dry season to congregate around water holes, the ALN concentrated
in their remaining sanctuaries, where they presented the French hunters a more vulnerable target.
For one last agonizing time, French soldiers believed that the army’s blood sacrifices had brought victory. This belief would
heighten their sense of betrayal when de Gaulle concluded that the war was being lost because of waning domestic support and
international opposition to colonialism.
IN SPITE OF all military successes, the French could not devise a political formula to end the conflict. De Gaulle dreamed
that historically close cultural, commercial, and sentimental ties would preserve a union of Algeria and France. Toward that
union he crafted new policies granting Algerians the full rights of French citizens. De Gaulle went to Algeria to announce
plans to provide better education and medical services, to create jobs for Muslims, and to admit them into the highest ranks
of public service. These were variants of the reforms that had been promised in the past. By now, the spirit of nationalism
was too strongly entrenched among the Muslim population to admit any compromise. When de Gaulle visited a model resettlement
town in the traditional insurgent stronghold of Kabylie, villagers greeted him with cheers while schoolchildren chanted “La
Marseillaise.” Just before he departed, a Muslim town clerk stopped him to murmur, “
Mon général
, don’t be taken in! Everyone here wants independence.” Such encounters confirmed de Gaulle’s belief that “in spite of our
crushing superiority in military means, it would be a futile waste of men and money” to try to retain the status quo.”
4
On September 16, 1959, in anticipation of the opening of the UN General Assembly, de Gaulle appeared on television to address
the nation. In a twenty-minute speech he directly mentioned the possibility of Algerian “self-determination” to be decided
by referendum. It was the first time a French leader had publicly suggested this possibility. It marked a watershed. Every
French proposal before this time was now irrelevant. There was no longer any chance of retaining Algeria within metropolitan
France. Although de Gaulle himself did not yet perceive it, everything that followed was no more than issues of procedure
and method.
This was a strategic victory for the insurgency and the leadership knew it. The FLN minister of defense, Belkacem Krim, the
only living member of the original nine revolutionary leaders who had plotted the rebellion, broadcast to his hard-pressed
fighters the news that “your struggle has obliged the enemy to talk of self-determination, thus renouncing the oft-repeated
myth of
Algérie française
. His retreat is the fruit of your efforts.”
5
Henceforth, all the FLN had to do was survive until France yielded to its demands. To ensure its survival, the FLN abandoned
conventional military operations and substituted hit-and-run raids and acts of terrorism. These acts had the psychological
and political purpose of showing the world that the FLN remained an unconquered force.
On the international stage, FLN cadres operating outside of Algeria garnered the reward for years of diplomatic labor. Their
propaganda machine continually publicized accounts of French brutality. They contrasted international support for self-determination
with the French repression of this right in Algeria. FLN propaganda undermined France’s claim to represent Western civilization
and France’s historic revolutionary roots based on the Declaration of the Rights of Man. By skilled and relentless manipulation
of the international media, FLN propagandists convinced the Non-Aligned Movement, as well as liberal factions in Great Britain
and particularly the United States, to condemn French conduct. They used the United Nations as a stage to tarnish France and
sow discord between France and her allies.
De Gaulle’s last attempt to find compromise featured a policy of “association” by which an autonomous Algeria would remain
loosely linked with France. He hoped to find a way to allow the
pieds-noirs
to remain and for Muslims loyal to France to assimilate peacefully into a new Algeria. This policy failed on all fronts. Muslim
demonstrations in Algiers showed that anything short of total independence was unacceptable. In keeping with the emerging
international consensus, on December 19, 1960, the UN General Assembly rejected de Gaulle’s policy and instead recognized
Algeria’s right to independence. The French army grew demoralized. Addressing mourners at the funeral of ten paratroopers
killed in Algeria, an army chaplain spoke for many when he said, “You have fallen at a time when, if we are to believe the
speeches, we no longer know why we are dying.”
6
Officers who had worked to protect Algerians from FLN reprisals, particularly the SAS officers who had developed close relationships
with villagers in their areas, felt dishonored that de Gaulle would betray people who had trusted France. The extreme loyalists
of French Algeria formed the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), a secretive terror group dedicated to retaining
pied-noir
control of Algeria. A revolt of French generals in Algeria, including General Challe, against de Gaulle’s government, the
so-called Generals’ Putsch of April 1961, demonstrated a powerful French military faction’s attitude toward compromise. With
his own rule in jeopardy, de Gaulle concluded that he had no alternative but to enter negotiations with the FLN in May 1961.
This decision violated repeated French pledges never to negotiate with the terrorists. The FLN leadership correctly perceived
that France needed a negotiated settlement more than the insurgents did. They stonewalled on every issue discussed at the
conference table and within one year France had capitulated on every major point it had once asserted represented a vital
national interest. On July 3, 1962, France officially recognized Algerian independence.
The Algerian settlement ended a sixteen-year French military effort to retain its colonies in Indochina and North Africa.
The terms of the settlement guaranteed the safety and property of French colonists for three years. Unpersuaded, at least
three quarters of the
pieds-noirs
, some 750,000 people, left the country they called home, the place where they and their families had been born and raised,
to flee to France. The summer of 1962 witnessed terrible scenes as a desperate, uprooted Europe an population pushed and shoved
to secure a berth on a plane or boat bound for Marseilles. In a haunting echo of the FLN slogan “The suitcase or the coffin,”
they had to leave all property behind except for their allotment of two suitcases each. Another 50,000 moved to Spain, while
10,000 Sephardic Jews emigrated to Israel. In total, their exodus was the most massive population relocation to Eu rope since
World War II.
Tragically left behind were those Algerians who had supported the French. They included career soldiers, militiamen, elite
members of the “hunt commandos,” police, and government bureaucrats. At first SAS officers had arranged transportation to
France for the men who were certain to face death if they remained in Algeria, namely the most devoted members of their units.
But the French government halted this effort and forbade all “illegal” emigration from Algeria. By this act of surpassing
dishonor, the French government thereby condemned several hundred thousand Algerian men and their families to reprisals at
the ungentle hands of the FLN. As the weeks passed, horrific stories leaked from Algeria of former French loyalists dying
by the hundreds while being compelled to clear the minefields of the Morice Line; of veterans forced to dig their own graves,
swallow their French medals, and then face execution; of burnings, castrations, and the elimination of entire families, including
young children. How many were killed is unknown, with estimates ranging from 30,000 to 150,000.
Why the French Lost
The war in Algeria lasted almost eight years. Two million French soldiers had crossed the Mediterranean to fight in Algeria.
The official French tabulation of casualties reported 12,000 French combat deaths with another 6,000 killed by “accidents.”
The Algerian militia including the
harki
hunter units suffered 2,500 killed. The number of combat wounded totaled 25,000, with the astonishing figure of 28,700 enduring
“accidental woundings.”
7
Over the duration of the war, the French estimated that 141,000 Muslim male combatants had been killed by security forces
and another 78,000 Muslim civilians had been killed by terrorist action, 12,000 of whom were killed in internal political
purges. On the other hand, in 1962 the FLN estimated that 300,000 Algerians had died from war-related causes. Later, the Algerian
government raised this estimate to one million. No one ever counted the number of civilians “accidentally” killed during French
search-and-destroy operations, losses from malnutrition and disease among the 1.8 million Muslims who either were regrouped
by the French or became refugees, or the number of reprisal killings conducted by the FLN after the French departed. While
the French totals surely are an undercount and the Algerian government’s count may be exaggerated, the true number is unknowable.
Taken as a whole, the war probably caused about a half million deaths, most of which were Algerian.