France's war in Algeria: telling the story

[lirelou]

Reverence the comment on Larteguy's "The Centurions" (and "Praetoriens"). The characters in the book are all composites. Thus Raspeguy is based largely upon Marcel "Bruno" Bigeard, but likewise includes bits of Langlais, Brechignac, and several other colourful airborne commanders. Julien Boisferas, the fictional 10th Colonial Para's intelligence officer, was partly based on Aussaresses, who knew Bigeard from their WWII FFI service, but also on Roger Trinquier and Decorse. The real Aussaresses served in a totally different regiment in Algeria. (Bigeard commanded the 3rd RPC, Trinquier was on the 10th Abn Div staff, but followed Bigeard into the 3rd RPC/RPIMa whereas Aussaresses served with the 11th Para "Choc' Regiment.) What Larteguy's two most excellent novels fails to capture is the success of the 3rd RPC/RPIMa (renamed in 1958) in converting captured "fells" to their cause end enlisting them into a 5th parachute rifle company within the 3rd RPIMa. You don't enlist former enemy combattants to your cause by torturing them. And their loyalty to the 3rd Colonial/Marine Paras included participating what was to have been a combat jump into Tunisia in 1961 (changed to airlanding at the last minute).

Which brings me to this point. Many French units were able to distinguish between terrorists, who targeted civiians with bombs, and enemy combattants, who fought openly against the French. And many of these same French units often included commando and partisan units composed of captured ALN cadred by an officer and a few really good NCOs who led these former "fells" on operations against the FLN infrastructure and ALN units in the field. A far better view than that in Larteguy's very excellent fiction can be found in such accounts as Jean Pouget's "Bataillon RAS", Henry-Jean Loustau's memoirs on Algeria (my apologies, title forgotten). The battle of Algiers was fought against terrorists who were targeting civilians. While I greatly respect Gen. Paris de la Bollardiere's moral principles, I do not condemn Aussaresses or the others who engaged in torture to break their way into the cells. They were trying to save innocent civilian lives, both Colon and Arab. The fact that they broke those clandestine cells speaks for the efficiency of their methods. But a contemporary eyewitness account I read long ago notes in an aside that those who often volunteered for services that required the application of torture were not the better elements of their units. Such methods were likely not applied across the spectrum. Otherwise the French would have had little success in recruiting former FLN for their partisan and commando units. Pouget (the model for Philippe Esclavier, and to whom Larteguy dedicicated The Centurions) is emphatic that captured ALN must be treated as combattants, and not as criminals. To extrapolate that experience, I would suggest that those Iraqi insurgents using car bombs and other devices to target U.S. Forces are legitimate combattants, while those who do so to target mosques, polling places, and other civilian targets are terrorists, despite the similarity of their TTP.

[lirelou]

Just a follow-up to my previous. I ran through Erwan Bergot's bio of Bigeard last night for the battle of Algiers. Of interest, Bigeard emphasizes what an intelligence analyst would call the "pattern analysis" approach to cracking the cells. He lays out the problem that the police had in dealing with insurgents using the existing French legal code, and emphasizes that the Army was not going to be bound by rules of evidence or criminal procedure, and that they were not going to fail. Bigeard attributes his success in Algiers to the fact that his company commanders were given specific pieces of territory and challenged to ferret out the information needed to identify the FLN cells within his regimental area, which included the Casbah. Specifically, he had his intelligence officer prepare a briefing for the unit commanders which detailed all that was known about the FLN and its organization, and capturing that in an organizational diagram with blank spaces showing for persons unknown. The S-2 had gained his information from the Police records, but the individuals were at that time out on the street. At the briefing, Bigeard informed his commanders that it was their jobs to fill in the spaces on the chart, not the S-2's, and that they would be judged accordingly. He emphasized that all they had were the very lowest ranking members of the organization, and that the nature of the organization was that each man would know only the members of his cell, and with luck, perhaps a member of another cell. The cell leader would know the name only of his higher contact. But, with the information they had, they held the keys to filling in the blanks. The advantage of the Army over the police was that the Army, under martial law, could be far more flexible and much quicker to exploit intelligence. They did not need to go to a judge to get a search order, and the same commander who picked up reportable information was the same entity who would be reacting to it. The units subsequently fanned out through their assigned areas, and began bringing in suspects. Deprived of their access to a defense attorney, and in total ignorance of how long and under what conditions they would be held, many of the suspects began to drop snippets of information, which the units immediately followed up on. It was a laborious method, but it allowed his regiment to accumulate enough information to begin piecing a more comprehensive picture together, which in turn generated more operations, more suspects in custody,and more information. The end result was a picture accurate enough to allow a patterned analysis of the insurgents infrastructure, resulting in the arrest and neutralization of its leaders. In the short term, Massu's 10th Abn Div won the battle of Algiers, but Bigeard warned that the victory was only operational, and that enough of a structure had fled to allow the FLN to return and reconstitute their networks, thereby resuming operations. As I understand his take on torture, which he neither denies nor endorses, the issue of torture was greatly exaggerated by both the FLN and the government's enemies in order to discredit the Army and thus build the political consensus in French political circles necessary to prevent the Army from ever undertaking such operations again.