A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (68 page)

Fundamental to Challe’s strategy were the prerequisites that the existing military establishment in Algeria should in no way be diminished, and that the “loyal” Muslim
harkis
be increased from 26,000 to 60,000. On both these scores de Gaulle’s sanction was required, and there had been a tense passage at an interview with de Gaulle when Challe had insisted, “I
must
have these effectives.” De Gaulle at his iciest had reproached Challe: “One does not impose conditions on de Gaulle!” But Challe, unabashed, replied that either he got de Gaulle’s approval or de Gaulle would have his resignation. Challe won, and was henceforth treated with a certain respect instead of just as the General’s “man” in Algiers.[
1
] The episode was typical of Challe’s uncompromising independence of mind, a characteristic which in just over two years’ time would confront de Gaulle with the most dangerous challenge of his entire career.

Challe’s first successes

At first the energetic, rugger-playing and pipe-smoking airman was regarded frostily by the army in Algeria. How could an aviator understand terrestrial problems, how succeed where the best army brains had failed? In a remarkably short space of time, however, Challe won over his subordinates by his straightforwardness, firmness and sheer integrity; but, above all, by his technical excellence. He soon proved himself, comments Jacques Fauvet, editor of
Le Monde
, to be “one of the rare generals in the French armed forces capable of planning and commanding in a modern war”. Challe also exhibited unerring skill in sifting his commanders, bringing forward the most competent and forceful; and transferring those ageing officers who had been around too long in Algeria. Within three months he had replaced nearly half the colonels commanding sectors. While de Gaulle had permitted no ambiguity about the civilian being the boss, with Delouvrier Challe’s relations were of the most harmonious from the very beginning; each month the Delegate-General would attend Challe’s corps commanders’ conference, while Challe took part in Delouvrier’s meetings with his prefects. Thus, within a few weeks of taking over, Challe had gone far to instil a new spirit of aggressive optimism in the army in Algeria, and by February the first instalment of the Challe Plan was ready to be unleashed.

Challe decided to start operations in the western end of the Ouarsenis range round Saida, lying to the south-east of Oran. The area was the fulcrum of Wilaya 5, previously commanded by Boumedienne, and had been firmly in rebel hands for several years, although the F.L.N. had always been weaker here than in the eastern parts of Algeria. Far less rugged than Kabylia or the Aurès, the rolling country of the Ouarsenis offered French mechanisation better prospects of driving the
katibas
out into the open and rounding them up; as the “softest option” it presented an ideal starting-place while Challe was still building up his Réserve Générale. As it was, the operation was spearheaded with an unprecedented concentration of fire-power, comprising the whole of Massu’s old 10th Para Division plus all the mobile troops available in the Oran zone. Challe kept up the pressure until April, when it was officially announced that the Ouarsenis had been cleaned up. Over 1,600 of the F.L.N. had been killed, 460 captured, and large quantities of arms and ammunition seized. Challe himself claimed that these losses amounted to fifty per cent of the A.L.N. manpower and forty to fifty per cent of its weaponry. Results in the Saida-Mascara sector, where the redoubtable Bigeard was once more back in action, had been particularly gratifying. The local commander, Youssef Smail, had surrendered and then broadcast an impassioned appeal to his comrades to heed de Gaulle’s
paix des braves
initiative. Most important of all, however, was the fact that the O.P.A. structure had been broken up and the French garrison forces left—as Challe’s strategy intended—in full command of the territory after offensive operations had moved on.

On 18 April Challe launched “Opération Courroie”, shifting the whole force against the eastern end of the Ouarsenis behind Algiers, the more difficult terrain that was the heart of Wilaya 4. Once again Challe allowed himself two months. For all the internal troubles within the Wilaya, he himself admits that results were “correct, but a little less good than in Oranie because the rebels split up and ran faster”. Challe also criticised the attacking forces for not having acted with quite the expected amount of vigour. Meanwhile, in March, the French had registered other successes elsewhere; Amirouche and Si Haouès had been killed, and, after suffering serious losses on the Morice Line in February, an A.L.N. line-crossing
katiba
nearly 150 strong had given itself up to the French on 22 March. By summer 1959 the Challe Plan really got into its stride, with a massive force of two first-class divisions earmarked for the key Réserve Générale. The modern, mechanised equipment backing up this force was impressive. In contrast to the early days when the French had at their behest only a handful of small helicopters, there were now enough big, American-made “Flying Bananas” to lift into action two whole battalions in a matter of five minutes. From France and Germany Super-Sabre pilots had been transferred in substantial numbers to squadrons of Harvard T.6 trainers, numbering over 300 and heavily armed with four machine-guns and two rocket pods. After the supersonic F.100s, the pilots complained that the Second World War Harvards, with their rackety top speed of little over 200 m.p.h., were like driving Citroën 2 c.v.s, but they were able to observe and pounce on the tiny target of a
djounoud
foxhole with far greater accuracy than their more glamorous grandchildren, and were cheap and easily patched up; and this was warfare that no one understood better than Challe the airman. (At the same time, the use of so much American military equipment supplied for the benefit of France in N.A.T.O. was the source of increasing embarrassment to the American government, and of alienation between them and the already prickly de Gaulle.)

On the ground, the expanded
harki
units forming the nucleus of Challe’s Commandos de Chasse showed themselves contributing more effectively than ever before—or afterwards. Modelled on the
katibas
themselves, the Commandos would strike off into the
djebel
for days at a time, living off the land and at the same time severing the adversary from his sources of supply, ruthlessly hunting down the hunter. They were constantly in radio communication with Challe’s command post, and immediately contact was made with a
katiba
the Commandos would bring down helicoptered shock troops from the Réserve Générale to hem it in from all sides. Never, says Philippe Tripier, “had the forces in Algeria been so well commanded…never had the military instrument been better adapted to its task, well-tuned as it was and animated by ardent and inventive leaders, under the constantly innovative drive of Challe”.

Operation “Binoculars”

On 22 July Challe threw in his most ambitious effort to date against the toughest nut of all—the vast mountain fastness of Kabylia, with its eyrielike villages and population of nearly one million. With little interruption, the F.L.N. had held sway in Kabylia ever since Krim and Ouamrane hoisted the standard of revolt in 1954; its Wilaya 3 was now in the hands of Mohand Ou El-Hadj, succeeding the slain Amirouche. “Jumelles” (or “Binoculars”) involved a double-pronged assault on both Little and Great Kabylia for which Challe mustered 25,000 troops in addition to the sector forces and including marines to make amphibious landings on inaccessible parts of the coast. But on the eve of launching “Binoculars”, Challe’s intelligence received news of A.L.N. movements in the Hodna mountains which link Kabylia with the Aurès. Overnight Challe switched regiments due to move into Kabylia, and struck a lightning, surprise sideswipe at the Hodna which in twelve days (he claims) knocked out fifty per cent of the rebel strength there. Typical of the speed and flexibility with which Challe operated, it also, in effect, created something of a moat or
cordon sanitaire
across which it would be difficult for Mohand Ou El-Hadj’s Kabyles to escape into the Aurès when fleeing from the impending pressure of “Binoculars”.

On a tour of inspection at the end of August, de Gaulle found Challe at his combat post 5,500 feet up in the Djurdjura mountains in the heart of Kabylia, personally conducting operations amid “a forest of radio aerials”. His Commandos de Chasse were combing through the endless, dense Forest of Akfadou, hitherto always a virtually untouched paradise for Wilaya 3, and there seemed to be no inch of Kabylia that was not at Challe’s fingertips. Troops seized the big crest-line villages with their marvellous panoramic fields of vision, then radiated out from them like the tentacles of an octopus. In the maquis were also operating, with extraordinary fearlessness, Captain Léger and a section of his
bleus
; their double-agent activities, as usual, were so successful that villagers refused any longer to give food supplies to the A.L.N., not knowing whether they were true
moudjahiddine
or Léger’s turncoats. Conditions in the field became terrible, with men dying as often from hunger as from enemy bullets. “One could no longer move,” stated one of Mohand Ou El-Hadj’s lieutenants:

One no longer ate. I was so weak that I could no longer even manage to carry my sub-machine-gun. The establishment of military posts, the multiplying of self-defence communities and intelligence agents was making life impossible, and even survival itself…. It was only by executing traitors one after the other that we did manage to survive. But one was never able to regain the initiative.

In the wake of “Binoculars”, Jules Roy revisited a village called Toudja, a small demi-Eden cradled in the jumbled mountains that rise above Bougie and the Soummam valley. Its orchards of fig and olive “were as luxuriant as an oasis. There are four potato harvests a year.” Before 1954, like many another Kabyle village, Toudja had no contact with the French except through the tax collector; during the war families had been divided, some with a man in the A.L.N., others with one serving in the
harkis
. Now, under Challe’s operations, Roy noted: “Today life has resumed, order reigns, and it is enough to send a tank ahead of the bus that goes to Bougie three times a week.” During the day the French army “ensured freedom in the commune and the nearby villages, almost all of which are in ruins. Every evening they set up ambushes to surprise the
fellagha
, who come for supplies or to see their wives.” But the cost of “pacification” was high. Apart from the ruined villages, cork cultivation had had to be abandoned; 15,000 of Toudja’s 17,000 fig trees no longer bore fruit for want of pruning; there was not one single head of cattle left out of the 238 that existed in 1950; out of a population of 7,230, 1,200 had died or disappeared, leaving a proportion of women to men of eight to two, which spoke volumes. And, says Roy, “compared with what I saw later on, I can affirm that the inhabitants of Toudja are well off”.

The “positive”…

For all this suffering, what were the results in Kabylia? Challe himself admits that, at first, they were “disappointing”. Mohand Ou El-Hadj had reacted swiftly by splitting up his
katibas
into small packets of ten to twenty men that went to ground in caves, or escaped through the teeth of the army comb. But “little by little the regiments saw the population come to us and give us their confidence”. By late October when the autumn rains brought an end to “Binoculars”, the French announced that 3,746 Kabyle insurgents had been killed, captured or wounded, and their military structure fragmented, while the F.L.N. itself admitted to extremely heavy losses. And Challe had still not finished; in November, moving ever east-wards, he was “cleansing” the mountain country of Wilaya 2, north of Constantine. In the spring of 1960 he was planning “Trident” to attack in full force in the Aurès—Nementchas, the only remaining territory where A.L.N.
katibas
still remained intact and effective.

But in the meantime many things had happened on the political level, and on 23 April 1960 Challe was posted home before “Trident” could be launched.

Seen in retrospect, “Binoculars” represented the peak not only of the Challe Plan but of all French military efforts in Algeria. Should it then be compared to the victorious Haig-Foch steamroller which broke the Kaiser’s army in the summer of 1918; or to the Ludendorff offensive of the preceding March, which had brought Germany to within an inch of victory, yet failed nevertheless, and not least, on account of factors far removed from the battlefield? On the balance sheet, Challe’s own forces had suffered losses rarely exceeding a ratio of one to ten, a few hundred killed; while on his departure he reckoned that over half the regular
katibas
of the interior had been destroyed in the course of the past year’s offensives. The proportion of prisoners to killed had, significantly, risen to forty-two per cent from twenty-seven for the previous year, and a number of those who gave themselves up switched allegiances to join the
harkis
. In arms, the French claimed to have collected five for every one lost to the rebels (also a significant change from the early months of the war; the A.L.N. were losing 300 weapons net per month, and it was estimated that by September 1959 their logistic potential had sunk more than twenty per cent over the past year). Thus, statistically, the A.L.N. looked defeated by the time of Challe’s departure in 1960. This is certainly how it seemed to many French commanders on the ground. “We have pacified the country so well”, Edward Behr quotes one captain as reporting to his commanding officer at about this time, “that the
fellagha
have almost disappeared. Nowadays, almost no one joins the guerrillas. It is more practical to stay put and campaign for independence in a thousand legal ways.” The whole chain of command between the
katibas
and the O.P.A., and the Wilayas and the G.P.R.A., so laboriously constructed since the Soummam Conference of 1956, had been disrupted. Irregulars—
moussebiline and fidayine
—had to fill the huge holes torn in the ranks of the
moudjahiddine
. Morale had never been lower. Claimed Challe: “The rebel is no longer king of the
djebel
; he is trapped there…. The military phase of the rebellion is terminated in the interior….”