A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (32 page)

Certainly it seems that, in the autumn of 1956, both Tunisia and Morocco had their own reasons for pressing the F.L.N. towards a negotiated peace, and now a golden opportunity of their support was sacrificed. As far as the peace negotiations, so delicately initiated by Mollet himself, were concerned, the bridges were truly down, and it would not be possible to re-erect them for many years to come. With his well-known wit, and speaking from personal experience, Bourguiba is said to have joked at the time: “Don’t forget, the French have a habit of locking up their
interlocuteurs
before negotiating with them!” Mollet could still have thrown the switches. He could have released Ben Bella and his colleagues, and have dealt with them, from a position of strength, as honoured negotiators, as indeed the French dealt with Mohammed V and Bourguiba. But, as revealed, the Mollet government possessed neither the will nor the power; and, in any event, with Suez in the offing, the time would soon be quite out of joint. So the
interlocuteurs valables
(which Mendès-France had sought so anxiously for) remained in the indignity of imprisonment, becoming more embittered and intransigent, a source of constant embarrassment to successive French governments, a veritable time-bomb in their midst.

From France’s point of view, in retrospect, much more might have been achieved by leaving Ben Bella well alone. For if there was any satisfaction gained from the whole episode, paradoxically it lay in the ranks of the F.L.N. leaders themselves. Overtly expressing outrage at the hijacking, privately Abane and the “interior” were delighted. The major split within the F.L.N., threatened as a consequence of Soummam, had been miraculously avoided; unity had been restored and all argument about the primacy of the “interior” resolved — because now the “exterior” had simply ceased to exist. Any flagging by potential “soft-liners” had been effectively quelled. Thus had the French army devisers of the coup really done the enemy a good turn.

Whatever else, the Ben Bella episode undoubtedly marked a major turning-point in the war. From now on the war could only proceed, savagely and irreconcilably; any other way out had been sealed off.

Suez

Almost immediately, however, other and greater events were pushing the Ben Bella episode into the background. Encouraged, briefly, by Khrushchev’s “de-Stalinisation” bombshell at the Twentieth Party Congress, the captive peoples of eastern Europe had seen their hopes for a more liberal future crushed by the police apparatus. This provoked serious riots in Poland, and on the day after the seizure of Ben Bella police opened fire in Budapest. There then followed the ten days of wild, mad euphoria of the Hungarian revolt when it seemed, momentarily, as if Russia might actually allow her satellite to regain some degree of freedom. Meanwhile, America was enmeshed in the re-election of President Eisenhower, and Israel and Egypt had gone to war. Then, on 30 October, after months of huffing and puffing, of making plans and changing them, France and Britain issued — and had rejected — their ultimatum to Nasser. The next day the R.A.F.’s ponderous and protracted “psychological bombardment” of Egypt began.

The Suez “war”, so well-trampled since by journalists, historians and self-justifying politicians, has a place in this story only in so far as it influenced the Algerian war and was in turn influenced by it. The lies, half-truths and fudged recollections that have overlaid Suez in the intervening twenty years have done much to confuse the prime motives of principals. None of them were identical, or even in harmony, and only Israel’s seem simple and straightforward: she was fighting for what she conceived to be survival. Eden was alarmed by the threat to Britain’s imperial position, and obsessed by the notion of Nasser being a new Mussolini—Hitler and Suez the Rhineland of our times; he cared little for French problems in North Africa, and probably less for Israel (which he generally referred to, revealingly, as “the Jews”).

Mollet in his turn cared little about British imperial problems, but to his death insisted passionately that Israel was his first concern. He was deeply conditioned by the past betrayals of Munich and the Spanish Civil War, and, as a good Socialist, was drawn to Israel as a “pioneer country socialising itself”.[
3
] He felt she had but one true friend in the world — the United States — which, in the throes of an election, would be unable to help her. He denied hotly that Suez was “done for Algeria”, and yet one is entitled to pose the question: had France
not
been so embroiled in Algeria, would Mollet have been quite so open to Israeli pressure, and would he in turn have pushed Eden so hard to participate in what was to prove to be such a desperate gamble? One has seen how France, from Soustelle onwards, had persuaded herself, erroneously, that Nasser and Ben Bella were the dynamos of the Algerian revolt. This had been reconfirmed during Foreign Minister Pineau’s Cairo visit of the spring, when Nasser had told him (with possibly exaggerated self-importance): “When you really have the intention of negotiating in Algeria, give me the word and it will be swiftly settled.” And the
Athos
had provided a last straw. Mollet and the strong man of his government, Defence Minister Bourgès-Maunoury, as well as many lesser Frenchmen convinced themselves, intuitively, that if Nasser went the collapse of the Algerian revolt would soon follow. In the well-chosen words of Hugh Thomas: “Publicly, the
Entente Cordiale
seemed at its height. But Eden joined not Europe but the French war in Algeria.”

The proclamations made to the French expeditionary force to Suez certainly had an archaic ring of the First World War about them. In words that seem unlikely to be heard ever again, General Beaufre addressed his troops on 4 November: “Officers, N.C.O.s and men, we are going into Egypt with our British friends and allies. France and the world have their eyes on you…. If necessary, you will repeat the exploits of your forebears on Egyptian soil … [i.e. Napoleon Bonaparte].” At dawn the next morning, 5 November, 600 British and 500 French paratroops dropped near Port Said. For all the muddles and delays of the past months, the last minute changes of plan whereby élite airborne troops had been sent in on invasion barges, operations proceeded with remarkable smoothness. Brushing aside fairly feeble resistance, Massu’s fast-moving paras, tempered by the war in Algeria, were well on their way to Suez when Bulganin issued his missile-rattling ultimatum to the “Allies” — just twenty-four hours after Russian tanks had rolled into Hungary to crush her short-lived liberty. The following day, 6 November, the news reached Beaufre that the British had agreed to a cease-fire and the advance was to stop. “I was in a suppressed rage, and at that moment I considered the possibility of disobeying,” says Beaufre, and many French troops shared his anger. It is said that some, on their way back through Cyprus, showed their disgust with their
perfide
ally by selling their weapons to E.O.K.A. terrorists. In France (where, on 31 October, Mollet had received a majority of 368 to 182 — including 149 Communists — compared with Eden’s 270 to 218) feelings ran high against Britain’s apparent lack of moral fibre.

Thus, after just forty hours, ended the Suez “war”, the shortest in history and possibly the silliest. As Hugh Thomas comments, “the grand old Duke of York” did at least get to the top of the hill! In terms of human losses it cost the French ten killed, the British twenty-two, the Israelis 200 and the Egyptians less than 3,000; in cash, instead of the figure of £5 million earmarked by Chancellor Macmillan in July, it was to cost Britain alone somewhere between £100 million and an estimated £328 million. But the unquantifiable costs were to prove far higher for both nations over the long term; even though history may not rate Suez as one of its most “decisive” battles, it may well come to be regarded as one of its most influential. “Never before”, wrote Harold Macmillan, “had Western Europe proved so weak. The fact that they [Britain and France] had been met by an unnatural combination between Russia and America was almost a portent.” For Britain, Suez meant that she would not henceforth be capable of a foreign policy independent of the United States; in her dealings with France it meant the end of the old
Entente Cordiale
and the beginning of an era of mistrust to be exemplified by the Gaullist “
Non
” to Britain in Europe. In France, as Roy Jenkins rightly noted, “the reaction to Suez was quite different. There was less guilt and more anger. The lesson there learnt was never to trust the Americans and probably not the British either. The ‘Anglo-Saxons’ became the main object of obloquy ….”

As far as Algeria was concerned, the impact of Suez was immense. On the one hand, F.L.N. morale soared; now they could reckon on getting
real
assistance from a victorious Nasser, and in fact a large consignment of British and French arms abandoned after the cease-fire would soon be flowing in to them. On the other hand, the French contingent returning to Algeria felt mortally discouraged. One of Lartéguy’s para officers explains in
The Centurions
, “It’s specially bad for our men. They thought they had escaped from prison. Now they’re going to be taken back to their cells under police escort.” Indeed, in the French news films of the time the contrast between the tough, confident professionals setting off for Suez and the broken men shambling from their ships at Algiers spoke volumes. Although there was a band waiting to greet them in the cold rain, Pierre Leulliette recalls feeling on his return that “the shame, ridicule and ignominy of a winner who has to run away like a pathetic loser was heaped on our backs….” When the instant resentment against the British had passed, it was replaced by something far more bitter against their own civil leaders: “Even in Indo-China, said the veterans, where you were betrayed daily by everyone, they wouldn’t have dared do anything like that,” recorded Leulliette. Many of the seeds of revolt that were to sprout eighteen months later were sown among the paras at Suez. If acquiescing to Bulganin’s threat had meant a fundamental change in the rules in the international game from 1956 onwards, it also guaranteed independence for Algeria — eventually. But, like other international realities, this was invisible to the French military in Algeria, for whom the Suez humiliation only reinforced their determination to win in Algeria.

For Guy Mollet the Suez debacle meant the torpedoing of his hopes of a military victory in Algeria, while the Ben Bella episode, at least temporarily, closed all doors to a negotiated peace. His whole policy lay in ruins; yet he was allowed to linger on in power, a lame duck, if for no other reason than that no other French politician was willing to relieve him of his burdens at this invidious time. So, after a year in which almost everything had turned out as a net gain for the F.L.N., the war ground on — with Simone de Beauvoir complaining: “My serenity was destroyed. The government was going to persist with this war. Algeria would win its independence; but not for a long time.”

[
1
] Literally “elected office-holders”.

[
2
] For an international parallel one is reminded of those good American Democrats, Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy, rushing into the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam respectively, where a Republican President might have feared to tread.

[
3
] Over seventeen years later he admitted: “I am now anti-Israel, because the Right is triumphant.”

CHAPTER EIGHT
“Why We Must Win”:
1956–1958

We want to halt the decadence of the West and the march of Communism. That is our duty, the real duty of the army. That is why we must win the war in Algeria. Indo-China taught us to see the truth.

Colonel Antoine Argoud, November 1960

France’s “new revolutionary army”

OBSERVING the disembarkation in Cyprus of the French contingent bound for Suez, a British correspondent and a former paratrooper noted a certain embarrassment on the part of the British reception committee. The British airborne “brass”, tidily arrayed on the tarmac according to rank and staff function, had difficulty identifying their opposite numbers among Massu’s men in their “leopard” battle kit still dusty from operations in the
bled
. In fact, the French turned out to have no “staff” as such and paid little deference to rank and, compared with their British counterparts, seemed more closely to resemble the revolutionary forces they had been combating. Those who saw them about their business at Suez, however, were at once impressed by their hard-hitting mobility and sheer ruthless professionalism. As
Le Monde
was to remark: “Few armies in the world possess a generation of officers who have fought so much.”

In purely military terms at any rate, the French army had come a long way since its first fumbling operations in 1954. At that time it had begun by repeating the early errors of the Indo-China war, of hitting back with tanks and heavy equipment, 1945-style, against will-o’-the-wisp guerrillas. Now the increase in manpower ordained by Mollet, a steady flow of American helicopters to land them swiftly where they could hurt the rebels most, new units, new leaders, new tactics, and a whole new structure and morale within the army itself, had radically improved its striking power. The new commanders studied local circumstances more closely and tailored their security actions to suit. For instance, in Kabylia General Olié had noted the central importance in Berber life of the
djemaa
, or council of elders, and wherever possible set about boosting the responsibility of the reliable
djemaas
and backing up their authority by the S.A.S. detachments so successfully fathered by Soustelle, which, in turn, could rely on speedy and massive intervention by an ubiquitous army presence.