ALGIERS Great Battles
OPPOSING FORCES
FRANCE
LEADERS:
Gen. Raoul Salan, Gen. Jacques Massu, Gen. Paul Aussaresses, Col. Marcel Bigeard, Col. Yves Godard, Col. Roger Trinquier
FORCES:
10th Parachute Division SDECE Action Service Gendarmerie Ultras
TACTICS:
Mass arrests and detention of suspects. Imprisonment and torture of FLN agents. Executions.
ALGERIA
LEADERS:
Saadi Yacef, Larbi ben M’hidi, Abame Ramdane, Benyoucef Benkhedda
FORCES:
1,400 - 1,500 operatives and fighters under the Comite de coordination d’execution. An estimated 5,000 spies and sympathisers spread across Algiers.
TACTICS:
Bombing and assassination. Avoiding pitched battles.
ALGIERS JUNE 1956 - SEPTEMBER 1957
As the Cold War’s chill hung over Europe, former colonies across Asia and Africa stirred from decades – and sometimes centuries – of foreign misrule. On too many occasions nationalist fervour led to unbelievable violence. The British Empire’s relatively peaceful release of India, for example, didn’t spare millions of innocents from the human toll wrought by Partition. Southeast Asia fared no better, as fresh conflicts erupted in Burma, Indonesia, Malaya and Vietnam. Yet in North Africa a war unlike any other was prosecuted with extreme cruelty. France had dominated Algeria for 133 years, subjugating it in a spasm of imperialism from 1830 to 1845. Instead of turning it into a protectorate like neighbouring Tunisia or Morocco, Algeria was made a French province. Enabling Algerie Française to exist and endure meant grafting a façade of French tastes and habits onto North Africa. This was most noticeable in Algiers, with its tree-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafes and imposing apartment blocks. Unscathed by World War II and populated by Europeans, the capital’s interior also offered refuge for the Arab migrants from the countryside displaced by pied-noir, or ‘black foot’, settlers who built their farms and vineyards over the land. This made conditions in the metropolitan slum of the Casbah intolerable. With its ramshackle brick houses piled on each other and crowded along winding alleys and back streets, the Casbah symbolised the iniquities of Algiers. So when the revolutionaries of the Front de Libération National, or FLN, and its armed wing the ALN rose up in October 1954 it marked a reckoning between a native populace long oppressed by the colonial yoke and an entrenched local elite, known as ‘colons’, ready to defend its privileges. Between them was an institution, the French armed forces, which wanted to prove itself after the recent debacles in World War II and Indochina.
It was in the Casbah of Algiers where France’s elite troops pitted themselves against determined urban ‘fellaghas’ – the derogatory term for guerrillas. It should