The General by Jonathan Fenby

Author:Jonathan Fenby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2012-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

III

Suez and the Battle of Algiers

It was elsewhere in North Africa that international attention focused on France. In July 1956, a desire to stem Arab nationalism prompted the Mollet government to join the British and Israelis in attacking Egypt after the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. The operation was a military success but ended in diplomatic disaster when American opposition and the threat of intervention by Moscow brought it to an abrupt end.

De Gaulle saw the episode as yet further evidence of the regime’s weakness; when questioned, he said that if he had been in office he would have broadcast an immediate warning to the Egyptian leader that two divisions of French paratroopers were being dispatched. They would have taken Cairo within two hours, he added, ‘and no force in the world would have stopped them’. He also depicted the Suez debacle as yet another example of the error of depending on London, remarking, ‘you have to be a socialist to believe in the military virtues of the British’. He would have been even more cutting had he known that Mollet secretly proposed a Franco-British political and economic union, which Anthony Eden’s government turned down.7

No sooner had the French been humiliated over Suez than the crisis in Algiers turned even more murderous, as the FLN boss Saadi Yacef launched a series of bombings carried out by young women who left explosives in places frequented by Europeans, including a milk bar, a cafeteria, a restaurant and a nightclub. The mayor of an Algiers suburb, a leader of ‘ultra’ settler conservatives, was shot. A bomb went off at the cemetery just before his funeral. Pieds-noirs ran amok, killing four Muslims and injuring fifty. Under Yacef’s instructions, the Casbah was transformed into an armed camp – the FLN leader had been born there, one of fourteen children of a baker, and knew its narrow, winding streets well. His artisans constructed a network of tunnels, explosives factories and hiding places, and he moved to and fro disguised by the veil and long dress of a Muslim woman.

At a loss as to how to cope with the escalating crisis, Lacoste handed over responsibility for suppressing the revolt to the paratroop general Jacques Massu, a tough, craggy Suez veteran with a formidable record which included service in Leclerc’s Free French forces in the desert. He had fought in Indochina and been among troops deployed by Jules Moch to put down Communist-led strikes. A committed Gaullist, Massu was a proud professional soldier with little interest in politics who believed in following his orders successfully, whatever the cost. But he did not underestimate the scale of the challenge he had been handed. ‘We’re in for piles of shit,’ he told his chief of staff, Yves Godard.

Godard was a more intellectual figure who had run a ‘dirty tricks’ unit for the French counter-intelligence service and fought in Indochina. He elaborated a systematic plan to defeat Yacef and his guerrillas, recruiting informers and moving forward block by block as the Battle of Algiers unfurled.

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