A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (107 page)

In a towering rage, the French Commander-in-Chief, General Ailleret, now ordered a full-scale assault on the O.A.S. stronghold of Bab-el-Oued. At first gendarmerie armoured cars raked the façades of apartment buildings with heavy .50 calibre machine-guns. But the O.A.S. marksmen fired back. Then, in the afternoon, 20,000 French troops — led by Ailleret himself — moved in and sealed off Bab-el-Oued with its some 60,000 inhabitants. Tanks fired their cannon at point-blank range into suspected O.A.S. snipers’ nests. In the evening a flight of T.6 planes flew in to strafe the still rebellious quarter with rockets and machine-guns. It was a scene more familiar to an army coup in Bolivia than anything ever experienced on French territory. For three days the “reduction” of Bab-el-Oued continued, and at the end of it the bullet-riddled walls, shattered windows, gutted cars in the streets and dangling trolley-bus cables resembled scenes from Budapest of 1956 — which, right from the beginning, Roger Degueldre had told Captain Sergent was what he wanted to create in Algiers. The fighting cost the French forces fifteen dead and seventy-seven wounded, while the Bab-el-Oued casualties were estimated at twenty killed and sixty wounded; 3,309 arrests were made and 1,110 weapons of various kinds seized, together with 100 kilos of
plastique
. During those days of siege, and afterwards, the uncommitted residents of Bab-el-Oued found themselves caught in a grim no-man’s-land between the O.A.S. and the F.L.N. “We didn’t dare go into the Casbah for fear of being kidnapped or killed by the F.L.N.,” recalled a Jewish school-teacher, Madame Lorette Ankaoua: “nor did we dare go into the European shops behind our house for fear of the O.A.S. So small Arab children in my class smuggled us bread secretly in their dirty haversacks. It was all we had to eat.”

Crushed as Bab-el-Oued might seem, there was more to come. On the 26th the O.A.S. mounted a mass demonstration to sweep along the whole
pied noir
population to the
monument aux morts
in protest against the treatment of Bab-el-Oued. Reckoning that anything up to 500,000 people might turn out, the new Algiers prefect of police, Vitalis Cros, declared all demonstrations banned and called up troop reinforcements to stiffen his twenty-five squadrons of
gendarmes mobiles
. The key role fell upon the 4th Regiment of Tirailleurs, one of the last regular units still containing a majority of “loyal” Algerian troops, which had just arrived — exhausted and tense — from operations in the
bled
. A few days previously their commanding officer, Colonel Goubard, had reported to the Commander-in-Chief, General Ailleret, that his Tirailleurs — averaging twenty years of age and with only eighteen months’ training — had proved themselves in the
djebel
but were in no way conditioned or trained for police activities in the city. Ailleret promised that the Tirailleurs would not be used in Algiers; but somehow, incredibly, the order was never passed down. Thus, at a time when nerves were at breaking-point in Algiers, these totally unsuited Algerian troops found themselves holding a road block in the centre of Algiers, across the Rue d’Isly by the Grande Poste, close to where Ortiz had erected his barricades in January 1960.

Despite the ban on demonstrations, shortly after 2 p.m. a wave of
pieds noirs
surged up the Rue d’Isly. They began jostling the Tirailleurs, who were obviously panicked by having to deal with a mob at such close quarters. Suddenly shots were fired by an unknown hand from a rooftop on the Rue d’Isly. The young Tirailleurs began spontaneously to shoot back, as they would have done out in the
djebel
. They shot, and shot — wildly, and at point-blank range — into the crowd. Among the journalists to witness it, Yves Courrière recalls that the horror of the scene was something he would never forget all his life. It was a repeat of the deadly fusillade which had prefaced “Barricades Week” in 1960 — only worse, with women and old men caught up in the murderous cross-fire. The crowd stampeded, and were fired after as they ran; men and women flattened themselves to the ground, then tried to crawl for safety to the Grande Poste or into nearby shops, with a hail of bullets following them. In the shattered window of one elegant boutique two corpses were found grotesquely sprawled among bullet-ridden dummies. Agonised shouts of “
Arrête ton feu, arrête ton feu, arrête
…!” went unheeded. When the shooting was finally stopped, forty-six dead and 200 wounded were picked up, more than a score of whom died subsequently. Afterwards some 2,000 cartridge cases were counted. Lengthy enquiries were held but, although the identity of the sniper on the roof was never clarified, it was generally assumed that he had belonged to the O.A.S., aiming deliberately to provoke a massacre that would speed the breakdown of order in Algiers. Whatever the truth, it was criminal negligence to place the Tirailleurs in such a predicament.

The O.A.S. decapitated

During the siege of Bab-el-Oued de Gaulle issued a curt instruction to Debré: “Immediate action must be taken to smash the criminal action of terrorist bands in Algiers and Oran.” But, disastrous as it had been, the week following the cease-fire in fact marked the peak in the fortunes of the O.A.S. and a turning-point in the struggle against it. In Algiers, guarded day and night by eight C.R.S. gunmen, the new tough prefect of police, Vitalis Cros, had taken over; meanwhile, the underground work of “Professor Ermelin”, alias Michel Hacq, and his “Force C” was at last beginning to bear fruit. In Oran a new army commander, an ex-trooper called General Katz, had assumed personal control of the battle. After the killing of his Deuxième Bureau chief, Katz installed himself in the prefecture, where the windows had been shot out, put his mattress on the floor to be out of the field of snipers’ fire, and read Saint-Simon by night to distract himself from the incessant shooting and bombing outside.

It was in Oran that on 25 March, between the assault of Bab-el-Oued and the Rue d’Isly massacre in Algiers — the first arrest came of an O.A.S. leader. With its preponderance of
pieds noirs
, with the wind in its dusty streets that seemed if anything to exacerbate violent tempers, Oran had given itself over perhaps even more completely to the O.A.S. than Algiers. March had begun with a particularly odious F.L.N. atrocity at Mers-el-Kébir: Muslims had broken into the house of a
pied noir
night-watchman during his absence, disembowelled his wife and smashed the skulls of his five- and four-year-old children against a wall. The predictable
ratonnade
had followed, with black-jacketed youths setting fire to Muslim shops in Oran and killing four Muslims “while attempting to evade arrest”. A few days later Oran’s civil prison was conflagrated by a crude butane and petrol bomb, creating a panic and killing two Muslims. On the 22nd the O.A.S. — with total impunity, and apparently aided by the bank clerks — pulled off the biggest bank raid in history to date, getting away with 2,200 million francs (about $4,700,000 or nearly £1,000,000) from the Banque d’Algérie in the centre of Oran.

Meanwhile, the O.A.S. boss in Oran, General Edmond Jouhaud — “Soleil bis” — was often to be seen promenading quite openly along the front under his alias of “M. Louis Gerbert, school-teacher”, with shaved head and bushy moustache. On 25 March General Katz got a “break” when an O.A.S. suspect under interrogation admitted that he had met Jouhaud in “a particularly high building on Oran’s Front-de-Mer”. The one building fitting this description was Le Panoramique skyscraper. As units despatched by Katz closed in on it, radio intercepts picked up an obvious warning in code — “The flowers are going to be watered” — which confirmed his suspicions. Inside Le Panoramique Jouhaud, holding a staff briefing, looked out of the window when a helicopter flew close and was horrified to see that the whole area below was filled with helmeted troops watching his windows through binoculars. In a few minutes there was a knock on the door. Jouhaud insisted on his identity as “Louis Gerbert”, but soon became confused on details of pedagogy; one million francs in brand new notes were found in the apartment; and Salan’s deputy finally condemned himself by signing a form to certify the removal of personal effects “E. Jouhaud” instead of “L. Gerbert”. By the following night Jouhaud was in the Santé prison, along with Challe and Zeller.

On hearing of Jouhaud’s arrest, Salan’s reaction was, “De Gaulle will have him shot … unless he catches me first.” He ordered General Gardy to take over in Oran, but the days of the O.A.S. ascendancy there were numbered. Salan, too, had become even more ineffectual as Commander-in-Chief of the O.A.S.; increasingly isolated, increasingly inscrutable, in dispute with his subordinates, and all the time with Hacq’s net closing invisibly in on him. On 7 April information from a captured German deserter from the Legion led the police to the hideout of the O.A.S.’s most effective and deadly operator, Roger Degueldre. With him at the time were five other O.A.S. leaders, including Pérez and Achard. “Degueldre simply refused to hide,” Pérez told the author, “the five of us went to ground, hidden in the lavatory behind a false wall. The police came in, took Degueldre and went away.” A myth of invulnerability had come to surround the Delta leader, in which he had evidently begun to trust himself, believing that his
baraka
and his false papers would get him by. Fearless to the end, knowing that he faced the firing-squad for his deeds, Degueldre never talked. Nevertheless, less than a fortnight after his arrest came Salan’s turn — within a day or two of the “Mandarin” ’s planning his withdrawal to Spain.

For weeks Hacq and the Sûreté Nationale had been painstakingly grooming an undercover agent called Jean-Marie Lavanceau, a former sergeant-major of Massu’s 10th Para Division, now become a police officer. Helped by such impeccable credentials from his army service, Lavanceau — with considerable courage — ferreted his way through various O.A.S. cut-outs to obtain access to “Soleil” himself. With the pretext of being an intermediary from Messali’s M.N.A., wishing to bring its former members into the O.A.S., he was passed from Achard to Captain Ferrandi, who promised him an interview with Salan for the next day — 20 April. Lavanceau was tracked to his rendezvous by a black Peugeot, similar to those used by the Deltas. Three men on motor scooters, with sub-machine-guns concealed in beach-bags, cruised innocently in the street, while 250 gendarmes were waiting in the background to seal off the neighbourhood. Entering the apartment where his O.A.S. contact led him, Lavanceau was astonished to find an almost unrecognisable Salan, his black dyed hair and moustache giving the elegant “Mandarin” an almost coarse look. For some time Lavanceau managed to stall about his mission; then Ferrandi rushed in, shouting that there were police outside. Lavanceau threw open the door and called in the waiting men. Fearing a possible O.A.S. riposte, they hustled Salan into a car, then into a helicopter to the army headquarters at Reghaia, still protesting that he was not Salan. At Reghaia he was met by an ice-cold General Ailleret, occupying the post that he had once held, who told him curtly: “You have had enough people killed; now you are going to pay for it.” In civilian clothes and looking more like a worried
petit commerçant
than the man who, back in 1958, had once held the fate of Algeria and France in his hand, the “Mandarin” was then bundled into a Dakota bound for Paris and the Santé.

On hearing the news of Salan’s capture, de Gaulle’s laconic comment was: “
Eh bien
, not a minute too soon!” Then, when told that Georges Bidault had been designated Salan’s successor, he added caustically: “At last, some good news!” Meanwhile, even before the capture of Degueldre and Salan, the O.A.S.’s one and only attempt to raise the standard of revolt outside the cities in the
bled
had collapsed in pieces. Under the idealistic Colonel Gardes, a detachment had tried to establish itself in the Ouarsenis near Orléansville, hoping for support from dissident army units; and the
harkis
of the Bachaga Boualem. But neither had materialised; Gardes’s expedition had been dispersed by a “whiff of grapeshot” from French aircraft; the Bachaga, France’s most loyal ally, realising which way the wind was now blowing, withdrew to the south of France with his remaining
harkis
. Then, on 4 May, André Canal — “Le Monocle” — was picked up by the French police. The O.A.S. was all but decapitated but still the killing continued.

The scorched earth

On 7 April the composite Provisional Executive established by Evian began its work of preparing Algeria’s transition to independence, under the presidency of the former speaker of the Algiers Assembly, Abderrahmane Farès. Symbolically, it was also the day that saw the capture of Roger Degueldre. In the former office of the Government-Delegate, Farès pronounced words that summed up sadly so much of what had passed: “The relations between Algeria and France are a graveyard of missed opportunities.” On 8 April de Gaulle’s referendum for the French people to declare their opinion on the Evian Agreements returned a massive vote of ninety per cent of
ouis
among those who polled. It was a vote of sheer lassitude. As a last viceroy to help guide the Provisional Executive and preside over the French withdrawal, de Gaulle had sent Christian Fouchet to be High Commissioner as replacement for Jean Morin, the exhausted Government-Delegate. Supported by de Gaulle’s own
éminence grise
, Bernard Tricot, Fouchet was a tall, fifty-year-old Parisian with iron-grey hair who, in 1955, had been Minister for Moroccan and Tunisian affairs when these countries were given their independence by Mendès-France. His brother had died at the side of General Leclerc in his wartime march. A serious but intensely humane personality, Fouchet found the role of “receiver” a thankless one. The first task allotted him by de Gaulle was to restore calm; but it was, he admits with understatement, “extremely difficult to impose
sagesse
upon a country which knew only passion”. On his arrival, Fouchet appeared on television to warn the
pieds noirs
in direct terms that “The whole world will range itself against you if you attempt to go back on what has been decided and concluded…. You would be the principal and earliest victims.” He condemned the O.A.S. as “madmen and criminals”, and urged the
pieds noirs
to “chase them out, because nothing is lost….” But now the majority of the
pieds noirs
, whether disgusted by horrors perpetrated by the O.A.S. or terrified for their own futures, had but one thought — to get out as quickly as possible themselves.