2RHPZ
06-02-2004, 06:43 AM
French memories of Algeria
FOR certain generations in France the memory of Algeria has not died even after more than four decades. With the publication in spring 2001 of General Aussaresses' confessions of torture, particularly during the Battle of Algiers, that sub-issue, sometimes erroneously identified with the entire conflict, came back strongly. Then, after the indiscriminate besmirchment, even of distinguished French soldiers, a more balanced tone of commemoration asserted itself. One could mention ever more numerous squares named for anciens combattants en Afrique du Nord. Perhaps emulating America's evolution on the memory of Vietnam, France is finally putting its Algerian history beyond the realm of simplistic stigmatization, except on the far Left. An annual day of homage to Muslim harkis who so suffered in the conflict was celebrated last September, not that it will make up for as many as 100,000 who were tortured, mutilated, or simply murdered by the victorious National Liberation Front (FLN).
In December 2002 President Chirac presided at the inauguration of the 'national memorial of the Algerian War', designated also for veterans of Morocco and Tunisia. (Chirac himself fought in Algeria.) Still under study is a future day to commemorate the end of the conflict: March 19, 1962, date of the Evian accords and ceasefire, is the top contender; but different veterans' associations, as well as pieds noirs and harkis groups, cite FLN violence through July, 1962 independence and beyond, along with Secret Army Organisation (OAS) and other vigilante activity. (The pied noirs are the French settlers who returned to France after Algeria became independent while the harkis are Algerians who supported continued French rule.)
How do ordinary Frenchmen recall or envisage the Algerian conflict? It depends on the generation. On a flight to Paris I asked a 30-year-old man for impressions of the era, and he mentioned a 'belle 'epoque', women's liberation, the Doors, his chronology stretching beyond 1962. In the San Francisco area a French graduate student in geography brightened at the mention of colonial Algeria. She assists in French courses, and they read a story by Camus set there. This seems to have been the extent of her knowledge on the subject.
Conversely, for those roughly 60 and over Algerian memories can be serious indeed. The war of ideas is still inside many, as for those who endured the Nazi Occupation (often the same people). One man who inhabits Neuilly served in the Aures mountains during 1958-1959. He felt that independence was inevitable, as the French could not win over enough Muslims. I retorted that Mafia-like tactics played a role there and he agreed -- so many feared throat-slittings. Another Frenchman some ten years younger tends a newspaper and Kodak place in Cannes. He was an airplane mechanic in seaside Bone during 1959-1960, and loved it so much after Paris that he wished to stay. A stocky smiler, he made do with Cannes, and still stares out at the Mediterranean, across which lies a troubled contemporary Algeria.
In fact the war there was the last hurrah of what turns out to have been on balance, a principled generation of French soldiers. Having experienced the defeat of 1940, many who were later in Algeria tried to wash away the stain by fighting abroad or in the Resistance, and in the final liberation of France. Many went on to the nine-year ordeal of France's attempt to regain control in Vietnam. And then came Algeria! All this represented twenty years of agony, but also a maturation process for a generation with much idealism and commitment.
One can of course read their books and paw through archives, and I have done both. Lately I have been most interested in the endpoint of the conflict. When the soldiers' putsch led by Generals Challe, Salan, Zeller and Jouhaud fizzled out in Algiers during April 1961, France found itself at a generational crossroads. The coup was led by a contingent of middle-aged or older officers, and one reason it misfired was because many younger soldiers lacked the same experience, or outlook, and there was a kind of oedipal revolt in the ranks, tending toward a new France of conveniences for all.
The Prince of Ambiguity, Charles de Gaulle, got in step with that 1960s materialism, all the while speaking out of both sides of his mouth on Algeria. First he preached modernization there too; but progressively, his overriding idea was to let go of its gorgeous cities, farmland, and less blithely, new petrol installations in the Sahara. More hauntingly yet, he would deliver up many Muslims who had sided with France, not to mention almost a million pieds noirs, leaving with only suitcases. Yes, he would listen to America concerning the obsolescence of European colonialism, stick with a smaller, modernized France at home, and eventually challenge the superpowers.
All this took place in the heady early 1960s -- the era of Kennedy -- not without a wrenching of feelings and upsets, including multiple assassination attempts on le grand Charles. Meanwhile, many fine soldiers -- transferred to Germany or Central Africa, or cashiered -- took it on the lip, leaving their best behind them; except in many cases to write above-mentioned memoirs, often fascinating ones.
Those still alive do remember Algeria, and for good and ill, know the Arabs, and ought to be consulted. More, the go-go America of the '60s and beyond, promising unpunished 'lifestyles', has come a cropper there, and as a model in today's France. I told one veteran in Paris, using the language made for aphorisms: 'La faiblesse se paie toujours', and sadly gesturing out of his window, he agreed. America and the entire West are now themselves at the wall, with many lethal types on a nearer horizon than Hanoi, or even Algiers.
The French can now look across to Britain and see Algerian 'asylum seekers' implicated in terrorist plots involving poisoning and even the murder of a policeman in Manchester. They can ruefully reflect that they warned a complacent Britain about this threat.
Meanwhile, little consulted, but often shatteringly bright, the old French veterans tend their gardens and memories. One, Jean Curutchet, drives me through succulent green Basque country near Bayonne, under a late autumn rain. His conversation hurtles from the history of Navarre and ancient Rome to his Basque heritage. He pulls up to a charming old abode, and I look at sheep peacefully grazing on hillsides. Curutchet opens up into a living room with timbers overhead going back to Richelieu's time. But I'm busy thinking of more recent Algerian history, and the part played in it by this once burly, now rather gentle, and enjoyably loquacious fellow.
As he tells us in his first book, Curutchet got an initial taste of Greater France when his father, a naval officer, was sent during the 'Phony War' of 1939-40 from Toulon to Casablanca. The ten-year-old boy fell in love immediately with the busy souk there, and made Arabic-speaking friends; then came his father's transfer to Algiers, where Jean burned for France's liberation, singing emotionally at a Christmas concert beamed by radio to children of the occupied metropole.
After the war he got a classic secondary education in Paris. But his father whisked him away from the bright lights, sending him to military school at La Fleche. Then, as Curutchet says in his second book, which he hands me after lunch, came a life of 'controlled violence'. That lunch is sumptuous - pink champagne, Basque fish soup, chicken with a sweet tomato sauce and rice, cheese and cake for dessert, and a Spanish Basque wine to wash it all down, served by his intelligent blond wife.
A younger Curutchet was not the thinker that later years of prison, careful reading of Nietzsche et al., conversion to Freemasonry, and finally, his career as a publisher made him. No, like so many humiliated by the Nazi occupation, the young man wanted action. He especially admired Marcel Bigeard and other 'paras' toughing it out in Vietnam. His own baptism under fire came in Tunisia, no dirty war, as he comments, but occurring well apart from cities. There he was optimistic, until Premier Mendes-France simply handed over autonomy. It was Curutchet's first shock, but not his last.
Algeria to which he naturally migrated was no Tunisia, or even Morocco. It had many French-speaking Europeans, and many Francophile Muslims (if one must be imperialised, I sometimes think, it might as well be by the French, rather than, say, the Mongols); and much infrastucture -- spanking new hospitals, rail and air facilities, facultes and restaurants.
For French officers of this generation, Algeria was the last Resistance. Captain Curutchet fought a war of the bled, where one became a local enlightened despot, making order, supervising medical and educational services, turning charity into work for pay. With a kibbutz model, as well as 'Kemalization' of Turkey in mind, he felt he could help create a new Algeria, and thereby regenerate France as well. Harkis who came to fight for him were better than French conscripts, he says. With tears in their eyes they demanded whether France would stay the course here; and Curutchet's promises in an outback where he was his country still anguish him.
The events of May 1958, with Europeans and Arabs fraternizing in Algiers, and Muslim women ripping off veils, were not simply stage-managed, as often alleged -- and he remembers seeing a hard-boiled General Massu shedding tears at this symbiotic moment. De Gaulle's advent also cheered him, as it did so many; then the President's speech of September 1959 on Muslim autonomy showed him which way the wind was blowing.
I ask about cruelty in Algeria, and Curutchet replies matter-of-factly: our method was mainly to shoot, while those who already slit animals' throats, letting them bleed to death used egorgement. So? But Curutchet's conversation takes long jumps back to the ancients, or ahead to Lebanon's civil war of the 1970s, which he also witnessed. Near his residence Palestinians murdered four civilians, and in return, Lebanese Christians knocked off over 100 Palestinians! Despite his experience, even Curutchet was shocked, but he says this is standard for that part of the world.
Returning to September 1959, he already felt that the only chance left for a French Algeria was action in the metropole. Like many good soldiers he was cut away from North Africa, transferred to an anodyne post on a 'dead French frontier'. Bitter over the fact that France had actually been improving militarily, even winning in Algeria, he took the major step of desertion. This was at the time when the Secret Army Organisation (OAS) was unleashing violence in France itself in an effort to keep Algeria French. Curutchet's years on the run as a key OAS member in France, though not part of assassination attempts on de Gaulle; his final cornering and five years of prison -- all this comes out better in his books than in person. For the man before me is no tough guy anymore; this is now a mellowed human vintage. But when he ran his publishing house, Curutchet made sure to print a Dictionnaire de la Guerre d'Algerie, and all sorts of other memoirs or studies. His own library of Algeria-related books is a full one. A t the same time he feels la Hegel that when certain historical forces take hold, you can't hold back the tide.
Another similar encounter I had was with Helie de Saint Marc, a rare bird indeed, whose experiences, including some in Algeria, merely sharpened on the stone of suffering an already acute French intelligence. Saint Marc's wife, Manette (Marie Antoinette), promptly answered my letter of inquiry, citing her 80-year-old husband's chancy health, and also Valery's comment, to the effect that one shouldn't meet people one admires from books. I shed a few tears reading her courteous epistle, nonetheless extending the possibility of a meal at their place in Central France, her husband's health permitting.
For one spot in Saint Marc's relentlessly affecting Memoires: Les Champs de braises concerns his Algerian courtship of the young Manette, whose father was a French officer there. Saint Marc describes how he and his 23-year-old loved one swam far from the fragrant coast, then returned to sip bitter Algerian rose on a terrace, watching as kepis and bumouses passed before them. And they so hoped -- no deeper, more self-questioning French 'imperialist' than Saint Marc -- that contesting sides could somehow reconcile, and that a beautiful country might go forward in peace and progress.
It did not happen, and as de Gaulle began pulling chestnuts from the fire, a paltry way to describe so much the French would lose here, General Challe asked Saint Marc to bring the First Regiment of Legionnaire Paratroopers into a coup attempt. The 18 months preceding that coup had increasingly made no sense, he says; soldiers didn't mind dying, but not when there was no clear reason. The putsch went bust, and Saint Marc who was not in the OAS, gave himself up as readily as Challe. At his trial he read a ringing statement, to the effect that he and his generation had given their best in various hell-holes, and there was no more to say. Leaving Manette and by then, two tiny daughters, he spent nearly six years in prison, reading high-minded authors, and fighting depression. As if Resistance activity in the Bordelais during World War II; deportation in 1943 to Buchenwald and underground labour at nearby Langenstein, reducing him to a louse-ridden skeleton, which few in his original convoy survived; then his sti nts in Indochina near the Chinese border -- as if that hadn't been enough!
So I understood when Saint Marc told me on the phone in France that I shouldn't visit him. He was too courteous to say: 'Look, you already know my books', including a just-published, point-counterpoint series of interviews with a former Nazi officer.
I decided then and there not to bother him with a visit. He did remark on the phone that French imperialism in places like Algeria had both a cote sombre, but also a cote lumineux. I said I agreed. When I called back next day to cancel my idea of a meeting, he said gruffly: 'Come to lunch Sunday, if you can'.
And I did, taking the train, then a taxi over the next day. And Manette was right -- nothing personal could top Champ de braises, an authentic masterpiece. But as in the book, you could feel Saint Marc's kindliness, making me think of Balzac's remark, to the effect that the few truly good people in this world ought to be placed in a museum!
A hostess with regal posture matching her salon, Manette served porto, then we repaired to the dining room for couscous. She remembered long afternoons in the 1950s, eating it with friends in Algiers, recalling exactly how Arab women prepared the dish. After lunch, where the conversation flew into many areas past and present, she told me what it was like for her during her husband's incarceration. Living with two children at her parents' place in Brittany, she beheld locals scribbling down visiting license plates, obviously for the government. She also had to take exhausting night trains to visit Helie for the long years they kept him imprisoned, before a pardon finally arrived.
But you can't re-write history, as Saint Marc tells me a few times. So many good people he knew had died miserable, often unsung deaths. In his memoir he mentions a tough Lithuanian in the Nazi labour facility, who for some reason saved his life with pilfered bits of food, before subsequent deportation back home, probably to a Soviet camp! There were Saint Marc's many fellow Legionnaires of sometimes doubtful pasts, but of legendary courage in 'Indo', who succumbed, out in the middle of nowhere. There were the Thos (a branch of Thais), whom Helie led in jungle night fights, dodging Viet Minh bullets, not to mention snakes. When the French panicked in 1950, withdrawing southward, Saint Marc was ordered to bring only armed partisans on the trucks. Reluctantly, he left behind civilians desperately clutching at departing lorries, exactly as many Muslims would later do in French Algeria. In both cases they would be gruesomely slaughtered, or tortured.
All this left memories it was hard to ignore. We discuss le grand Charles, and Saint Marc imitates those long outstretched arms of early June, 1958 - promises made to all and sundry in Algeria. Did de Gaulle merely use France's army in 1958 to regain power? Did he hope for a rapid Algerian peace, and failing that, decide simply to chuck it, and damn the consequences? Saint Marc remains unsure, but the President's growing hypocrisy galled him, as it did so many soldiers of that era. However, the beautiful bitterness comes out more in his memoirs than in a kindly old man wearing tweed and tie, bent now from Parkinson's, wanting to serve more to eat or sip, and handing me books.
We discussed sadism, and also what makes certain people hold on in extreme circumstances. Sadism thrives in systems that encourage it, he says, and survival efforts are affairs of each person's heart. Well the French army broke its collective heart in Algeria; yet that was also where Saint Marc met a wife who eventually gave him four daughters, and at this point, 15 grandchildren.
His recent Legion of Honour promotion to the second highest rung? I see it as part of the new balance on Algeria, a belated recognition of soldiers who gave so much there. According to Saint Marc, both Giscard, who awarded him an earlier decoration, and now Chirac with the latest, did so in part for political reasons - to help old divisions heal.
Political or not, no one deserves the award more. Of course commemoration ceremonies can't do justice to what so many went through in the conflict; nor to the marvel that was French Algeria. Helie remembers the great drained swamp of the Mitidja, the pride of pieds noirs, who with Arab workers had made it bear fruit, vegetables, vines galore. Now, he says, most of it has gone back to fallow nothingness. Such is the way of history.
After leaving and boarding a train, I read Saint Marc's interview in a recent collective book he gave me on the French army in Algeria. He described leaving that lush 'Indo' he so loved, then being thrown pell-mell into an arid part of southeastern Algeria. There, soldiers still reeling from Vietnam would see des hommes egorges, emascules, defigures. (French somehow makes such horrors sound more palatable than English.) What people still ignore, he says, is that this was a Muslim civil war.
It is not a bad thing to recall when looking back at the Algerian cauldron. Either one gave in to terrorist thugs, joining them, or one tried to trust the French as protectors. And it all ended badly -- as in Vietnam, thug regimes followed; but the impulse wasn't completely bad. (It is worth noting that recent events in Britain show that Algerians provide the largest numbers of recruits to terrorist groups connected to Bin Laden.)
In the same book of collected memories, another legend, Pierre Guillaume, looks back to that period as I do, considering it the last of a more idealistic French epoch. And he reminds us that had home and world opinion not scuttled the enterprise, militarily 'this was the first time an army succeeded in winning a terrorist war'.
Will today's Americans do as well? What of contemporary France, shorn of its former ideals? Guillaume feels that patriotism has tumbled there, and that after dropping the harkis, French 'abandonments' simply multiplied. Yes, 'principles of morality, honour, courage, fidelity became defunct'. And now there are parts of France (one thinks of greater Paris or Marseilles) that are less 'held' than Algeria of 1958 'Policemen die every week and people don't even think of reacting', notes Guillaume. Instead, France sends token forces far away for its 'intellectual comfort'. Or as Curutchet told me, since the Evian accords 'we don't know what game France is playing'.
You know something? They have a point. For these old soldiers, the memory of French Algeria may be a bitter one; but it's also the memory of a more forthright and to them, an oddly more enlightened and courageous epoch. As well, it's something of a cautionary tale, and partly why President Chirac (who knows recent Algeria well) hesitated to sign on for today's war in Iraq.
David Lehmann
06-02-2004, 06:57 AM
On the military level this 1954-1962 war was won, the FLN was exhausted but then it was typically a political problem and De Gaulle wanted to get rid of Algeria ... which was part of the French territory (not a colony, a French department) since 1830, that is to say it has been French for 132 years.
The rebels where mostly annihilated by the French army. In Algiers, the so-called battle of Algiers really dismantled all the terrorist organization in the capital but we lost our souls by using non conventional warfare and torture to make the POWs talk in order to find the bands and the bombs they were spreading in all the city, killing innocent civilians.
The rear bases of the FLN in Egypt were destroyed during the "Musketeer" operation in Suez in 1956.
The FLN was also supported by Morocco and Tunisia ... The French army had not the right to hit them in these countries but some commandos did it anyway.
In Tunisia, at Bizerte, the French army had still an aeronaval base, and there was also a clash between the French troops and the Tunisian army + Algerian rebels who were defeated.
On the Tunisian and Moroccan borders the French army had built defensive lines (barbed wire lines, electronic systems etc.) which proved to be very effective, quite no rebel troops or supply could enter or escape at least not without being chase by commandos and Foreign Legion ... the rebels had very high losses there.
About the FLN, after the French troops had left Algeria and after the peace treaty, they assassinated many Harkis (French Muslims which fought with the French army) and French civilians. All the Muslims in the French army were also more numerous than the rebels, which first eliminated the communist rebellion and after the war and nowadays it is still the same group of men who have the power in Algeria.
If today there is an Algeria it is because during the 19th century France created an entity called "Algeria", with borders, institutions. Algeria before France did never exist ... and this country would still be just a desert without all the French engineers, teachers, leaders, medics etc. It became a French department, not a colony ... but it is true that the indigenes never totally gained the same rights than the Europeans.
Some of the rebels in Algiers were in fact tortured to discover other bombs / avoid other bombings in Algiers, the government had given the order to the military to stop the terrorism by all means. But long before that, French troops and Algerian civilians had to face the FLN atrocities. Terror and torture was an exception in the French army, but it was common method in the FLN, a well thought strategy. French soldiers, dignitaries, former Muslim soldiers in the French army, French farmers, civilians and medics, Algerian civilians who didn't want to pay the revolutionary taxes etc. were all killed or mutilated .... nose cut, lips cut, hears cut, castration, throat cut, beheaded etc.
It was even recognized by a FLN leader (Krim Belkacem) : each conscript had officially to kill at least one French or one traitor to be recognized as a soldier.
Mostly all of the French POWs were tortured, mutilated and killed .... Most of them were found with their genitals in the mouth and the throat cut off .... some had no skin at all anymore ...
At the beginning most of the rebels bands were just led by bandits who controlled an area thanks to terror. There were also former Muslims from the French army who fought during WW2 and in Indochina, some former Waffen-SS members of the Foreign Legion as well as communists deserters who joined the rebels.
For example Mohammedi Saïd, aka Nasser, a Kabyle was second-lieutenant during WW2 in the Deutsche Arabische Legion. It was a very religious (read extremist like today Al Qaida) man. Some were members of the Brigade Nord Africaine - 180 Algerians who were used as guards in French factories by the Germans and responsible for the killing of 50 French workers during WW2 etc.
Many Muslim villages and French civilians were simply destroyed and killed by the FLN ... look at the contemporary GIAs (armed islamic groups) in Algeria during the 90's, they behaved the same way.
In France the leftists, all those who are against the army etc. associated with the former terrorists are always on TV to tell about crimes committed by the French army, France has to beg pardon etc. but they never talk about all the atrocities committed by the FLN, they never talk about the French communists who were traitors and gave money and weapons to the terrorists etc. and these same people are today in the French administration without any problem.
Algeria, from 1830 to 1962 was built by the French .... marshes had been dried, roads and bridges constructed, all the modern infrastructures like schools, hospitals, post offices etc. After the French had left Algeria only 3 engineers remained in Algeria. After the war there were massive purges in the FLN itself and they chased all the men in favour of France.
Today people only focus on the warcrimes of the French army and no one talks about the atrocities of the FLN ... we are the bad colonialists, the bad white men.
During Algiers's battle torture has been used, but not for the pleasure of some soldiers, it allowed to find dozens of unexploded bombs that would have laid by terrorists in civilian areas (theaters, bars etc.), to dismantle artisanal weapons/explosive manufactures and to completely destroy the rebels's organization in that area. Many civilian lives were saved, explosive, weapons and money discovered. I guess that with woman hiding grenades under their integral dress, children carrying explosives or ammo between rebel groups etc. it is far away from a conventional conflict.
I personally know several veterans from the 11e Bataillon de Choc and one of my uncles was a simple conscript in Algeria. Each time they speak about what happened there, how they found there MIAs mutilated etc. I can see tears in there eyes.
The Army felt really betrayed by the politicians ... they fought and then the politicians simply stated that Algeria should be independent (according also to the referendum in Algeria). The subject is still vivid in France because of the events, because leftists associated to former rebels (now in the Algerian government) like to try to dirt our army, the torture that was employed and the fact that many communists helped the rebels and indirectly contributed to the death of French soldiers, which in that time were conscripts and not professionals (but these ones are never accused of something, only the army).
The politicians behaved not with honor IMHO ... while giving orders to the military to stop the rebels by all means, during the same time they didn't really wanted to know what happened on the battlefield and they treated with the rebels. One thing I am really ashamed about is the fact that orders where given to let the Muslims suppletives (Harkis) in Algeria. Theoretically they were protected by the cease-fire agreement but it was obvious (I guess) that retaliation will occur ... and 30,000 to 120,000 of them (all returned to civilian life) according to various sources were simply slaughtered by the FLN. Some French officers managed to bring a few with them in France.
Once in France these Harkis were often not well recognized, the politicians simply ignored them. In the same kind of idea, 10-30 French POWs that were held by the rebels were simply forgotten by the politicians who simply wanted to get rid off all the issue.
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How many killed in Algeria ? A big controversial question ...
According to the current (FLN) Algerian government the French army slaughtered coldly 1.5 million civilians ... According to many historians about 250,000 Algerians died in this conflict.
Algerian losses were real civilians, armed rebels in civilian clothes and regulars from the FLN. The rebels were killed by the French army, but also by the FLN itself. The FLN was not really the liberation army depicted today by the men who want to make trials to France because of some torture acts.
It was a fierce guerrilla war and war against terrorism ... The FLN slaughtered itself many civilians, Muslims or not. They still today consider the Harkis refugees in France as traitors.
1) The French army lost 24,319 Europeans + 3010 Harkis = 27,329 men
2) Rebel losses :
FLN in Algeria : about 151,000 KIA
FLN in Tunisia : about 500 KIA
FLN in Morocco: about 1500 KIA
guerrilla members killed by the FLN itself : about 12,000 KIA
total = about 165,000 KIA
3) Civilian losses :
civilians assassinated by the FLN : about 4500 Europeans and about 36,000-50,000 Muslims plus about 30,000 former Harkis who have been assassinated by the FLN AFTER the war (some sources give 150,000 Harkis but it is exaggerated).
Probably grossly about 20,000 civilians deaths for which the French army is more or less responsible ... some prisoners were simply shot in fact but how many …
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What is also very interesting is that the French army developed many tactics and equipments in Algeria like the counter-guerrilla techniques for light planes and armed helicopters (see separate post in this section) etc. The concepts of light units moved by helicopters, the airborne assault and the large use of armed helicopters (before that they were only used in sanitary evacuation) was born there in the French army.
I would say the tactics used were grossly the ones that were later used by the USA in South Vietnam. A pacification program was initiated during 1957-1960. Part of the population was moved in camps/fortified villages under military supervision to prevent them from helping the rebels. That allowed to create wide forbidden areas were any target was ****e to aerial attack or bombardment.
In 1957 General Salan divided the country into sectors (a "quadrillage"), each permanently garrisoned by troops responsible destroying the FLN in their assigned area. This method was effective but mobilized to many troops in static defence. Salan also build a heavily patrolled system of barriers to limit infiltration from Tunisia and Morocco. In 1958 the tactic was shifted to the use of mobile forces deployed on massive "search-and-destroy" missions. The airmobile forces were highly developed and many chasing/hunting commandos organized based on French air force, navy and army "special forces" ... sometimes wearing enemy or civil clothes etc.
Nord AS.10 and AS.11 wire-guided antitank missiles were used from helicopters (Alouette) and planes (MD.315 for example) to hit rebels hidden in caves difficultly accessible. General Maurice Challe, succeeding to Salan, has suppressed major rebel resistance in a few operations. In 1958-59 the French army had won military control in Algeria but political intrigues had already overtaken the victory. The night vision devices have also been tested on US M2 carbines and French MAS 49/56 rifles etc. The counter-guerrilla warfare was highly developed in Algeria, relying also on the former experience in Indochina.
Regards,
David
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