De Gaulle becomes commander-in-chief

On 4 April 1944 in Algiers the French Committee of National Liberation adopted an ordinance and a decree that reshaped the high command of the French armed forces. The post of commander-in-chief, held since November 1942 by General Henri Giraud, was abolished together with its staff. The head of the army, navy and air force became the chairman of the committee, General Charles de Gaulle, who also presided over the National Defence Committee. Giraud was to be moved to the honorary post of inspector general of the army. The general refused and a dozen or so days later went into retirement. On the same day the first communists joined the committee.

A popular chronology states that on this day de Gaulle “took command of all the Free French forces”. That is a simplification. The Free French forces no longer existed as a separate formation – in the summer of 1943 they had been merged with the Army of Africa into a single French army. Nor did de Gaulle take command in the field: the French troops in Italy and North Africa continued to fight under Allied command and under their own generals. What the decree of 4 April did give him was full political authority over the military, and it removed the last post from which a rival could stand up to him. Giraud learned of the decision only a few days later, and the communiqué was published around 9 April.

Two generals in Algiers

The quarrel between de Gaulle and Giraud had been going on since the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942. Giraud, who a few months earlier had escaped from the German fortress of Königstein, was the Americans’ candidate to lead the French fighting in Africa. After the assassination of Admiral François Darlan in December 1942 he took over civil and military authority in Algiers. De Gaulle had behind him Free France, London and the growing support of the underground at home.

In June 1943 both became co-chairmen of the new committee, but the advantage quickly passed to de Gaulle. The principle that the commander-in-chief could not at the same time hold civil authority deprived Giraud of influence over policy, and the expedition to Corsica, which he prepared on his own in the autumn of 1943, alienated most of the commissioners. In November 1943 de Gaulle became sole chairman of the committee, and Giraud left it. He kept only the post of commander-in-chief – in practice he was responsible for rebuilding the army with American weapons and for military liaison with the Allies.

In the winter of 1943–1944 relations between the generals grew tense again. The dispute concerned above all the secret services: in January 1944 the committee placed the merged French intelligence services under the chairman, yet Giraud’s men continued to obstruct their work. The commander-in-chief’s position was also undermined by the trial of Vichy’s former interior minister, Pierre Pucheu. Giraud himself had brought him to North Africa, giving him a safe conduct, and had then had him interned. In March 1944 a military tribunal sentenced Pucheu to death, and on 20 March he was shot. Giraud testified at the trial but did not save him. He thereby lost the trust both of the Gaullists and the underground and of the officers of the former Army of Africa, who resented his compliance with the committee.

The decree of 4 April

The ordinance of 4 April 1944 completed the construction of a unified authority over the military that had begun in the autumn of 1943. The chairman of the committee became head of the armed forces – French historians stress that for the first time a head of government expressly took the title of “head of the armies” (chef des armées). The National Defence Committee, made up of the chairman, the commissioners responsible for the military and the top commanders, ceased to be a decision-making body and became an advisory organ attached to de Gaulle. The staff of the commander-in-chief and the national defence secretariat were merged into a single National Defence Staff (État-major de la défense nationale), directly subordinate to the head of government. From April to August 1944 it was headed by General Émile Béthouart, and later by General Alphonse Juin.

On the same day the committee was enlarged. André Diethelm, one of de Gaulle’s longest-serving associates from London, became commissioner for war. Two communists joined the committee – François Billoux as commissioner of state and Fernand Grenier as commissioner for air – along with the Radical Paul Giacobbi, who took charge of production and supply. Since November 1943 the French Communist Party had been arguing with de Gaulle over who should choose its representatives. In the end it gave way and entered the government on his terms. From then on the committee embraced all the significant currents of the French resistance, from the communists to the right, which a few weeks earlier had agreed on the programme of the National Council of the Resistance.

The decision was not unanimous. According to a report by the Allied propaganda services of 16 April, quoted by the historian Alfred Salinas, the commissioner for the navy, Louis Jacquinot, contrived to be absent from the meeting, and – paradoxically – the sharpest protests against the humiliation of Giraud came from the new communist commissioners, especially Billoux. Henri Queuille was reportedly the most dejected by the general’s departure. De Gaulle nevertheless got his way.

Giraud’s departure

Giraud learned his fate on 8 April, when de Gaulle received him and announced that the post of commander-in-chief would be abolished and that he himself would be appointed inspector general of the army. According to his biographers, Giraud broke off the conversation and walked out, slamming the door. De Gaulle then summoned one of Giraud’s trusted officers, General René Chambe, and let it be understood that if Giraud undertook to obey the committee, he could stay in post. The next day Chambe brought a letter containing such an undertaking, but at the same time the France-Afrique press agency had already announced Giraud’s appointment as inspector. Faced with a fait accompli, the general refused to accept the new post.

Giraud still sought help from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who for a year and a half had been his chief protector. Washington, however, did not intervene. The American representative in Algiers, Robert Murphy – the same man who in 1942 had prepared the ground in North Africa for the Allied landings and had backed Giraud – advised Secretary of State Cordell Hull that the United States should no longer tie itself to a general whom many Frenchmen regarded as “America’s lackey”. According to Murphy’s correspondence, cited by Salinas, in some units in Morocco and in the Oran district officers of the wing of the Army of Africa loyal to Giraud threatened to move against de Gaulle, but nothing came of it. Most of the army accepted the change calmly.

On 14 April 1944 Giraud was transferred to the command reserve. On 18 April, at the Summer Palace in Algiers, he took leave of his supporters before a guard of honour of spahis, and two days later he moved into a villa requisitioned for him at Mazagran near Mostaganem. There, guarded and at the same time watched by French soldiers, he sat out the liberation of France. He never again held a command in any campaign – neither in Italy nor in France. On 28 August 1944 one of the Moroccan riflemen of his guard shot him in the face. The general survived and returned to France in the autumn.

The army de Gaulle took over

The army of which de Gaulle became head was largely the work of Giraud and the Americans. Under the agreements reached at the Casablanca Conference, the United States armed and equipped the French divisions in North Africa. They were recruited above all from soldiers of the Army of Africa – Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians and Senegalese under French officers – as well as from the French of North Africa and from volunteers who had escaped from France across the Pyrenees.

The most important fighting force was General Juin’s French Expeditionary Corps in Italy. Its first divisions had been fighting since December 1943 in the Mainarde mountains in the Apennines, and in January and February 1944, during the first assault on the Gustav Line, they took the Belvedere massif north of Cassino. In the spring of 1944 the corps comprised four divisions – the 2nd Moroccan Infantry Division, the 3rd Algerian Infantry Division, the 4th Moroccan Mountain Division and the 1st March Infantry Division (formerly the 1st Free French Division) – as well as three groups of Moroccan tabors. In May it numbered about 112,000 men, some 60 per cent of them from North Africa. Juin believed that his mountain troops could break the German defences where the Allies had failed at Cassino.

In North Africa General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, who in the autumn of 1943 had escaped from the Vichy prison at Riom and made his way to Algiers, was forming Army B – the future French First Army, intended to land in Provence. In Morocco General Philippe Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division was preparing to move to Britain, from where it was to take part in the fighting in Normandy. In France itself, from 1 February 1944 the main armed organisations of the underground were being merged into the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). De Gaulle made their commander General Marie-Pierre Kœnig, sent to London as his representative to General Dwight Eisenhower.

Place in the war

The decree of 4 April 1944 ended the dual authority that had divided the French fighting on the Allied side since the landings in North Africa. From then on de Gaulle directed both the government and the army, and his committee, enlarged to include the communists, represented the whole resistance. This mattered precisely in the spring of 1944: the invasion of France was approaching, and de Gaulle wanted power in the liberated country to be taken over by an administration answerable to Algiers rather than by the American military government he feared after his experience with Darlan and Giraud.

Over the following weeks the committee prepared the state for its return to France. The ordinance of 21 April 1944 laid down the organisation of public authority after the liberation and granted women the vote. On 3 June 1944 the committee proclaimed itself the Provisional Government of the French Republic. The forces of which de Gaulle had become head played a large part that year. In May Juin’s corps broke through the German defences in the Aurunci Mountains, opening the road to Rome for the Allies. Leclerc’s division fought in Normandy and on 25 August entered Paris, and de Lattre’s Army B landed in Provence on 15 August as part of Operation Dragoon. Giraud, who had built a large part of this army, watched its victories from afar.