The Free French take Gabon

On 12 November 1940 the Free French aviso Commandant Dominé put into Port-Gentil, the port at the mouth of the Ogooué river. Aboard was the Governor of Gabon, Georges Pierre Masson – a few days earlier still the highest representative of the Vichy government in the colony, now sent by the victors to persuade the last garrison to lay down its arms. Three days before, Libreville, the colony’s capital, had capitulated, and on 10 November the troops of Colonel Philippe Leclerc and Major Marie Pierre Kœnig had entered it. The surrender of Port-Gentil, which most accounts date to precisely 12 November, ended a campaign that had begun on 27 October. Gabon, the last colony of French Equatorial Africa loyal to Marshal Philippe Pétain, passed under the authority of General Charles de Gaulle.

One sometimes reads that on this day “British forces” completed the seizure of Central Africa from Vichy. That is not quite right. The Gabon campaign was led and won by the Free French alone: legionnaires, tirailleurs from Chad, Cameroon and the Congo, and a handful of de Gaulle’s airmen and sailors. The Royal Navy maintained a blockade of the coast, and one of its sloops forced a Vichy submarine to scuttle, but on London’s orders British warships took no part in the attack on Libreville. Nor was it a matter of the whole of Central Africa: the Belgian Congo had been on the Allied side from the start, while West Africa, with Dakar, remained loyal to Vichy. What the Free French did was complete what they had begun in August: the whole of French Equatorial Africa, together with Cameroon, was now in their hands.

Vichy’s last colony in Equatorial Africa

At the end of August 1940 Chad, Cameroon, Middle Congo and Ubangi-Shari went over to Free France within three days. Gabon broke ranks. On the night of 28 to 29 August Masson announced that the colony was joining de Gaulle, but after a day or two he went back on his decision. He was under pressure from the Vichy High Commissioner in Dakar, Pierre Boisson, from some of the French residents of Libreville and from the influential Bishop Louis Tardy, Vicar Apostolic of Gabon, who saw de Gaulle’s movement as the work of Freemasonry. On 30 August the Vichy submarine Sidi-Ferruch appeared off Libreville, and her captain announced that a squadron was on its way from Dakar. De Gaulle’s supporters were arrested; some were held aboard the ship Cap des Palmes, others were taken to Dakar.

On 7 September Commander Robert Morin’s aviso Bougainville, the submarine Poncelet and the Cap des Palmes, carrying two companies of tirailleurs, arrived at Libreville from Dakar. Vichy could afford no more. A cruiser squadron that had set out from Toulon in September to recover Equatorial Africa was turned back by the British on its way from Dakar to Libreville, and the Royal Navy’s blockade cut Gabon off from the sea. The colony, which by contemporary estimates had some 350,000 inhabitants, including a few thousand French, lived by exporting okoume timber to France, and that trade had stopped. Morin reported to Dakar that many merchants and loggers favoured de Gaulle, because they saw in him the only salvation for their businesses. On 17 October an air force general, Marcel Têtu, released by the Germans from a prisoner-of-war camp and appointed by Vichy as Boisson’s deputy and Vice Governor-General of Equatorial Africa, flew in to Libreville. His task was to restore obedience and defend the colony by force of arms.

After the failure of the expedition to Dakar in September, de Gaulle needed a success. On 8 October he arrived in Douala, and on 12 October, with Winston Churchill’s consent, he gave the order to take Gabon. On 27 October in Brazzaville he issued a manifesto declaring the Vichy regime illegal and set up the Empire Defence Council, the first governing body of Free France. A hostile Gabon, wedged between Cameroon and the Congo and open to the ocean, was a threat to that authority. De Gaulle later wrote in his memoirs of a “hostile enclave in the very heart of our equatorial possessions”, and General Edgard de Larminat warned that the loss of the territory would undermine “the very principle of our presence in Africa”.

From Mayumba to Lambaréné

The fighting for Gabon began long before de Gaulle’s order, and at first it was more a war of nerves than a campaign. At the beginning of September the colony’s eastern departments and the northern Woleu-Ntem region, with Oyem, went over to Free France without a fight. On 15 September Major André Parant landed by aircraft with a dozen or so men near Mayumba on the southern coast and, bluffing that he had large forces behind him, took over the post. A few hours later Poncelet arrived there with a detachment of Vichy tirailleurs. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Bertrand de Saussine, answered bluff with bluff, and the two sides parted without a shot. On 22 September near Sindara, Parant’s column, advancing north from Pointe-Noire, exchanged fire with Vichy troops for the first time. It ended with three men lightly wounded and a dinner shared by the two commanders.

After that things were no longer so gentle. In front of Lambaréné, a strong post on an island in the Ogooué where the roads to Libreville and Port-Gentil met, Parant’s column was held up for several weeks. The post’s commander returned letters unopened and threatened to fire on emissaries. On 17 October, on Lake Onangué, the first bloody clash with the Vichy river flotilla took place. Aircraft on both sides bombed the enemy’s positions. In the north, Captain Louis Dio’s column – some 350 men with mountain artillery and Hotchkiss tanks – set out southwards from Oyem. After a fight for the village of N’Gomo on 27 October, which is usually taken as the start of the campaign, and a raid by Lysanders, the garrison of Mitzic withdrew and Dio took the town without a fight. By 1 November he was at N’Djolé on the Ogooué. On 5 November, after an ultimatum from General Larminat and a day-long bombardment, the defenders of Lambaréné abandoned the island, falling back towards Port-Gentil, and Parant entered it by night. On land Vichy now held only Libreville and Port-Gentil.

The Royal Navy offshore

In October Churchill agreed to support the operation with two warships. On 25 October, after the meeting at Montoire, at which Pétain had talked with Adolf Hitler, caution prevailed in London. The British and the Americans did not want to do anything that might push Vichy still closer to Germany. Vice Admiral John Cunningham, the same man who had commanded at Dakar in September, was ordered to confine himself to blockading the coast and not to fire first. His cruisers Devonshire and Delhi, with several smaller ships, therefore cruised offshore, well away from the fighting.

Leclerc decided to act without the British. He wrote to de Gaulle that he took full responsibility and was prepared to be recalled if he failed. On the morning of 7 November he began putting the first detachment ashore in Mondah Bay, a dozen or so kilometres north of Libreville. That same day Poncelet left Port-Gentil with orders to attack the transports. She was spotted by the British sloop Milford. A Walrus seaplane from Devonshire damaged the submarine with depth charges; a torpedo fired at the sloop passed beneath her hull, and a second jammed in its tube and began to give off poisonous fumes. In the evening the submarine, hit by a shell from Milford as well, surfaced and struck her colours. De Saussine ordered his crew off the boat, then opened the valves himself and went to the bottom with Poncelet so that she would not fall into British hands. He was the only man killed. Some sources date this action to 8 November, but British signal logs and French studies point to the evening of 7 November. It was the Royal Navy’s only engagement of the campaign.

Libreville

On 8 November a battalion of Kœnig’s 13th Demi-Brigade of the Foreign Legion landed in Mondah Bay, followed on the night of 8 to 9 November by tirailleurs from Cameroon. Some 1,200 men took part in the landing in all. On 9 November the columns of Kœnig and Major Bouillon covered a dozen or so kilometres through forest and swamp and came up in front of the airfield, which was defended by tirailleurs and sailors from Bougainville. Machine-gun fire stopped the attack. Captain Duplan was killed, and according to accounts the bullets missed Leclerc himself by a hair’s breadth. What decided the matter was a move round the position along the beach by companies of legionnaires. By about seven in the evening the airfield was in Free French hands. According to the research of Colonel Thierry Noulens, based on the French army archives, the fight for it cost seven killed on the Free French side and 27 on the Vichy side.

The same day, on the waters off the town, two sister avisos flying the same tricolour fought a duel. Commander Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu, commander of de Gaulle’s naval forces – a Carmelite friar who had left his monastery for the navy in 1939 – called on Morin to surrender his ship in return for his crew being sent back to a Vichy port. Morin refused. In the afternoon Lieutenant Commander André Roux’s Savorgnan de Brazza and Bougainville clashed in the estuary of the Gabon river. Much of Bougainville’s crew had gone ashore earlier, and her fire was weak. After some twenty minutes the Vichy ship, ablaze, pulled out of the fight with many dead and wounded.

On the evening of 9 November d’Argenlieu called on General Têtu to cease fighting, threatening to shell the town. He had neither the intention nor the means to do so: Savorgnan de Brazza had used up most of her ammunition. Têtu, with Leclerc’s troops at the gates of the town, gave way. At 8.45 p.m. Colonel Crochu of his staff and Lieutenant Commander Roux signed the capitulation convention drawn up by Leclerc, and on 10 November the Free French entered Libreville.

Port-Gentil and the governor’s death

The Libreville convention did not cover Port-Gentil, with which communications had been cut. The port was defended by Major Sacquet’s garrison, reinforced by sailors from Poncelet. Masson and Colonel Crochu agreed to sail there aboard Commandant Dominé and persuade the defenders to lay down their arms. They arrived on 12 November. According to most accounts the garrison surrendered without a fight that day. According to some descriptions a bluff helped: two Gaullists flew into the town and announced the imminent arrival of a large assault force, though no one had authorised them to negotiate. Colonel Noulens’s detailed reconstruction presents a less smooth sequence of events. On 12 November Sacquet refused, judging that he had not yet exhausted all means of defence, and ignored a personal telegram from de Gaulle calling further resistance a “criminal absurdity”. He gave way only when Savorgnan de Brazza appeared off the port, when on 14 November Casamance brought troops, and as two Free French river columns approached the town. Either way, from 12 November the last pocket of Vichy resistance in Equatorial Africa ceased to have any military significance, and no more shots were fired.

Masson did not return to Libreville. On the way back he hanged himself in his cabin aboard ship. Sources give various dates, from 12 to 16 November; Noulens writes that the body was found on the morning of 15 November aboard Savorgnan de Brazza. A few days earlier the governor is said to have told his wife: “I bear responsibility for this affair. I must pay.” It was he who in August had been on de Gaulle’s side for a day or two and then for two and a half months kept the colony loyal to Pétain. Bishop Tardy, whom the Gaullists regarded as chiefly to blame for his about-turn, remained in Libreville as Vicar Apostolic until 1947.

The reckoning

The number of casualties in the campaign is disputed. De Gaulle wrote of “about twenty” killed, Noulens of about thirty, other historians of several dozen, and Jean-Pierre Azéma of “about a hundred”. The Gabonese memorial by the Gué-Gué bridge in Libreville commemorates more than fifty people. To these must be added African civilians, whom no one counted precisely, and the Gabonese who fled the fighting into Spanish Guinea. Vichy lost Poncelet, Bougainville and several aircraft. The Free French air force lost several machines, including a Blenheim that went missing over the sea.

Many Vichy soldiers, above all Africans, went over to the victors. The officers were another matter. On 15 November de Gaulle flew to Libreville and addressed the prisoners in person. Most of the officers, led by General Têtu, refused to join him. They were interned in Brazzaville as prisoners of war, and after the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942 most of them ended up in the army of General Henri Giraud. De Gaulle appointed Parant, promoted in the meantime to lieutenant colonel, Governor of Gabon.

Place in the war

On 12 November the Governor of Chad, Félix Éboué, became Governor-General of Equatorial Africa, and on 16 November in Brazzaville de Gaulle issued an Organic Declaration supplementing the October manifesto and instituted the Order of Liberation. Free France was no longer merely a movement of exiles in London. From Brazzaville it governed a territory several times the size of France, with its own administration, army, radio station and revenue from trade, which was redirected to British Nigeria. On 6 January 1941 Britain formally recognised the Empire Defence Council. After the humiliation at Dakar, the victory in Gabon, bitter though it was, restored de Gaulle’s standing in Churchill’s eyes and showed that his men could carry out an operation on their own.

Gabon also closed the shortest route by which Vichy could threaten Douala, Pointe-Noire and the air route through Fort-Lamy, along which the British were ferrying aircraft from the Gulf of Guinea to Egypt. Equatorial Africa became a rear base for the war against Italy. Immediately after the campaign Leclerc took command of the troops in Chad, and on 1 March 1941 his column captured the Italian oasis of Kufra in Libya. The Foreign Legion battalion from Libreville sailed for East Africa and fought the Italians in Eritrea, and in 1942 Kœnig commanded the Free French at Bir Hakeim.

The price was a deepening of the rift. Vichy presented Gabon as proof that the Gaullists were shedding French blood at Britain’s behest, and de Saussine, who had gone down with his boat, became a hero of its navy. Talks between Vichy and Germany on jointly recovering Chad never got beyond paper, but the fratricidal war was only beginning: in 1941 Frenchmen fought Frenchmen in Syria and Lebanon, in 1942 in Madagascar and North Africa. Gabon itself remained under French rule until 1960, when it gained independence. No one asked its inhabitants for their opinion in 1940, although it was largely African soldiers, on both sides, who bore the cost of this campaign.