The liberation of Corsica

At 5.45 a.m. on 4 October 1943 Moroccan goumiers of the 73rd Goum entered Bastia, the main port on the north-east coast of Corsica, followed by a French assault battalion and Moroccan riflemen. A few hours earlier the last German vessels had left the harbour. The town had been wrecked by bombing and fighting, and its quays were strewn with abandoned equipment. With the capture of Bastia the fighting ceased across the whole island. Corsica became the first département of metropolitan France to be liberated from occupation – eight months before the Normandy landings.

It is often written that Corsica was liberated by “Free French forces”. The date is right, but the description needs correcting. The regular French troops who landed on the island belonged to General Henri Giraud’s army of North Africa, which answered to the French Committee of National Liberation, not to the former Free French forces of General Charles de Gaulle. They fought side by side with the Corsican resistance, dominated by the Communist-led National Front, and with soldiers of the Italian “Friuli” and “Cremona” Divisions, who had turned their weapons against the Germans after Italy’s surrender.

An island under occupation

Corsica came under occupation in November 1942, when, after the Allied landings in North Africa, the Germans and Italians occupied the hitherto unoccupied part of France. Initially some 30,000 Italian soldiers arrived on the island, and in time – by various counts – nearly 85,000, against a population of about 220,000. Fascist Italy had long laid claim to Corsica, and some of the occupiers treated it as a future Italian province. In the summer of 1943 the Germans sent an SS assault brigade of their own to the island.

The resistance had been organising since 1942, in several strands. De Gaulle’s men were sent to the island from London. The best known of them, Fred Scamaroni, a native Corsican, landed in January 1943 with the task of uniting the underground. In March he was arrested by Italian counter-intelligence; under torture, he took his own life in a cell in the citadel at Ajaccio, leaving – according to fellow prisoners – words written in his own blood saying that he had betrayed no one. Giraud, who from the end of 1942 commanded the army in Algiers, sent missions of his own – the first, under Major Roger de Saule, as early as December 1942. From April 1943 the underground was co-ordinated by a gendarmerie captain, Paulin Colonna d’Istria – appointed by Giraud according to French studies, sent by de Gaulle according to some English-language ones. He relied on the strongest organisation, the National Front, founded by the French Communists. Men and weapons were brought from Algiers by the submarine Casabianca under Commander Jean L’Herminier, which in November 1942 had broken out of Toulon while the rest of the French fleet was going to the bottom there. In the summer of 1943 the Italian political police, the OVRA, and the Fascist militia responded with mass repression: according to studies, some 860 Corsicans were imprisoned and deported to Italy, and on 30 August one of the leaders of the Front, the schoolteacher Jean Nicoli, was shot in Bastia on the sentence of an Italian military court. Even so, by French estimates the National Front had between 10,000 and 15,000 armed men on the island in September 1943.

September: uprising and the race for Bastia

News of the Italian surrender, announced on the evening of 8 September, became the signal for an uprising. The National Front’s committee called the Corsicans to arms; in Ajaccio the insurgents occupied the prefecture and forced the Vichy-appointed prefect to recognise the authority of the Liberation Committee. The commander of the Italian VII Corps, General Giovanni Magli, after the first clashes with the Germans in Bastia triggered by Operation Achse, sided with the insurgents. On 12 September Hitler ordered both Sardinia and Corsica to be evacuated, and the German units – reinforced by the 90th Panzergrenadier Division, which had come over from Sardinia – concentrated on the east coast and sailed from Bastia for Elba and Tuscany.

Giraud, without waiting for the agreement of all the Committee’s members, obtained General Dwight Eisenhower’s consent to intervene on condition that the French used only their own ships and troops. During the night of 12–13 September the Casabianca landed 109 men of the assault battalion at Ajaccio, and over the following weeks destroyers and cruisers of the French navy brought some 6,000–7,000 troops over from Algeria – mainly from the 4th Moroccan Mountain Division, goumiers and artillery. They were commanded by General Henry Martin. On 21 September Giraud himself arrived on the island.

The aim was to cut off the Germans’ escape route, but the French forces were too small and the terrain mountainous. The insurgents and the French took Sartène and Porto-Vecchio, while Italians of the “Friuli” Division and goumiers led the advance in the north. On 30 September they took the San Stefano pass and on 3 October the Teghime pass, the last obstacle on the road to Bastia. The Germans resisted only as much as was needed to complete the evacuation. During the night of 3–4 October the last units of their rearguard sailed away, and in the morning the French entered the town.

The balance of the fighting

For the Germans the evacuation of Corsica was an operational success. According to figures cited in studies, they took more than 6,000 soldiers, some 1,200 prisoners and over 3,000 vehicles off the island by sea, and more than 21,000 men by air. Allied aircraft and submarines sank ships totalling around 17,000 tons in the process, and several dozen German transport aircraft were destroyed on Italian airfields.

The casualty figures given in the literature are approximate and vary. According to French tallies the Germans lost about 1,600 men, including about a thousand killed and 400 taken prisoner. Italian losses are given very differently – from about 250 to over 600 killed and more than 550 wounded. The Corsican resistance lost, according to various sources, 160–170 killed and about 300 wounded, and the regular French army about 75 killed and more than 230 wounded.

“The first liberated piece of France”

On 8 October General de Gaulle arrived in Corsica. In Ajaccio, before a crowd gathered in the square, he said that Corsica had “the good fortune and the honour to be the first liberated piece of France”. He also visited Bastia and other towns, and the visit was a demonstration that it was the Committee in Algiers, not Vichy, that represented France. Behind the public ceremonies, however, lay a bitter dispute.

De Gaulle had been informed of the operation only once the uprising had already broken out and Giraud had sent in troops. He believed that his co-chairman on the Committee had acted on his own, behind the backs of its other members, and – what particularly outraged him – had handed the initiative on the island to the Communists of the National Front, who had taken over the prefecture and the municipal councils. In a stormy conversation he accused Giraud of leaving the Communists a “monopoly”. The dispute strengthened de Gaulle: on 25 September, while the fighting was still going on, a majority of the Committee curtailed Giraud’s powers as co-chairman, and in November Giraud ceased to sit on the Committee. The general’s military success turned into his political defeat.

On the island the Communists had indeed gained enormous influence – according to French studies, by the end of 1943 they controlled the prefecture and most of the more than 300 communes. Over the following months de Gaulle backed the return to power of traditional Corsican politicians in order to counterbalance that influence.

Place in the war

The liberation of Corsica was the first major part played by the rebuilt French army in the liberation of metropolitan France and the first example of the French resistance acting together with regular troops. It also showed that Italian soldiers, with whom France had still been at war only a few weeks earlier, could fight alongside the Allies. Although the Germans withdrew almost all their forces from the island, they lost an important position in the Tyrrhenian Sea.

In the following months the Americans built more than a dozen airfields on Corsica, and the island earned the nickname “USS Corsica” – an unsinkable aircraft carrier. Bombers and fighters flying from it attacked German supply lines in Italy; in June 1944 French troops set out from Corsica for Elba, and in August 1944 the island was one of the main air bases for the landings in Provence. The dispute over Corsica also hastened de Gaulle’s victory in the contest for the leadership of Fighting France – in 1944 it was he, not Giraud, who returned to Paris as head of the provisional government.