Henri Giraud

Henri Giraud was a soldier of the old school: brave, stubborn, loyal to the army and to Marshal Pétain, averse to politics and little interested in it. Twice, in 1914 and in 1942, he escaped from German captivity, and the second escape, from the fortress of Königstein in Saxony, made him the most famous French general after de Gaulle. The Americans saw him as the man who would bring the French army in North Africa over with him, and in 1942–1943 he headed the French administration in Algiers for more than a year. He lost his rivalry with de Gaulle, however, and in 1944 he faded into the background. His story shows how hard it was for the French, after the defeat of 1940, to choose between obedience to Vichy and a return to the war.

Youth and the war of 1914–1918

He was born in Paris on 18 January 1879. His father, Louis, had helped to defend Paris during the siege of 1870 at the age of seventeen. According to some biographers the family came from Alsace. Giraud was educated at Paris lycées and in 1900 graduated from the officers’ school at Saint-Cyr. At his own request he was posted to the 4th Zouave Regiment in Tunisia. Promotion came slowly: he waited ten years to become a captain, partly, according to his grandson, because as a Catholic and a conservative he was viewed with disfavour by the ministry at the time of the anticlerical Affaire des Fiches (the “card-index affair”). In 1907–1909 he passed through the École supérieure de guerre (the staff college), served on staffs in France, and in 1913 returned to the Zouaves in Tunisia.

In August 1914 he commanded a company at the Battle of Charleroi. On 30 August, during the Battle of Saint-Quentin, he was badly wounded in the lung while leading a bayonet charge. Left for dead, he was taken prisoner. Together with another wounded officer, Captain Charles Schmitt, he planned an escape from the prisoner-of-war hospital at Origny-Sainte-Benoite. They were helped by a French nurse who brought them clothes, a plan of the building and a key to an unguarded door. On the night of 30–31 October 1914 the two men, their wounds still unhealed, slipped out towards the canal. Giraud spent two months in occupied Saint-Quentin working as a stable hand, then made his way into Belgium, where in Brussels he came into contact with the escape network of the nurse Edith Cavell, which got him across to the neutral Netherlands. In February 1915 he returned to France by way of England.

He then served on the staff of General Louis Franchet d’Espèrey’s Fifth Army. In 1917 he took command of a battalion of Zouaves and on 23 October, at the Battle of La Malmaison, captured the Fort de la Malmaison, taking some 600 prisoners. He ended the war as chief of staff of the Moroccan Division, with five mentions in dispatches.

Between the wars: Morocco and Metz

After the war Franchet d’Espèrey brought him on to the staff of the Allied forces in the Balkans and in Constantinople, and in 1919 Giraud was an expert on Turkish affairs at the Paris Peace Conference. The after-effects of his lung wound kept him out of service for two years. In 1922 Marshal Hubert Lyautey took him to Morocco. During the Rif War in 1925 Giraud, then a colonel, commanded the 14th Algerian Tirailleurs Regiment and prevented the Rifians from cutting the Taza corridor, the strategic route between Morocco and Algeria. Wounded in the thigh, he received the commander’s cross of the Legion of Honour in a Paris hospital. In 1926 he escorted the defeated Rifian leader Abd el-Krim into exile.

From 1927 to 1930 he taught infantry tactics at the École supérieure de guerre. He then returned to Africa: in December 1930 he was made brigadier general and for four years directed the “pacification” of the tribes of the High Atlas on the Moroccan–Algerian border, completing the French conquest of Morocco. In 1934 he took command of a division at Oran, and in 1936 he became military governor of Metz and commander of the military region there. From 1937 one of his subordinates was Colonel Charles de Gaulle, commander of the 507th Tank Regiment. Giraud took an interest in armour but did not share de Gaulle’s views on independent armoured formations, preferring tanks to advance together with the infantry. In June 1939 he joined the Conseil supérieur de la guerre (Supreme War Council), the body of future army commanders.

The war of 1939–1940 and captivity

In September 1939 he took command of the Seventh Army, a reserve made up of the most mobile French divisions. When the Saar offensive ended he was among the generals who protested most loudly against the withdrawal of the troops to their starting positions. In the autumn of 1939 General Maurice Gamelin moved his army to the far left of the line, on the coast, and in March 1940 ordered it, in the event of a German attack, to advance as far as Breda in the Netherlands (the Dyle Plan in its “Breda variant”). Giraud, like Generals Alphonse Georges and Gaston Billotte, had serious reservations about the idea, since it took away the French army’s main reserve.

On 10 May 1940 the Seventh Army set off through Belgium, but before it reached Breda German paratroopers had seized the bridges at Moerdijk and the Dutch army had fallen back northwards. On 12 May Giraud was ordered to turn back towards Antwerp. When the Germans broke through at Sedan, Gamelin on 15 May took command of the shattered Ninth Army away from General André Corap and gave it to Giraud. The army was already disintegrating. The general stayed close to the front line, and on 19 May, while reconnoitring in an armoured car, he was surrounded and captured near Wassigny. A few days later the Germans reached the Channel.

On 25 May 1940 he was imprisoned in the fortress of Königstein on the Elbe, an Oflag for generals and admirals that also held the Pole Franciszek Kleeberg, the Dutchman Henri Winkelman and the Norwegian Otto Ruge. He was the most important prisoner there. He wrote memoranda to Philippe Pétain on the causes of the defeat, which he attributed to the falling birth rate, paid holidays, parliamentarianism and the trade unions, and in 1941 he handed Georges Scapini, Vichy’s envoy for prisoners of war, a paper on possible economic collaboration with Germany in return for the release of prisoners. At the same time, in a letter to his children of September 1940 that later circulated throughout France, he forbade them to accept the defeat. From the winter of 1940–1941 his family and former officers of his staff, with the help of French military intelligence, prepared his escape.

The escape from Königstein

On 17 April 1942 the 63-year-old general let himself down from the fortress on a rope about 45 metres long, which he had plaited with General Gustave Mesny from parcel string and reinforced with smuggled wire. With a guide, Roger Guerlach, he crossed Germany by train to Alsace, on 22 April slipped into Switzerland, and by 25 April he was with his family near Lyon, in the unoccupied zone. Adolf Hitler flew into a rage, and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, according to the testimony of General Erwin Lahousen at the Nuremberg trial, demanded that Wilhelm Canaris have the fugitive killed.

In Vichy Pétain received him coldly, and the new head of government, Pierre Laval, urged him to return to captivity, since the escape was spoiling his talks with the Germans about prisoners. Giraud refused, and on 2 May at Moulins he rejected the pressure of Ambassador Otto Abetz. On 4 May he gave Pétain his word that he would do nothing to harm the marshal’s relations with Germany. He considered himself released from this promise in June, when Laval publicly wished Germany victory. In retaliation the Germans took members of his family hostage; his eldest daughter, Renée, arrested in Tunisia, died in 1943 on her way to Germany.

North Africa, 1942

In the summer of 1942 Giraud, in hiding near Lyon, was planning a landing on the south coast of France together with the Allies and a rising of the Armistice Army. General Maxime Weygand refused to lead such an undertaking. The Americans, who did not want to work with de Gaulle – at odds with the Vichy officers and burdened by the failed expedition to Dakar – were looking for a French commander famous enough for the army in Africa to follow him. Giraud was the only candidate. His representative in Algiers, General Charles Mast, held talks with the American diplomat Robert Murphy, and in October 1942 met General Mark Clark in secret near Cherchell.

On the night of 5–6 November the British submarine HMS Seraph, on whose deck an American officer was put on show to reassure the general, picked Giraud up from the coast near Le Lavandou. On 7 November at Gibraltar the general spent many hours trying to persuade General Dwight Eisenhower that he himself should command the whole of Operation Torch. He gave way only the next day. His radio appeal to the troops in Africa on 8 November went unheeded, because the officers had sworn an oath to Pétain, and when he landed in Algiers on 9 November real power lay with Admiral François Darlan, who happened to be in the city. The Americans concluded a ceasefire with Darlan, and on 14 November Giraud accepted, under Darlan’s authority, command of the French ground and air forces in Africa, which then fought in Tunisia.

High Commissioner and de Gaulle’s rival

After Darlan was assassinated by Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle on 24 December 1942, Giraud insisted on a swift trial of the assassin, who was shot on 26 December. That same day a council of Vichy dignitaries, at Eisenhower’s wish, appointed him High Commissioner in French North and West Africa. He governed in a spirit that came to be called “Giraudism”: resolutely anti-German, but faithful to the ideas of the marshal’s “National Revolution”. He kept Vichy legislation in force, including the anti-Jewish laws, retained Darlan’s men in their posts, and at the end of December had a group of Gaullists who had helped the Allies during the landings interned. Historians also cite his circular of November 1942 recommending that Algerian Jews should not be sent to combat units.

At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 Giraud obtained from Franklin Delano Roosevelt a promise to equip the French army, but his agreement with de Gaulle was only for show – a handshake for the cameras. Under pressure from American opinion and on the advice of Jean Monnet, on 14 March 1943 he made a speech in which he broke with Vichy, declared its acts null and void and came out in favour of democracy. He nevertheless refused to restore the Crémieux Decree, which had given Algerian Jews French citizenship. In May 1943 his troops took part in the victorious Tunisian campaign.

On 3 June 1943 Giraud and de Gaulle set up the French Committee of National Liberation in Algiers and became its co-presidents. Giraud, who wanted to deal only with military matters, was gradually sidelined on the committee. He became commander-in-chief of the combined French forces, and in September and early October 1943, without consulting the committee, he carried out the liberation of Corsica with Allied help – something de Gaulle used against him. On 9 November 1943 Giraud lost his post as co-president. His position was further undermined by the trial of Pierre Pucheu, Vichy’s former Minister of the Interior, whom he had invited to Africa and who was condemned and shot in March 1944. In April 1944 the post of commander-in-chief was abolished, and Giraud, offered the honorary post of inspector general, retired.

On 28 August 1944, at his villa in Mazagran in Algeria, one of his guards shot at him. The bullet passed through his cheek, and the general survived. In the autumn he returned to France, and in 1945 his family regained their freedom.

After the war

In June 1946 Giraud was elected for the Moselle department to the second Constituent Assembly on the list of the right-wing Republican Party of Liberty. He called for a stronger executive in matters of defence and voted against the constitution of the Fourth Republic. Until December 1948 he was vice-president of the Supreme War Council. He wrote two books of memoirs: Mes évasions (“My Escapes”, 1946) and Un seul but, la victoire. Alger 1942–1944 (“One Aim, Victory”, 1949).

He died on 11 March 1949 in the military hospital in Dijon. The day before, he had been awarded the Médaille militaire, France’s highest decoration for soldiers, for his escape of 1942 and his service in Algiers. After a state funeral he was laid to rest at Les Invalides in Paris.

Significance

Giraud earned his place in history above all through daring: two escapes from German captivity, the second of which gave the French a rare reason for pride in the spring of 1942. As a politician he was a transitional figure. For the Americans he served as a bridge to the Vichy army in North Africa, which after November 1942 returned to the war on the Allied side and fought in Tunisia, Italy and France. His conservatism, his attachment to Pétain and his resistance to abolishing Vichy’s laws, however, meant that he could not unite the French who were fighting Germany. De Gaulle did, and the rivalry between the two generals in 1943 decided who would speak for France when the Allies landed on its shores.