Max Boot: The Consummate Warrior
[Max Boot is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is writing a history of guerrilla warfare and terrorism, on which this article is based, for W.W. Norton.]
In English-speaking countries, the French armed forces have become a joke. Literally. Entire websites are devoted to one-liners like: “How many gears do French tanks have? Six: five reverse and one forward.” This is a gross slander of a nation that, back in the days of Louis XIV and Napoleon, was synonymous with military excellence. Those skills, that courage, that panache did not suddenly disappear in the 20th century, notwithstanding France’s string of humiliating defeats. There is no better reminder of that than the career of General Marcel Bigeard, who died on June 18 at age 94.
Born in 1916 to a railway worker, he left school at 14 to work in a bank. Called up when war came in 1939, he was a lowly warrant officer when captured on the Maginot Line in 1940. The following year, after two failed attempts, he escaped from a German prison camp and made his way to French West Africa to join the Free French forces. In August 1944 (using the call sign Bruno, which became his lifelong moniker), he parachuted back into France to work with the Resistance and help the invading Allied armies. In the process, he earned the Legion of Honor and Britain’s Distinguished Service Order.
Once World War II was over, the French army turned its attention to imperial wars, starting in Indochina where the Viet-Minh under Ho Chi Minh were trying to expel the colonial power. Captain Bigeard arrived in Saigon in 1945. By 1952, he was on his third tour, a major, and newly installed commander of the 6th Colonial Parachute Battalion (“Bataillon Bigeard”). By then everyone in Indochina, wrote French journalist Jules Roy, “knew his high forehead, his fair crew-cut hair, his bird-of-prey profile, his touchy independence”—and the extraordinary combat record that would one day earn him four-star rank without benefit of a St. Cyr education....
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In English-speaking countries, the French armed forces have become a joke. Literally. Entire websites are devoted to one-liners like: “How many gears do French tanks have? Six: five reverse and one forward.” This is a gross slander of a nation that, back in the days of Louis XIV and Napoleon, was synonymous with military excellence. Those skills, that courage, that panache did not suddenly disappear in the 20th century, notwithstanding France’s string of humiliating defeats. There is no better reminder of that than the career of General Marcel Bigeard, who died on June 18 at age 94.
Born in 1916 to a railway worker, he left school at 14 to work in a bank. Called up when war came in 1939, he was a lowly warrant officer when captured on the Maginot Line in 1940. The following year, after two failed attempts, he escaped from a German prison camp and made his way to French West Africa to join the Free French forces. In August 1944 (using the call sign Bruno, which became his lifelong moniker), he parachuted back into France to work with the Resistance and help the invading Allied armies. In the process, he earned the Legion of Honor and Britain’s Distinguished Service Order.
Once World War II was over, the French army turned its attention to imperial wars, starting in Indochina where the Viet-Minh under Ho Chi Minh were trying to expel the colonial power. Captain Bigeard arrived in Saigon in 1945. By 1952, he was on his third tour, a major, and newly installed commander of the 6th Colonial Parachute Battalion (“Bataillon Bigeard”). By then everyone in Indochina, wrote French journalist Jules Roy, “knew his high forehead, his fair crew-cut hair, his bird-of-prey profile, his touchy independence”—and the extraordinary combat record that would one day earn him four-star rank without benefit of a St. Cyr education....