In the intervening months between November 1954 and the start of Soustelle’s reforms and the subsequent troop surge, military commanders in Algeria improvised their own methods to restore order in their sectors in the absence of any overarching strategy. One such leader was General Spillmann, the Commanding General of the Constantine Division in eastern Algeria, who had authored a set of orders for his sector that attracted the attention of leading members of the French defense establishment. In July 1955, Minister of National Defense, Pierre Koenig, and Minister of the Interior, Maurice Bourgès-Manoury, wrote to General Henri Lorillot, who had taken command of all French forces in Algeria the previous month. They believed it was time to apply a consistent doctrine to all of Algeria for subduing the rebels. They had determined that Spillman, commanding the Constantine Division, had devised effective methods to accomplish the desired return to peace and ordered that his "doctrine . . . be applied in the same ways, without restriction, in all of the Algerian departments."74
General Spillmann advocated a fairly active response to the “rebel bands,” which he explained used commando-led sabotage and the fear of explosive charges to stop Muslims from supporting the French or partaking in French cultural activities. The French army, he said, should “adapt itself to operations more of the police than military type.” Incidentally, he also recognized that the outcome of this engagement would carry
74 Pierre Koenig and Maurice Bourgès-Manoury, Instruction fixant l’attitude à adopter vis-à-vis des rebelles in ALGÉRIE (Paris: Ministère de la Défense Nationale, July 1, 1955), 1, 1H 2577, SHAT.
consequences, particularly that “the French army risks the loss of its prestige” if sufficient efforts were not made to bring the rebels back under French control.75
Spillmann essentially recommended a “shoot-first-ask-questions-later” approach: any rebels, people aiding rebels, or persons trying to escape should be fired upon. Any rebels or supporters not killed should be captured and turned over to local civilian authorities. His word choice probably over-simplified the tactical situation and assumed that his soldiers could easily distinguish rebels and rebel-supporters from regular
inhabitants in the course of his recommended night raids and helicopter insertions. Intentionally or not, he ignored any possible political fall-out that might accompany hunting innocent men by mistake. This early advocacy for shooting suspects before detaining them favored the soldier’s safety at the expense of the civilians whom they were ostensibly deployed to protect. The attitude that follows this practice would become normalized within the ranks quickly, and later army commanders who advocated policies of respect toward the civilians would have a difficult time re-programming the troops that had grown accustomed to looking after themselves first.
After allowing the general’s order to speak for itself on the tactical situation, Koenig and Bourgès-Manoury weighed in to address their expectations of civil-military cooperation at all echelons and detailed precisely how leaders should divide
responsibilities between themselves. In particular, “the civil authority has the direction and responsibility for all operations” while “the military commander has a choice of means to execute the missions that are asked of him by the civil authority. In any case however, he can not undertake any mission except with the approval of the legally
responsible civil authority, properly represented by administrative attachés or Officers of Indigenous Affairs.”76 Likewise, the ministers ordered civil and military authorities to coordinate closely in planning, and they ordered civilian authorities to support their military counterparts materially as necessary.77
General Spillman, by virtue perhaps of being the first general officer to coherently package his outlook toward fighting the insurgency into a discrete policy, proffered the first broad approach for countering the insurgency that was disseminated through
directives to the field commanders. This policy, endorsed by the highest echelons of army leadership, and which expected civil-military cooperation, became the first official
method for dealing with insurgents. A musician cannot improvise a jazz riff without an underlying melody. Spillman’s directive, in this case, became the melody and baseline against which commanders would improvise solutions to their specific problems. While riffs can be highly creative, they must maintain enough connection to the melody that a listener understands the relationship. Similarly, while commanders at this point may have retained the potential for tremendous creativity, their choices now had a baseline not present before, a baseline that effectively endorsed a shoot-first ask-questions-later approach.
76 Koenig and Bourgès-Manoury, Instruction vis-à-vis des rebelles, 4.
77 Basic counterinsurgency outlooks often revolve around the order of events: (1) kill and capture rebels first and then co-opt whomever remains, probably requiring a second rebel hunt after co- opting has run its course; (2) kill and capture while simultaneously building local civilian rapport and running social works projects; (3) try to co-opt as many locals and rebels through rapport- building and social works projects until such time as all moderates have chosen a side, after which it is appropriate to hunt down the remaining rebels. We will return to this divide later, although I will not openly favor one approach over the other in this paper as choosing recommended strategies is not this project’s intent.