It is hard, after 40 years, to convey the public impact of France's war to maintain her colonial grip on Algeria; yet in the late 1950s this ugly conflict dominated Europe's media to almost the same extent as would Vietnam ten years later. It brought France to the very verge of military coup d'etat; it destroyed thousands of careers; bitterly divided the French military and political classes for a generation; and sent hundreds of thousands of European settler families into often ruinous exile. Its exact cost in lives is unknown. Some 25,000 French troops died in action, by accident or of disease; some 3,600 European civilians were killed or disappeared, and a similar number of loyal Muslim troops were killed. The Algerian guerrillas lost perhaps 155,000 killed outright, and many more died of wounds; Muslim civilian deaths from all causes easily exceeded 50,000 even before the vengeful post-ceasefire bloodbath, which killed anything up to twice as many. The much-qouted total estimate of a million Algerian dead
is now discounted, but the true cost was certainly at least half that - a sufficiently monstrous figure. Martin Windrow details the history, organisation, equipment and uniforms of the forces involved, with plenty of illustrations and eight full page colour plates by Mike Chappell.
- The background
- Summary of main events
- The army of national liberation
- The french army in Algeria
- Select bibliography
- The states
Auteur
Martin Windrow is series editor at Osprey and an authority on the post-war French army, particularly the Foreign Legion. He is the author of the very successful MAA 300 French Foreign Legion since 1945 and the recent MAA 322 The French War in Indochina 1946-54.
Illustrateur
Mike Chappell comes from an Aldershot family with British Army connections stretching back several generations. He enlisted as a teenage private in the Royal Hampshire Regiment in 1952 and retired in 1974, as RSM of the 1st Battalion The Wessex Regiment (Rifle Volunteers), after seeing service in Malaya, Cyprus, Swaziland, Libya, Germany, Ulster and home garrisons. He began painting military subjects in 1968 and since then has gained worldwide popularity as a military illustrator. Mike has also written and illustrated many books in the Osprey Military list.
