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🪵 The Threshold

French tactical victories failed to convert into strategic gains in the Aurès

Properties2
tagsja-picks, factual_claims, singleton, xref, category/causal-relationships
aliases@horne_savage_1977, loc. 791, @horne_savage_1977, loc. 329

4 min read

French tactical victories failed to convert into strategic gains in the Aurès

Evidence

From outside Le Cap, bands of slave insurgents were watching. Although the April 4 decree was passed with the explicit intention of defeating the slave uprising, the commissioners had made little progress in doing so in the months after they arrived. Many of the French troops that accompanied them succumbed to disease; by one account half of them died within two months. In late October and early November 1792 a large and wellarmed expedition led by Rochambeau flushed insurgent bands out of the northern plain and captured their stronghold at Ouanaminthe, along the border with Santo Domingo. But most of the insurgents simply retreated into the mountains, and in the end the mission did little but “inflame the pride of the enemy,” who had realized that they could survive even when an impressive army was sent against them. The rebels remained “masters of the mountains, from which they could, at will, bring fire and iron to the plains.” With the majority of troops back in Le Cap, the insurgents advanced across the plain again, and by December some bands were once more camped close to the town. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 506 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Militarily speaking, the encounter at Agounennda—a model of well-applied intelligence and hard-hitting mobility—looked like a triumph for the French. Yet it was an incomplete success; the well-laid ambush had not succeeded in wiping out the main body of the force trapped in it. Ideally set up for the French style of warfare, it was also the kind of opportunity that would seldom occur again. Therefore, while the French military might deduce from Agounennda as from the Battle of Algiers that the F.L.N. could never beat them in a clear confrontation, a more dispassionate observer might have questioned whether, if Bigeard’s crack unit could not score a total victory on its own terms, there was much hope for winning more elusive engagements in a war that might be indefinitely prolonged. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 791 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

The F.L.N., growing more experienced, wilier and more cautious about accepting combat with superior French forces, became like mountain sheep — always one ledge, one ridge higher up in the wintry mountains than their pursuers. The war in the Aurès began to bog down, to the deep dissatisfaction of Mendès-France and, even more, of the impatient pied noir leaders in Algiers. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 329 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: French punitive failures drove uncommitted Auresians to join the F.L.N.; French tactical victories could not win a prolonged elusive insurgency; Pre-Challe French tactics wasted vast firepower while letting the A.L.N. slip away intact (+9 more)

Broader Connections

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