French troops stormed Bab-el-Oued with tanks and planes to crush the O.A.S.

Evidence

In a towering rage, the French Commander-in-Chief, General Ailleret, now ordered a full-scale assault on the O.A.S. stronghold of Bab-el-Oued. At first gendarmerie armoured cars raked the façades of apartment buildings with heavy . calibre machine-guns. But the O.A.S. marksmen fired back. Then, in the afternoon, 20,000 French troops — led by Ailleret himself — moved in and sealed off Bab-el-Oued with its some 60,000 inhabitants. Tanks fired their cannon at point-blank range into suspected O.A.S. snipers’ nests. In the evening a flight of T. planes flew in to strafe the still rebellious quarter with rockets and machine-guns. It was a scene more familiar to an army coup in Bolivia than anything ever experienced on French territory. … During those days of siege, and afterwards, the uncommitted residents of Bab-el-Oued found themselves caught in a grim no-man’s-land between the O.A.S. and the F.L.N. “We didn’t dare go into the Casbah for fear of being kidnapped or killed by the F.L.N.,” recalled a Jewish school-teacher, Madame Lorette Ankaoua: “nor did we dare go into the European shops behind our house for fear of the O.A.S. So small Arab children in my class smuggled us bread secretly in their dirty haversacks. It was all we had to eat.” — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 1602

Categorization

• XREF: The scene evokes Budapest 1956, which Deguelde wanted to recreate in Algiers — connects to the parallel the author draws between anti-OAS urban warfare and Soviet repression of uprisings. — connects to: French forces fought a pitched urban battle against the O.A.S.; F.L.N. annihilated the rival M.N.A. militia with French troops watching passively — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 422

Related

• French forces fought a pitched urban battle against the O.A.S. (similarity 0.94)
• Defeated OAS destroyed Algeria’s French-built infrastructure and institutions (similarity 0.82)
• Killing French conscripts turned the army decisively against the O.A.S. (similarity 0.82)
• The OAS escalated to total war against French authority to force general paralysis (similarity 0.80)
• The Ouarsenis offensive broke up the O.P.A. and left French forces controlling the territory. (similarity 0.80)
• OAS believed attacking French Communists would trap de Gaulle politically, but miscalculated. (similarity 0.79)
• Algerian fighters in Tunisia outnumbered the infant Tunisian army. (similarity 0.79)
• French troops faced guerrilla warfare that negated their conventional military advantage. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• F.L.N. annihilated the rival M.N.A. militia with French troops watching passively #responds-to (0.40) — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 422