Word: guerrillas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...readier to accept French authority than that of the Dey. Rallying behind AbdelKader, the handsome, 25-year-old son of a holy man, they launched a jihad (holy war) to expel the infidel. French General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, a veteran of Napoleon's Spanish campaign, where the word guerrilla was invented, responded with a tactic called the razzia -a swift, merciless strike at a native village, sparing nothing and nobody. In one razzia, in 1845, nearly 500 Algerian men, women and children were asphyxiated by fires lit at the mouth of a cave in which they had taken refuge...
...Hammer & the Fly. To Algeria's young nationalists the massacres of May 1945 meant one thing: the only way Algeria would ever get self-government was by armed revolt. Avidly they began to read military history, concentrating on guerrilla warfare-memoirs of French resistance officers, Tito's partisans, Irish rebels. Their first attempt at an underground, the Organisation Spéciale, soon had 3,000 recruits, ample stocks of hidden weapons, too ambitious and complex a hierarchy, and a card file of members. Result: when French police once got a lead into the O.S., it swiftly collapsed...
Though now a highly organized and professional army, the F.L.N. sticks to guerrilla tactics and suffers when it does not. Sleeping by day and fighting by night, it moves in 40-man combat groups, attacks only when it has a French unit at a disadvantage, withdraws in the face of any major French force. Result is that although the overweight French army has won some local successes-notably the stamping out of terrorism in the casbah of Algiers by General Jacques Massu's hardened paratroopers-most of its time is spent in vain pursuit of a will...
...failed to join the F.L.N., but slowly became embittered by the French temporizing, finally told friends, "We are all fellaghas. Those who aren't cowards have taken up arms. Those who are cowards talk to the administration. I'm finished now. The real Algerian leaders now are guerrilla leaders in the hills." Since joining the F.L.N., Abbas has lived in Switzerland with his French wife, shuttles between Cairo, New York and South America, working for independence...
...first job on the Chicago Tribune's famed Paris Tribune, later worked 15 years as foreign editor on Lord Beaverbrook's giant (circ. 4,116,157) Daily Express. After World War II, Foley wrote a bestselling book on Hitler's daredevil Handyman Otto Skorzeny and guerrilla warfare, quit the Beaver and sailed to Cyprus in 1955. "It seemed a quiet place," he says...