After their arrival in Oran, the 5BMA enjoyed a period of relative inactivity. It was near Oran that Fanon watched soldiers throwing pieces of bread to starving Arab children who fought savagely over the scraps of food.87 He would never forget the sight. Since 1939, many areas and notably Kabylia were famine zones. Albert Camus published damning articles on the famine in Alger républican in June of that year, describing how he had seen ragged children fighting with dogs over the contents of a dustbin in the Kabyle capital of Tizi-Ouzou. He learned that, in the villages, poor people had been reduced to supplementing the small amount of grain they could obtain by eating the roots and stalks of thistles and nettles.88 Wartime rationing made matters much worse. ‘Europeans’ and ‘natives’ had ration cards of different colours entitling them to different rations. There were ‘native’ and ‘European’ distribution centres in the countryside. In some areas, rations were limited to four kilos of barley per person per month. In some cases, even the barley had been replaced by what the locals called ‘American flour’; the maize flour caused food poisoning and other digestive disorders because the recipients did not know how to cook it properly.89 The children Fanon saw near Oran were the lucky ones; bread was a luxury for many of their fellows. Disease was taking its toll too; in 1941 alone, typhus killed 16,000 people in Algeria.90
Fanon did not have much time to observe the harsh realities of wartime North Africa. On 10 September, he was crossing the Mediterranean on an American-flagged transport. The 5BMA’s training had not been particularly thorough, and it was not particularly well armed, its main weapons being First World War vintage Lebel rifles, the 1915-model Chuchat light machine gun and Hotchkiss machine guns.91 The crossing took two days, and Fanon’s first sight of France was an invasion beach near St Tropez and the shattered town of Toulon. His unit was not part of the spearhead. Operation Anvil got underway early on the morning of 15 August, when 10,000 men of the US First Airborne Task Force jumped to a drop zone a few miles inland from Fréjus and St Tropez. French and American commandos were landed and took very heavy casualties. At 8 a.m., three US infantry divisions hit the beaches of the south coast, which had been heavily bombarded from both the air and the sea. By mid-morning, Allied troops had reached the centre of St Tropez, where American paratroops and the French Forces of the Interior were already besieging the German garrison. A bridgehead had been established and the French divisions of de Lattre’s ‘B Army’ landed the next day. The German infantry regiment stationed to the east of St Tropez was in retreat and the other German forces – seven infantry divisions and one Panzer tank division – were so thinly deployed that they could not be regrouped to offer much resistance. The Allied objective was now the road and rail corridor leading to Toulon, and then the Rhône valley.
After heavy street-fighting, Toulon was taken on 19 August by the sixth regiment of Tirailleurs sénégalais (6RTS), which was part of the Ninth Division of Colonial Infantry (9DCI). Formed in June 1943, 9DCI was made up of a Moroccan infantry regiment, the Fourth, Sixth and Thirteenth Regiments of Tirailleurs senégalais and an artillery division from Morocco. The 6RTS had already seen combat in Corsica and Elba, where it took heavy casualities. These were tough troops who were particularly good at fighting at close quarters, and the Germans were afraid of them. So much so that, according to Cézette, they took no black prisoners. On 20 August, Général de Brigade Pierre Magnan issued an order of the day, congratulating his men on their victory:
You defeated the enemy in a three-day battle that took you from the Cuers region to the gates of Toulon. And then, taking responsibility for the conquest of the town, you wrested this old colonial city, which is the cradle of your army, from the enemy inch by inch. The high number of prisoners in your hands, and the quantity of munitions and matériel you have captured, are testimony to the valour of your efforts and the greatness of your victory.92
Magnan was apparently quite oblivious to the irony of his words. Toulon was the cradle of the colonial army in more than one sense: it was the main port of embarkation for the invasion of Algeria in 1830.
Magnan had unwittingly touched upon the vital question of what happens when the colonized liberate their colonizers, and then realize that they themselves are still colonized. Similar questions had begun to be asked during the Italian campaign. When New Year parcels from America arrived for the mixed colonial and French units, a French officer decided that they should be distributed on the basis of one parcel for each Frenchman, and one parcel to be shared between three Moroccans. When an Algerian sergeant protested, he was told that he was an agitator and did not deserve the médaille militaire for which he had been recommended. The sergeant was Ahmed Ben Bella, the future first president of independent Algeria, and his feelings about the war he was fighting were becoming dangerously ambiguous: ‘I was fighting for a just cause, and I believe that I was happy. Or at least I would have been happy, if the thought of unhappy Algeria had ever left me for a moment.’93 Fanon was probably not worrying about the unhappy Algeria of which he had seen so little, but his doubts as to just what he was doing would soon grow.
On landing in France, where it was immediately involved in mopping up operations, the 5BMA was split up as part of the seemingly endless and confusing reorganization of France’s fighting forces.94 Most of its men were transferred to the Atlantic coast, where they fought bravely in the battle to retake the Royan ‘pocket’ at the mouth of the Girone estuary – which had been bypassed by the Allies after their breakout from the Normandy bridgeheads – and lost their commanding officer in doing so. The remainder, including Fanon, Manville, Cézette and Mosole, were incorporated into the 9DCI’s Sixth regiment of Tirailleurs sénégalais. Astonishingly, the friends remained together, although Cézette became a semi-detached member of the little group when he became a driver attached to a liaison officer and acquired what he calls ‘my own jeep’. As the division took Aix-en-Provence and then moved north along the Rhône valley towards Grenoble, Fanon was forced to wonder who he was: ‘on the one hand, the Europeans, either native or from the old colonies; on the other, the tirailleurs’. He no longer knew whether he was a black ‘native’ or an honorary white toubab (European), but he did have the impression that the black troops were taking the brunt of the fighting and casualties and were being sent into action first.95
As the division headed north, the weather was becoming colder, and the High Command decided on 27 October that the three regiments of Tirailleurs sénégalais could not be expected to fight in winter conditions to which they were not acclimatized and should be pulled back to more temperate areas. Some of the beneficiaries of the decision were ungrateful enough to see it as a ploy designed to deny them the military glory of crossing the Rhine into Germany.96 The official documents described this as the ‘whitening’ (blanchiment) of the division, which was now officially a European unit. Not all its ‘European’ soldiers were European in any real sense and they were definitely not white: some, like Fanon, came into the strange category of neither ‘native’ nor ‘toubab’. Fanon had never seen snow and, having been brought up on an island where the temperature rarely falls below the high twenties, he had never been cold. He had no more experience of the harsh winters of Eastern France than his Senegalese comrades, but he had to fight on in increasingly difficult conditions as the temperature fell to well below zero. Whether or not the decision to send the small group of Martinicans and Guadeloupeans north into the snow was deliberate or an instance of military incompetence is not clear. Charles Cézette is still tempted to think that they were simply ‘forgotten about’. He also suggests that there may have been other factors behind the decision to whiten the division. He hints, that is, that the Senegalese may have been pulled back in order to intimidate the local French population and to forestall possible outbreaks of ‘people’s justice’, a murderous purge of collaborators or even an attempted Communist insurrection. There is no proof that this was the case, but such