Henri Giraud
Henri Honoré Giraud (born January 18, 1879 in Paris , † March 11, 1949 in Dijon ) was a French Général d'armée .
Military career in the First and Second World Wars
Giraud was of Alsatian origin and graduated from the Saint-Cyr Military School by 1900 . He then joined the French army and served in French North Africa until his return to France in 1914. Then he took part in World War I , in which he commanded the Zouave troops. At the end of August 1914, he was captured seriously wounded at the Battle of Saint-Quentin . Two months later he managed to escape; he returned to France via the Netherlands . He later served on the French staff under General Franchet d'Esperey in Constantinople .
From 1922 to 1926 he was in Morocco in the Rif War against the Rifkabylen in use. After Abd el-Krim was captured, he was made a member of the Legion of Honor . He then became military commander of the Metz Fortress and in 1939 received a seat on the French War Council.
Giraud - like other French generals of the Second World War - had at that time different views on the tactics of the use of armored forces than the then Colonel Charles de Gaulle . Giraud became commander of the 7th Army when he was sent to the Netherlands on May 10, 1940, the first day of the campaign in the west . There he could only delay the handover of Breda to the Wehrmacht on May 13th. The German general and strategist of the tank units, Heinz Guderian , victoriously demonstrated the value of de Gaulle's recommendations to the detriment of the French army and the BEF . Later the shrunken 7th Army was merged with the 9th Army . While trying to repel a German attack through the Ardennes , Giraud was captured by the Wehrmacht in Wassigny as chief of the 9th Army on May 19, 1940.
Escape from German captivity
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As a prisoner of war, Giraud was housed with other high-ranking French officers at the Königstein Fortress near Dresden. From there he managed to escape to the unoccupied part of France after two years under circumstances that were not fully understood. According to his own account, Giraud had carefully planned the escape over two years. He learned German without an accent and memorized a map of the area. From numerous food parcels that he had his wife sent to him, he collected the twine and patiently braided them into a rope, which he reinforced with a 50 meter long copper wire that his wife also included in a food parcel.
On April 17, 1942, Giraud lowered himself from the cliffs of the mountain fortress. He had shaved off his beard and was wearing a Tyrolean hat. He traveled to Bad Schandau to meet his SOE contact there. From him he received a civilian suit in a suitcase, an ID in the name of an industrialist with a photo similar to him, and a lot of money. In order to shake off his pursuers, he drove across Germany by train. He used tricks to avoid Gestapo controls on platforms and trains. So he reached the Swiss border. From there he got to the "unoccupied" Vichy France . Due to his great political distance from de Gaulle, he was later accused of having been released with German help. A reward of 100,000 Reichsmarks was offered in Germany on April 21, 1942 for his recovery.
Giraud's escape was quickly known all over France. Heinrich Himmler ordered the Gestapo to kill him; Pierre Laval , the prime minister of the Vichy regime, tried to persuade him to return to Germany. Giraud admired Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain , but refused to cooperate with the Germans and therefore had to stay underground. The Allies liberated Giraud from Vichy France, took him on the Mediterranean coast on board the British submarine HMS Seraph and brought him to Gibraltar .
Entitlement to Allied Command in Operation Torch
In Gibraltar he met General Eisenhower and asked him to serve as the commander of the entire Operation Torch . However, Eisenhower only offered him to command the French troops in Algeria , Morocco and Tunisia after Operation Torch . The disappointed Giraud refused to return to Algiers immediately, where French resists were waiting for him to assist the Allies with the landing. Instead he stayed until November 9th under the code name "King-Pin" in Gibraltar.
After the Allies landed in North Africa , Giraud, whose authority most French officers refused, placed himself under the orders of Admiral François Darlans on November 10 , who made massive threats and promised to remain at his post in French North Africa after the fire had ceased , moved by General Mark W. Clark to the Ceasefire Command in Oran and Morocco. Giraud was then given command of all French troops against General de Gaulle's protest.
Vichy regime in liberated Africa
François Darlan, admiral of the French Vichy government, was murdered on December 24, 1942 by the young Frenchman Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle , who, trained by the British SOK intelligence service, was allegedly an agent of de Gaulle. The background was that the US President Roosevelt supported the use of Vichy officials in the administration of conquered former French territories; British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, on the other hand, was inclined to believe de Gaulle, who opposed the use of the Vichy people.
Immediately after Darlan's murder, Giraud rose to American pressure by resolution of the Conseil Impérial as Darlan's successor to the position of High Commissioner for French North and West Africa . He let the assassin by a state court on December 25 sentenced to death and the following day at 7.30am execute by firing squad . Giraud then shocked the Americans when he ordered the arrest of the 27 resists who, through their heroic efforts, had enabled Eisenhower's troops to capture Algiers. Without Roosevelt's representative, Robert Murphy , protesting, he ordered their transfer to the southern Algerian concentration camps in the Sahara. American and British war correspondents warned of the circumstances and the public reaction to them in their homeland.
Power struggle with de Gaulle
Giraud was unpopular with the Allied generals and was considered presumptuous in connection with his refusal to help the Allies land in Algiers and his claim to lead the entire Torch operation. Giraud still implemented the Hitler-inspired laws passed under Pétain to the detriment of the army, which was in urgent need of reinforcement, by denying Jewish soldiers and officers access to the combat units in order to prevent them from depriving them of their war awards, wounds, etc. could regain French citizenship . His reactionary attitude earned him the opposition of the Committee for a Free France under General Charles de Gaulle. In his own words, Giraud only thought of the fight, rejected politics and, according to de Gaulle in his memoirs, had nothing against the Vichy regime. De Gaulle went on to write that Giraud had no understanding of the elementary, popular, revolutionary nature of the Resistance in the motherland and at least disapproved of it. Ultimately, however, Giraud failed less because of de Gaulle than because of himself, because while de Gaulle viewed the Resistance as an evolutionary political process in which the national sovereignty and freedom of France rose through the fight against National Socialism and the Third Reich , Giraud wanted the CFLN leave.
Giraud attended the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 with Franklin D. Roosevelt , Winston Churchill and de Gaulle, without any agreement between him and de Gaulle. After brief negotiations, Giraud, under the influence of Jean Monnet , accepted that the laws passed by Pétain and inspired by Hitler should no longer be applied and that the prisoners of the Vichy regime should be released from the concentration camps in southern Algeria. On May 30, de Gaulle landed in Algiers and used his political skills to the full to become head of the political organization. So he campaigned for the freedom of the French media. It was not until June 3, 1943, when the French Committee for National Liberation (CFLN) was formed in Algiers with the two generals as chairmen with equal rights.
Although the United States backed Giraud, he lost this office in November 1943 when he kept his plan to liberate Corsica a secret from the committee until the last moment and armed the strongly communist-dominated Corsican National Front. After it became known in April 1944 that he had exclusive access to the ex-Vichy secret service , which had previously persecuted the Résistants relentlessly, de Gaulle almost forced him to give up his post as Commander-in-Chief. He rejected the position of Inspector General of the French Army offered him as a replacement . On August 28, 1944, he survived an assassination attempt in Algeria.
Post war career
Giraud was elected to the Constituent Assembly of the Fourth Republic in June 1946 for the Parti républicain de la Liberté (Republican Party of Freedom), a party of the moderate right, and retained a seat on the War Council until 1948. He died in Dijon on March 11, 1949 . Awarded the Croix de guerre and the Médaille Militaire , he was buried in the Invalides in Paris.
Works
- Henri Giraud: Mes Évasions . 1946.
- Henri Giraud: Un seul but la victoire . 1942-1944, 1949.
Web links
- Literature by and about Henri Giraud in the catalog of the German National Library
- The wildest escape of the century: How General Giraud got from Saxony to Switzerland and France (PDF file; 1.69 MB)
- English biography of Henri Giraud
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Thomas Parschik: “Catch the Schiro!” In: The paper . 20th year, no.12 June 5, 2017, accessed on June 7, 2017 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Giraud, Henri |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Giraud, Henri Honoré (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French general |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 18, 1879 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 11, 1949 |
| Place of death | Dijon |