François de Linares

François Jean Antonin Marie Amédée Gonzalez de Linares (family name also Gonzalès de Linarès , born July 7, 1897 in Guérande , † March 2, 1955 in Baden-Baden ) was a French army officer, most recently with the rank of Général de corps d'armée . During the Indochina War he was the regional commander in chief of Tonkin (North Vietnam).

life and career

First World War and the interwar period

François Gonzalez de Linares came from an originally Spanish, now British-French family. His parents had lived in India, France and Canada and were British citizens. He attended the Lycée Sainte-Geneviève (Ginette) in Versailles .

During the First World War he enlisted in the French army in 1916 . He fought as a simple soldier on the Western Front , qualified for an officer career and, after having taken on French citizenship, attended the Saint-Cyr Officers School in 1916/17 (year nº100). He was then again on the Western Front in combat and was wounded twice.

After the end of the war, Linares initially worked as a trainer in Saint-Cyr, but joined the colonial army in French North Africa in autumn 1919 and served in Morocco until 1924. Back in the motherland, he graduated from the École supérieure de guerre . He then worked as a company leader in Algeria from 1930 to 1936.

Second World War

After the outbreak of World War II , Linares commanded the 15th alpine hunter battalion ( 15th battalion de chasseurs alpins ) and was on the staff of the 2nd Army Group ( groupe d'armées nº 2 ).

After the defeat he remained in the service of Vichy , but took part in a Resistance network that helped French prisoners of war - including General Giraud - escape. In November 1942 he fled the Gestapo to North Africa, where the Allies had recently landed . In Algiers he joined the Free French forces under General Giraud, who made him head of his military cabinet. In mid-1943 he was a member of the French military mission in London. In the autumn he took over command of the 3rd Algerian Rifle Regiment ( 3e régiment de tirailleurs algériens ) and took part with this from December 1943 to August 1944 under General Goislard de Monsabert in the Italian campaign. The regiment distinguished itself here in the battle for Monte Cassino and was one of the first allied formations in Rome. On 16./17. August 1944 landed Linares, now with the rank of Colonel ( Colonel ), with his regiment on the Côte d'Azur ( Operation Dragoon ) and participated in the capture of Toulon . In September he became Deputy Chief of Staff of Army B under General Lattre de Tassigny . He learned to appreciate Linares as an efficient officer and close confidante and furthered his career: Linares was promoted to brigadier general ( général de brigade ) in November 1944, and in February 1945 he became chief of staff of the now renamed 1st Army ( 1re armée ). At the end of March, the French troops advanced into southern Germany. In April Linares was appointed commander of the 2nd Moroccan Infantry Division ( 2nd division d'infanterie marocaine ). At the end of the war he was in Vorarlberg .

In the post-war period, Linares took on a number of administrative positions, for example he headed a commission for the revision of infantry guidelines and in April 1946 became commander of the second infantry division in Nancy, which was under construction . In April 1948 he became a division general ( général de division ). In March 1950 he took command of the 3rd Military Region.

Indochina War

At the request of General Lattre de Tassigny, who recently became commander in chief in the Indochina War , Linares traveled to Indochina in mid-January 1951 . He took over command of the French armed forces in Tonkin (North Vietnam) at the beginning of February as the successor to General Boyer de Latour . As usual, the French civil administration of the region was also subordinated to him as Commissaire de la République .

In North Vietnam, the French had fallen on the defensive as a result of the catastrophic defeat on Route Coloniale 4 in the fall of 1950 and were now trying to hold the Red River delta against advances by the Viet Minh . Lattre de Tassigny succeeded in repelling three massive Vietminh offensives ( Vĩnh Yên in January, Mạo Khê in March, Sông Đáy in May / June 1951) and thus stabilized the situation. Sick of cancer, however, he gave up high command in November and returned to France as a dying man. The command of the French offensive on Hòa Bình , which had just started at that time , fell to Linares, who until then had been largely in the shadow of his superior. The French troops had been able to occupy the city of Hòa Bình with almost no resistance, but were now exposed to severe counterattacks by the Viet Minh, who tried to interrupt the French supply lines. As a result, it became more and more expensive for the French to keep route Coloniale 6 between Hanoi and Hòa Bình open. The newly appointed Indochina Commander in Chief, General Salan , finally gave the order to withdraw from Hòa Bình in January 1952, as the soldiers deployed to secure the delta were urgently needed. Linares, meanwhile promoted to Army Corps General ( Général de corps d'armée ), then initiated a staggered multi-week withdrawal operation, which was successfully completed by the end of February. The troops withdrawn from Hòa Bình were then used against the Viet Minh forces in the Thái Bình area. The 320th Vietminh Division in action there was surprised by the French reinforcements and pushed back with high losses.

Linares remained Tonkin Regional Commander in Chief under General Salan's command. From July to September 1952 he also served as acting commander-in-chief for all of Indochina on behalf of the absent Salan. Overall, he hardly set his own accents and was forced to concentrate on the defense of the controlled area, for example by promoting a military village program, as well as building up the Vietnamese national army . He openly admitted to an American government representative that the French forces were at a disadvantage despite their superior firepower, as a large part of the soldiers had to be deployed to secure the hinterland and important infrastructure (such as roads and telegraph lines), which is why the much more flexible Viet Minh determined the course of the war .

After the failure of Salan's offensive operation Lorraine , the French were able to achieve defensive success at the end of 1952 at the Battle of Nà Sản . In May 1953 Salan was replaced by Henri Navarre at the request of the Paris government . Linares also resigned from his command and left Indochina. His successor in Tonkin was the much more active René Cogny .

Back in France, Linares became Inspector General of Infantry ( inspecteur général de l'Infanterie ) in September 1953 and finally a member of the Supreme War Council ( conseil supérieur de la guerre ) in early 1955 . However, he died a few weeks later on March 2, 1955 in the French military hospital in Baden-Baden at the age of 57 of an illness.

Honors, afterlife

François de Linares was among other things bearer of the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor ( Grand-croix de la Légion d'Honneur ) and the Croix de guerre with 16 citations . In honor of his honor, he received the status of Mort pour la France .

He had ten children with his wife, Alix Pellaumail , whom he married in 1923. One of his sons, Stephen , also served in Morocco and Algeria and eventually with the Alpine Hunters, but was killed in a training mountain run in 1972 at the age of 39 by a debris avalanche. In honor of father and son, the 1972–1974 class of the Saint-Cy officers' school was named “de Linares”.

The eldest son, François junior , published his father's memories in book form. In 2005, the work “Par les portes du Nord: la libération de Toulon et Marseille en 1944” about the landing in southern France was published, followed by “Campagne d'Italie 1943-1944, Cassino, Rome, Sienne: l'affrontement des cinq armées ” on the Italian campaign in 2009.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Le Monde : LE GENERAL DE LINARES EST MORT , March 4, 1955 (only the beginning of the article freely available)
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr - Association Promotion Linares: François de LINARES (accessed April 2020)
3. Jump up ↑ Jean Boÿ, Saint-Cyr: Historique de la 100e promotion (1916-17), promotion des Drapeaux et de l'Amitié Américaine, dite la Centième , 2008/2010, p. 5
4. ↑ Forum La Guerre d'Indochine: GONZALEZ DE LINARES - ETAT DES SERVICES (accessed April 2020)
5. ↑ John P. Glennon (ed.), Neal H. Petersen (ed.), US Department of State: Foreign Relations of the United States: 1952–1954, Volume XIII: Indochina (Part 1) , US Government Printing Office, Washington DC 1982, p. 40
6. ^ Bernard B. Fall : The Two Vietnams: A Political and Military Analysis , Praeger, New York 1964, p. 372
7. ^ Ronald H. Spector : United States Army in Vietnam. Advice and Support: The Early Years, 1941-1960 , Center of Military History, Washington DC 1985, pp. 168/169
8. ↑ Christopher E. Goscha : Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War (1945–1954) - An International and Interdisciplinary Approach , NIAS Press, Copenhagen, 2011, pp. 187/188 (entry GONZALEZ DE LINARÈS )
9. ↑ École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr - Association Promotion Linares: Stephen de LINARES (accessed April 2020)