Pierre Lelong (General)

Pierre Lelong (born June 20, 1891 in Angoulême , † May 22, 1947 in Corsica ) was a French general .

Life

Lelong embarked on a military career and entered the Saint-Cyr Military School in 1910 . He then went to the 22nd Colonial Infantry Regiment of the French Colonial Forces. In July 1914, the unit was relocated to Madagascar . During the journey through the Red Sea , the First World War began . The unit returned, he was deployed in Argonne . He was wounded at Frignicourt in September 1914. In February 1915 he was captured in the Beauséjour Fort . In German captivity, he first came to Mainz . After five attempts to escape, he was transferred to the Ingolstadt fortress , where he stayed until the end of the war. At times, Charles de Gaulle , Roland Garros and Mikhail Nikolajewitsch Tukhachevsky were among his fellow prisoners.

In 1919 he was promoted to captain and took part under General Maurice Janin in the French expedition against the Red Army in the Urals and Siberia . This was followed by a deployment in the Levant , where he was deployed in Syria against Arab uprisings. In 1922 he was deployed to Dakar , from where he was sent to Bilma in the Nigerian desert. There he learned the regional language and was able to mediate in regional disputes.

In 1926 he returned to Syria and was at the head of the 2nd Battalion of the 17th Senegalese Tirailleurs Regiment in the Hauran region in the fight against Druze . In 1928, two years after the end of the Rif War , he came to the still troubled Morocco . Another mission took him back to Bilma until he returned in 1935 and married the officer's widow Élise Merit . Later he adopts her daughter from her first marriage, Jacqueline Nonin .

Lelong was then used in the construction of the Maginot Line . This was followed by an assignment in Madagascar, where he took his wife with him. At the beginning of the Second World War in the so-called seated war , he led the 6th Colonial Infantry Regiment and was deployed on the Franco-German border in the Saar area. After the French troops withdrew from Germany, he and his unit lay on the Rohrbach plateau in Lorraine in the winter of 1939/40 . With the beginning of the western campaign in May 1940 he was responsible for the defense of the Sommauthe area . Ultimately, after long resistance, he had to withdraw to the south. He took command of the Salses military camps and then Rivesaltes . In November 1940 he was released from military service and wrote autobiographical texts.

Monument to Lelong in Ajaccio

With the support of Colonel Astier de la Villatte , he managed to reach French North Africa in 1942 . He was offered the leadership of the management school in Fort de-l'Eau near Algiers , but then went to Morocco , where he was responsible for the administration of the phosphate mines. However, it was a camouflage for his military tasks. He was a member of the Pillafort Group and was involved in preparing for the Allied landings in North Africa. In September 1942 he was in London. He was promoted to general by de Gaulle and sent to Tunisia and Libya as the successor to General Marie-Pierre Kœnig at the head of the first brigade of the 1st Free French Division . In this capacity he took part in the fighting in North Africa. From 1943 to 1945, despite his wish to be deployed in France, he was posted back to Madagascar, where he set up the civil administration for free France. Attempts to catch up with his family failed. His wife and daughter had participated in the Resistance since 1941 ; in 1944 they were arrested in Montgeron and interned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp .

After Lelong's return to France in 1945, he organized the exhibition Overseas France at War and in November 1945 directed the reopening of the military training center in Montegron. In March 1946 he was appointed officer of the Legion of Honor in Tübingen . In 1946 he went to Corsica to take over the military organization of the island. He died here on May 22, 1947 when his jeep crashed on a bridge over the Petrignani on the way to Bastia .

He was buried in the Ajaccio cemetery in the family chapel of Mayor Eugene Macchini . At the citadel of Ajaccio there is a monument dedicated to him.

Web links

• Le général Pierre Lelong on www.troupesdemarine-ancredor.org (French)