"As a child I had many dreams," René Cogny once recalled. "I was in love with the history of great French soldiers, and I read all I could about them." Cogny's own quest for glory was long frustrated by a run of bad luck. Born in April 1904, son of a civil servant in a Norman fishing village, he swept through high school and military academy with high grades (except for discipline); he graduated, class of 1929, from the Fontainebleau artillery school. Despite a long series of routine assignments, Cogny lost none of his enthusiasm. "I love troops," he once cried, "and guns and maneuvers."
Just before World War II Cogny was promoted to battery commander. In the early skirmishes of the war he won the Croix de guerre. But the German armored divisions rumbled smoothly through Belgium and swerved northeastward behind the Maginot Line. Among the 780,000 French prisoners was Captain René Cogny.
Anthem in a Camp. For eleven months Cogny planned escape so that he could get back to the fighting. He studied German ; he kept in trim by hiking every day around his P.W. camp; he secretly tailored civilian clothes from his blankets. Then one dark night, pushing their homemade clothes before them, Cogny and three companions elbow-crawled naked through a drainpipe that led out beneath the camp walls—getting stuck for an agonized 15 minutes on the way. At the drainpipe outlet, Cogny heard alarm sirens and the snuffling of a huge German police dog. "I lay there without breathing," he said, "and for some reason the dog trotted off without barking." Cogny scrambled across the barbed wire, across Bavaria and back to Vichy France. But Vichy surrendered to the Germans and Italians in November 1942, and Cogny lost his second army command.
Cogny next joined the underground: he led raids against Italian outposts and spied for the Free French. But Cogny was trapped by a Gestapo decoy less than a year later, and he was out of the war for good. The Gestapo beat him "rudely," as he put it, on seven different occasions ("I succeeded in not talking"); they condemned him to death and finally shipped him off to Buchenwald. While many of his brother-officers were making their names in North Africa, Italy and the Vosges, Cogny was slaving in German road gangs, his head shaven, his weight down from 200 to 135, his striped camp uniform in tatters. Cogny had to take his glory in bitter fragments: he once managed to slip water into some German V-2 rocket fuel; and on Bastille Day, 1944, he led his skeletal fellow inmates in a full-throated Marseillaise.
Vigor in Command. Cogny was liberated in April 1945, and at last, in 1946, he got his chance. Marshal de Lattre de Tassigny noticed Cogny's work on the French Army Reorganization Commission and called him over: "You! You there! I don't know you, but I want you to work for me. I like the way you think." Cogny rapidly became full colonel, regimental commander, executive secretary to the Defense Minister. De Lattre took Cogny to Indo-China, to London and Washington (where Cogny learned to speak English well). Cogny became De Lattre's disciple. After De Lattre died in January 1952,
France named Cogny to command Indo-China's northern front with its crucial Red River Delta. Cogny, at 48, was a general.