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Most of Tshombe's staff work was coordinated by French army veterans seasoned in Indo-China and Algeria. Ablest and best known is Major Rene Faulkes, a thin, ascetic ex-para officer who was left for dead in Indo-China and who became notorious in Algeria for torturing French sympathizers of the F.L.N. Faced with a treason rap in France, many of the French mercenaries are acutely sensitive about publicity; they have threatened to kill photographers and television cameramen who have attempted to take their pictures. "The French are brave, resolute, and fanatical," says a former U.N. official. "Most of them are Algerian extremists of the type who think De Gaulle is a Communist. They're tough babies."
But of the "tough babies," few are now left in Katanga. Most were removed by the U.N.; others quit when their pay and allowances were cut and their authority reduced. Never more than 700 in number, their strength has shrunk to approximately 100. Around this nucleus has formed a rag-tail army of European civilians—not so much mercenaries, says one U.S. correspondent, as minutemen. -
They range from Belgian teen-agers to businessmen who moonlight as soldiers; at least half a dozen Union Miniére du Haut-Katanga executives have reportedly doffed their dark business suits for camouflage outfits. One Elisabethville butcher sells meat in his shell-pocked shop all day, fights the U.N. most of the night.
This irregular home guard use automobiles for tanks and carry a bizarre assortment of weapons that ranges from revolvers to ancient muzzle-loaders and World War I rifles; ammunition is packed in plastic airlines bags. They patrol the streets in sports shirts and slacks, stuff sandwich rations into their hip pockets. These whites have small regard for Tshombe or Africans, but they are determined to fight for their property—and against what they regard as the blundering brutality of the U.N. troops.
Outgunned and outmanned. the remaining "mercenaries" were no match for the U.N. forces. Where once they were the bulwark of Tshombe's forces, they are now only a tattered remnant.