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On the morning of V-E day, 1945, ten thousand Moslems appeared in the streets of Abbas' own home town of Setif brandishing banners which read, DOWN WITH COLONIALISM, FREE MESSALI. There was a scuffle as gendarmes tried to wrest the banners away, and then, inevitably, a shot rang out. In sudden fury, bands of Moslems took off through Setif, savagely attacking every European they saw with clubs, knives and hatchets. And as word of the Setif "uprising" spread through the rugged mountains of Kabylia, bloodthirsty Berber bands, killing, pillaging and looting, set off on the warpath against the area's 200,000 Europeans.
The French response was a holocaust. Throughout the countryside Senegalese, spahis and Foreign Legionnaires were given carte blanche to kill and pillage the
Berbers. Three cruisers of the French navy shelled coastal villages and French air force bombers destroyed 44 native settlements inland. In vengeance for 100 European dead, the French killed thousands of Moslems. Officially, French authorities place Moslem casualties at 1,005, but a prominent French politician recently estimated that the actual figure was closer to 20,000.
The Hammer & the Fly. To Algeria's young nationalists the massacres of May 1945 meant one thing: the only way Algeria would ever get self-government was by armed revolt. Avidly they began to read military history, concentrating on guerrilla warfare—memoirs of French resistance officers, Tito's partisans, Irish rebels. Their first attempt at an underground, the Organisation Spéciale, soon had 3,000 recruits, ample stocks of hidden weapons, too ambitious and complex a hierarchy, and a card file of members. Result: when French police once got a lead into the O.S., it swiftly collapsed.
Doggedly the nationalists started all over again, this time on the principle that "if the French come against us with a hammer, we will become mosquitoes." Instead of a single large army, they concentrated on building small, highly trained cadres. As the nucleus of the F.L.N. (Front de Libération Nationale) took shape, Mohammed ben Bella, a former French army noncom with a brilliant World War II combat record, negotiated promises of aid from Egypt. Then at i a.m. of All Saints' Day, 1954, simultaneously across Algeria, 30 F.L.N. bands struck. The Algerian war had begun.
Collective Responsibility. Only a few months before, neighboring Tunisia had with little bloodshed won from France the promise of internal autonomy. Perhaps F.L.N. leaders did not foresee a long fight for themselves. But in French eyes, Algeria was not a mere colony like Tunisia; it was an inseparable part of France "The only negotiation," announced French Interior Minister Fran-gois Mitterrand, "is war." By middle 1956 there were 400,000 French troops tied down in Algeria. The following year, to seal off Algeria from Tunisia, French forces began construction of the grandiose Ligne Morice (named after former Defense Minister Andre Morice)—a 150-mile, electrified barbed-wire fence running south from the Mediterranean coast parallel to the Tunisian frontier.