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Late Switch. Five months before the outbreak of World War II. Raoul Salan married Lucienne Bougnin, 28, daughter of a Vichy hotel owner. A cool, tenacious blonde who is called Babiche (little doe) because of her large, soft eyes. Lucienne has never wavered in her loyalty to her husband, is thought to have shaped his ideas and been a spur to his ambition.
Raoul Salan fought with "remarkable courage" (according to the official citation) against the Nazis in the six-week war of 1940. The armistice with the Germans confronted him with the first of many crises of conscience: Should he support the government of Vichy's Marshal Pétain or switch to De Gaulle and the Allies? Stationed in Dakar, Salan waited four years before joining De Gaulle.
After the Normandy invasion, he commanded a brigade under General de Lattre de Tassigny on the Alsace front. Veterans of that winter campaign remember Salan as a competent and "correct" soldier: when touring outposts, Salan would remove his glove even in zero weather before shaking hands with a soldier.
After the war, as deputy to De Lattre, Salan went back to his old colonial paradise of Indo-China, which was now threatened by nationalist rebels under Communist Ho Chi Minh. The struggle against the Communists proved a nightmare that dragged on for years and pitted swift guerrillas against a ponderous French army fighting a classic war with tanks, planes and heavy artillery. It was like trying to swat mosquitoes with a sledge hammer.
When De Lattre died, in 1952, Salan succeeded him. He did no better and no worse than those before and after him. In 1954, covered with praise and new medals, Salan returned to Paris, and another ill-starred general took over the hopeless Indo-China war.
Paladins of the West. Salan thought deeply about the causes of the French defeat. Some veterans, like Colonel Jean Gardes (now chief of ordnance for the S.A.O.), held seminars to devise answers to Red tactics. Infused with his own brand of religious mysticism, Gardes would pose such questions as "Can one indulge in torture without sin?" His conclusion: "Yes, provided you are torturing a Communist or a Communist suspect."
Other officers blamed the defeat on political factions in France and on the slack ness of civil life. While they fought and died for the cause of antiCommunism, they felt they were being betrayed or ridiculed by Parisian intellectuals. They decided that all revolutions in Asia and Africa are essentially Communist, and that a hidden conspiracy lurks inside Western society which seeks to destroy it. Members of this conspiracy were by turns identified as liberals, Jews, left-wing Catholics, the newspapers, and (later) De Gaulle.
Most of all, the officers were sick of fighting rearguard actions that always ended in defeat. These wars, wrote one veteran of his fellow officers, "have cut them off from France, from their families, from their friends. They have the sense of having been made use of,