The Empire Strikes Back
In response to the sudden mass insurrection, the First Army under General D’Esperey, 90,000 strong, began marching south towards the Tuareg capital of Bachar.
Once the soldiers arrived in Djelfa an immediate assault was launched on the Tuaregs with Lt. General Delestraint’s motorised infantry ordered to push ahead through the Saharan desert, which they had crossed twice before, in order to end the rebellion as quickly as possible.
Meanwhile, the Guinean rebels were advancing along the south coast, threatening Dakar and its vital shipyards. The local garrison faced the prospect of isolation and siege unless relief were to arrive quickly.
To make things worse, local landowners staged an insurrection and seized control of the French-occupied Spanish Mediterranean islands. The islands had been left ungarrisoned and so the ports and airfields were lost without a shot being fired. The native inhabitants of the islands were determined to remain Spanish and, until such a time as the Spanish Civil War ended, would sit things out. Whilst the islands had little strategic importance, their loss was yet another blow for the embattled French Empire.
However, by the end of June the anxious French public and government finally received some good news.
The Guinean push towards Dakar had left the Labe region exposed and French militia began pushing into the region on June the 24th without encountering any sustained resistance.
More importantly, however, just three days later on the 27th the motorised infantry of Delestraint, supported by the First Army, fought and won a two hour battle with several thousand mounted Tuareg rebels, slaughtering many and dispersing the rest. Pre-Weltkrieg rifles and lances and sabres proved to be no match against the MAS Modèle 37 bolt-action rifle, supported by truck mounted machine guns.
In the aftermath of the battle the order was given for all prisoners to be treated as traitors rather than POWs. It is estimated that anywhere between one and two thousand Tuareg rebels or suspected rebels were executed following the battle.
However, the victory now opened the way to Colomb Bechar and many of the most important Tuareg settlements. High Command decided that Delestraint’s fifteen thousand motorised infantry should be sufficient and to put down the remainder of the Tuareg rebels while the First Army returned to Algiers to await naval transportation to the south.
The siege and eventual relief of the beleaguered French Foreign Legion Saharan garrisons by Delestraints soldiers as he pushed his way into sub-Saharan Africa was covered in extensive detail by the Imperial French press and would later go on to become extensive fodder for the silver screen. The heroic tales of small, outnumbered garrisons of Foreign Legionnaires, cut off from supplies yet holding out against impossible odds with rapidly decreasing water and ammunition was been told again and again in films all the way from the forties right up to the present day. Indeed, the classic 1953 original version of “The Mummy” included in its opening scenes an attack on a Legionary garrison by hundreds of Tuareg horsemen, after which the sole survivor was left wandering in the desert before eventually making his way to Egypt where, a few years later, he would be involved with an ill fated archaeological team that awakened an ancient Egyptian curse leading to a vengeful mummy tracking down and killing the cursed members of the dig team before being defeated by the heroic former legionary.
Films like these show the lasting impact of the Revolt in French culture and they played a large part into turning what had been a horrifying but ultimately feeble uprising into a French victory of mythic proportions in the eyes of the Frepublic.
By the time Delestraint arrived in Colomb Bechar in early July, he and his men were already national heroes.
Meanwhile, in the south, the French colonial militia continued to encounter no resistance as they pushed further and further into the nominally rebel held region of Labe. However, the Guinean rebels were still a threat as an offensive by their troops succeeded in capturing Tambacounda only two days after Delestraint’s victory against the Tuaregs.
This news was overshadowed, however, by Delestraint increasing his already notable reputation for bayonet-point negotiations (a reputation started by his actions in the Liberian Campaign) through a meeting with Tuareg tribal elders where he bluntly informed them that, unless, they were to cut off supplies and support to the rebels immediately, he would see to it that every well and oasis in the Tuareg homelands would be poisoned and then buried by his troops.
With Delestraint having the force to back up his threat, the elders were forced to agree rather than see their livestock die of thirst and their tribes suffer from mass starvation and thirst.
Starving, and without any hope of supply, the majority of the Tuareg warbands were ultimately forced to surrender to the French troops now occupying the region or to throw down their arms and slink back to their old lives. The few rebel diehards who retreated deep into the desert to continue their war would prove an irritant to the authorities and a hazard to travellers for the next decade but they would be too few in number to ever again pose a credible threat to the security of the empire. By any measure, the imperial armies of France had won a crushing victory.
With the Guineans now the only remaining threat, Delestraint and his men paused only to reinforce the Saharan garrisons before pushing south towards the coast. With the First Army back in Algiers, it would be up to Delestraint’s mobile infantry and the colonial militia to take on the Guineans alone.