Jean De Lattre De Tassigny

Jean Joseph Marie Gabriel de Lattre de Tassigny (2 February 1889 – 11 January 1952) was a French ''général d'armée'' during World War II and the First Indochina War. He was posthumously elevated to the dignity of Marshal of France in 1952.

As an officer during World War I, he fought in various battles, including at Verdun, and was wounded five times, surviving the war with eight citations, the Legion of Honour, and the Military Cross. During the Interwar period, he took part in the Rif War in Morocco, where he was again wounded in action. He went on to serve in the Ministry of War and the staff of ''Conseil supérieur de la guerre'' under the vice president ''Général d'armée'' Maxime Weygand.

Early in World War II, from May to June 1940, he was the youngest French general. He led the 14th Infantry Division during the Battle of France in the battles of Rethel, Champagne-Ardenne, and Loire, until the Armistice of 22 June 1940. During the Vichy Regime he remained in the Armistice Army, first in regional command posts then as commander-in-chief of troops in Tunisia. After the Allied invasion of French North Africa in November 1942 the Germans invaded the unoccupied portion of France; de Lattre, Commander of the 16th Military Division at Montpellier, refused the orders not to fight the Germans and was the only active general to order his troops to oppose the invaders. He was arrested but escaped and defected to Charles de Gaulle's Free French Forces at the end of 1943. From 1943 to 1945 he was one of the senior leaders of the Liberation Army, commanding the forces that landed in the South of France on 15 August 1944, then fought up to the Rivers Rhine and Danube. He commanded large numbers of American troops when the US XXI Corps was assigned to his First Army during the battle of the Colmar Pocket. He was also the French representative at the signing of the German Instrument of Surrender in Berlin on 8 May 1945.

He became Commander-in-Chief of French Forces in Germany in 1945, then Inspector General and Chief of Staff of the French Army. In March 1947 he became the vice-president of the ''Conseil supérieur de la guerre''. From 1948 to 1950 he served as Commander-in-chief of the Western Union's ground forces. In 1951 he was the High Commissioner, commander-in-chief in Indochina and commander-in-chief of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps, winning several battles against the Việt Minh. His only son was killed there, and then illness forced him to return to Paris where he died of cancer in 1952. He was elevated to the dignity of Marshal of France posthumously in 1952 during his state funeral.

Early life

Jean Joseph Marie Gabriel de Lattre de Tassigny was born on 2 February 1889 in Mouilleron-en-Pareds, Vendée leader Georges Clemenceau. He was the son of Roger de Lattre de Tassigny and Anne-Marie Louise Henault, the daughter of the mayor of Mouilleron. Her grandfather had been his predecessor, assuming the office in 1817. In turn, Roger de Lattre succeeded his father-in-law as mayor in 1911, and still held the office forty years later. An ancestor had added the suffix "de Tassigny" to the family name in 1740, after the family property of Tassigny near Guise. He had an older sister, Anne-Marie, who later became the Comtesse de Marcé.

From 1898 to 1904 de Lattre attended the College of Saint-Joseph in Poitiers, where his father had gone. He then decided that he would join the Navy, and to prepare he went to the College de Vaugirard, where Henri de Gaulle was a teacher. He passed the written examinations for the Navy but missed the oral examination owing to illness. He then went to the at Lycée privé Sainte-Geneviève in Versailles to prepare for the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr, where he won a place in 1908. Before he entered, his father sent him to Brighton in England to improve his English. As was the custom in the French Army, he also served in the ranks for four months, in his case, with the at Provins, south east of Paris. He was a cadet at Saint-Cyr from 1909 to 1911 (''Mauritanie'' promotion). One instructor expressed the hope that de Lattre was not related to the one who had raised the white flag of Henri, Count of Chambord over Saint-Cyr in 1873. This was his uncle, and henceforth de Lattre refused to have anything to do with the instructor. He ultimately graduated 201st out of 210 in his class, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant on 1 October 1910. He then went on to the Saumur Cavalry School.

First World War

De Lattre was assigned to the , which was stationed at Toul and Pont-à-Mousson near the frontier with Germany and still wore red riding breeches and a helmet with a plume. He was promoted to lieutenant on 1 October 1912. He was still serving there when the First World War broke out in August 1914. On 11 August 1914, he was wounded for the first time when he was hit in the knee by a shell fragment during a reconnaissance mission. On 14 September, he was wounded a second time, in an engagement with four Bavarian Uhlans during which he killed two with his sword, but a third struck him in the chest with a lance, perforating his lung. His troop sergeant took him to a cellar in Pont-à-Mousson, where they hid from German patrols until one from the 5th Hussar Regiment reached them. He received the Legion of Honour on 20 December 1914.

In 1915, de Lattre responded to an appeal for cavalry officers to volunteer for service in the infantry, and he joined a Vendée regiment, the . He was promoted to captain on 18 December 1915, and was a company commander and then assistant battalion commander in its 3rd Battalion. As part of the 21st Infantry Division, the 93rd Infantry Regiment fought in the Battle of Verdun, where he was gassed in July 1916. The mustard gas affected his injured lung, necessitating time in hospital. He was back with the 21st Infantry Division in time to participate in the ill-fated Nivelle offensive in April 1917. In an attack on 5 May, his battalion suffered 300 casualties, but captured 500 prisoners. De Lattre received his eighth mention in despatches. He was hospitalised again that month, and did not return until December, when he became an intelligence officer on the 21st Infantry Division staff. The division was decimated in the Third Battle of the Aisne in May 1918, but it was reconstituted and fought in the Meuse-Argonne offensive later that year, during which de Lattre liaised with the staffs of three divisions of the United States Army.

Between the wars

In February 1919, de Lattre was assigned to the 18th Military District section at Bordeaux, where his duties included providing recreation for American troops prior to their repatriation. At the end of the year he joined the , which was stationed at Bayonne. From 1921 to 1926, he was in Morocco, where he participated in the campaigns of the Rif War. He became the head of the Third Bureau (the staff section responsible for operations) of the Meknes area, and directed operations in Upper Moulouya. These normally involved two or more columns, each with between four and eight battalions of infantry and attached artillery and transport, converging on a locality. The following year operations moved on to the rugged Taza Province. De Lattre was critical of the tactics used by Marshal Philippe Pétain, which he regarded as slow, expensive and materialistic. He was slashed in the right cheek by an assailant wielding a dagger on 13 March 1924, resulting in a prominent scar, and he was wounded in the knee by a bullet on 26 August 1925 during a reconnaissance mission. He was promoted to the rank of ''chef de bataillon'' (commandant) on 25 June 1926.

De Lattre returned to France, where he spent several weeks with his parents at Mouilleron-en-Pareds. At a luncheon given by a deputy for Vendée, he met , the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Paris deputy. They met again at a party on the Île d'Yeu, an island off the Vendée coast. They were married on 22 March 1927, at Saint-Pierre-de-Chaillot in Paris. They had one child, Bernard de Lattre de Tassigny, who was born on 11 February 1928. (Driving with him on his daily tour of inspection in January 1945, the seventeen-year-old John Julius Norwich recalled: "I did have a little trouble keeping his hand off my thigh in the car on the way home...but nothing serious.")

De Lattre commanded a battalion of the 4th Infantry Regiment, which was stationed at Auxerre, and prepared for the entrance examination for the École de guerre, coached by Captain Augustin Guillaume, an officer he had met while serving in Morocco. He managed to pass the examinations, and entered the École de guerre as the senior officer of his year. One of the staff exercises involved command of an invading force tasked with capturing Cherbourg from the sea. After graduation in 1928, he was assigned to the at Coulommiers as a battalion commander.

In 1931, de Lattre was assigned to the 4th Bureau of the Ministry of War, responsible for logistics. He was promoted to on 24 March 1932. On 20 June, he joined the staff of the Conseil supérieur de la guerre, serving under the vice president, Général d'armée Maxime Weygand. During this posting, he was tasked mainly with following foreign international policies, internal politics, and the challenges of complex military budget initiatives. He became embroiled in the Stavisky affair and had to appear before a parliamentary commission. With the retirement of Weygand, who had reached mandatory retirement age, de Lattre was retained on the general headquarters staff of Général Alphonse Joseph Georges. On 20 June 1935, he was promoted to colonel and appointed commander of the at Metz. Between 1937 and 1938, he studied at the Centre des hautes études militaires (CHEM), an advanced staff college for generals. In July 1938 he became Chief of Staff at the headquarters of the military governor of Strasbourg, Général d'armée . Hering retired in March 1939, and was succeeded by Général d'armée Victor Bourret. On 20 March, de Lattre was promoted to général de brigade.

World War II

Battle of France

De Lattre became the chief of staff at general headquarters of the Fifth Army on 2 September 1939. The following day France declared war on Germany again. In January 1940, he was given command of the 14th Infantry Division, which was holding the sector between Sarreguemines and Forbach. On 14 May, four days after the main German offensive began, the 14th Infantry Division was ordered to move to Rheims, where it came under the command of André Corap's Ninth Army.

De Lattre engaged the German forces around Rethel, where his division resisted for an entire month, repelling German assaults in front of the River Aisne. On 9 June, the German Twelfth Army launched a major assault on the 14th Infantry Division's positions. Although it managed to hold on, the divisions on its flanks could not, and de Lattre was forced to retreat to the Marne, and then the Loire. Part of his division was cut off at Chalons. Although it lost about two-thirds of its strength, the division retained its cohesion in the midst of chaos. When the Armistice of 22 June 1940 ended the fighting, the 14th Infantry Division was at Clermont-Ferrand.

Army of Vichy

Following the armistice de Lattre remained in the Army of Vichy France. He was made a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour on 12 July for his handling of the 14th Infantry Division in the Battle of France, an award Weygand, to whom he remained loyal, conferred on him in person. De Lattre was appointed to command the 13th Military Division, the military district at Puy-de-Dôme

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