This was a very informative book on post WW2 France and their involvement in Algeria. I think a lot of lessons can be learned from this book both concerning international terrorism and specifically the acts of terrorism that have taken place in France in the recent years.

The book proves that torture and the dark arts work to solve an issue. But the cost on the society and the practitioners is high. I found it interesting that many of the torturers were tortured themselves in Indochina. They actually used and refined the methods used on them. And the fact that many Algerians fought side by side with them in Indochina, where the Viet Minh planted the seeds for rebellion was interesting.

France should have found a way to stay in Algeria and rise the tide of the native Algerians so that they could educate themselves and learn to run their own country. Fighting to preserve a colony and then cutting and running leaving the people you kept down for years just leaves fertile grounds for terrorism in the future. It seems to be the only playbook.

Ted Morgan's My Battle of Algiers provides a "worm's eye view" of the efforts made by the French Army to hang on to Algeria after they lost Indochina.

Morgan who had graduated from Yale and was working as a reporter in the US, was drafted by the French Army. In an effort to honor the memory of his father, who died during WWII, Morgan chose to serve rather than renounce his French citizenship and continue his career as a journalist in America.

The book describes Morgan's training in the French army, his commissioning as a 2nd LT and his first couple of job in Algeria, first as transportation officer, then as an infantry platoon leaders, and finally as an Intelligence officer out in the bled. As an intelligence officer Morgan essentially beat a prisoner to death in an effort to extract information and was so disgusted with himself and the process that he obtained a more serene billet as a journalist for a French Army psy-ops newspaper in Algiers.

From this position Morgan had a birds-eye view of the unfolding Battle Algiers which he writes about in a fair amount of detail. He is very good on the descriptions of the bombings and their aftermaths, as well as the mindsets of both the French military and the "pieds noirs" or the French civilian colonists.

As a personal memoir of a relatively low ranking participant the book is quite good, especially at evoking a sense of what it was like at that time and place. However, I do have some issues with the book. First, Morgan makes a fairly ham-fisted effort in the preface of the book to link France's war in Algeria with the US war in Iraq. Thsi material really didn't belong in this book.

Second, and more importantly, he also provides a kind of summary or overview of France's colonization of Algeria and the entire Algerian War, including a fair bit of detail on the activities and mindset of FLN. I understand his motivation, he's trying to give readers unfamiliar with that episode in history context for his experiences. Unfortunately, all of this material is presented utterly without sourcing or notes. Since this material is clearly outside the scope of his personal reminiscences the lack of sourcing material is a bit troubling.

With those two caveats I enjoyed the book and recommend it, perhaps alongside another more conventionally sourced history of France's involvement in Algeria such as Horne's Savage War of Peace.

Ted Morgan is the American name adopted by Sanche de Gramont, a French-American born in 1932 ("Ted Morgan" is an anagram of "de Gramont"). Shortly after graduating from Yale and beginning his career as a journalist, Morgan, then still a French citizen, was conscripted into the French Army in 1955. From September 1956 to December 1957 he served as a lieutenant in Algeria. For the last eleven months of his service he helped write and put out a newspaper in Algiers, "Réalités Algériennes", that in actuality was a French Army-sponsored organ of propaganda, addressed to the Arab community and intended to show France and the French Army (though not necessarily the colons) in a positive, benevolent light. Thus, Morgan had a front-row seat, at times far too close for comfort, of the "Battle of Algiers" that the French Army waged for control and pacification of Algiers during 1957. The French "won" that battle, though they of course ultimately lost the war to retain Algeria as part of France.

Morgan wrote about his military service in Algeria fifty years later. His book, MY BATTLE OF ALGIERS, is an excellent companion to Alistair Horne's classic book "A Savage War of Peace" or to Gillo Pontecorvo's classic film "The Battle of Algiers", although it also has considerable intrinsic merit standing alone. It is a mixture of personal memoir and eye-witness history, sprinkled with reflections on war, torture, and sundry other topics. It is very well written and quite engaging. Although Morgan reports on many cruel and abhorrent episodes, he also reports on the sunny aspects of life in a beautiful and exotic Mediterranean city as well as many incidents from the human comedy.

From the beginning, Morgan was opposed to the French military efforts in Algeria. When he was drafted, he did not try to avoid service primarily as a gesture to the memory of his father, who died in 1943 in a plane crash while a pilot in the Free French escadrille of the Royal Air Force. Once posted to Algeria, his principal objective was survival. That was difficult in his initial assignment to a company in relatively remote forested hills, where he served as transportation officer, intelligence officer, and platoon leader. As intelligence officer, Morgan killed an insurgent while interrogating him (something which, fifty years later, he still had not fully come to terms with). Unwilling to continue in that capacity, he took charge of a platoon. On patrol, his platoon was ambushed leading to a firefight that ended with two French and seven insurgents dead. Instead of accepting the citation that was proffered, Morgan requested and was granted two-days leave in Algiers. While there, serendipitously, he was tabbed by the French General Jacques Massu to serve the rest of his tour of duty in Algiers, out of uniform and living in a comfortable civilian apartment, as a propagandist and inadvertent witness to the Battle of Algiers.

With the passage of time, the Battle of Algiers seems to assume ever greater significance, historically, because it was triggered by the first "systematic use of urban terrorism" by insurgents, turning a major city into a battlefield in which all occupants, not just combatants, are at risk. The response of the French Army under General Massu was draconian. At bottom, it was grounded on the suspension of the civil justice system and wholesale arrests, detentions, interrogations, torture, and liquidation (over 3,000 Arabs who were arrested simply disappeared). Especially in the wake of the ongoing American invasion of Iraq and "war on terrorism", both the morality and efficacy of torture are hot topics. Morgan's input on the subject is that in the Battle of Algiers torture was effective, tactically and in the short term. But Morgan recognizes that in the long term, French acts of torture and other atrocities only served to further alienate and embitter the Arab population, with, of course, lethal consequences to many (some innocent) and incalculable psychological consequences for many of the French practitioners.

In the end, Morgan survived. "When I left in December 1957, I felt that I was fleeing a burning building. I had been scorched, but I was still alive." He also comments, retrospectively: "The Algerian experience did not enrich me; it diminished me." Paradoxically, however, reading about it is an enriching experience.

Thus, I strongly recommend MY BATTLE OF ALGIERS, despite one nagging reservation - namely, that it was written fifty years after the fact. Why did Morgan wait so long? (He wrote almost twenty other books in the interim.) His critique of the French war effort certainly would have had more impact if published in the 1970s, say, instead of in the 21st century. And then there is the question of the reliability of his account after all this time. The book includes numerous extended conversations, with lengthy verbatim quotations, that surely must be largely (entirely?) reconstructed. We can only hope that Morgan is faithful to the essential truth of those conversations as well as to the truth of the historical events he reports on, but, alas, we can never know for sure (as with so much else in life).

I REALLY ENJOYED THIS BOOK. ITS ALWAYS FASCINATED ME HOW QUICKLY THE TORTURED BECAME THE TORTURERS. YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE TO GO BACK TO THE RESISTANCE, A LOT OF THE LEGIONAIRES & PARAS HAD BEEN TORTURED BY THE VIETS. I LIKED THE WAY HE MENTIONED SCENES FROM THE FILM 'THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS.' VERY PERTINENT TODAY. TORTURE REALLY DOESN'T WORK & COMES WITH SERIOUS COSTS: YOUR OWN PEOPLE ARE DEMORALIZED & IT'S A GREAT RECRUITING TOOL.