Henri Giraud

Henri Honoré Giraud was a French Army general best known for his escape from German captivity in 1942 and subsequently as one of the leaders of the French Resistance and a rival of Charles de Gaulle. He was outmanoeuvred by de Gaulle and sidelined in April 1944, leading to his resignation.
Giraud also escaped from German captivity during the First World War, having been wounded and captured during the Battle of St. Quentin in 1914. He further distinguished himself at the Battle of La Malmaison in 1917, where he commanded the battalion that captured the Fort de Malmaison, and during the Rif War in 1925.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Giraud was placed in command of the Seventh Army and tasked with executing the ill-fated Breda manoeuvre during the Battle of France in May 1940. He assumed command of the routed Ninth Army in the midst of the battle and was shortly after captured by the Germans.
After his escape to Vichy France in April 1942, Giraud went into hiding and established contact with the Allies. Giraud was selected by the Roosevelt administration as the U.S.-backed candidate for the French leadership and assumed command of French troops in North Africa in November after the Allied landings. Following the assassination of François Darlan in December, Giraud became High Commissioner for French North and West Africa. His tenure was marked by a slow transition from Vichy authoritarianism to democratisation.
In January 1943, he took part in the Casablanca Conference along with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Charles de Gaulle. In June, Giraud and de Gaulle established the French Committee of National Liberation as a unified French government of which they became co-presidents. Following his sidelining and resignation, Giraud was the victim of an assassination attempt in August 1944.
After the war, Giraud was elected to the 1946 Constituent Assembly that was to establish the French Fourth Republic. He died in Dijon in 1949.

Early life and education

Henri Honoré Giraud was born in Paris on 18 January 1879 to Louis and Marie Giraud. His father was a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War, having enlisted in the National Guard at the age of 17 during the Siege of Paris. Giraud studied classics at Collège Stanislas, Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and Lycée Bossuet.

Early military career

Giraud graduated from Saint-Cyr in 1900 as a Sub-lieutenant and, at his request, was assigned to the 4th Zouaves Regiment in Tunisia. He was promoted to lieutenant in 1902, though despite several recommendations from his direct superiors it would be ten years before he was promoted to the next rank of capitaine. According to Giraud's grandson, his career advancement was possibly hindered by the Affair of the Cards scandal that saw conservative Catholic officers passed up for promotions. In 1907, he was admitted to the War College and transferred to the 27th Infantry Regiment in December.
Giraud was appointed to the staff of the 9th Army Corps in 1909 and completed his staff internship in Tours in 1911, after which he was selected by General Louis Fernand Montaudon in October as his aide-de-camp. In June 1913, Giraud returned to the 4th Zouaves in Tunisia, in command of the 14th company. At the outbreak of the First World War Giraud was on leave in France and returned to his regiment a few days later, in the midst of the mobilisation.

First World War

Giraud arrived in France with the 4th Zouaves in August 1914 and commanded his company of 250 men in the Battle of Charleroi. Giraud was gravely wounded while leading a bayonet charge during the Battle of St. Quentin on 30 August. Presumed dead, he was discovered by German troops and taken prisoner. While recovering from his lung injury in a military hospital in Origny-Sainte-Benoite, Giraud plotted his escape with fellow wounded prisoner-of-war Captain Charles Schmitt.
On 10 October, a French nurse warned Giraud and Schmitt that the Germans were considering evacuating them to Germany and they resolved to escape as soon as possible. The nurse brought them items of clothing which they were able to conceal behind their hospital beds, provided them with a detailed map of the hospital, and had a key made for an unguarded door that led to the Oise Lateral Canal. With their wounds yet to heal, Giraud and Schmitt made their escape on the night of 30 October. They then travelled to German-occupied Saint-Quentin where they remained for two months, Giraud working as a stable boy and Schmitt as a butcher's assistant. In early February 1915, Giraud made the journey to Walcourt in occupied-Belgium from where he continued onto Brussels as an assistant to a travelling show. Once there Giraud encountered Edith Cavell's escape network, which helped him to cross into the neutral Netherlands. He reached Boulogne via Folkestone on 10 February and carried onto Paris, having reunited with Schmitt by chance at the Vlissingen docks.
On 22 February, Giraud was assigned to the staff of the Fifth Army at the request of General Franchet d'Espèrey. In May 1917, he was promoted to the rank of Commandant and assumed command of the 3rd Battalion of the 4th Zouaves in July. As part of the 38th Infantry Division, Giraud's battalion captured the Fort de Malmaison during the Battle of La Malmaison on 23 October and took 600 prisoners. In late 1917, he was appointed chief of staff of the Moroccan Division under General in the Woëvre sector. Giraud collaborated on counteroffensive operations between the spring and autumn of 1918 and ended the war with five citations.

Interwar period

Giraud was summoned by General d'Espèrey to head the Allied operations bureau and served as an expert on Turkish issues at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Due to a sequela from his lung injury, Giraud spent two years in a status of temporary inactivity. In 1922, he assumed the position of chief of staff of the military-administrative Subdivision of Marrakesh at the request of Marshal Hubert Lyautey. During the Rif War in the summer of 1925, and in command of the 14th Algerian Tirailleurs Regiment, Colonel Giraud prevented Riffian forces from closing the strategically important Taza corridor. He was wounded by a bullet to the thigh and awarded commandeur of the Legion of Honour in his Paris hospital bed. Giraud returned to Morocco and escorted Riffian leader Abd el-Krim into exile in 1926.
In October 1927 Giraud was appointed professor of infantry tactics at the ESG, where he taught for three years. In February 1930, Giraud was appointed to a military command in the Morocco-Algeria border region and promoted to brigadier general in December. Over four years, he pacified the tribes of the High Atlas from his headquarters in Boudenib. Giraud assumed command of the Oran Division in 1934 and then the 6th Military Region in April 1936 as military governor of Metz. From 1937, Colonel Charles de Gaulle was under his command in charge of a tank regiment. According to Michèle Cointet Giraud was interested in the use of tanks but opposed de Gaulle's theories, favouring a more conventional approach whereby tanks would move alongside infantry. In June 1939, Giraud became a member of the Conseil supérieur de la guerre.

Second World War

In September 1939, Giraud was placed in command of the Seventh Army that was initially held in reserve in the Reims region and which contained some of the most mobile divisions in the French Army. In November, General Maurice Gamelin moved the Seventh Army to the far-north, headquartered in Saint-Omer, and tasked Giraud with preparing an intervention in the Netherlands. In March 1940, Gamelin finalised the Breda variant of the Dyle Plan whereby Giraud's Seventh Army was to rapidly advance through Belgium and link up with the Dutch Army. Giraud expressed strong reservations about the Breda manoeuvre, alongside generals Alphonse Joseph Georges and Gaston Billotte, which depleted the central reserve that was intended to cope with unexpected contingencies. Frustrated by the Phoney War, Giraud believed that the French Army should enter Belgium without the Belgians' prior agreement.

Battle of France

With the commencement of the German offensive on 10 May, Giraud's Seventh Army executed its planned advance, with the first units reaching Breda on 11 May. However, German paratroopers captured the Moerdijk causeway, splitting Holland in two, and Dutch forces withdrew northwards to Amsterdam and Rotterdam. This made it impossible for the Seventh Army to link up with Dutch forces, nullifying the purpose of the Breda manoeuvre, and Giraud was ordered in the afternoon of 12 May to abandon the plan and to redeploy his forces towards Antwerp.
On 15 May, Gamelin ordered General André Corap to be replaced in command of the Ninth Army with Giraud, who assumed command that afternoon. By this point, the Ninth Army was in a catastrophic state of total disintegration, though this was partly concealed by the chaotic state of communications. Giraud established his command post close to his frontline troops and, having been ordered on 18 May to fall behind Le Catelet, he advanced in a reconnaissance armoured car. He was surrounded by the Germans and taken prisoner at Wassigny on 19 May, with his final message to general headquarters reading: "Surrounded by a hundred enemy tanks, I destroy them in detail."

Captivity and escape

Giraud was taken to Königstein Fortress in eastern Germany on 25 May, where he was the most important of the approximately one hundred French and foreign generals and admirals held there. In July, he sent Marshal Philippe Pétain a letter on the causes of the defeat in which he denounced, among other things, the declining birth rate, paid holidays, parliamentarianism, trade unions, the state of public education, and a dilution of the notion of authority. The commandant of the fortress allowed the prisoners to go on supervised tourist excursions, though prisoners signed a register upon leaving and Giraud claimed postwar that he felt bound by honour not to use these daytime walks to escape.
A code based on handwriting anomalies was smuggled out of the fortress in October in the tunic of General Paul-Wilhelm Boell, who had been released for health reasons, and given to Giraud's daughter shortly before he died. Alongside the code was a letter from Giraud dated to September and addressed to his children that was subsequently circulated widely in France: