Philippe de Hauteclocque known as Leclerc
Birth:November 22, 1902
Belloy-Saint-Leonard, France
Died:November 28, 1947 (aged 45)
Colomb-Béchar, Algeria
Nationality:France
Allegiance:French Army - FFL
Military rank:Army General (1946)
Service:1924 - 1947
Conflicts:Second World War Indochina War
Command:2nd Armored Division
Feats of arms:Oath of Kufra, Battle of Normandy, Liberation of Paris Liberation of Strasbourg
Distinctions:Marshal of France, Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, Companion of the Liberation, Croix de guerre 1939-1945, Croix de Guerre des TOE
Philippe François Marie, Count of Hauteclocque, Marshal of France, also known by his resistant name Jacques-Philippe Leclerc (November 22, 1902 Belloy-Saint-Léonard, France - November 28, 1947 near Colomb-Béchar in Algeria).
Son of Adrien, Count of Hauteclocque (1864-1945) and Marie-Thérèse van der Cruisse de Waziers (1870-1956), he grew up in a Picardy nobility family
. He spends most of his family holidays in the fishing village of Audresselles. In 1922, he entered the Special Military School of Saint-Cyr (class of Metz and Strasbourg, from which he left two years later as a major of the cavalry. He then entered the School of Application of the cavalry of Saumur, from which he left in 1925, again, being a major.
He married the same year with Marie-Thérèse de Gargan (married on August 10, 1925) with whom he had six children (four boys and two girls).
Since 1918 (and until 1930), the Saar has been under French occupation as a result of the Treaty of Versailles (1919) following the First World War. The young Philippe de Hauteclocque was first assigned to the 5th Regiment of Cuirassiers in Trier; after spending a year there, he obtained an assignment to the 8th Algerian Spahis in Morocco. He participated in the pacification of the territory during the Rif War, during which he distinguished himself. In particular, he had several horses killed under him during clashes with Berber tribes and was injured in particular (heel or ankle) when he fell from his mount, which earned him the use of a cane for the rest of his life. In 1929, he was given command of the 38th GUM.
He became an instructor at the School of Saint-Cyr in 1931. During a second stay in Morocco, he was promoted to captain in 1934, obtained the Legion of Honor, as well as the rank of captain on an exceptional basis. In 1938, he passed the entrance examination for the École de Guerre (now the Joint Defense College), from which he graduated major in 1939.
1939-1940:the French campaign
In May 1940, Philippe de Hautecloque was captain of staff in the 4th Infantry Division, stationed on the Belgian front. During the German attack, he was taken prisoner, but managed to escape and reach the Allied lines, where he resumed the fight.
On June 15, he participated in a counter-offensive in the plain of Champagne during which he was wounded in the head. German armor opened fire on the house he was in and part of the ceiling collapsed on top of him. The injury does not seem to affect him so much that he continues the fight, until he is taken prisoner again.
1940-1942:the struggle continues in Africa
On June 17, 1940, he managed to escape and decided to continue the fight. He crossed France by bicycle, despite the German occupation, joined his wife and 6 children on the roads of exodus near Libourne in Gironde. After informing them of his will to fight, he crossed the Pyrenees near Perpignan. He was briefly arrested in Spain, then arrived in Portugal from where he reached London by boat.
He presented himself to General de Gaulle on July 25. In order to avoid reprisals being directed against his family, he took the pseudonym Leclerc, a common name in his native region. General de Gaulle, recognizing in him an exceptional leader, promoted him from captain to squadron leader from their first meeting and gave him the mission of rallying French Equatorial Africa to Free France. His commitment to Free France made him abandon Action Française.
On August 6, 1940, he left England for Cameroon with René Pleven, André Parant and Claude Hettier de Boislambert. Twenty days later, he landed at night in a canoe in Douala with 22 men. He meets Commander Louis Dio, who arrives from Fort-Lamy at the head of a detachment of the regiment of Senegalese skirmishers from Chad. He managed to convince the authorities loyal to Vichy to step aside and rallied Cameroon, Chad and the Congo to the cause of Free France under the aegis of Félix Éboué and Larminat.
Leclerc was appointed Commissioner General of Cameroon and on August 28, the entire AEF, with the exception of Gabon, rallied to General de Gaulle. The latter, during a visit to Douala on October 8, gave his agreement to Leclerc to try to rally the country to his cause. With the help of the Free French Forces, withdrawn after the failure of the Dakar expedition (September 23-25), Leclerc landed near Libreville on November 8 and on November 10, Gabon joined Free France. /P>
Leclerc was then officially confirmed to the rank of colonel by General de Gaulle, a rank he had given himself "as if by magic" according to De Gaulle's expression when he arrived in Cameroon so as not to be in hierarchical inferiority to to the lieutenant-colonel stationed in Douala, and is designated as military commander of Chad.
Free France has for the first time a significant territorial and strategic base.
From these bases, his column, which notably includes Captain Massu, carries out raids of several thousand kilometers in the direction of the Italian posts. Having taken the oasis of Koufra (February 28, 1941) with 1 cannon and only 300 men, he took an oath with his soldiers not to lay down their arms before seeing the French flag flying over Strasbourg cathedral.
He continued the fighting in Libya and took part in the capture of Tunis by the Allies with Force L (L for Leclerc) at the very beginning of 1943.
1943-1945:Victory on the march
The army of Leclerc, who was named general, is equipped with American equipment and takes advantage of a few months of respite to expand its ranks, incorporating in particular former soldiers of the Army of Africa, Vichy.
Sent to Normandy, its 2nd Armored Division (better known as the 2nd DB) landed on August 1, 1944. Part of General Patton's 3rd Army, Leclerc's division, or "Croix de Lorraine division", sometimes even became the iron to launch American attacks. His division liberated Alençon on August 12, distinguished itself in the Écouves forest, but on August 13 came up against Argentan, which it could not invest, in fact hampering American movements. Leclerc then asks for permission to leave the theater of operations in Normandy, to "Not lose a single man here and liberate the capital of France".
With the agreement that he wrested from his superiors, the 2nd Armored Division rushed to Paris, so that on August 25, 1944, General Leclerc received the surrender of General von Choltitz, German military governor of Paris, at the Gare Montparnasse . The capital was liberated in two days, almost without a fight, in a mixture of jubilation and gunfire. Generals de Gaulle and Leclerc walk down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées side by side while sporadic skirmishes still break out.
Before the end of 1944, on November 23, his troops liberated Strasbourg, an opportunity to take up arms to remind us that the oath of Kufra had been kept. Ultimate feats of arms, it is the French soldiers of Leclerc who seize the Kehlsteinhaus, the eagle's nest of Adolf Hitler in Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, just a few days before the armistice of May 8, 1945.
On June 21, he solemnly bid farewell to his division, which he left to join the French Expeditionary Corps in the Far East in French Indochina, occupied by Japan since 1940.
On September 2, 1945, it was Leclerc who signed, in the name of France, the act of capitulation of Japan aboard the battleship USS Missouri, in the harbor of Tokyo.
The terrible years
He also participated in the reconquest of Indochina, occupied by Japan - with the agreement of the Vichy authorities until the coup of March 9, 1945. Arrived in October 1945, after the capitulation of Japan and the proclamation of independence by Ho Chi Minh on September 2, he managed to restore French sovereignty throughout Cochinchina and South Annam on January 29, 1946, while being lucid about the need for a political solution. In Tonkin, Ho Chi Minh welcomed Leclerc on March 26, 1946 in Hanoi, shaking his hand. Indeed, he was in favor of a political resolution of the crisis that shook the French colony.
In 1946, Leclerc was appointed Inspector General in North Africa.
A tragic death and the tribute of a nation[edit]
On November 28, 1947, during an inspection tour of North Africa, his plane, a B-25 Mitchell, was caught in a sandstorm. It is assumed that the pilot descended to low altitude to find geographical landmarks, but the plane struck the railway, not far from Colomb-Béchar. The 12 occupants of the aircraft were killed instantly.
The news of this death is a shock for a France which is struggling to recover from a terrible war and which saw in this man the liberator of Paris and Strasbourg, the one who had washed away the affront of the defeat of 1940. After a tribute national at Notre-Dame, the 2nd Armored Division escorts its leader to the Arc de Triomphe, where a crowd of French people come to bow before the army general's coffin. He is buried in the crypt of the Invalides.
He was elevated to the dignity of Marshal of France, posthumously, by decree of August 23, 1952.
Controversy over the circumstances of death
Konrad Killian, probably assassinated on August 30, 1950 in circumstances that remained mysterious, was the first to launch the idea:England would have had Leclerc assassinated because of the secret oil war in Fezzan, in the western part of Libya. . However, there is no evidence to support this thesis.
On the contrary, Jean-Christophe Notin demonstrates that the plane, modified to accommodate passengers and unbalanced by the addition of a berth at the rear, would have simply stalled when it was flying at low altitude, as it had tend to do so as a result of these changes.
Anecdotes
* To cross the enemy lines of the Lille pocket in May 1940, he declares to the German officer who captured him that he is reformed, unfit for military service, showing him a medical prescription dating from Morocco prescribing him to quinine three times a day. Thanks to this subterfuge, he was let go and he was able to join the French lines on the Crozat canal.
* To leave for England, he will cross France at war thanks to all kinds of means of transport. His journey, which began on June 17 in Avallon, will pass through Paris, Le Mans, Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, Bayonne where, faced with the impossibility of taking a boat on July 5, he will cross the Pyrenees to Perpignan to pass by Spain then Portugal and finally arriving in London on July 25.
* In Cameroon in August 1940, to rally this territory to Free France, he considers his rank of commander insufficient in the face of the Governor General and the Lieutenant-Colonel commanding the troops in Douala. He tears off the three stripes from his left sleeve to sew two on the right one, here he is, a colonel who was just a simple captain a month ago. He will explain himself to General De Gaulle by the fact that "this operation of a special nature, was based on persuasion and authority and that he had to confer this rank on a temporary basis to carry it out". On August 28, Colonel Brevet Leclerc was appointed Commissioner General of Cameroon by General De Gaulle. He got into the habit of hiding his left arm behind his back so that it would not be noticed that the number of stripes on it did not correspond to the claimed rank.
* Throughout the war, he used all kinds of subterfuge to force victory. He embodied the Free French spirit of those who had, behind General De Gaulle, refused the defeat of 1940. At that time, disobeying the orders of Marshal Pétain, the winner of Verdun, was difficult for officers trained in the discipline of Saint-Cyr.
Memory of Leclerc
* His name is today one of the first surnames attributed to public roads and monuments in France.
* The Leclerc tank, assault tank of the French army was named after the Marshal.
* The "Marshal Leclerc Foundation", created and directed for 32 years by Lieutenant-Colonel Philippe Peschaud (1915-2006), a close friend of Leclerc, has never ceased to revive, in the collective memory of the French, the memory of this key player in French history.
* Nowadays, the direct descendants, and only the direct descendants, of the Marshal are officially named Leclerc de Hauteclocque.
Service Status
* September 9, 1924:Appointed second lieutenant,
* Metz-Strasbourg de Saint-Cyr promotion (5th of promotion out of 344 students), Assigned to the 24th Dragoons Regiment
* October 26, 1926:Promoted to lieutenant
* 8-10-1926:assigned to the 8th Algerian Spahis Regiment
* 19-9-1928:Instructor at the school of Moroccan cadets
* 15-7-1930:assigned to the 1st African Chasseurs Regiment
* 24-5-1931:Cavalry instructor at the Special Military School
* December 25, 1934:Promoted to captain
* 11-6-1938:Patented observer in plane n°3993
* 1-11-1938:Student at the Superior War School
* 1939:Staff Certificate (60th class)
* 13-2-1940:Head of the 3rd office in the battleship division of the general staff
* 1-6-1940:Taken prisoner but released.
* 15-6-1940:Wounded, taken prisoner
* 17-6-1940:Escaped
* 25-7-1940:Joined Free France in London
* July 31, 1940:Promoted to major
* 27-8-1940:Rally Cameroon to Free France
* November 25, 1940:Self-promoted colonel, without ever having been lieutenant-colonel, will then be confirmed in his rank by General de Gaulle
* 25-11-1940:Commander of the Regiment of Senegalese Riflemen in Chad, and directs operations Mourzouck and Koufra
* August 10, 1941:Appointed brigadier general on a provisional basis
* April 14, 1942:Named brigadier general on a permanent basis
* May 25, 1943:Promoted to Major General
* 6-1943:commander of the 2nd D.F.L.
* 1-9-1943:Commander of the 2nd D.B
* 20-2-1945:Commander of the 3rd C.A.
* May 25, 1945:Raised to the rank and appellation of Lieutenant General
* 18-8-1945:Commander of the Far East Expeditionary Force in Saigon, General Delegate of the High Commissioner of France in Indochina
* 2-9-1945:signatory, on behalf of France, of the armistice with the Japanese in Tōkyō
* 19-11-1945:authorized to add the surname LECLERC to his birth name
* 18-3-1946:Enters Hanoi
* July 14, 1946:Raised to the rank and designation of army general
* 25-12-1946:Chargé de mission by the president of government in Indochina
* 12-4-1947:Appointed Inspector of the Land, Maritime and Air Forces of North Africa
* 1-7-1947:Appointed member of the Superior Council of National Defense
* 28-11-1947:Death in service, in Colomb-Béchar, during an inspection mission (plane crash)
* August 23, 1952:Raised to the dignity of Marshal of France posthumously
Main decorations
* Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor
* Companion of the Liberation - decree of March 6, 1941
* Military Medal
* Croix de guerre 1939-1945 (8 citations at the order of the army)
* TOE War Cross (1 citation at the order of the army)
* Resistance medal with rosette
* Colonial Medal with clasps
* Escapees Medal
* Wounded Medal
* Distinguished Service Order (UK)
* Silver Star (USA)
* Many other international distinctions