Leading Free French forces in Africa, Leclerc was assigned the mission of forming France’s 2nd Armored Division in mid-1943. The unit was to be equipped by the United States and organized along the lines of an American division. The division first drew on Leclerc’s Free French forces operating in Chad and other parts of Africa. After training in Africa and England, it embarked for Utah Beach as an attachment to Patton’s Third Army in support of Allied operations in France following D-Day as part of Wade Haislip’s XV Corps.
Recruiting forces for the division, Leclerc drew on France’s Armée d’Afrique. Reading William Mortimer Moore’s biography of Leclerc, I didn’t see this coming (footnotes omitted):
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The new division would come under US command for training and operations, but, since the Army only used black troops in support of arms at this time, the RMT [Chad Regiment] would have to “whiten” itself — blanchir. All indigenous African troops who had marched and fought well all the way from Chad to Tunis would have to be transferred to other units.
For Jacques Massu and many other French officers, this news was shattering. A true soldier of La Coloniale, Massu had only known military life in Africa commanding méharistes, or colored soldiers of one tribe or another, and he had left his indigenous wife [I think she was his mistress], Moido, behind. “How could we leave our black tirailleurs [indigenous infantry] who had been with us through everything, Kufra, the Fezzan raids, the march to Tripoli, and the Tunisian campaign! Men so devoted, faithful and courageous.”
In fact, this grotesquely racial incident ended quite simply. Many of La Colonne Leclerc‘s black soldiers returned home, glad at least to have ended the Italian brand of colonialism…
