Rif War

Pride, provocation by French actions, and overconfidence combined to cause Krim to hurl a four thousand-man mehalla at the French on April 13, 1925. His objective was most likely to prevent the French from consolidating their positions in the Ouerrha Valley, inflict a bloody nose on them, and force Paris to negotiate. At first it looked as if Krim’s strategy might succeed — although the attack did not catch the French by surprise, its ferocity threw them back on their heels. The French resident general, General Louis Hubert Lyautey, France’s veteran colonial administrator who preached the virtues of ‘indirect rule,’ using intrigue to control native politics rather than brute force, believed that he had the tribes in the French zone well in hand. Like all French in Morocco, he attributed Krim’s military success to Spanish incompetence rather than to the combat qualities of the Riffians. He felt the sixty-four thousand troops France had in Morocco, backed by modern artillery and air power, were more than sufficient to handle the scrapings of the Rif.

However, Spain’s defensive posture in Morocco allowed Krim to shift most of his forces toward the south. Furthermore, four years of fighting the Spanish had allowed the Riffians to perfect the art of blockhouse busting. By June, forty-four of sixty-six French posts had been overrun. Like their Spanish counterparts, the French came to understand that isolated posts were difficult to relieve once a siege had set in, because the Riffians etched siege trenches out of the unforgiving ground and laid ambushes along all obvious routes of approach. Relief parties had to march in tight formations over roadless hills, in the searing heat of the Moroccan summer with temperatures reaching 130 degrees, through gantlets of snipers.

The garrison at Aulai held out for twenty-two days under sustained mortar fire until it could be rescued, even though the Riffians overran some of the outlying fortifications and butchered their garrisons. The two posts that crowned a horseshoe-shaped hill called Biban changed hands several times before they could be secured by a grenade attack in September that cost the French Foreign Legion 103 dead and 300 wounded. At Beni Derkul, a few miles from Biban, Lieutenant Pol Lapeyre ignited his magazine and perished with his few surviving Senegalese after a two-month siege pushed him beyond the brink of endurance. Many posts were abandoned without a fight, while those that held out suffered great deprivation despite efforts to resupply them by air.

‘This Riff campaign of May 1925 in the Wergha Valley was exceptionally hard,’ wrote the future general André Beaufre, who served with Algerian tirailleurs. ‘Newcomers like myself did not realize this, but Moroccan veterans shook their heads: we were up against trained fighters who manoeuvred skillfully.’ The elusive Moroccans unsportingly refused to defend ground, preferring to inflict casualties and vanish.

‘The column halted at the foot of a hill from which the partisans (goums) had just withdrawn,’ Beaufre remembered of one attack. ‘The advance guard had made contact. The hills ahead of us appeared deserted but soon the air was filled with shrill cries which echoed from rock to rock, and sporadic firing broke out. In front, a battalion of the Legion in their white képis deployed as regularly as though they were on an exercise. The artillery (four 65 mm. mountain guns) opened up. We had to attack through the legionnaires. We clambered over rocks and through olive trees, bullets whistling past us; then there was nothing except a few dead Riffs lying in their holes. We climbed on, out of breath. Then a deserted village — a poor village smelling of rancid oil, the sole sign of life a flurry of scrawny chickens destined for the pot that night. We reached the crest, regrouped and called the roll: a handful of wounded, one man killed.’

Night brought no respite. Constant sniping kept the campsite awake with cries of ‘aux armes!’ Riffians worked in pairs against sentinels, one drawing his attention while the second murdered him. After some French troops woke up to discover that their rifles had been stolen from the middle of their bivouac, soldiers began sleeping with their rifles strapped to their wrists. This only caused the stealthy Riffians, stripped and oiled, to slit French throats before appropriating their weapons, a practice that put severe psychological strain on the invaders.

Not surprisingly, the morning found the soldiers ‘exhausted, pulling our swollen feet back into our boots, we drank scalding coffee, buckled our equipment, loaded the animals, folded the tents, stowed the kit and, as the day broke, set off on another day just like the last,’ Beaufre remembered.

Artillery failed to find productive targets among Riffians dispersed in gullies and behind boulders. Air power, upon which the French had placed great faith, also gave disappointing results, especially after the rebels overran the forward air base at Ain Mediouna. Planes could not reprovision the isolated posts. Nor was their bombing effective, because it was seldom coordinated with objectives on the ground. So while the French suffered no debilitating Anuals nor Chechaouens, Krim’s offensive was humiliating nonetheless — he drove to within twenty miles of Fez, in the process obliging chiefs loyal to the French to defect, flee, or face death. This advance netted the Riffians 51 cannons, 16,000 shells, 35 mortars with 10,000 rounds, 200 machine guns, 5,000 rifles, 60,000 grenades, and about 2,000 prisoners, mostly Moroccan ‘irregulars,’ while inflicting numerous casualties on the French.

Franco-Spanish peace feelers in the summer of 1925 offered the Rif a degree of autonomy that some of Krim’s advisers urged him to seize. Instead, Krim, backed by his brother, insisted upon full recognition of the Rif Republic. In retrospect this seems a foolish stipulation brought on by his distrust of the imperialists and his conviction that continued resistance would wring more concessions from the colonial powers.

However, perhaps Krim realized that he faced an insoluble dilemma: Peace could only have been a truce. Paris could never tolerate a successful independence movement that would threaten the sultanate and require a huge garrison in the French zone. Perhaps, too, he calculated that peace would simply encourage the Riffian penchant for creative anarchy, temporarily suspended by the wartime requirement for solidarity, to reassert itself. Krim had reached his culminating point of victory. He probably realized it, but he was powerless to back down. His military success, while spectacular and unprecedented in colonial warfare, had bought time but yielded no strategic benefits.

The French war machine rumbled into action, slowly building deliberate but crushing momentum. Sultan Mulay Yussef, revered in Morocco as a descendent of the Prophet, traveled to the front to shore up the loyalty of wavering tribes and to lend credence to the French argument that they were defending Moroccan territorial integrity, Islamic legitimacy, and internationally recognized agreements. Krim blamed his subsequent defeat on the’saints,’ local holy men who were probably worked by the French and Spanish to throw their influence against the rebellion. With that, Krim’s tribal coalition was unraveling.

In June 1925, Paris and Madrid began to lay down joint plans to master the rebellion. The following month, Paris dispatched a World War I hero, Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, to Morocco to take command in the French sector, which was beefed up with one hundred thousand fresh troops. For Lyautey, Pétain’s arrival was the last straw. He rightly saw the appointment of a man celebrated for his symphonies of crushing firepower on the Western Front as a deliberate and pointed rejection of his nuanced emphasis on persuasion rather than force. Humiliated by the clear message that he no longer had the confidence of the government, Lyautey resigned as resident general and returned to France.

By the end of summer, three hundred sixty thousand French and Spanish troops were concentrated against a rebellion weakened by poor harvests and by a typhus epidemic that swept the mountains. Besides, the Riffians were raiders rather than conquerors, men capable of inflicting great carnage but who then moved on, failing to organize the ground they held. On September 10, Pétain’s forces rumbled forward in a crushing advance that recaptured Biban and reclaimed all the territory lost to Krim since April.

The French were gradually getting the measure of their foe. They abandoned their costly daylight assaults once they realized that the Moroccans usually retired at night to caves and villages, leaving positions undefended. Instead, they would move forward under cover of darkness and throw up a wall of rock and concertina wire around high ground. Then they would send out swarms of ‘partisans,’ some of the roughly five thousand Moroccan irregulars supplied by tribes loyal to the French, who were meant to keep the Riffians at bay. The efficiency of partisan warfare might be in doubt — these men were extremely reluctant to sell their lives for France, although they might sell their weapons, or at least some of their precious bullets, to the rebels. For the Europeans, it was reassuring to see their own Muslims wheeling and galloping over the hills, looting villages with admirable thoroughness before setting fire to them, then dashing off to the next place of pillage.

Meanwhile, Spanish dictator Primo de Rivera planned, rehearsed, and supervised an amphibious landing along Alhucemas Bay. On September 8, sixty-three ships, some of them French, landed eight thousand Spanish troops spearheaded by Franco and the Spanish Legion on the beach at Cebadilla. Backed by naval artillery, they began to advance over the seven miles of rocky terrain that separated the invasion beaches from Krim’s ‘capital’ at Ajdir. Riffian fighters, secreted on Monte Malmusi, fiercely resisted the Spaniards with artillery and rifle fire.

The Spanish captured Monte Malmusi on September 23, but it cost the Legion seven hundred men. Planes, naval artillery, and poison gas were lavished on the defenders, who finally abandoned Ajdir on October 2. Spain rejoiced at the first positive news from Morocco in years and celebrated Francisco Franco, the thirty-three-year-old brigadier whose steely courage and seeming immunity from enemy fire had made it possible. To appease Spanish public opinion and send the message that the rebellion was being mastered, Primo de Rivera began to draw down the Spanish presence to around one hundred thousand men.

The onset of winter gave Krim time to catch his breath. Shifting his capital to Tamasint, he could still count on an estimated twelve thousand warriors dug into the crags of the central Rif. In February he launched a large raid on Tétouan to demonstrate that the rebellion retained offensive punch.

However, it was obvious that with roughly half a million enemy troops in the Ouerrha Valley and camped out on Alhucemas Bay, defeat was only a matter of time. Morale plummeted in the Rif. The allied squeeze on Tangier had cut off the flow of weapons to the Riffians, so that as many as eight rebels shared each rifle. Starvation stalked the mountains, and prices skyrocketed.

As Riffians grumbled, Krim grew testy and treated counsels of compromise as treachery and defeatism. His only hope was that Paris and Madrid, both with vocal peace factions that saw Krim as a noble resistance leader, would seek negotiations. When he offered to talk peace in the spring of 1926, the allies were bound by international and domestic opinion to accept. (Indeed, pressure from the United States had caused Paris to disband the Escadrille Cheériffian in November 1925 after a public outcry over their bombing of Chechaouen. Charles Sweeney, an American soldier of fortune and Notre Dame graduate, had led that raid.)

Unfortunately for the Rif Republic, the allies understood that any concession that rewarded Krim’s defiance threatened the stability of North Africa and, indeed, of the imperial enterprise. The Spanish army burned to avenge Anual and Chechaouen, while French soldiers had a few scores to settle as well. They demanded that Krim surrender strategic points in the Rif to Franco-Spanish occupation and refused to compromise on the issue of autonomy — positions calculated to undermine negotiations. Talks collapsed in the first week in May.

France had not waited for Krim’s representatives to walk out of negotiations. In mid-April three French divisions pushed north and west, a strike joined by the Spanish on May 1. Krim’s tribes made a stand against the Spanish at Aith Hishim (Hill of the Saints) southeast of Ajdir. Although they inflicted over a thousand casualties on the Spaniards and continued to resist the Iberian advance in small-scale battles, the rebels had been exhausted. Soon five columns of French and Spanish troops circulated through the gorges and valleys of the Rif, accepting submissions of the villagers, a ceremony sealed by the ritual slitting of a calf’s throat. On May 22, when Spanish troops reoccupied Anual, the rebellion had come full circle.

Krim, now clearly on the ropes with his coalition melting away and a price on his head, became increasingly desperate. On May 18, the French, possibly tipped off by Krim’s secretary, had bombed his hideout. Krim toyed with the idea of seeking asylum with the American or Italian legations in Tangier. However, with the Spanish closing in and certain to execute him, he opted to throw himself on the mercy of the French. On May 26, he released 283 Spanish, French, Senegalese, and Algerian captives, all pathetically malnourished and suffering from pneumonia. (All Spanish officer POWs had been shot in retaliation for Spain’s bombing of Riffian villages.)

At dawn on May 27, Krim rode into the French camp at Targuist at the head of his family, trailing a mule train of possessions that allegedly included a quarter of a million dollars. To the bitter indignation and fury of the Spaniards who demanded a war crimes trial for the Riffian leader and his important lieutenants, the French exiled Krim to a comfortable estate on the island of Réunion with an annual pension of one hundred thousand francs. In 1947 the French government decided to transfer Krim and forty-two members of his entourage to an even more elegant and opulent exile on the French Rivera. On May 31, as the ship carrying him to France called briefly at Port Said, Krim slipped his surveillance and sought asylum in Egypt. He died there in 1963.

With Krim out of the picture, pacification of the Rif proceeded with relative ease, although isolated opposition could still produce a lively firefight. Most of Krim’s close collaborators had taken French offers of exile. Once they had surmounted their desire for revenge, even the Spanish understood that the best policy was to offer positions in the imperial administration to their erstwhile enemies. The Rif was pacified, and Paris and Madrid rejoiced at the end of the ‘Moroccan problem.’

Those who cared to look closely recognized a new phenomenon. Krim’s revolt became a symbol that guided and inspired Morocco’s desire for independence. Morocco had seen pretenders before, men who masqueraded as descendants of the Prophet to build a following. While Krim certainly built on that tradition, he had taken it a step further by attempting to construct a new state in northern Morocco that combined Muslim tradition with European innovation, a rudimentary government, and an organized military force, underpinned by a semblance of modern nationalism.

Krim’s movement exerted a strong influence on young Moroccan idealists and nationalists who, although they did not join the Riffians, began to form clandestine nationalist organizations in Morocco’s major cities. These groups became the precursors of the Istiqlal (Independence) Party that emerged in the 1940s. In 1958, two years after Morocco’s independence, Sultan Mohammed V declared Krim a national hero, restored his confiscated property, and invited him to return to Morocco, which Krim declined to do.

The impact of the Rif rebellion was also felt north of the Strait of Gibraltar. Spain had paid a huge price for victory, one not just tallied in lives. The Rif War had politicized the Spanish army. The disaster at Anual upended Spanish democracy and justified Primo de Rivera’s coup d’état of September 1923, terminating the most durable constitution that Spain had yet experienced and irretrievably undermining the Bourbon monarchy. Africanistas in Melilla initially hatched the July 1936 conspiracy against the republic, and it spread through the protectorate, orchestrated by the high commissioner in Tétouan, General Francisco Franco, before it jumped the strait into Andalusia, spearheaded by sixty-two thousand Regulares and legionnaires.

Many of the Nationalist commanders put their Rif War experience to good use against the Republican forces. In that way the colony had come back to dominate the politics of the fatherland, much as the Algerian conflict of 1954-62 served to convince important constituencies in the French military that France’s prestige and security hinged on the maintenance of empire.

This article was written by Douglas Porch and originally published in the Winter 2006 edition of MHQ. Douglas Porch, a specialist in French military history, is an MHQ contributing editor. His most recent book is The Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theater in World War II.

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