Claude Hettier de Boislambert (26 July 1906 - 22 February 1986) came to prominence during the German occupation of France in the 1940s as a Resistance leader, appointed by the Général a Companion of the Liberation in 1943. After the war, with Germany under military occupation, he served between 1946 and 1951 as governor of the region that during his period in office was reconfigured as Rheinland-Pfalz. Subsequently, he became a Gaullist member of parliament ("l'Assemblée Nationale"). From 1960 his contribution to public life was made, principally, as a member of the diplomatic service, notably in Africa.
Biography Provenance and early years Claude André Charles Antoine Marie Hettier de Boislambert was born at Hérouvillette (Calvados) just outside Caen into an upper-middle-class family with long roots in this part of Normandy. He successfully passed his school final exams (Baccalauréat) in 1922. He studied Law and went on to study political sciences at the prestigious Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris. After that, according to one source, he worked as a journalist. Other sources focus on what might be interpreted as a more self-indulgent life-style. By the time he graduated he had inherited sufficient wealth to lead a quasi-aristocratic existence, involving much sport and extensive foreign travel in central Africa where it is reported that he carried out "ethnographic research", in Scandinavia, in central Europe and in the middle-east. His favourite sport was hunting (la chasse). He was also a landowner, and by 1939 was running a well-managed farm-estate at Sainte-Marie-du-Mont (between Caen and Cherbourg).
On 16 January 1928 Claude Hettier de Boislambert, whose father had died two years earlier, married the heiress Solange de Maleville in what was described as "a very elegant ceremony in the Chapel of Beaulieu-Siorac" in the Dordogne region. The bride's beautiful satin dress by the couturier Henriette Boudreau did not go unremarked in news reports.
War and resistance Before the German invasion The German army launched an invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. The French and British governments reacted by declaring war on Germany on 3 September 1939, albeit without becoming militarily involved in Poland, even after the Soviet army launched its own invasion of Poland from the other side on 17 September 1939. The French army was more active closer to home, however, and Claude Hettier de Boislambert was called up in September 1939 as part of a generalised mobilisation: he was to serve as a cavalry lieutenant. Immediately he was sent to Lorraine to take part as leader of a horse-back platoon in a reconnaissance group. During the brief invasion of Germany which took place from eastern France in September/October 1939, his reconnaissance group was one of the first to undertake some of the many patrols that the French army high command ordered in the occupied Saarland, notably in the Sierck sector adjacent to the Luxembourg frontier.
The invasion After this he became a liaison officer with the British, serving on 1st Division of Cuirassiers which was part of a multi-national combined military operation that also included the British Expeditionary Force, and which had been assembled to defend France's northern frontier against a possible German attack through Belgium (as had happened in 1914 at the start of the First World War). The anticipated German invasion of Belgium and Luxembourg was eventually launched on 10 May 1940. Hettier de Boislambert took part with a tank unit in the fighting around Tienen and Louvain in which French and British forces attempted to resist the German advance towards the English Channel. Then he was ordered to rejoin the main French army which was consolidating a defensive frontline along the Somme. Because of the way the battle lines had moved this now involved crossing enemy lines as the German invasion forces continued their push towards the sea. Hettier de Boislambert rejoined the French army at the Somme frontline on 20 May 1940.
He fought in the 1940 Battle of the Somme (generally identified in English-language sources as the Battle of Abbeville) between 27 May and 4 June 1940, and then in a succession of smaller "delaying actions", first alongside the Seine where the Germans were fighting to capture a series of critical bridges before defenders could blow them up, and then further to the west in Normandy and Brittany. The German invasion of France is nevertheless remembered for the speed with which German forces were able to use their air superiority and pioneer new motorised warfare techniques to capture the northern part of the country. German armies entered Paris on 14 June 1940 and the French government signed an armistice a few days later. By 16 June 1940 Claude Hettier de Boislambert was at the port of Brest. As France fell, he resolved to continue the fight, which meant crossing to Britain, which he did accompanied by those officers and sub-officers who had been fighting under his command who now volunteered to follow him. They travelled on a liner/troop ship that the English had sent to pick up Polish troops who had been fighting in France against the German invasion, having fled the German-Soviet occupation of their own country.
De Gaulle On reaching England he learned that Général de Gaulle, whom he had come across during the fighting in northern France, was already on London. On 19 June 1940 Claude Hettier de Boislambert became the first French officer to offer his services to France's self-appointed wartime resistance leader in London. He was invited to participate in the construction of the general's first staff team and join his first "cabinet". Before the war Hettier de Boislambert had come to know Africa well thanks to his regular hunting trips. De Gaulle now teamed him up with resistance commanders René Pleven and Philippe Leclerc for a mission to French Equatorial Africa and Cameroon. They embarked on 6 August 1940. Their objective was to rally the French colonial forces to back Général de Gaulle rather than the Vichy puppet government under Philippe Pétain that was being set up in southern France with German backing. By the end of 1940 French Equatorial Africa had become the strategic centre of Free French activities in Africa, but that was only achieved after several months of fighting against forces backing the Vichy regime. Hettier de Boislambert took command responsibilities successively in Douala and in Cameroon. He took the command at Pointe-Noire under extremely difficult conditions and managed to capture five or seven large cargo ships which now passed to allied control. The success of the mission provided the allies with the means to deliver desperately needed fighter aircraft to the Syria-Lebanon (Proche-Orient) front. He was later made a Compagnon de la Libération as a result of this action.
Hettier de Boislambert was now promoted to the rank of squadron leader ahead of the attempt on 23 September 1940 to capture the strategically important port city of Dakar from the pro-German Vichy French administration of what was then known as French West Africa (modern-day Senegal). The attempt failed, however. Hettier de Boislambert was given charge of the land-based support operation for the Franco-British landing which in the end had to be aborted. After five days at liberty during which he was able to piece back together many of the resistance elements which had been disrupted during the operation, he was himself one of the two resistance leaders captured in the jungle by Pro-Vichy forces on 30 September 1940. There followed long weeks of interrogation in prisons at Dakar and, later, Bamako during which he faced, among others, the Vichy-appointed colonial governor general Pierre Boisson, but sources insist that these sessions left his interlocutors and their Vichy bosses none the wiser about the resistance activities in which he had been engaged.
Vichy justice and escape He was then transferred to mainland France where he was imprisoned first at Marseille, then at Clermont-Ferrand and thirdly at Gannat (a small town in the hills between Clermont-Ferrand and Vichy. After approximately nine months of pre-trial detention, it was at Gannat that Claude Hettier de Boislambert faced a court martial on 13 June 1941. The death sentence which the court conferred on him was immediately commuted to "forced labour in perpetuity". Initially he was now taken to another prison, this time in Saint-Etienne, where conditions were particularly harsh. Later he was taken back to the prison at Gannat. At the end of 1942 he managed to escape, probably from a labour gang, which ended a period of detention that by now had extended to approximately 26 months. He spent a couple of months living "underground" (unregistered) in France and was then returned to the presence of The Général in London. The return involved what one source describes as "an aerial operation in the region of Clermont-Ferrand", which was undertaken during the night of 14/15 January 1943.
With the general When Hettier de Boislambert was captured in September 1940 many believed that Hitler's Germany would win the war. By the time of his escape from custody, just over two years later, the Nazi-Soviet pact had been upended in June 1941 and the German army had been haemorrhaging men and capability at Stalingrad since the late summer of 1942. On the allied side, the US military had been lining up alongside the British since the Attack on Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941. Hettier de Boislambert's return to de Gaulle's side coincided the start of the Casablanca Conference at which, almost for the first time, western leaders were able to plan seriously for an end to the war on allied terms. Général de Gaulle's attendance was deemed essential by the US and British leaderships, and de Gaulle was determined that if he attended he would do so on his own terms. He arrived accompanied by Claude Hettier de Boislambert whose presence the general evidently thought would be useful. That was quickly followed by a succession of missions to the colonies in Africa.
MMLA Promoted by the general to the rank of lieutenant colonel, Hettier de Boislambert was given the delicate but critical mandate to create, organize and command the Mission militaire française de liaison administrative (MMLA, literally, "French military mission for administrative liaison"). The purpose was to establish and harmonise relations between allied forces and liberated civilian populations. It was in reality the core element in support of a larger objective on the part of de Gaulle, to block Anglo-American plans for the establishment of Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories - in other words, the administration of postwar France by British and American military personnel. The head of the MMLA, supported by representatives from not yet created government ministries, had to ensure the security of civilian populations, reorganise health provision in each territorial sector as it was liberated, deal with reanimating hospitals and to prepare to address the housing needs of displaced persons. It had to attend to provision of essential supplies directly following liberation, the installation of civil administration and take the first steps to restore a civilian police force and internal security more generally. Ensuring the viability of basic communications channels was another urgent responsibility.