French generals

Christian Marie Ferdinand de la Croix de Castries (11 August 1902 – 29 July 1991) was the French commander at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

Fernand Gambiez (27 February 1903 – 29 March 1989) was a French Army general and military historian who fought in World War II, the First Indochina War and the Algerian War. During the Algerian War, Gambiez was commander-in-chief of the French Army in Algeria.
Gambiez was born in Lille, graduated from Saint Cyr in 1925. He served with the Foreign Legion in Morocco before studying at the Superior War School in 1935. He was a captain in command of a company during the Battle of France. He trained and commanded a Choc battalion in 1943, taking part in the fighting to liberate Corsica in 1944. Gambiez served as chief of staff to the French commander-in-chief Henri Navarre during the First Indochina War, including the Battle of Dien Bien Phu where one of his sons died.
He was promoted to Général de corps d'armée in 1958, commander of the Oran Corps in 1959, Inspector General of the Infantry in 1960 and finally commander-in-chief of the French Army in Algeria in 1961. He was arrested by the rebellious generals during the Algiers putsch in April 1961.
He was the director of the French military history commission from 1969 to 1989. He was also elected member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in 1974.

Jacques Marie Alfred Gaston Faure (2 March 1904 – 9 April 1988) was a French Army general and skier. He was the leader of the French national Olympic military patrol team in 1936 which placed sixth and in 1961 one of the masterminds of the Algiers putsch.

Valérie André (French pronunciation: [valeʁi ɑ̃dʁe] ; born 21 April 1922) is a veteran of the French Resistance, a neurosurgeon, an aviator and the first female member of the military to achieve the rank of General Officer, in 1976, as Physician General. In 1981, she was promoted to Inspector General of Medicine. A helicopter pilot, she is the first woman to have piloted a helicopter in a combat zone. She is also a founding member of the Académie de l'air et de l'espace.As a member of the military, she is not addressed as "Madame la Générale" (a term reserved for spouses of generals) but as "General".She started as a Medical Captain in Indochina in 1948, already a qualified parachutist and pilot, in addition to being an army surgeon. While in Indochina, she realized that the most difficult part of her duties was retrieving the wounded, who were often trapped in the jungle. She returned to France to learn how to pilot a helicopter, then flew one to Indochina. From 1952–1953, she piloted 129 helicopter missions into the jungle, rescuing 165 soldiers, and on two occasions completed parachute jumps to treat wounded soldiers who needed immediate surgery.One typical mission occurred on 11 December 1951, when casualties were in urgent need of evacuation from Tu Vu on the Black River. The only available helicopter, stationed near Saigon, was dismantled, flown to Hanoi by a Bristol Freighter and reassembled. Captain André then flew into Tu Vu despite heavy mist and anti-aircraft fire. There, she triaged the casualties, operated on the most pressing cases and then flew the urgent wounded back to Hanoi, two at a time. Later, she was put in command of a casualty evacuation flight.
She continued in Algeria as a Medical Commander in 1960, where she completed 365 war missions. She rose to the rank of Medical Lieutenant Colonel in 1965 then to Medical Colonel in 1970. She had a total of 3200 flight hours, and received 7 citations of the Croix de Guerre.
She has written two collections of memoirs : Ici, Ventilateur! Extraits d'un carnet de vol. (Calmann-Lévy, 1954) and Madame le général (Perrin, 1988).
She is one of eight women to hold the Grand-croix (Great Cross) rank in the Legion of Honour, with Germaine Tillion, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Jacqueline de Romilly, Simone Rozès, Christiane Desroches Noblecourt, Yvette Farnoux and Gilberte Champion.
She is the aunt of politician André Santini.
She turned 100 on 21 April 2022.

Paul Aussaresses (French: [pɔl osaʁɛs]; 7 November 1918 – 3 December 2013) was a French Army general, who fought during World War II, the First Indochina War and Algerian War. His actions during the Algerian War—and later defense of those actions—caused considerable controversy.Aussaresses was a career Army intelligence officer with an excellent military record when he joined the Free French Forces in North Africa during the Second World War. In 1947 he was given command of the 11th Shock Battalion, a commando unit that was part of France's former external intelligence agency, the External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service, the SDECE (replaced by the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE)).
Aussaresses provoked controversy in 2000 when, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, he admitted and defended the use of torture during the Algerian war. He repeated the defense in an interview with CBS's 60 Minutes, further arguing that torture ought to be used in the fight against Al-Qaeda, and again defended his use of torture during the Algerian War in a 2001 book; The Battle of the Casbah. In the aftermath of the controversy, he was stripped of his rank, the right to wear his army uniform and his Légion d'Honneur. A 2003 documentary revealed that, after moving to Brazil in 1973, Aussaresses had advised South American dictators on the use of torture widely used against leftist opponents to the military regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Paraguay. Aussaresses also admitted to advising the CIA for the Americans' Vietnam era Phoenix Program, which utilized torture.
Aussaresses, recognizable by his eye patch, lost his left eye due to a botched cataract operation.

Philippe Morillon (French pronunciation: [filip mɔʁijɔ̃]; born 24 October 1935) is a former French general and was a Member of the European Parliament until 2009. He was elected on the Union for French Democracy ticket with the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe group. On 23 July 2004 he was elected Chair of the Committee on Fisheries.
Before turning to politics he was an army General, and commanded the United Nations Forces in Bosnia (1992-1993). In Srebrenica, Bosniak survivors fled into three eastern enclaves where the Bosnian republican army had resisted: Goražde, Žepa and Srebrenica, their populations swelled by displaced deportees, cowering, bombarded relentlessly and largely cut off from supplies of food and medicine. The population of Srebrenica swelled from 9,000 to 70,000, and by March 1993 the situation was sufficiently horrific that Philippe Morillon led a convoy into the battered pocket and, appalled, promised: “You are now under the protection of the UN forces. I will never abandon you.” The UN duly proclaimed Srebrenica as one of six “safe areas” to be defended by the United Nations Protection Force (our emphasis), or Unprofor. In July 1995, 8000 Bosnian men and boys were massacred in Srebrenica.After Bosnia, Morillon commanded the Rapid Reaction Force, after which he retired with the rank of général de corps d'armée. He is a Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur.
In September 2010, Morillon was denied access to Srebrenica Genocide memorial by Bosniak women who believed that he had allowed the Srebrenica massacre.

Alain de Boissieu Déan de Luigné (French pronunciation: [alɛ̃ də bwasjø]; 5 July 1915 – 5 April 2006) was a French general who served in the Free French Forces during World War II, later becoming Army chief of staff (1971–1975). He was the son-in-law of General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French and postwar President of France.

Pierre Pouyade (25 June 1911 – 5 September 1979) was a French Air Force general, World War II flying ace, and a commander of the Normandie-Niemen squadron. By the end of the War he had scored eight solo victories and two group victories, all but one on the Eastern Front.

Henri-Gatien Bertrand (28 March 1773 – 31 January 1844) was a French general who served during the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. Under the Empire he was the third and last Grand marshal of the palace, the head of the Military Household of emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he followed in both the exiles to Elba and Saint-Helena.

Maurice Challe (5 September 1905 – 18 January 1979) was a French general during the Algerian War, one of four generals who took part in the Algiers putsch.
A native of Le Pontet, Vaucluse, and a veteran of the Second World War, Challe transmitted the Luftwaffe order of battle to the British prior to D-Day and backed De Gaulle's return to power. Challe initially served his conscription service in the infantry and was later commissioned as a pilot officer in military aviation, going on to become commander of the French Air Force in Algeria between 1955 and 1960.
In July 1956, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser took control of the Suez Canal, in violation of agreements he had signed with the British and French governments. On 14 October 1956, Challe visited British Prime Minister Anthony Eden at Chequers, accompanied by French Minister of Labor Albert Gazier. The two Frenchmen told Eden of the secret negotiations between Israel and France regarding a proposed Israeli attack on Egypt followed with military occupation by European powers, to control the Suez Canal. Eden backed the plan with UK resources including military forces, directly leading to the Suez Crisis.Challe was a French Air Force general whose greatest military success was in the realm of counter-insurgency operations during the Algerian War. His offensive, begun in March 1959, succeeded in substantially weakening the ALN. Through the use of speed and concentration of force, Challe kept the ALN insurgents in constant retreat and disorder. His innovative tactics would be studied and emulated by others - notably Syrian government forces in the Syrian Civil War seeking to keep insurgency at bay and off balance. The Challe Plan was only partially completed before he was reassigned to France.
A line of electrified wire, minefields and other military barriers, the Challe Line, was named after him. It doubled another defence work, the Morice Line, which fortified the border and separated Algeria from Morocco and Tunisia.He was Commander-in-Chief Allied Forces Central Europe (CINCENT) from May 1960 to his deliberate resignation in February 1961.Challe was one of the heads of the Algiers putsch of 1961, along with Raoul Salan, Edmond Jouhaud, and André Zeller. A prime reason for Challe's involvement was his concern that the Muslim harkis who had served with the French Army against the FLN would be subject to reprisals in the event of Algerian independence. In the event, large numbers of these loyalists were massacred in 1962. After the failure of the putsch, he and Zeller surrendered to the French Army (while Salan and Jouhaud created the OAS). Challe was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. He was freed in December 1966 and received amnesty from President de Gaulle in 1968. Challe died on 18 January 1979, aged 73, in Paris.