45 years ago this week. 22 February 1980. Opération Tacaud. Chad. “Batha,” a M101A1 (M2) 105mm howitzer in action during a live-fire exercise by 2ème batterie, 11e régiment d’artillerie de marine (RAMa). The location is likely Camp Dubut north of N’Djamena, the country’s capital.
Note the cannon is likely named for the Batha prefecture of Chad. Marc-André Desanges/ECPAD/Défense. F 80-115 L256
The handy 4,900-pound U.S. M2/M101A1 howitzer entered French service in 1943 as the HM2 10,5cm gun and it remained a standard in operations against the Viet Minh in Indochina, in Algeria, and in other places– such as Chad against the Libyans– until finally withdrawn from service in 1997.
While the gunners of 11e RAMa– a unit that dates back to 1622— are still in French Army service, based at Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier and equipped with Caesar 155mm guns, 120mm mortars, Mistral missiles, and VOA Griffons, the French have officially departed Chad after 70 years of post-colonial security assistance (and 60 years of colonial rule).
It would seem the Chadians are pivoting towards Moscow.
The Republic of Chad, a French colony from 1900 with the defeat of Sudanese warlord Rabih az-Zubayr at the one-sided Battle of Kousssri (4,500 Sudanese casualties to 103 French), to 1960 when it gained independence, was long key to the Republic’s control of Equatorial and North Africa.
On 26 August 1940, just two months after the fall of metropolitan France to the Axis, Chad was the first French territory in Africa to break with the Vichy government and join De Gaulle’s Free French movement.
Free French infantryman, native of the Chad colony, who was awarded the Croix de Guerre, in 1942. Note the tribal face scars. (NARA)
In all, some 15,000 Chadian troops would serve De Gaulle in the push for Liberation.
The Republic remembered, too, and, still patrolling the desert post-WWII, the new nation became a hub for the French Foreign Legion post-1962 after it withdrew from Algeria.
Then, after 1969 when Mummar Qaddafi/Gaddafi overthrew the Libyan king and started getting close to the Soviets, this only increased.
When Libyan troops pushed over the line into the country from the North in 1979, the French supported Chad’s president, Hissene Habre, and over the next decade, with the help of upwards of 3,000 French troops, forced the Libyan army off Chadian soil in the Toyota Wars and Jaguar Diplomacy that followed.
August 31 – September 7, 1983 – Chad Portrait of a legionnaire from the 1st Foreign Cavalry Regiment (REC) at the Biltine campRéf. F 83-382 LC308 Photo by Bernard Sidler/ECPAD/Défense
Libyan tanks stand abandoned in the desert after being captured by FANT (Forces Armees Nationales Chadiennes), the Chadian National Army, as troops reconquered the Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti region of Chad. The Chadian Army recaptured Faya-Largeau and Wadi Doum airport, where the retreating Libyan army abandoned many dead and a great deal of military equipment, most of it of Soviet manufacture. Libyan planes made a bombing raid on the same day in an attempt to destroy material that had fallen into Chadian hands. Between April 6 and April 10, 1987, Wadi Doum, Chad
Even with Gaddafi gone for more than a decade, the continued instability in Libya to the North, the fight against Boko Haram to the South, and the tension along the 1,400 km border with Sudan to the East, meant a continued– and even welcome– French presence in Chad.
Now, following the election of Gen. Mahamat Idriss Déby, son of the late strongman Gen. Idriss Déby Itno (who served as Chad’s president from 1991 to 2021), apparently, the good times are over and the country is moving to “fully assert its sovereignty” and is demanding the departure of the 1,000 French troops left in the country, as it leans closer to Russia.
Chad earlier this year sent a 70-member U.S. Army SF det home from a training mission in the country, although talks were apparently looking good a few months ago to send them back. Maybe not after this.
Notably, the French have been kicked out of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso in recent months, signaling a much smaller role for the traditional “Gendarme of Africa.”
