Swallows of Death:
Les Marocains, Part One
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
January 2023

Modern French interest in the Sultanate of Morocco began in the late 1700’s, as Moroccan pirates preyed on French shipping in the Mediterranean and Atlantic and seized French citizens as slaves. The Moroccans promised to exempt French ships from their attacks, and the French held off from bombarding Moroccan coastal cities.

After the 1831 French conquest of neighboring Algeria, the French became more interested in Morocco. Moroccan support for Algerian resistance fighters led to French retaliation in 1844, what became known as the First Franco-Moroccan War. The French bombarded Moroccan ports, defeated a Moroccan army in a field battle, and imposed a peace on the Sultan that recognized French rule over Algeria and ended support for the Algerian resistance. The Moroccans undertook an unsuccessful offensive against the Algerians, and dispatched assassins who failed to kill the Algerian leader, Abd-el Kadr.

With their border secure, the French then more or less ignored Morocco for the next several decades. When European powers began slicing up the map of Africa in the 1870’s and 1880’s, France made Morocco part of its sphere of influence, in cooperation with Spain. A series of international agreements steadily weakened Moroccan sovereignty, and in 1900 French troops stationed in Algeria began a stealthily pushing the Algerian-Moroccan border westwards. In 1901 they took at oasis of Tuat, a series of settlements deep in the Sahara that the Moroccan sultans claimed but had never effectively controlled.

This time the people noticed, and street protests broke out against Sultan Abdelaziz. Ongoing unrest not only weakened the sultan’s government, but provided the desired pretext for outside intervention. In 1904, France and Britain signed a quasi-alliance known as the Entente Cordiale, which among other things recognized a French sphere of influence over Morocco. Along the Algerian border, French troops again pressed their operations into Moroccan territory, supposedly in reaction to the murder of an Algerian merchant in Morocco. To help quell the unrest they had started, the French offered the Sultan military advisors or even troops.

Enter Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Not allowing a good crisis to go to waste, in March 1905 the Kaiser boarded the liner Hamburg, escorted by the armored cruiser Friedrich Carl, for Morocco. After riding through Tangier on the back of his white horse – shipped from Germany for the purpose - he met with Abdelaziz and gave a speech promising to go to war to defend Moroccan independence.

The resulting crisis led to an international conference at Algeciras in Spain (across the bay from Gibraltar), recognizing French influence in Morocco (including control of customs, and the right to develop Moroccan ports) but granting all other nations access to trade in Morocco. When Moroccan tribal leaders reacted by attacking a new customs house and killing a French physician. That provided the excuse to occupy a small slice of territory along the Algerian border and to engage in a three-day naval bombardment of Casablanca. Indiscriminate shelling killed up to 7,000 Moroccan civilians.

Less noticed in Europe, the French steadily encroached on Morocco from the east, sending troops over the Algerian border in “flying columns” ostensibly in response to raids by Moroccans into French territory. Moroccan irregulars had no answer to the awesome rapid-fire power of the new 75mm Model 1897 light artillery piece, and Madame Soixante-Quinze formed the backbone of the French columns. The French columns usually included mixed elements – Algerians, French colonials, Foreign Legion, Africans – and sometimes, Moroccan irregulars known as goumiers.

A Moroccan coastal battery destroyed in the 1907 bombardment of Casablanca.

The French presence continued to irritate ordinary Moroccans, and provide the excuse for even more of them to enter the country. In the spring of 1911 the French used the pretext of a Moroccan rebellion to send more troops into the country and occupy the capital city of Fez, to protect European lives and property in an interior region that hosted precious little of either.

This time, Kaiser Wilhelm sent a gunboat, SMS Panther, followed by the cruiser Berlin. The warships were to rescue German civilians, but the German civilian sent to Agadir in southern Morocco to be rescued actually showed up three days after the gunboat. Nevertheless, Wilhelm threatened war, and this time the Germans obtained the unilateral negotiations with the French that they’d sought in 1905. The Germans gave their approval to a full French occupation of Morocco, in exchange for a huge swath of swampland in the Congo.

Now the French poured in troops for the outright conquest of Morocco. Sultan Abdelhafid initially cooperated, with resistance centered around the camel-riding, veil-wearing Saharan religious fanatics known as the Blue Men. The French and the Blue Men vied for the loyalty of the powerful semi-feudal warlords of rural Morocco, with the French offering cash while the Blue Men preached that the nobles were irredeemably damned. The French approach usually won out.

A Moroccan regular army had been established in the 1860’s, with British contractors supplying instructors, small arms and artillery. Nominally the Sultan’s army numbered 21,000 men, raised by conscription, but widespread purchase of exemptions as well as desertion lowered their number to perhaps one-fifth of that. Some French occupation officials advocated disbanding the force, but instead French officers and NCO’s took over training with an eye toward expanding the force for use alongside French formations in the occupation.

That occupation became official in March 1912, when the Sultan signed over sovereignty and Morocco became a French protectorate. The Sultan’s army reacted with a mutiny that saw the Moroccan troops attack their trainers and kill 84 of the cadre. The French in turn shot 84 of the Moroccan soldiers, who marched to their deaths in perfect order, reciting an Islamic chant.

Steadily, the French broke the power of recalcitrant warlords and religious leaders, and the provision of roads, schools and medical care attracted a large proportion of the Moroccan population, both elites and working classes, to the new order. French colonies did not produce notable profits for the home country or its investor class, and French exports had no market in places like Morocco. But the army insisted on colonial expansion under the banner of exporting civilization, and it numbered roads, schools and clinics as the chief weapons in its arsenal.

Moroccan Tirailleurs, shortly before the First World War.

The remnants of the Sultan’s army and new recruits formed five “auxiliary companies,” which performed patrol and occupation duties in rural Morocco – at garrisons widely separated from one another. By 1914 each of the companies had expanded to battalion size, with a cadre of experienced, Arabic-speaking French officers and NCOs.

When war broke out in Europe about two-thirds of the troops in Morocco – then numbering about 38,000 – departed for mainland France. The Army of Africa, in charge of locally-raised troops, formed two “Moroccan” divisions (one of which would be split into two separate brigades). The troops in these two divisions came from the Algerian and Tunisian battalions of the Moroccan occupation force. A fifth “Indigenous” brigade came from the five Moroccan auxiliary battalions. Within Morocco, the depot companies of the five departed battalions began recruiting new men to fill out a new battalion, while the Army of Africa set up another four battalions of Moroccans plus two training battalions.

The indigenous brigade’s battalions debarked in Bordeaux in early August 1914, and on the 25th they formed into the brigade at Chalons. After a few days in a quiet sector of the front, on 1 September the brigade joined the newly-formed French XXXVII Corps for the Battle of the Marne, numbering about 5,000 men. At Penchard, the Moroccans went forward across open ground in an attempt to seize wooded heights held by the Germans 22nd Reserve Infantry Division. The Moroccan brigade lost 1,150 men and 19 officers in its first day of combat. The handful of surviving officers included Sous-Lieutenant Alphonse Juin, the future Marshal of France.

Moroccan machine-gunners, September 1916.

Over the days that followed, the Moroccans continued to bleed. When withdrawn from combat on 23 September, only 1,800 remained of the initial 5,000. The remnants formed a new regiment, but did not return to the front until March 1915. With additional training and the arrival of reinforcements from Morocco, the regiment now performed well and would receive the Croix de Guerre unit citation five times. They fought with the 48th Infantry Division in Champagne, and at Verdun. It later served in the 3rd Moroccan Brigade (which, initially, had included no Moroccans).

A second Moroccan regiment joined them in March 1918, but the two regiments fought in different divisions. The 2nd Moroccan Tirailleurs earned to unit citations of the Croix de Guerre. Supposedly the Germans named the Moroccans the “Swallows of Death,” but like most “enemy nicknames” this seems to have been an invention of their own side.

Approximately 45,000 Moroccan soldiers served the French during the First World War. Of those, nine thousand were killed in action and another 17,000 suffered wounds or disease. An additional 38,000 Moroccan civilians performed labor tasks for the French Army during the course of the war. As horrific as those casualty figures appear, they’re actually less than the proportions incurred by the French Army as a whole.

But Morocco was not finished bleeding for France.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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