Buckling Down

As dawn broke over the small Algerian fishing port of Collo, the grim shape of a French cruiser materialized out of the darkness. Even as French children swarmed down to the beach to cheer, Georges Leygues' 8-in. guns swung shoreward and thundered salvo after salvo into the hills behind the town. Minutes later, French planes strafed the target area. Marines swarmed ashore from the cruiser, trucks carrying Senegalese troops roared up the road from Philippeville and swung up into the hills. It was the first combined air-sea-ground operation of the French in Algeria, aimed at the concentration of fellagha bands behind Collo. At operation's end, French troops found caches of food, abandoned hideouts, and the bodies of 14 rebels.

On a strictly military basis, the operation seemed an expensive way of killing 14 rebels. But it symbolized an end to a long period of hesitation and half-hearted temporizing by a Socialist government trying to fight off the label of "war party." A month ago Premier Guy Mollet had offered the Algerian rebels a "last chance'' to lay down their arms, and the rebels had answered only with bullets. Last week France was buckling down to a full-scale war in Algeria.

The government announced that it was buying another 175 helicopters for use in Algeria, and organized an emergency airlift of 10,000 Senegalese troops from French West Africa. Under protective arrest, Algerian Nationalist Leader Messali Hadj, who three weeks ago organized the strike of 10,000 Algerians in Paris, was transferred from mainland France to an island off the Brittany coast. Reflecting new allied sympathy for France's efforts, SHAPE Commander General Al Gruenther gave his approval to France's withdrawal of two first-class divisions from NATO's European shield in Germany, declaring that Algeria was "indispensable to Western defense."

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