SOUTHERN THEATRE: De Gaulle at Gabon

Gabon is not the most conspicuous colony of what used to be France, but it is strategic. It lies, heavily forested, under Africa’s western armpit, on the coast of French Equatorial Africa, which extends into the continent so far that it touches Libya and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. South of Gabon lies little Cabinda (part of Angola); then the seaward corridor of the Belgian Congo; then Angola (Portuguese) ; then Southwest Africa and the Union of South Africa, which are British. North and west of Gabon lie the Cameroons (French), Nigeria (British), Dahomey and Togo (French mandate), the Gold Coast (British), the Ivory Coast (French), Liberia (free), Sierra Leone (British), French Guinea, Gambia (British, with the harbor of Bathurst) and Sénégal (with Dakar, the French base on Africa’s westernmost shoulder-point). Gabon is about equidistant (2,000 mi.) from Dakar and Cape Town.

What happened in Gabon last week was not too clear. Vichy said British light cruisers from Bathurst shelled Libreville, Gabon’s capital, for hours to prepare for a landing by Free French forces under General René de Larminat, Chief of Staff of the French Army in Syria before France fell. The British denied any shelling, but said they had forced the ocean-going French submarine Poncelet to be scuttled off Gabon. Vichy said Libreville’s attackers, who landed on both sides of the town and surrounded it, were French colonial troops from garrisons in Equatorial Africa, led by “criminal former officers.” They had some bombers and made things hot for defenders under General Tenu, the colony’s vice governor, who announced: “Nothing will make us bend our knee.”

Presently the Free French escort vessels Savorgnan de Brazza and Commandant Dominé steamed into Libreville harbor and General de Gaulle broadcast from nearby Leopoldville: “Gabon has been on the side of the Free French forces since yesterday. . . . Marshal Foch and the eleventh of November are connected in our memory with the glory of victory.”

Chief significance of long-nosed General de Gaulle’s efforts to nail down French colonies on Africa’s west coast is that, in Axis hands, those colonies could base raiders to prey on Britain’s supply line to Cape Town, Australia and around through the Red Sea to Egypt. Having failed at Dakar, the De Gaullists were pressing their luck elsewhere, as much as anything to keep colonists from succumbing to Axis pressure and Vichy subservience. The distance is too great, through too country, for Gabon or the Cameroons to serve as an alternative point of ingress to the Sudan. But some of the raw materials which the French and British West African colonies produce are cocoa, vegetable oils, gold, manganese, timber.