The Marshal Steps Down

"My profession," said France's testy, unpredictable Alphonse Juin in Morocco in 1951, "is to make war -and I am making war." There were others who thought his job in Morocco was to make a peace possible -but then, Alphonse Juin was always a man of stormy views. The son of a French policeman in Algeria, Soldier Juin followed his profession with vigorous abandon from the moment of his graduation from Saint Cyr, declaring war on virtually everybody who opposed him. Cleaving first to Petain after the fall of France in World War II, he later switched to the Allied side and became the able battlefield commander of the Free French forces in Italy. As the only living Marshal of France in 1952, he publicly blamed the United States for France's troubles in North Africa and Indo-China, and threatened to lead his nation personally out of the United Nations if Washington did not mend its ways. Back in Paris as NATO's Commander for Central Europe, Juin went on picking and fighting his enemies as he saw them. His opponents accused him of an overriding ambition: waiting for a summons to rule France once the parliamentarians had made a complete mess of it. While in his NATO job, he blasted the EDC plan for a unified European Army as "completely inadmissible," lashed out at his nation's government with the charge: "What we need here is a State."

Stripped of his French army jobs and officially spanked by the NATO Council in a resolution condemning "the public utterances of Marshal Alphonse Juin," the obstreperous old soldier went right on saying his say with uninhibited vigor. Strongly opposing any kind of liberal policy toward the rebels in North Africa, 67-year-old Juin last month proposed in a magazine article that NATO itself take on the job of quelling the trouble in Algeria. The proposition was received at SHAPE headquarters with the utmost coolness.

Last week NATO issued a terse communique concerning its most cantankerous commander. "General Alfred Gruenther, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe," it read, "announced today that Marshal Alphonse Juin has just informed him he intends to request release from his appointment as Commander in Chief, Allied Forces Central Europe."

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