Chandon, Claude

Date of birth:: October 29th, 1894 (Charolles, France)
Date of death:: August 6th, 1944 (Carhaix, France)
Nationality:: French

Biography

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In December 1914, Claude Chandon succeeded in being incorporated after pressing requests. An infantry officer, he testifies during the 14/18 war of a rare military value. Seven times cited, seriously injured, he received the Legion of Honor and the British Military Cross. He was the flag bearer of the 408th Infantry Regiment in the Victory Day parade on July 14, 1919.

Demobilized, he married in 1920 and lived in Paris for a few years as a businessman.

After the loss of their only daughter, the Chandon couple settled in Guyana in 1927 where Claude Chandon would run a breeding and mixed farming estate near Regina first and then, in the 1930s, a large banana plantation near Cayenne. .

Reserve captain since 1932, he was recalled during the declaration of war in September 1939 and asked - but in vain - to join the metropolis. Considered to be more useful on the spot, he was responsible for training and instructing reinforcements for France. He took command of the 1st company of voltigeur fusiliers in Guyana, which he reinforced and trained.

Claude Chandon, worried about news from France, heard the Appeal of June 18, which convinced him without reservations; the next day, by mail, he made himself available to General de Gaulle to continue the fight against the advice of his leaders. In July and August 1940, while he was then on a mission in Saint Laurent du Maroni in the west of the territory, feeling the favorable population, he prepared, with the agreement of General de Gaulle, the rallying of Guyana to free France.

But, under arrest, Claude Chandon could not return to Cayenne. He then joined Georgetown in British Guyana and prepared a coup from outside. The order to act was given to him by General de Gaulle on September 7.

But the takeover of the administration by the High Commissioner for the West Indies, Admiral Robert, loyal to the Vichy government, then the arrival in Guyana, also in September, of Governor General Carde and the auxiliary cruiser Quercy, with on board 250 marines, thwarted this attempt.

Promoted battalion commander (from September 2, 1940) by General de Gaulle, Claude Chandon organized the passage to Dutch Guyana of volunteers to continue the fight.

After having formed a detachment of more than 150 men, and faced with the impossibility of reasonably undertaking any action on the spot, he left Guyana in February 1941 with the volunteers. The contingent joined Pointe Noire in April 1941 after a long journey at sea.

By decree of February 1, 1941, Commander Chandon was named, among the very first, Companion of the Liberation.

Appointed commander of the Gabon infantry battalion and military commander of Gabon, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel on January 1, 1942.

In July 1942, he was appointed military commander of Cameroon. Its mission is then to supply the Colonne Leclerc with staff. To this end, he created the Ngaoudéré camp and formed the Cameroon Brigade intended to fight on the European front.

On March 26, 1943, he gave an address on Radio Brazzaville calling on the Guyanese to move towards the fighting France of General de Gaulle rather than towards General Giraud.

At the end of 1943, to his great disappointment, he was refused operational command of the Cameroon Brigade he had formed on the grounds that he was only a reserve officer.

Following his request to participate in the liberation operations of the metropolis, he obtains to be assigned to the Military Administrative Liaison Mission (MMLA) as deputy to Colonel Claude Hettier de Boislambert; the MMLA - created in October 1943 - was to serve to facilitate relations between the Allied military authorities and the French civil authorities as the territory was liberated.

Claude Chandon left Douala for London, via Cairo and Algiers, January 28, 1944. Landed in Arromanches on June 7, 1944, he welcomed General de Gaulle on his arrival on French soil in Courseulles on June 14.

He commands the mission with the American Army that he accompanies to the south after the breakthrough of Avranches. Colonel Chandon, accompanied by three female auxiliaries of the Army (AFAT), then crosses Brittany in a jeep.

On August 6, 1944, when he lost contact with the Allied troops, Claude Chandon, moving in vanguard towards Brest, arrived in front of the town of Carhaix (Finistère) with the female second-lieutenant Cromie, Sainsbury and Dumas and a young resistance fighter, Annick Le Goff. Noting the occupation of the city by the Germans, the small group bypasses it and, a few hundred meters further, in front of a farm in Plouguer, falls into an ambush led by around 80 Wehrmacht soldiers who open a violent fire, wounding all passengers in the vehicle.
In order to spare the lives of his subordinates, Colonel Chandon gets out of the vehicle to request a ceasefire and is killed with a bullet in the head fired by the officer commanding the detachment. First buried in Carhaix, the body of Colonel Chandon was transferred to his hometown of Charolles.