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About Gabriel Sabattier
- Camille Ange Gabriel Sabattier (2 August 1892 – 22 May 1966) was a French general in Indochina during World War II.
- The highest rank he attained was lieutenant-general.Sabattier was born in Paris on 2 August 1892 and entered the academy of Saint-Cyr in 1913.
- In 1915, during World War I, he was promoted to lieutenant.
- In 1916 he was made captain.
- In 1928 he was sent to serve in French Morocco and in 1934 he was sent to China as a military attaché with the rank of lieutenant-colonel.
- Promoted to colonel, he was sent to Indochina by the Vichy government in November 1940.
- He fought in the brief war with Thailand between October 1940 and May 1941.
- By 1942 he had been promoted to brigadier-general and was in charge of all French troops in southern Vietnam, although the country was now under Japanese occupation.By 1944, Major-General Sabattier was commanding the Tonkin Division.
- He asked Lieutenant-General Eugène Mordant for permission to prepare to fight a guerrilla war in the event the Japanese chose to end French administration.
- This would have included establishing supply caches in the mountains.
- The request was refused.
- Anticipating a Japanese coup, Sabattier put his troops on armed exercise status on 8 March 1945.
- Although this was countermanded by Mordant, not all units heeded his order and some were prepared when, on 9 March, the Japanese staged a coup d'Ă©tat and overthrew the French colonial government.Under Sabattier's command, about 6,000 men from the vicinity of Hanoi abandoned their camps in the wake of the Japanese coup and retreated west.
- Although he and the Provisional Government of the French Republic in Paris hoped to receive assistance from the American Fourteenth Air Force stationed in China, none was forthcoming.
- On 10 April 1945, the Paris government appointed Sabattier their delegate-general in Indochina with plenary civil and military authority.
- Ensconced in Dien Bien Phu, he concentrated on civil matters and left the military to Major-General Marcel Alessandri of the 2nd Tonkin Brigade.When the Japanese launched a campaign to destroy the French in the mountains, Sabattier led his soldiers on a retreat of 600 miles (970 km) to China in May.
- In all some 2,000 to 5,000 soldiers made it to China.
- There Sabattier was the highest-ranking military representative of the French government for three months.
- He was replaced as delegate-general on 15 August when Georges Thierry d'Argenlieu was appointed high commissioner.Sabattier returned to Paris at the end of 1945.
- He wrote a memoire, Le destin de l'Indocine: souvenirs et documents, 1941–1951, that was published in Paris in 1952.
- He died on 22 May 1966.
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