Philippe de Hauteclocque was a French general during the Second World War. He became Marshal of France posthumously in 1952, and is known in France simply as le marechal Leclerc or just Leclerc.
Background
Philippe Francois Marie de Hauteclocque was born on 22 November 1902 at Belloy-Saint-Leonard in the department of Somme. He was the fifth of six children of Adrien de Hauteclocque, comte de Hauteclocque (1864–1945), and Marie-Therese van der Cruisse de Waziers (1870–1956). Philippe was named in honour of an ancestor killed by Croats in 1635.
Education
Philippe de Hauteclocque was homeschooled until he was 13, when he was sent to L'ecole de la Providence, a Jesuit school in Amiens. In 1920, at the age of 17, he went to Lycee prive Sainte-Genevieve, known as Ginette, a preparatory school in Versailles. He then entered the Ecole speciale militaire de Saint-Cyr, the French military academy. Each class has a name, his was Metz et Strasbourg after towns in Alsace and Lorraine returned to France by the Treaty of Versailles. He graduated on 1 October 1924, and was commissioned as a sous lieutenant in the French Army. Having chosen the cavalry branch, he then had to attend the Cavalry School in Saumur, from which he graduated first in his class on 8 August 1925.
Career
In 1939, as a captain of infantry, he was wounded and captured by the Germans, but he managed to escape to England. Upon hearing that General Charles de Gaulle was rallying Free French Forces from London, he took the name Leclerc (so as to spare his family in France any reprisals) and joined de Gaulle. Promoted to colonel by de Gaulle, he achieved a number of military victories in French Equatorial Africa. After being promoted to brigadier general, he staged a spectacular 1,000-mile (1,600-km) march from Chad to Tripoli, Libya, to join the forces of the British Eighth Army, capturing Italian garrisons along the way. He was promoted to major general in 1943.
He took part in the Normandy Invasion of 1944 as commander of the Free French 2nd Armoured Division, which debarked on August 1 and took part in the drive to Alençon and Argentan by U.S. General George S. Patton’s Third Army. On August 20 the 2nd Armoured Division was ordered by Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower to liberate the French capital, and on August 25 the commander of the German garrison in Paris, Dietrich von Choltitz, surrendered to Leclerc. The next day Leclerc and de Gaulle formally entered Paris in triumph.
Leclerc went on to liberate Strasbourg (November 23, 1944) and then led his men on into Germany, capturing Berchtesgaden. In July 1945 Leclerc was named commander of the French expeditionary force to the Far East. That same year he legally changed his name from Philippe-Marie, vicomte de Hauteclocque, to Jacques-Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque, using his wartime name.
In March 1946 Leclerc was sent to French-occupied Indochina. He perceived that the nature of the problems there was more political than military, but he aroused controversy with that message in France and resigned his post. In July 1946 he became inspector general of the French forces stationed in North Africa. He was killed there in an airplane accident. In 1952 the French government posthumously named him marshal of France.