Sorry for the lack of posts this past month–for some reason the older you get the less time you seem to have each day (and I thought it would be the other way around). Here are some items I came across recently..
1. More Foreign Legion Photographs. In addition to his fantastic photo album on Flickr Mr. Tappen has graciously shared several more photographs of various Foreign Legionnaires from his massive collection. There is an additional album of 61x miscellaneous photographs called “Légion Étrangère – Random Pictures”. There are also several other pictures that were placed into another album called “Archiv 7”. Most of these appear to be post-WWII depicting legionnaires in North Africa. What wonderful pictures of long forgotten men in a lost time and place.
2. Here’s What You Should Know About the French Foreign Legion. Here is a short video from the military themed website called We Are the Mighty. Nothing much new here but I liked how they kept it simple and wove in clips from various Foreign Legion movies. This is a video follow up to their earlier podcast here which took 58 minutes to cover the same ground in much more detail.
3. Germain VanderCruyssen. I noticed a link to this facebook page on Tom Savage’s page (French Foreign Legion: a Descriptive Bibliography). It is another veteran Legionnaire’s remarkable collection photographs chronicling his service in the Foreign Legion during the early 1950’s and covering time spend in Algeria and Indochina (Laos and Vietnam). There are many blurry images but also just as many great images showing life in a French support base (the heavy mortars suggest a dual role supporting local patrols) in Laos. It is interesting to note the local girlfriends, the tropical “tiki” bar-like canteens, the various assemblages of uniforms (nobody seems to be in the same outfit), and the seemingly relaxed approach to guerrilla warfare as fought from a fire base.
4. Novica Lukic (1919-1957). Here is a short but very interesting biography of Serbian Legionnaire Novica Lukic. It is a tragic story about the fate of a Serbian partisan who escapes the communists after the war only to be cut off from his wife and son he has never seen. Like so many other displaced men he joins the Foreign Legion to survive and in this corps he thrives but never stops trying to reunite with his family. He is killed in North Africa in 1957 without seeing his family. (I hate fu**ing communists!)
5. Sergeant X of the Foreign Legion. Here is an oddity. A trailer for the 1960 movie Sergeant X of the Foreign Legion. Never saw this one. This movie appears to be an ingenious splicing of studio film with clips and footage of real Legionnaires doing Civil Engineering work in North Africa. It is a French made film that probably had a surplus 5-ton cargo truck as the biggest item in it’s budget. Posters found at IMDB re-posted below–just because.
Mon Legionnaire 