What ever happened to the French Foreign Legion? "The legion was conceived as a provisional solution to a fleeting problem —the migration of undesirable persons into France in the wake of revolutions throughout Europe in 1830–31." "In retrospect, a military remedy to illegal immigration appears both contemporary and imaginative. The July Revolution of 1830 had resuscitated the French Revolutionary concept of a citizen army and led to disbandment of the Swiss Guards and other foreign formations that had enforced Bourbon mastery of such uprisings. To address the resulting coagulation of refugees in French cities, King Louis-Philippe on March 9, 1831, signed into law an act creating a ghetto foreign force within a citizen army. Recruiters quickly enlisted the undesirable aliens and packed them off to Algiers — et adieu, la Légion!" "A French general named Ulrich, who in 1861 inspected the 1er régiment étranger at Sidi bel-Abbès, in then French Algeria, warned that if the army failed to disband the legion by decree, it was in danger of dissolving itself from below: “Misdemeanors, serious infractions are very frequent and denote an advanced state of demoralization,” he wrote. “A regiment which counts 648 deserters, in which one does not dare hand out the munitions which each soldier must carry, in which only one pair of shoes per man can be distributed lest they sell them, is far from being a disciplined regiment.” Two years later in Mexico those very legionnaires executed the corps’ signature action at Camarón de Tejeda, Veracruz. On April 30, 1863, 62 legionnaires under Captain Jean Danjou— a Crimean War veteran with a wooden prosthetic hand — defended a walled farm called Hacienda de la Trinidad against hundreds of Mexican insurgents. At the end of the day, their ammunition exhausted, the five surviving legionnaires — Lieutenant Clement Maudet, Corporal Louis Maine and Privates Catteau, Constantin and a Prussian named Wenzel — fixed bayonets, fired a valedictory volley and plunged to their deaths in a tsunami of sombreros." A member of the French Foreign Legion salutes American soldiers as they march by during a parade June 4, 2014, in the streets of Carentan, France. The parade was part of the commemorative 70th anniversary of D-Day. (Sgt. 1st Class Abram Pinnington/Army)
The defeat of the French Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Fu which led to the involvement of Great Britain and the U.S.A. In Vietnam. http://foreignlegion.info/battle-of-dien-bien-phu/
...the best gift, I ever got! Bill Murray: Replica French Foreign Legion Fort “Well, there used to be a show, Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion, that starred Buster Crabbe. He was an Olympic gold-medal winner, went on to play Flash Gordon, and then he had this show, and my parents got me this giant set that was a replica of a French Foreign Legion fort.”
I think somewhere down the line I had some of the FFL soldiers also. Wasn’t Buster Crabbe’s son also on the show as Captain Gallant’s son?