French Foreign Legion’s 13th Demi-Brigade Fought in World War II

 | Military History  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

British command finally authorized a nighttime breakout. The Free French went out in vehicles and on foot. Susan Travers later recalled her adventures in driving Koenig and Amilakvari: “Shells were falling around us like rain and sudden, violent explosions tore the night, showering our car with burning metal….The wounded who could walk were ordered to get out and continue on foot to lessen the weight of the vehicles picking their way through the mines. From starting off as a reasonably well-planned evacuation it had become a shambolic flight.” Soon on their own, Koenig, Amilakvari and Travers came within yards of a German camp and shot off into the darkness, with German gunfire behind them.

The last stragglers out of Bir Hacheim reached British lines three days later. Covering the flanks of the pullout had proved more costly for the 13th DBLE than the siege: 11 killed, 32 wounded, 37 captured. One of the captured, a Sergeant Eckstein, had an arm amputated just hours before the breakout, but he refused to ride. Luckily, his German nationality went undetected, and he survived captivity.

If Bir Hacheim was the demi-brigade’s most heroic episode, its most tragic moment came perhaps five months later, on the opening night of the Battle of El Alamein. Ordered to take the 1,300-foot ridge of Oaret el Himeimat, Amilakvari had misgivings. He told the demi-brigade’s hospitalized Yugoslav chaplain: “I had a horrible dream. I was badly wounded and someone was giving me the last rites and it wasn’t you.” Their evening assault was pinned down by German machine gun fire, and they were counterattacked at dawn by armor and the Luftwaffe. While only 11 Legionnaires were killed and 60 wounded, one of the dead was Prince Dimitri Amilakvari. A shell fragment had pierced his cloth-and-leather kepi. He had once said, “With or without helmet, death knows when it is your turn.” A French chaplain administered the last rites, after which he was buried wrapped in his trademark cape.

Angry at the demi-brigade’s failure to seize the objective, British General Bernard Law Montgomery pulled it out of the battle and the campaign itself until its final weeks, in Tunisia. The 13th DBLE would not again see action until almost a year later, when it was sent to Italy. There it fought its own mini Monte Cassino against a Renaissance castle atop Monte Radicofani north of Rome. Six volunteers with rope and pitons finally climbed up from behind and surprised the Germans with a hail of grenades. Just two months’ service in Italy cost the demi-brigade 466 casualties, 25 percent of its strength.

On August 16, 1944, the 13th DBLE returned to France as part of the invasion of the south, helping to take Toulon and Lyons. The demi-brigade was by then so desperate for men that it took in as a unit 650 Ukrainian deserters from the Waffen SS without bothering to assimilate them.

The bitter winter fighting in Alsace around Strasbourg and Colmar cost the 13th DBLE over 40 percent losses, a total of 1,026 casualties. One surrounded company had a German Legionnaire ask a Wehrmacht sentry in the dark for directions and dispositions. He then knifed the sentry, and the unit fought its way out. By March 1945, the demi-brigade was down to 700 men when complaints by its members to Paris about tactics and shortages of equipment and recruits led to its being shoved to the military backwater of the Alps. Meanwhile, other Legion units that had not joined the fight until the Allied occupation of North Africa were allowed to drive on into Germany.

Although the 13th DBLE was the only unit in the French military to wear the Gaullist Cross of Lorraine on its shoulder patch, it got little recognition for its contributions despite the fact that Legionnaires, who come from around the globe, “become French by spilled blood,” as the well-known adage goes. Even Douglas Porch’s history of the Legion says the demi-brigade “finished an interesting but poor third” (as if the horrors of combat had Nielson ratings). Public recognition back in the French homeland went to the Resistance and the regular division led by the legendary Lt. Gen. Philippe Leclerc. Legionnaires had to be satisfied with dying for France, or in the words of the demi-brigade’s greatest hero, Amilakvari, “The only way for us foreigners to repay our debt to France is to die for her.” By that standard then, the dead are all French and have no debt.

As for the living, public recognition may well not have mattered to the grizzled, battle-scarred men of the 13th Demi-Brigade who survived the war. After all, the motto of the French Foreign Legion is Legio Patria Nostra — “The Legion is our homeland.”

This article was written by John W. Osborn Jr. and originally published in the December 2006 issue of Military History magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Military History magazine today!

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

Tags: Historical Conflicts, World War II

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.