American Fighters in the Foreign Legion (Jerner Great War Memoirs Book 1)

In 1914 a group of young Americans found the only way they could volunteer to help defend France was to enlist in the Foreign Legion. This is the classic work on American Volunteers in the French Foreign Legion in the First World War. Written twelve years after the war by one of the original volunteers, it chronicles those Americans who joined the Legion to fight for France in 1914 and later. It also covers the men who transferred from the Legion to the Regular French Army, The Lafayette Escadrille, and to the American Army in 1917. It also provides a brief description of what the survivors did after the war. This remains THE book on this subject.

Siege At Dien Bien Phu

Siege at Dien Bien Phu is an historically accurate depiction of the the battle that ended French colonial rule in Vietnam. A rewrite of the novel "First a Torch", accepted by the French Foreign Legion as part of their official history in Vietnam, the book, and title, now better illustrates the events of the siege. The 14,000 French soldiers in the battle faced over 50,000 Viet Minh. Only about 3,000 French soldiers survived the battle and the subsequent internment.

The French Foreign Legion

What attracts men from 136 different nations to embrace the harsh military code of an army that requires them to lay down their lives for a country not their own, if ordered to do so by politicians whose language many of them hardly speak?

Douglas Boyd’s history of the Legion answers that question, with fifteen historic photographs and eleven battle/campaign maps.

Founded in 1831 to fight France’s colonial wars without spilling French blood, this mysterious army is today a world-class fighting force. Training is so tough that five recruits out of six are rejected, never to wear the coveted white kepi.

This is a world where fact exceeds the wildest fiction: men fighting literally to the last bullet at Camarón in Mexico in 1863; cooks and clerks with no parachute training volunteering to be dropped into beleaguered Dien Bien Phu in 1954 with the intention of dying beside their comrades; the paras who mutinied in Algeria to bring down the government of France; the heroes who dropped on Kolwezi to rescue thousands of European hostages.