PHOTOS: Foreign Legion Saharan Battery from 1939 to 1942

The latest part in our series on interesting photographs presents an exceptionally rare collection depicting members of the first officially established Saharan unit of the French Foreign Legion, spanning from mid-1939 to the weeks following the Allied landings in North Africa in late 1942. These images include the only publicly known photographs of a Foreign Legion Saharan unit taken before the Second World War.

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80 years ago: Foreign Legion’s last artillery batteries were disbanded

With the conflict in Ukraine, a long-neglected component of Western armies, artillery, has once again stepped to the fore. It might come as a surprise to many Foreign Legion enthusiasts that a 1920 law allowed the Foreign Legion to establish, along with a cavalry regiment, also a separate artillery regiment. Equally surprising might be the fact that, in 1941, the legionnaires probably served in as many as 11 artillery batteries at the same time. The last of these units were disbanded 80 years ago, in 1944.

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