PHOTOS: A Legionnaire’s Photographs from My Tho, French Indochina, 1947–1949

This is a new part in our PHOTOS series. Once again, we turn to French Indochina — this time to southern Vietnam in the late 1940s. The photographs presented here were shared with us by a French reader whose grandfather, Emile Louis André, served there with the Foreign Legion. His granddaughter, Ms. Alcina Machado, provided some basic details about his service, while the rest had to be researched or pieced together from the photographs themselves. She also shared a few lines about her grandfather’s life, giving us a glimpse into the personal story of one of the tens of thousands of legionnaires who were deployed to the First Indochina War (1946–1954).

A Difficult Start

Emile Louis André was born in September 1926 in Paris. His mother, unmarried and only nineteen at the time, left him in the care of her own mother; his father officially acknowledged him but played no part in his upbringing. Raised by his maternal grandmother in a working-class neighborhood of the French capital, Emile grew up through the hard years of the Great Depression.

As a child, he appears to have been strongly influenced by a Polish man who lodged with him and his grandmother. When war broke out in 1939, the Pole enlisted in the Foreign Legion — as many Eastern European immigrants in France did at the time — to help fight the Germans. It was likely Emile’s first encounter with the Legion, and it seems to have left a lasting impression.

After France fell in the spring of 1940, Emile spent the remaining war years under German occupation — an experience that must have shaped him in ways that are difficult to fully measure.

The end of the war in 1945, however, brought no relief. His beloved grandmother — the only real family he had ever known — died, leaving the young man, barely eighteen, completely alone in the world. What followed was a downward spiral not uncommon among young people left without support in the chaos of postwar France. In August 1945, Emile was arrested and sentenced to a year in prison for attempted theft. After his release, with no family to return to and few prospects ahead of him, he made a decision that would define the rest of his life: he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion.

In the Foreign Legion

Emile joined the Foreign Legion in February 1947, at the age of twenty. He was sent through the port of Marseille to the Legion’s headquarters in Sidi Bel Abbès — located in Algeria, at that time part of French North Africa — where he was assigned to the Foreign Regiments Joint Depot (DCRE) responsible for receiving and processing new recruits.

His basic training lasted only two months, half the usual duration — a clear sign of how urgently the Legion needed reinforcements for the escalating war in Indochina. By late May 1947, Emile had arrived in the Far East and was stationed in what was then still called Cochinchina — the southernmost part of French Indochina, roughly corresponding to today’s southern Vietnam.

Unfortunately, Emile’s service records contain no details about his assignment in Indochina — no unit designation, no operational notes. However, three of his photographs bear the handwritten inscription “Mytho, 11 September 1947,” and the armored boats visible in several images helped narrow down his probable unit: the little-known 4th Armored Boat Company (Compagnie de Bateaux Blindés) of the 71st Colonial Engineer Battalion, officially designated as 71e BCG/4e CBB (also 71/4). This was one of several engineering units of the Foreign Legion that were assigned to French Engineer Corps formations operating in Indochina.

The 4e CBB was established in My Tho — a town in the heart of the Mekong Delta, roughly 45 miles (75 km) southwest of Saigon — in April 1947, initially as a small platoon of legionnaires. On July 1, 1947, it was upgraded to an independent company, and that September it was incorporated into the 71st Colonial Engineer Battalion.

Operating from its base in My Tho, the company was tasked with securing river traffic on the Mekong and its dense network of tributaries and canals. Its duties ranged from patrols and troop transport to resupplying remote outposts and carrying out construction work across Cochinchina.

By 1948, the unit had grown considerably and took part in numerous combat operations, seeing repeated engagements with Viet Minh forces. One of the heaviest clashes for the unit occurred in the Mekong Delta in April 1949. By May of that year, the company’s flotilla had expanded to five armored pinnaces, five armored barges, and three Unicraft vessels. In June 1949, the unit successfully participated in Operation Jonquille in the Plain of Reeds — a vast inland wetland in the Mekong Delta — fighting through strong enemy resistance.

Emile took part in these operations and did not come through them unscathed. He was wounded by shell fragments — pieces of metal that would remain embedded in his body for the rest of his life. He also contracted dysentery and severe malaria, diseases that were as much a part of the Indochina experience as combat itself.

In September 1949, after completing the standard two-year overseas tour, Emile returned to Algeria and was granted two months of military leave. He then underwent further instruction at Sidi Bel Abbès with the 1st Foreign Infantry Regiment (1er REI; now 1er RE).

In June 1950, he was assigned to the 11th Company of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Foreign Infantry Regiment (4e REI), stationed in Morocco, also part of French North Africa at the time. A year later, when the 4e REI was considerably downsized, his unit was reorganized and redesignated as the 1st Company of the 1st Battalion.

Emile returned to Sidi Bel Abbès in September 1951, where he was assigned to the Foreign Legion Joint Depot (Dépôt Commun de la Légion Étrangère, DCLE). This was the successor to the DCRE where he had begun his Legion career and a unit comparable to today’s 1st Foreign Regiment, based in Aubagne, France. Having completed his five-year contract, he left the Legion in January 1952.

Civilian Life and Its Shadows

After leaving the Legion, Emile settled in Paris, married, and had nine children. He worked as a truck driver and later in military vehicle maintenance.

But much like his childhood — spent without parents, in the shadow of economic crisis and then war — the final years of his life were marked by hardship. The alcohol-based treatment he had received for malaria, combined with the painful memories of Indochina — a subject that remained strictly off-limits within the family — took a heavy toll on his personal life. His wife eventually left him, a blow that devastated him deeply. Then came a diagnosis of tongue cancer. Doctors were forced to partially amputate his tongue, but the disease continued to spread. Emile Louis André died of cancer in 1991.

His granddaughter, Alcina Machado, remembers Emile with deep affection. She describes him as a man of strong character — straightforward and tough, but someone who always treated others with kindness and respect. According to her, his life experiences, however painful, enabled him to raise his children with firm moral values and to give them the fatherly love and presence he himself had never received.

Yet Indochina was a door that remained firmly shut. Emile never spoke of the war with his family. The only tangible links to his years with the Foreign Legion were a small collection of photographs — the ones presented here — and the metal fragments still lodged in his body, which he would sometimes remove with tweezers when they worked their way back to the surface of his skin.

I would like to thank Alcina for entrusting these photographs to our website and for taking the time to share her grandfather’s story. It is through contributions like hers that pieces of history, which might otherwise be forgotten, find their way to a wider audience.

P.S. If you have similar rare material from the Indochina War or other periods of Foreign Legion history, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Click on the previews to enlarge them:

Photos - Foreign Legion Etrangere - 4th Armored Boat Company - 4 CBB - 1947-1949 — Barracks of the 4e CBB at *My Tho*, southern Vietnam, around 1947.

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