RAF Russian linguist, international businessman, music impresario, BBC Television Producer/Director, Douglas Boyd has been writing full-time since setting up home in a medieval farmhouse in south-west France thirty-five years ago. Perhaps the greatest praise of the book is the fact that legionnaires liked this history of their incredible army so much that they elected author Douglas Boyd an honorary ex-legionnaire. 'A tight and fascinating history of the nearly two centuries of the Legion's activities.' - Brig Anthony Hunter-Choat (UK's senior ex-legionnaire) 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. Training is so tough that five recruits out of six are rejected, never to wear the coveted white kepi.

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?ĭouglas Boyd’s history of the Legion answers that question, with fifteen historic photographs and eleven battle/campaign maps.įounded in 1831 to fight France’s colonial wars without spilling French blood, this mysterious army is today a world-class fighting force.

The french foreign legion douglas boyd