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446:"Battalion of the Damned" actually was the name for BILOM, a French military unit made up of Frenchmen who had been imprisoned by French authorities for service in the German military. These men were given the option to serve in this unit in order to "make amends to the nation". They fought in Indochina but were never a part of the Foreign Legion.
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It's considered BS by many old
Legionaries and actually a form of Communist Black propaganda which wanted to portray the fight against the Viet Minh, and by inference the Viet Cong, as 'Nazi' and 'Fascist' and thus morally bankrupt. I was published in 1971 after all. Those ex-Nazis who certainly did
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Probably the latter. Prof. Douglas Porch in his seminal work on the Legion dismissed it as fiction. I have emailed back-and-forth quite a bit with Bill Brooks, who was in the Legion in the 70s, who has not a shred of doubt that it was fiction. Too bad. It was a great
505:, and he mentioned a retired Waffen-SS officer who lived in Bhutan for a great many years after the war. I doubt he was "Wagemuller", though short of waterboarding Elford (is he even still alive?", I doubt we'll ever know the truth about who his sources were.
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serve in the Legion in the 40's and 50's tended to keep their politics quiet and wouldn't have been boastful like the characters in this book. The Legion possessed people too who had suffered under the Nazis
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It's like those rumors you hear about
Skorzeny addressing the Special Warfare Center at Bragg in the late '50's- anyone who knows anything kept their mouth shut and is probably long-dead.
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On a slightly unrelated note, Tom told me when he was stationed in Panama in the late 1970s, his German-expat
Volkswagen mechanic was an alumnus of the 1st SS Panzer Division,
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I enjoyed the book. As to its authenticity, well who cares? After all, Bravo Two Zero has had its critics too.
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The author is also known as Eric Meyer and there are more books in the series
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I would not be too quick to dismiss the entire book as totally fictional
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I was discussing the book with LTC (Retired) Tom
Kratman, author of
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These include WWII prequels, a book set in
Afghanistan, etc.
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https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/4996978.Eric_Meyer
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