Seegaara? Zigarette?
It happened 80 years ago this week, 14 June 1945, Stuttgart, Germany.
Official period caption: “Goumiers from a Moroccan tabor trade tobacco with a local resident. No tobacco supplies arrive in the town.” The men are from the 3rd GTM. Note the slung M1903A3 Springfields and GI webgear and boots.
Réf. : TERRE 10622-L39 by Vincent Verdu/ECPAD/Défense
France’s tough local reliables, the Goumiers were a Berber gendarmerie force intended to carry out patrols or reconnaissance missions on Moroccan territory. With some 121 company-sized Goums on hand in 1940, they were distinctive in their brightly colored wool djellaba cloaks with a hood (koub) to protect the soldier in harsh weather, loose gandoura blouses, naala ox skin sandals attached with palm cords, short séroual pants that ended in the mid-leg, a wool head covering, and leather choukara satchels in place of the more traditional French musette bag.
One of the most famous photos of a Moroccan goumier, from Yank magazine, shows one sharpening an M1905 bayonet for his M1903A3 Springfield rifle while wearing a French Adrian-style helmet
Fighting early on in support of the Free French, a regiment of Goumiers (1er GSM) was created in May 1940, while, post-Torch, four brigade-sized GTMs, or Grouping of Moroccan tabors, were stood up as light infantry with American-supplied equipment (hence the M1903s). Landing in Sicily, Italy, and France, they took the war all the way to VE-Day.
Collectively, the Goumiers racked up 26 unit citations for their WWII service. In all, they suffered more than 8,000 casualties fighting in Europe, about one-third of their strength.
https://polldaddy.com/js/rating/rating.jsAlso infamous for war crimes on the Italian front, especially rapes, to the extent that a new verb was coined in Italian at the time, marocchinare: to commit (mass) rape. On the one hand, one wanders if there was some racist basis in targeting the Moroccans (aided, no doubt, by enemy propaganda), on the other one has to admit that none of the other French colonial troops (Algerians and Tunisians) were accused of such misconduct.
Indeed