100km a day Across the Desert and all the Rivets you can eat
While traveling around New Orleans, I often come across old French Foreign Legion insignia in antique and curious goods shops. My guess is that Francophiles and Cajuns in the area often, at one point, would sign up for life in the old Legion Etrangere and then return home at the end of the contract.
Holding their old insignia as souvenirs of places long gone, these items would eventually ebb away from them when they passed on to the great barracks in the sky.
Echoes of history, I suppose.
This one is appropriate today, that of Compagnie Montée du 4e REI, qui devient Automobile (CMA/4), a unit that only existed between 1933 and 1940.
The badge, featuring a running ostrich inside of green cog with a grenade and horseshoe, was created in 1934 by the company commander, Captain Gaultier, and made by Arthus Bertrand, Paris Depose. There is also an example with a black Ostrich head.
The outfit was created as the horse-mounted scout company or Compagnie Montée (1ere CM) of the 1st Foreign Regiment (1er REI) in the early 1900s. In September 1920, it became the mounted company of the 4th Foreign Regiment (4 REI), then dubbed CM/4e REI.
In April 1933, they ditched their horses and became a motorized company (Compagnie Montée, Automobile) of the same regiment, or CMA/4 REI, and were based at Ighrem in Morocco.
The nearly battalion-strength company was composed of some 284 officers, NCOs, and legionnaires in a command platoon, service unit, and two armored platoons with AMC Panhard 165/175 armored cars, along with an outsized “platoon” of 120 legionnaires transported by truck (14 Panhard 179 armored trucks, including two with radios, and a dozen Laffly LC2 light Saharan trucks with Veil-Picard “thorn proof” tires).
The Panhard 165, just look at all those rivets
I am pretty sure there is a CMA/4 ostrich cog on the top of this desert-bound Berliet VUDB armored car, of which only 62 were made from 1929 to 1932. 50 of these were used by France in North Africa starting in 1934, with the Legion’s mobile units.
Light platoon of CMA/4, at Forum el Hassan in the mid-1930s, equipped with camouflaged Panhard AMD 165/175s. (Via Osprey MAA 325)
In early 1934, CMA/4 participated in the Anti-Atlas campaign in the far south of Morocco– the first fully motorized operation of the French Army– led by Colonel Trinquet.
Under Captain Louis-Antoine Gaultier– a tough officer who had fought as an enlisted man in the 4th Zouaves in the Great War and would eventually retire in 1955 as a general and Commandeur de la Légion d’honneur with three Croix de guerre in his cabinet– they were very involved in the fighting in Morocco. Eventually, the unit was split into two; and half would build and occupy the post at remote Forum el Hassan, while the other half established the post of Fort Tindouf (Ain Ben Tili) on the westernmost tip of Algeria near the border with Mauritania, both very “Waiting for the Barbarians” kind of places.
From there, they would conduct long-range patrols to Bir Moghrein (Fort Trinquet), a distance of nearly 500 km as the crow flies– or ostrich runs!
The company was dissolved during the Petian era, post Armistice, on 15 November 1940– some 85 years ago this month– and was combined with other units to become a mixed mounted unit of the 2nd Foreign Regiment, 12e Cie. Mixte Montee/2e REI, which further drifted off into history by 1944.
All that is left of CMA/4 are badges such as this one, and the forts they built in the swirling desert, which were abandoned when the French left North Africa in 1962.
Fort Tindouf (Ain Ben Tili), in northeast Mauritania.
