British Tommies return to Ypres again
May 27, 1940
In the last days of May the B.E.F., still assisted by the Belgian armies, held in bulldog grip the plains of Western Flanders behind Dunkirk, while the bulge on their right flank widened and the onrushing German mechanized columns moved to surround them and cut them off from the sea. Some of the fiercest fighting took place at Ypres, round the Menin Gate (seen above), the memorial to the British troops who fought and fell in the defense of Belgium during the First World War of 1914-18.

BRITISH AT MENIN GATE

Francisco Franco (left) and his patron (later cheerleader and minister) José Milan Astray.  Milan Astray was the founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion.  Unlike the French equivalent, this force was "recruited" more or less exclusively from Spanish citizens.  In the main, they were condemned criminals and similarly inclined reprobates.  Their intended function was to control Spain's turbulent North African territories.  The Legion, in its early days, was itself kept under control by means of iron discipline, enforced from the top down by Milan himself.  He, mind you, led from the front in the complicated Rif War, in which many officers who subsequently served the Nationalist cause in the Spanish Civil War earned their spurs.  Foremost among them was the modest-seeming, reactionary protégé of Milan, Francisco Franco.

Strangely enough, that iron discipline inspired general devotion to Milan, and to Franco, among the ranks of the Legion.  Along with the equally devoted Moorish forces, they followed Milan and Franco into the Spanish Civil War, operating at a level of brutality consistent with their North African experience.  Not that the other side were any less brutal, given the chance.  That was some civil war ... Best regards, JR.

Soldiers of Fortune are we ...

New Zealand gunners fire at the enemy from a captured German 75-mm anti-tank gun PaK 40 at the battle of Monte Cassino, Italy.