Harrison Forman’s Pictures of the First Indochina War

[earlymb]

In case these slipped through the cracks till now: monlegionnaire.wordpress.com/2016/12/20/harrison-formans-pictures-of-the-first-indochina-war/

[craigtx]

Thanks! A few there that I hadn't seen yet...

[Kenneth]

Everyone looks older than the average GI when I was in the service in the 1960s and almost none look especially muscular. But maybe I was a little younger than average, too.

[lew]

Thanks, early. Hadn't seen those before.

Dec 4, 2020 14:36:28 GMT -5 Kenneth said:

Everyone looks older than the average GI when I was in the service in the 1960s and almost none look especially muscular. But maybe I was a little younger than average, too.

The average age for military forces dropped notably after the mid-'50's. That age for US servicemen in WW2 was 26, and that's on par with other nation's militaries of the period

As for their physique, we can thank Legion record keeping for maintaining stats on individual legionnaires: the average weight gain of a legionnaire returning to Sidi Bel Abbes after service in Indochina was 20 pounds. Disease and malnutrition affected the French Union forces almost as badly as it did the Viet Minh. Compare these pictures with those of troops on combat ops in Algeria just a few years later and the difference is easily noticed.

[Kenneth]

For what it's worth, my father was drafted in WWII at the age of about 28 or 29. I was 19 when I went in the army in 1965. Regarding the Legion, however, I understood that they were frequently veterans of some other army before entering the FFL and so they would generally have been older than American draftees. I don't know about what a typical US serviceman would have been like between the wars, or for that matter, a French serviceman.