so long miss susan travers

[kepiblanc]

Susan Travers, French Foreign Legion's only woman member, matricule 22166 and completed the rank as Adjudant-chef. She died in Paris aged 94.

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[Hoss68]

Susan Travers, who has died in Paris aged 94, was the only woman to have joined the French Foreign Legion. English by birth, she came to regard the legion as her true family and played a key part in the breakout by its troops from Rommel's siege of the desert fortress of Bir Hakeim in 1942.

When war came in 1939, Travers was living in the South of France, where she had grown up, and she joined the Croix Rouge, the French Red Cross. She had previously led the rather inconsequential life of a socialite, but the challenges that now faced her gave her a purpose for the first time. Although her dislike of blood and illness made her a less than ideal nurse, she soon realised her ambition to become an ambulance driver, and in 1940 accompanied the French expeditionary force sent to help the Finns in the winter war against the Russians.

France fell to the Nazis while she was in Scandinavia, and so she made her way to London, where she volunteered as a nurse with General Charles de Gaulle's Free French Forces. She was attached to the 13th Demi-Brigade of the Legion Etrangere (about half the legion had stayed loyal, the others throwing in their lot with Vichy) and sailed for West Africa, where she witnessed the abortive attack on Dakar.

She was then posted to Eritrea and took on the hazardous job of driving for senior officers. The desert roads were often mined and subject to enemy attack, and she survived a number of crashes, as well as being wounded by shellfire. Her dash and pluck quickly endeared her to the legionnaires, who nicknamed her "La Miss". For her part, she admired the legion's code of "honneur et fidelite", and formed good friendships with many of her comrades, among them Pierre Mesmer, later prime minister of France.

She also enjoyed several romantic liaisons, notably with a tall White Russian prince, Colonel Dimitri Amilakvari, but none of these proved lasting. Then, in June 1941, her world was transformed. The cause was Colonel Marie-Pierre Koenig, her commanding officer, whose new driver she became. Although he was married, they quickly fell for each other - he wooing her with roses when she was in hospital with jaundice - and although it was impossible to show affection for each other in public, they enjoyed a happy few months together while posted to Beirut.

This idyll was ended when their unit was attached to the 8th Army and, in the spring of 1942, sent to hold the bleak fort of Bir Hakeim, at the southern tip of the Allies' defensive line in the Western Desert. At the start of May Italian and German forces attacked in strength, Rommel having told his men that it would take them 15 minutes to crush any opposition; the 8th Army hoped the fort would last a week. Instead, under Koenig's command, the 1000 legionnaires and 1500 other Allied troops held out for 15 days, and Bir Hakeim became, for all Frenchmen who resisted the Nazis, a symbol of hope and defiance. With all ammunition and - in temperatures of 51C - water exhausted, Koenig resolved to lead a breakout at night through the minefields and three concentric cordons of German panzers that encircled Bir Hakeim. Travers was to drive both him and Amilakvari.

The attempt was swiftly discovered, however, when a mine exploded, and with tracer lighting up the night sky and tank shells hurtling towards her, Travers took the lead. Determined to get her passengers to safety, she pressed the accelerator of her Ford to the floor and burst through the German lines, blazing a trail for the other Allied vehicles to follow. Although her vehicle was struck by a score of bullets, and on one occasion she drove into a laager of parked panzers, she reached the British lines. Of the 3700 Allied troops who had been at Bir Hakeim, more than 2400 escaped, including 650 legionnaires, and Koenig became the hero of France. Travers was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Ordre du Corps d'Arme for her feat.

With Koenig's career in the ascendant, he ended his affair with Travers soon afterwards, much to her grief. Nevertheless, she remained with the legion through the fighting in Italy and France until the end of the war, acting as both a driver and a nurse to the wounded and the dying. By May 1945 "I had become the person I'd always wanted to be" and, not wanting any other life, applied to join the legion officially. She took care to omit her gender from the form, and her application was accepted. She was appointed an officer in the logistics division, and so became the only woman ever to serve with the legion.

Travers was born in London. Her father, a naval officer, had married her mother for her money and the union was not a happy one. For Travers, childhood was comfortable but strict, and she had her most enjoyable times with her grandmother in Devon, away from her parents. She was sent to school at St Mary's, Wantage - an experience which she did not remember fondly - but during World War I her father had been put in charge of marine transport at Marseilles (where his own father had once been British consul), and in 1921 he decided to move the family to Cannes.

The Riviera was starting to become fashionable, and Travers quickly took to the way of life there. Inspired by the deeds of a neighbour, Suzanne Lenglen, she also became a fine tennis player. Being a girl, she had been more or less ignored by her father and her only brother, and by her late teens had developed a craving for male company: "Most of all," she wrote later, "I wanted to be wicked." Sent to a finishing school in Florence, she succumbed at 17 for the first time to the blandishments of a man, a hotel manager named Hannibal.

By her own admission, she spent the next decade caught up in a rather vapid, if enjoyable, round of skiing and tennis parties all over Europe, thinking nothing of travelling to Budapest or Belgrade for a week's entertainment. With her gamine figure, striking features and blue eyes, she was a constant and willing object of male attention, heedless of her father's reproach that she was "une fille facile". It was a careless approach to life brought to an abrupt halt by the onset of conflict in 1939.

After the war she served for a time in Indo-China, but she resigned her commission in 1947 to bring up her children from her marriage that year to a legion NCO, Nicholas Schlegelmilch. He contracted an illness in the tropics in 1949 and, after spending 18 months in hospital, was never the same person as before. Nevertheless, they remained together; after his death in 1995 she continued to live in France.

In 1956 Travers was awarded the Medaille Militaire in recognition of her bravery at Bir Hakeim. The task of pinning the medal on her lapel fell to Koenig, who by then was minister of defence. Forty years later, in 1996, she was given the legion's highest award, the Legion d'Honneur, in recognition of her unique part in the force's history. She published a memoir, Tomorrow to be Brave, in 2000.Travers is survived by two sons.

se reposer dans la madame de paix...

[kepiblanc]

General Pierre Koenig -- "She was exceptionally brave."
merci camarade "la miss"

[kepiblanc]

se reposer dans la madame de paix...
gracias hoss

SUSAN TRAVERS

Chevalier de la Légion d’hormeur

Médaille militaire

Croix de Guerre 1939-1945 avec palme et étoile de vermeil

Médaille commemorative 1939-1945 avec agrafes "Afrique", "Italie" et "Liberation"

Médaille coloniale avec agrafes "Erythrée", "Lybie", "Bir-Hakeim", "Tunisie" et "Extreme-Orient"

Mérite Syrien de 4e classe

Croix de la Liberté Finlandaise

Officer du Nicham Ifikar