What are some cases of foreigners joining or fighting for another army? I dont mean necessarily as a foreign legion, but more as individual volunteers.
a few instances pop up to me, what are some more? >proposed English SS Division >French Charlemagne SS division >American pilots flying for Poland >American pilots flying for the RAF >Hungarians fighting for the Polish underground
there was also that weird battle during the closing days of WW2 where an American unit paired up with a Wehrmacht unit to fight another Wehrmacht/SS unit and liberate POW's, or something of that sort but I dont think that really counts as foreigners in armies
Spain had a foreign legion in the thirties but it eventually desolved because it was mostly just Spaniard and South American people using foreign aliases.
Charles Roberts
Most of the Carthaginian army ended up being volunteers from wherever they were fighting from, since Carthage itself didn't have a great amount of soldiers to draw from. Hannibal had to constantly get locals to join to keep up the fighting prowess of his army.
Liam Ortiz
Well, off the top of my head, without looking anything up, I can list:
>Dr. Livingstone's (the explorer) son moved to America for a time purely so that he could join the Union Army during the American civil war and help abolish slavery
>George Orwell (the writer) fighting with leftists against Franco during the Spanish Civil War
>Eddie Rickenbacker and other American pilots joining the French Air Force during WW1
>Modern day Mexicans joining the US army to get American citizenship
>The enormous number of foreigners who've gone to Syria to fight there for one side or another, ranging from hardcore jihadists to unbelievably naive westerners.
Weirdest story I ever saw was two Latino gangbangers from LA who went to Syria to fight for Assad for some reason that I'm sure makes sense only in their minds if they're somehow still alive.
Gavin Jackson
46% of the US Army in the Civil War was foreign-born.
Angel Barnes
Wasn't there a Russian Regiment on the Western front in WW1 that stayed to fight even after the Russian government had collapse?
Hunter Lewis
Why the fuck would they do that?
Austin Collins
>fight >or go home to the Bolsheviks Not much of a choice.
Joseph Foster
They did and they stayed there for quite a bit. They also contributed to the grumblings of revolution in the Trenches which contributed to the French mutanies.
Cooper Jones
probably 20-25% of the troops who fought in the US Civil War were foreign born, including BASED Cleburne (Irish and former British army officer). Lots of Germans fought for the Union including some former leaders of the failed 1848 Revolutions. David Livingston's son died in Andersonville (in fact the commandant of Andersonville was German).
Leo Sullivan
now with pic...
Joseph Watson
>Weirdest story I ever saw was two Latino gangbangers from LA who went to Syria to fight for Assad for some reason that I'm sure makes sense only in their minds if they're somehow still alive. Probably wanting to get some Assyrian qts. Who could blame them?
Ethan Morales
>Weirdest story I ever saw was two Latino gangbangers from LA who went to Syria to fight for Assad for some reason that I'm sure makes sense only in their minds if they're somehow still alive
Similar to this, Alois Brunner worked for Assad after WWII.
Jaxson Lopez
George Orwell is the one holding the pupper, Ernest Hemingway is behind is left shoulder
There was an Estonian division of the Waffen SS, 20th Waffen Grenadier division.
My grandfather was part of it which put him in the interesting position of being an ethnically Jewish Russian technically in the SS. His family were Czarist supporters and when the Soviets invaded Estonia they killed his father and sent him to forced labor, the Germans invaded and sent him to college. From his perspective the Nazis were the lesser of two evils.
Parker Price
Estonians formed a separate battalion (no. 200) in the Finnish army during WWII.
A weird American volunteer served in the Latvian ambulance corps during the Russian Civil war adjacent Latvian war of independence.
Swedes served in the Finnish military despite the policy of neutrality during the Winter War.
Christopher Lee volunteered to fight in the Winter War for the Finns, though never saw front line action.
A Latvian lieutenant colonel by the name of Voldemārs Ozols served first in the Russian military, then the Latvian - was thrown out due to disagreement - then served the Lithuanians, and finally the Republican army in the Spanish Civil war.
Latvian general Pēteris Radziņš was deputy chief of staff of the short-lived Ukrainian state in 1919.
The mad Prussian Baron Robert von Massow served with the CSA in the US Civil War.
James Miller
Just watched that one. Wow, I never knew that.
Carter Cruz
A korean named Yang Kyoungjong fought for Japan, the Soviets and Germany during WW2
Juan Sullivan
...
Gabriel Young
There was a group of Poles who went to fight for Haitians during their revolution.
The Czech legion during the First World War is an epic story of an army of Czechs fighting for the Czar against Austria to free their country. They eventually got caught up in the Russian Civil War and had a long journey through Siberia to the Pacific, going the long way around to their newly free country
I should clarify that the Poles didn't go to Haiti originally to fight for the slaves, but for Napoleon. Once the Poles got there though they sympathized with the slave revolution and the majority switched sides
Aaron Carter
Lauri Törni was one badass motherfucker.
Lucas Cruz
army of vlasov
Jose Brooks
There's a movie about the guy.
Isaiah Jackson
Basically all the Irish do
Landon Anderson
Blue Division was a Spainish foreign division for Germany during ww2. It became so large and was skilled enough that Stalin wanted an invasion of Spain. It was heavily made from nationalist civil war venterans iirc.
Jayden Jones
My American grandfather joined the war two years early by serving in the Canadian navy as a Radio operator. He eventually was transferred into the American navy (I think). Might've been the coast guard. He was in a ship en-route from Murmansk when they were hit by a U-boat torpedo; all of his friends in the crew quarters died.
Dominic Peterson
A Japanese guy fought for Italy in WW1 and taught karate to soldiers.
Zachary Brooks
Polish army wore a traditional 4 cornered peaked cap, a design dating back centuries. The Polish Airforce was new and wore modern round peaked caps.
Easton Reed
>Ernst Jünger joined French forces as a young man and was in Africa for a while before WW1 broke out.
Hunter Nelson
>The Saint Patrick's Battalion (Spanish: Batallón de San Patricio), formed and led by John Riley, was a unit of 175 to several hundred immigrants (accounts vary) and expatriates of European descent who fought as part of the Mexican Army against the United States in the Mexican–American War of 1846–8. Most of the battalion's members had deserted or defected from the United States Army.
Jace Thomas
why did paddies fight for the Mexicans? Was anti-Irish sentiment that bad?
Isaiah Roberts
>Might've been the coast guard
Are you sure you don't mean the Merchant Marines?
Xavier Fisher
brits fighting for isis
Christopher Howard
A bunch of Catholics arrive to a new country, they have to enlist to fight in a war. They are supposed to fight another bunch of Catholics who are fighting agaisnt some Protestant who are trying to get some land from them.
I wonder why the Irish identified with the Mexicans here...
Hunter Perez
There was a lot of foreign volunteers in the croatian army during the balkan wars especially french and german
Xavier Cox
During world war 2 Polish officials-in-exile cooperated with Japan, and sent agents with Japanese papers to gather intel on USSR in embassies, given next to Japanese.
Also Muslims Bosnian and Indian SS units are worth a mention
Anthony Jenkins
Why did he fight for the Republicucks?
Dylan Cooper
Read again the names in OP pic. That "Cooper" is Merian C. Cooper (who, by the by, was behind several other really great movies)
Nathaniel Fisher
US Civil War, the CSA had Kelly's Irish Brigade, and hoards of Irish fighting on the Union side.
The Varangian Guard were always foreigners, with a heavy Anglo-Saxon element post 1066
During the spanish Civil war the "brigadas internacionales" fought for the cuck(Republican) side and they came from very different parts; US(formed the Licoln brigade), UK, France...
At first they were heroes of socialism and the revolution, then after some time they were treated like shit with things like taking out their passport as soon as they came or sending them specifically to the worst parts of the conflict.
There was also an Irish brigade under the nationalist side, but they lasted even less.
I'm not counting Italy or Germany; they fought in the conflict but for the interest and direction of their own countries, not the Spanish command.
After the Spanish civil war is when we get very weird things:
The winners, nationalist, sent the blue brigades formed by volunteers, that lets be honest; they went in a mix of ideology and the idea that they would rather die from a bullet than from hunger. In 1942 most came back as Franco started to see a power shift(right call in the pragmatic sense), but a nucleus of hardcore voluntaries formed the blue legion that stayed until the very end of the war.
On the republican side you get a shit load of things.
>The refugees that went to the USSR ended up joining the soviet army and fighting as paratroopers. >Other refugees went to France and from here you find that some joined the resistance, others actually joined the French army and even participated in the liberation of Paris(although not as the first ones as some claim).
And as some have already told you, the Spanish foreign legion lasted until the 1930s, but I don't know why they abolished the concept, I think foreign legions are a pretty good idea.
Lincoln Lee
You can´t have a foreign legion without foreigners.
Nicholas Gutierrez
Flag of Partido Liberal Mexicano.svg Caryl ap Rhys Pryce
There are infinite examples of this shit. Armies being composed exclusively by people from the country it represents is a pretty new idea.
Juan Moore
A bunch of yugoslavs that got captured by the russians and became a volunteer corps that helped Romania fight against the Mackensen's german troops in Dobrogea during WW1.
They had to cross the Aegean Sea, then navigate almost all of its Mediterranean length to Gibraltar, navigate along the Atlantic off the Iberian Peninsula to enter the North Sea Channel, and again take the route of the Atlantic, in order to finally land, after a thousand-mile journey, at Murmansk, the harbor free all year round of the ice from the Barents Sea. From Murmansk, another thousand kilometers, this time on land, via train, through the endless Russian steps to Odessa. And then they were sent to Dobrogea/Dobruja.
Xavier Sanders
>JCHEA MAYNGE JUS LIE CAWADOODY MAYNGE WE GODDA GEDDA EGYPT OR WHUDEVA MAYGNE CHOO GNOE ESE??
