Erwin Rommel Frustrated By French Foreign Legion At Bir Hacheim

German commander Erwin Rommel was pushing hard toward Cairo, but a remote desert outpost manned by the French Foreign Legion would upset his plans.

This article appears in: Fall 2020

by Edward L. Bimberg When Brig. Gen. Joseph-Pierre Koenig, commander of the 1st Free French Brigade, surveyed the area he had just been ordered to defend, he must have been mightily discouraged. It was at the end (and most desolate part) of the so-called Gazala Line, a yet to be completed series of British Eighth Army defensive positions that were strung out through the Libyan desert, from Ain-el-Gazala on the Mediterranean coast to Bir Hacheim some 40 miles inland. The Ever-Unappealing Desert