Free French 2nd Armored Division
(1943–1945)
France
Brotherhood Rank #41
“They said France was dead. We came back to prove she still had enough blood left to make a mess.”
— anonymous tank crewman, 2e DB, Paris, 1944
Paris, August 1944
The streets reek of cordite, diesel, and champagne. Machine-gun chatter rattles off cobblestones while Parisians kiss strangers between bursts of tracer fire. A Sherman tank named Romilly grinds through barricades like a drunk at closing time, draped in tricolor flags and the ghosts of every Frenchman who’d ever refused to bow.
The Free French 2nd Armored Division—Leclerc’s bastards, de Gaulle’s vindication—had come home to reclaim a corpse of a country. They weren’t clean soldiers. They were angry, exiled, half-mad veterans of every colonial hellhole the tricolor had ever flown over. They’d fought in Africa, bled in Italy, hitched a ride on American steel, and now roared into the capital like revenants dragging the word “France” back from the grave.
They were the proof that defeat wasn’t genetic.
Origin: From Sand and Shame
The division was born in the Sahara, 1940, out of rage and sandstorms. Philippe Leclerc—once a minor noble, now the poster child for French obstinacy—refused to accept Marshal Pétain’s armistice. While the rest of France sat down, he got up, stole a handful of tanks and trucks, and marched across the desert like a man allergic to surrender.
At Kufra, Chad, and Fezzan, his men carved an oath in the sand: they would not rest until the tricolor flew over Strasbourg. No one laughed then, but they should have—because at that point, Strasbourg was 3,000 miles away and heavily guarded by Nazis.
By 1943, the Free French 2nd Armored Division (2e Division Blindée) had taken shape in North Africa, equipped with American Sherman tanks, halftracks, and the kind of vengeful zeal that turns infantry into instruments of national therapy.
The Madness and the Method
They were mongrels—African tirailleurs, Spanish Republicans, Gaullists, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, and men who’d deserted from every other army on Earth. They spoke ten languages and cursed in twenty. But when Leclerc spoke, they listened.
They didn’t fight to defend; they fought to reclaim. Every kilometer they advanced was a personal insult avenged. They drove through Normandy in August 1944 like a hurricane of red, white, and blue spite, smashing through German lines with a grin that said this one’s for 1940.
At Alençon, they cut through Panzer divisions like tin cans. At Argentan, they boxed in retreating Germans so the Americans could slaughter them. But it was Paris where they earned immortality.
Liberation: The Party and the Hangover
They weren’t supposed to go to Paris yet—the Allies wanted to bypass it. Eisenhower didn’t want a street fight in a city of monuments. Leclerc didn’t care. He promised the Resistance he’d be there “tomorrow night,” and when a Frenchman makes a romantic promise like that, best stand clear.
On August 24th, his advance guard—Captain Dronne’s halftrack column—rolled into the capital and fired the first shots of freedom. The next day, the 2nd Armored stormed in full. Tanks named Montmirail, Champaubert, Eylau—each christened for old Napoleonic victories—fought their way past the Hôtel de Ville and the Seine bridges.
The people poured into the streets waving flags and wine bottles, screaming, “Vive Leclerc!” as snipers popped from rooftops. The 2e DB fought, drank, and liberated simultaneously.
When the German general von Choltitz surrendered the city, he handed his pistol to Leclerc—a man who’d crossed a desert to keep that appointment.
Their Peak: Strasbourg or Bust
Leclerc’s oath came due on November 23, 1944, when his tanks entered Strasbourg. Snow on their treads, tricolor on the cathedral. They’d done it—the same men who’d started as desert rats now parked in the heart of Alsace. France was resurrected, though still missing a few limbs.
The 2e DB kept fighting into Germany, rolling through Bavaria, Dachau, and Berchtesgaden like ghosts settling old debts.
Virtues and Vices, in Blood and Iron
They didn’t retreat—because they’d already done that once, in 1940, and it had nearly killed their soul. The men of Leclerc’s 2nd Armored held lines that had no right to exist, outnumbered and under-supplied, driven not by orders or logistics but by something far more combustible: pride and spite. When Leclerc gave the word to move, they didn’t advance—they lunged. Fast, surgical, relentless, their armored thrusts made the Wehrmacht look slow, old, and suddenly mortal. They weren’t the deadliest unit on paper, but statistics have never captured the mathematics of vengeance; wherever rage and memory could substitute for armor plating, their kill ratio soared.
Ruthlessness came to them not as cruelty but as certainty. They didn’t torch villages or posture for terror—they simply reduced enemy armor to slag and then drove over it, belting out La Marseillaise like a national exorcism. Their loyalty was absolute: to Leclerc, to de Gaulle, and above all to the real France—the one that refused to kneel while the other wore collaboration’s cheap cologne. From the sands of Kufra to the boulevards of Paris, they forged a legend that smelled of diesel and redemption, a myth hammered out in steel and exhaust.
The Allies admired them, the Germans feared them, and the Parisians adored them. Even Patton—whose compliments came harder than his whiskey—gave a curt nod. In the end, their impact reached beyond military triumph. They didn’t just win back a city; they resurrected a nation’s dignity, and in doing so, rebuilt its army and its soul. That, in the long arithmetic of war, is far deadlier than any bullet ever fired.
Downfall and Aftermath
Victory is a cruel god. Leclerc died two years later in a plane crash, the kind of ending you’d call poetic if it weren’t so absurd. His division carried on, but peace is the one battle no army ever wins cleanly.
They faded into history, replaced by NATO acronyms and Cold War bureaucracy. But every time a French tank rumbles down the Champs-Élysées on Bastille Day, it’s Leclerc’s ghost driving it.
Notable members
1. General Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque — The aristocrat who traded titles for tank grease and turned exile into crusade. He marched across deserts on fumes and pride, swore an oath in sand, and delivered it in snow at Strasbourg. He didn’t just liberate France; he reanimated it. When Death finally caught him in a plane crash, even the wreckage saluted. “He promised France he’d return—and even Death had to make an appointment.”
2. Captain Raymond Dronne — The man who liberated Paris by accident and attitude. Drove into the capital before anyone told him he could, which is how revolutions usually start. His halftrack rolled past snipers and champagne-drunk Parisians like a prophet of payback. History forgot his name, but Paris still remembers his headlights. “He asked permission later, forgiveness never.”
3. Sergeant José Millán-Astay — A Spanish exile who fought fascism so long it forgot which language he cursed in. He swapped one lost cause for another, slaying tyrants like they were unpaid debts. Every bullet he fired was revenge, every step defiance. Died laughing in Alsace, having finally run out of dictators. “Two dictators, one life—call it even.”
4. Lieutenant Jean Simon — A tank officer built from discipline and déjà vu. He liberated France once, then spent the next thirty years fighting its ghosts from Indochina to Algeria. Calm in fire, furious in peace, he was Leclerc’s legacy in a uniform that never cooled. Age didn’t kill him—disillusionment did. “Liberated France once, spent the rest of his life trying to remind her.”
5. René de Tonquédec — A philosopher who decided God deserved suppressive fire. He quoted Augustine while shelling Panthers, proving theology works better with a trigger. His faith was armor, his gun a pulpit, and his death outside Paris the shortest sermon ever preached. “Faith, Fire, and a Forty-Five.”
Suggested Sources
Leclerc de Hauteclocque, Philippe. Mémoires d’un Chef de Guerre. Paris: Éditions Berger-Levrault, 1946.
Dronne, Raymond. Carnets de Route: De Paris à Berchtesgaden. Paris: Éditions France-Empire, 1948.
Porch, Douglas. The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
Shirer, William L. The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969.
Beevor, Antony. D-Day: The Battle for Normandy. London: Viking, 2009.
Wikipedia. “Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed [date]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Leclerc_de_Hauteclocque.
(Unverified; possibly written by someone convinced Leclerc is a supermarket cheese brand.)