Le Bras armé de Saint-Michel

I wasn't sure what to blip on this day, it had been a long and semi productive one. I was looking at something at random and this was in there, it's just less than one centimetre across, and has a screw thread on the back so it can be fastened through something a bit like a rivet. I took the picture then tried to find out what it is...

I was pretty sure it was my father-in-law's but I wasn't sure what it is. Apparently it's the "Armed arm of St Michael" and part of the uniform of all paratroop units from metropolitan France. I'd always know he'd been a para, but it's only after his death and looking through the bits of paper we have on him that we found out the details.

During the second world war the Free French army in England was kitted out with lots of British stuff and organised along British lines, including creating their own SAS (called SAS in English with the same British motto and insignia). After the war France like the UK demobilised, but still ran national service and had a lot of colonial wars to fight... The new French army was reformed, but their special forces still retain to today, their British SAS origin in their character.

Anyhow my father-in-law was conscripted as a young man after the war, but was sent home to work the land (he was a poor farmer) and then rejoined shortly after, and ended up in one of the newly reformed marine-parachute regiments that has their origin in the WWII era SAS. He was posted overseas several times, and was involved in some of the very nasty stuff that happened all over the French colonies (akin to what happened to Britain's colonies too). Looking through his official record, we see he was mentioned in dispatches and given the Médaille militaire which is pretty serious stuff. He NEVER spoke about what he did, and other than wearing his medals on Armistice Day you'd have never known what he did. My wife always assumed they were just campaign or service awards, it's only when we found the notice that we realised they were real medals for doing really dangerous stuff.