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Brigadier-Chef. Marcel LeGuen MMe, CdG.
French Army 11th Cuirassiers
from:Plouegat-Moysan, Finistere, Brittany, Fance
On 12th of June 1940, while serving with the Cavalry Division of the French 11th Cuirassiers (Armoured Division) and attached to the 51st Highland Division, Marcel Le Guen, aged 23, was captured at St Valery en Caux near Dieppe. He was imprisoned at the Citadelle de Cambria.
Six months later he escaped by hiding in a coal truck and stayed with cousins in Paris before returning to his home in Brittany. While working in the family farm, he joined a local Resistance movement. Tired of in-fighting within the local units, eighteen months later he decided to make his way to the British Embassy in Barcelona, Spain and from there join the Free French in England. On 6th December 1942, after crossing the Pyrenees on foot, he was arrested near Gerona as an escaped prisoner of war and incarcerated in the prison camp of Miranda del Ebro.
He persuaded British embassy officials, who were reporting on conditions in the camp, that he was a French-speaking Canadian named Marcel le Goen of Quebec and in June 1943 he was released and made his way to Gibraltar where a representative of General de Gaulle arranged for his transport to England on the troopship Highland Princess. Marcel Le Guen joined the Forces Francaises Libres in London on 2nd July 1943 as a Soldier Second Class, Number 35948, attached to the FAFC l'Infanterie de l'Air, 2nd Company, lst Battalion. He was trained somewhere in England, possibly Dean Camp, Camberley, as a parachutist and took part in several campaigns in Holland and Belgium in 1944. In 1945 he was parachuted into Normandy with 21st Army Group during the invasion, fought at Arnhem and served behind enemy lines in Holland and Germany. After his demob on 1st June 1946 he joined the French Diplomatic Service. He died in Berne, Switzerland on 12th October 1958 from TB he had contracted in 1940, probably at Cambrai.
