THE ALLIES: Distinguished Unit

As part of the 23rd Regimental Combat Team at Chipyong last month, the French battalion in Korea fought a bloody, victorious battle against three Red Chinese divisions (TIME, Feb. 26). Thirteen hundred enemy dead were counted in front of the U.N. lines, the majority in front of the French positions. Said the 23rd’s commander, Lieut. Colonel John H. Chiles: “The French are some of the fightingest men I have ever seen. When they attack a position, they carry it. When they hold a position, they hold it. When you put them some place, you don’t have to worry about it. They will be there when you come back.”

The French battalion is commanded by Lieut. Colonel Ralph Monclar, a short, bespectacled Foreign Legion veteran who gave up his major general’s rank to fight in Korea. Monclar allows his men, and General MacArthur, to address him as “man General,” but in official acts he is a lieutenant colonel. Said Chiles: “I can’t make him walk on my right as a general should. He says to me: ‘You are the regimental commander. I command a battalion. I walk on the left.’ And he does.”

Last week Lieut. General Matthew Ridgway presented Monclar’s men with the Distinguished Unit Citation, first such award to a non-American outfit in Korea.