Coué, Hervé

Date of birth:: October 2nd, 1919 (Vieil-Baugé)
Date of death:: May 21st, 1944 (Hyères, France)
Nationality:: French

Biography

Enlisted at the age of 18, he was in Syria at the outbreak of war in 1939 and served with the 3rd Battalion of the 24th Colonial Infantry Regiment (24th RIC).

But when the armistice arises, his battalion, which is then in Cyprus, refuses to surrender and decides to continue the fight.

Led by Captain Lorotte, the 3rd Battalion refused to return to Tripoli and assembled in Nicosia where it was enthusiastically received by the British in July 1940.

Gathered at the Moascar camp, and joined by the company of Captain Folliot, the French volunteers decide to take the name of 1st Marine Infantry Battalion (1st BIM) and constitute, for the British, the first element of the Free French (French Free).

Hervé Coué is then condemned to death and the confiscation of his property by Vichy.

With the 1st BIM, then the Marine and Pacific Infantry Battalion (BIMP), and alongside the 8th British Army, Hervé Coué took part in the fighting in Africa: he was in Syria in June 1941 then in Libya and in Bir-Hakeim in May-June 1942 and in El Alamein in October 1942 where he was called to the order of the army corps after having "helped a comrade to free the body of his mortally wounded section chief, under intense fire machine guns and grenades ".

After El Alamein, the BIMP is the only French unit, with a flying column of tanks and machine guns from the Moroccan spahis, to be detached to the British VIIIth Army to take part in the offensive pursuit of the enemy which is beginning. from November 5, 1942 and continued as far as Tunisia.

Master Corporal Coué with the BIMP forces the Mareth line and counts, on May 13, among the victors of Takrouna.

He married in Tunisia on December 18, 1943. One of his chiefs offered him the security of a secretariat in a staff office, which he absolutely refused. He did not hesitate and embarked, in April 1944, for Italy with the 1st Free French Division and within the Marching Battalion No. 21 (BM 21).

The day after the landing in Provence, it was on French soil, during the fighting in Hyères on August 21, 1944, that Master Corporal Hervé Coué was killed in a hand-to-hand grenade.