Tirailleurs Sénégalais

Sent to the front in France from the first weeks of the war, the Tirailleurs Sénégalais saw a great deal of combat. This was largely because French army commanders viewed West Africans as an elite fighting force among the 500,000 colonial subjects who fought for France during the war, and so deployed the Tirailleurs Sénégalais most often as ‘shock troops’. During the war, 134,000 Tirailleurs Sénégalais served on the Western Front.