CONGO COLONEL Thomas Michael "Mad Mike" Hoare WILD GEESE "5 COMMANDO" INSIGNIA

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COLONEL Thomas Michael "Mad Mike" Hoare WILD GEESE "5 COMMANDO" INSIGNIA
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This is a very special Original (not cheap import copy)
COLONEL Thomas Michael "Mad Mike" Hoare WILD GEESE "5 COMMANDO" INSIGNIA. You will receive the item as shown in the first photo.
Other items in other pictures are available from my eBay Store.
Thomas Michael "Mad Mike" Hoare (born 17 March 1919) is a British mercenary leader and adventurer known for military activities in Africa and his attempt to conduct a coup d'état in the Seychelles. He turned 100 years old in 2019, despite his lifelong philosophy that 'you get more out of life by living dangerously'. His son Chris Hoare wrote a biography on Mike Hoare's life of derring do. It is titled 'Mad Mike' Hoare: The Legend. Hoare was born in British India[1] and was educated in England. He joined the London Irish Rifles at the outbreak of World War II, and served as an officer in India and Burma. He was promoted to the rank of major. After the war, he trained as a chartered accountant, qualifying in 1948.[2] He subsequently emigrated to Durban, Natal Province in the Union of South Africa, where he later ran safaris and became a soldier-for-hire in various African countries.  Mike Hoare led two separate mercenary groups during the Congo Crisis.  Mike Hoare's first mercenary action was in 1961 in Katanga, a province trying to break away from the newly independent Republic of the Congo. His unit was called "4 Commando". During this time he married Phyllis Sims, an airline stewardess. In 1964, Congolese Prime Minister Moïse Tshombe, his employer in Katanga, hired Major Mike Hoare to lead a military unit called 5 Commando, Armée Nationale Congolaise (5 Commando ANC) (later led by John Peters;[3] not to be confused with No.5 Commando, the British Second World War commando force) made up of about 300 men most of whom were from South Africa. His second-in-command was a fellow ex-British Army officer, Commandant Alistair Wicks. The unit's mission was to fight a revolt known as the Simba rebellion. Later Hoare and his mercenaries worked in concert with Belgian paratroopers, Cuban exile pilots, and CIA-hired mercenaries who attempted to save 1,600 civilians (mostly Europeans and missionaries) in Stanleyville from the Simba rebels in Operation Dragon Rouge. This operation saved many lives.[4] Hoare was later promoted to lieutenant-colonel in the Armée Nationale Congolaise and 5 Commando expanded into a two-battalion force. Hoare commanded 5 Commando from July 1964 to November 1965. Speaking on the conflict, he said, "I had wanted nothing so much as to have 5 Commando known as an integral part of the ANC, a 5 Commando destined to strike a blow to rid the Congo of the greatest cancer the world has ever known—the creeping, insidious disease of communism.” Later, Hoare wrote his own account of 5 Commando's role in the 1960s Congo mercenary war, originally titled Congo Mercenary[7] and much later repeatedly republished in paperback simply as Mercenary (subtitled "The Classic Account of Mercenary Warfare"). In the mid-1970s, Hoare was hired as technical adviser for the film The Wild Geese, the fictional story of a group of mercenary soldiers hired to rescue a deposed African president. Colonel Alan Faulkner (played by Richard Burton) was patterned on Hoare. At least one of the actors in the film, Ian Yule, had been a mercenary under Hoare's command, before which he had served in the British Parachute Regiment and Special Air Service (SAS).[8] Of the actors playing mercenaries, four had been born in Africa, two were former POWs and most had received military training.
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