The son of an aristocratic family, Hauteclocque graduated from the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr, the French military academy, in 1924.

He was awarded the croix de guerre des théâtres d'opérations extérieures for leading goumiers in an attack on caves and ravines on Bou Amdoun on 11 August 1933.

After his forces captured Kufra, he had his men swear an oath known today as the Serment de Koufra, in which they pledged to fight on until their flag flew over the Strasbourg Cathedral.

Philippe was named in honour of an ancestor killed by Croatian soldiers in service of Habsburg monarchy during Thirty Years' War in 1635.

[8] The third son, Constantin, who had served in Napoleon's Russian Campaign, was created a chevalier by King Louis XVIII, and a Papal count by Pope Pius IX in 1857.

They had six children:[12][13] Henri (1926–1952), who was killed in the First Indochina War;[14] Hubert (1927–2015[15]), who served as mayor of Tailly from 2001 to 2008; Charles (1929–); Jeanne (1931–2018); Michel (1933–2014); and Bénédicte (1936–).

He was awarded the croix de guerre des théâtres d'opérations extérieures for leading goumiers in an attack on caves and ravines on Bou Amdoun on 11 August.

[24] In contrast, his cousin Xavier de Hauteclocque [fr] was an award-winning journalist who covered the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, visited the concentration camp at Dachau, and wrote about the Night of Long Knives.

[29] He attempted to make his way back to the French lines by pretending to be a civilian refugee, but was apprehended by a German patrol and taken prisoner when they discovered an old military pay receipt.

[30] Hauteclocque reported to the headquarters of Général d'armée Aubert Frère, the commander of the Seventh Army, who gave him permission to visit his home at Tailly, which was still behind French lines.

Once in Spain he took a train to Madrid, and then to Lisbon, where he went to the British embassy, which arranged his passage to Britain on a merchant ship, the SS Hillary.

[37] At this time he adopted Leclerc as his nom de guerre, so that Thérèse and their children would not be put at risk if his name appeared in the papers.

He started with a small raid on Murzuk by eleven men of the Régiment de Tirailleurs Sénégalais du Tchad (RTST) and two troops of the British Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) on 11 January 1941.

[42] Leclerc learnt a great deal about how to handle and supply a force advancing across the desert, and was rewarded with the British Distinguished Service Order.

This was delayed by a year due to Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel's defeat of the British Eighth Army in the Battle of Gazala, and the subsequent German and Italian advance into Egypt.

[45] De Gaulle ordered the plan for an advance into Libya to be put in motion in the wake of the Eighth Army's victory in the Second Battle of El Alamein in November 1942.

Leclerc's command, now reinforced by the Greek Sacred Squadron, and known as L Force, covered the Eighth Army's inland flank during its advance into Tunisia.

[57] The German commander, General der Infanterie Dietrich von Choltitz, was inclined to surrender, and did so to Leclerc and Henri Rol-Tanguy of the French Forces of the Interior at the Gare Montparnasse on 25 August 1944.

[58] The next day de Gaulle held a triumphal parade, accompanied by senior military figures including Leclerc, Alphonse Juin, Marie-Pierre Kœnig and Georges Thierry d'Argenlieu.

These were replaced by men and women who, like Leclerc's sons, offered themselves at a recruitment office the 2e DB established near the Bois de Boulogne.

American historian Hugh M. Cole wrote that "this fight, characterised warmly by the XV Corps commander as a 'brilliant example' of perfect air-ground co-ordination, not only was an outstanding feat of arms but also dealt a crippling blow to Hitler's plans for an armoured thrust into the Third Army flank.

The German offensive in the Ardennes in December and in Alsace in January led Eisenhower to consider abandoning Strasbourg, but strong opposition to the idea from the French caused him to back down.

[68] In an incident that took place on 8 May 1945 at Karlstein near Bad Reichenhall in Bavaria, he was presented with a defiant group of a dozen captured Frenchmen of the SS Charlemagne Division.

The group of French Waffen-SS men was summarily executed by the RMT without any form of military tribunal procedure, and their bodies left where they fell until an American burial team collected them three days later.

[77] The French government negotiator Jean Sainteny flew to Saigon to consult Leclerc, who was acting as high commissioner in the absence of d'Argenlieu.

Leclerc approved Sainteny's proposal to negotiate with Ho because he preferred a diplomatic solution to a larger conflict, but he still dispatched a flotilla with shiploads of French soldiers to northern Vietnam ready to attack if the talks failed.

[81] At the time many French and American politicians were willing to believe that Ho was part of a Soviet plan to dominate the world, but Leclerc warned that "anti-communism will be a useless tool unless the problem of nationalism is resolved.

On 28 November 1947, his North American B-25 Mitchell, Tailly II, carrying Leclerc and his staff, crashed near Colomb-Béchar in French Algeria, killing everyone on board.

[22] Today his marshal's baton is displayed in the Leclerc room of the Musée de l'Armée at Invalides,[88] as is his battered képi with the Italian stars that he wore at Kufra.

Wounded during the Battle of France, escaped from the hands of the enemy and joined the Free French Forces;Took a decisive part in the rally of Cameroon, which he then knew, as governor, to organize for the war, and in the liberation of Gabon;Commander of the troops of Chad, prepared and beautifully conducted the victorious operations of Murzuk and Kufra, which brought glory back under the folds of the flag.For his attribution of the Military Medal: During a glorious epic, which belongs to history, showed that the French flag always knew how to spread as a victor wherever the sacred cause of the homeland called it.