I highly recommend Paco Roca's historical graphic novel, "Twists of Fate". It tells the story of the Spanish soldiers from the civil war, refugees from Franco, who ended up in Algeria under a brutal Vichy government. They fight for the French Foreign Legion, then desert to join the "La Nueve" division of the Free French army, first fighting the Germans in North Africa, then fighting through France, being the first to enter Paris, and the ones to storm Hitler's last stronghold.

It's not all about the fighting, or it wouldn't have interested me. It's framed by a (fictional) conversation between the cartoonist and a survivor. It was fascinating to learn how much of the French army were refugees from all over Europe. The Spanish were anarchists, communists and Republicans. They only listened to a French officer if they respected him, for they were already veterans of 3 years of war and figured they knew what needed to be done. The shoddy treatment of the Chadian solders In North Africa by de Gaulle shouldn't have surprised me, but did.