merging branches with separate but identical history

Hi list

I have two branches which start with the same commits, and I want to merge them. I believe the two branches were individually pulled from the same SVN repo, so they look like this:

branch1: a--b--c--d--e--f--1--3--5 branch2: a--b--c--d--e--f--2--4--6

If I do:

Merge made by recursive

The merge succeeds but the commits in each branch aren't squashed
together (git log shows two commits for each actual commit)
 i.e., now my history looks like this:

a--a--b--b--c--c--d--d--e--e--f--f--1--2--3--4--5--6

Is there a way to do this without the duplicates? (perhaps a way to mark the branch as merged up to 'f', without actually performing a merge?)

Thanks Craig de Stigter -- Koordinates Ltd PO Box 1604, Shortland St, Auckland, New Zealand Phone +64-9-966 0433 Fax +64-9-969 0045 Web http://www.koordinates.com