Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (12 page)

Sumner Jackson belonged to the established American colony of Paris. He lived in the most chic district of the Right Bank, and his family spent weekends in the country. His patients were from European aristocracy and American high society. Dean Beekman, the anti-communist Episcopal firebrand of the faux-Gothic American Cathedral in the avenue George-V, was a friend. Yet Dr Jackson was a dissenter. He and Toquette were both agnostics from Protestant, free-thinking families. They had known war and poverty, and both distrusted Hitler. His entry in
Americans in France: A Directory, 1939–1940
listed the American Legion as his only membership. Most of the other Americans in the Paris version of the
Blue Book
belonged to fraternities, country clubs and alumni associations like the Harvard and Yale clubs. As a member of the hospital’s medical committee, Jackson braced the institution for war and took a special interest in his poorer patients.

Soon after the Munich agreement in 1938, the American Hospital’s governors offered their facilities to the French government to treat the wounded if war broke out. When war came in September 1939, casualties were far fewer than in the Great War. The hospital took them in, and Jackson operated on wounds similar to those he had seen between 1916 and 1918. Over Christmas 1939, Josephine Baker sang and danced at the American Hospital for injured French troops. The soldiers, in pyjamas and many in wheelchairs, toasted her beside a Christmas tree. The hospital established a temporary centre on the Normandy coast at Entretat. When the Germans invaded France in mid-May 1940 and made swift advances through the north, the facility had to move. The
New York Herald Tribune
reported on 8 June 1940 that the hospital’s doctors had already ‘selected a building at Angoulême in the Charente, which has been requisitioned to be turned over to the hospital for this purpose by the French government’. The 100-bed field hospital was on the direct Paris–Bordeaux railway line, so the wounded could be moved there without being trapped on roads blocked by refugees. Other temporary American hospitals and dressing stations opened at Châteauroux and in the casino of Fontainebleau, just south of Paris. Dr Jackson, Dr Bove, Dr Morris Sanders and other American surgeons laboured day and night on the growing number of French soldiers whom the Germans had seriously wounded. Most of the casualties came to the hospital in ambulances of the American Ambulance Corps, paid for by donations from American citizens and driven by American volunteers. When French friendly fire hit one ambulance and wounded a French soldier, Jackson had to amputate his leg in darkness. The amputation was nonetheless clean enough for the leg to take a prosthetic. When he was not operating on patients, Jackson took care of anaesthesia for other doctors. It was grinding, bloody labour without any reassurance that the suffering would save France from German conquest.

French General Lannois came to the American Hospital to award the Médaille Militaire, France’s highest military decoration, and the Croix de Guerre to a wounded Zouave dispatch bearer named Maurice Longuet. With the general was the soldier’s father, whose eye patch marked him as a wounded veteran of the previous war. His 19-year-old son lay in bed, while the general pinned the ribbons on his pyjama shirt. Drs Jackson, Bove, Gros and de Martel watched the informal ceremony. Jackson whispered to Bove, ‘
Tel père, tel fils
,’ such a father, such a son. More sons were brought in every day.

Dr Bove, who operated beside Sumner Jackson, recalled the chaos of the final weeks:

The day before the Germans entered Paris, Dr Bove told Sumner and Toquette, ‘It’s only a matter of a few weeks before Roosevelt brings America in and declares war on Germany. But this time the Boches will have Paris, and if we stay they’ll lock us up.’ Bove prepared to leave. Dr Gros, in Bove’s words, ‘seemed to age before our eyes’ and was no longer able to work. Sumner considered going, but his wife convinced him that the hospital’s French staff would not stay without him. Sumner asked Toquette, who had resumed working as a nurse, to take their son to safety. She and her sister Alice, nicknamed Tat, left Paris with 12-year-old Phillip for the family’s lakeside house at Enghien.

With his wife and son no longer in their avenue Foch apartment, Jackson moved into one on the third floor of the hospital. On the last warm June night before Paris fell, he ascended to the roof to smoke a cigar. He could see the fields where French kings hunted before the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie planted suburban villas in Neuilly. Artillery flashes on the horizon made it clear that the Germans were advancing on Paris from the east and north. It would not be long before they reached Neuilly. Jackson’s main concern now was to save the hospital from falling into German hands. Wounded French and British soldiers needed the institution, one of the finest in France, as much as the American civilians still in Paris. There were already rumours that the Germans had listed the hospital for requisitioning. Soon, Jackson would face another dilemma. Donald Coster, a young American who had come from Montreal to drive ambulances for the American Ambulance Field Service, asked for a safe haven. There was something curious about Coster. As an American neutral, he had nothing to fear from the Germans. Yet, for some reason, he was hiding in the hospital’s basement. If he were caught there, the Germans might seize the hospital and arrest Jackson for helping him. Jackson, 54 years old with a wife and young son to protect, had decided which side he was on. Helping Coster was only the first step along the anti-German road.

 

By the time the Germans consolidated their hold on Paris, most of the Americans who had vanished in the war’s chaos had been accounted for. Some of the American volunteer ambulance drivers, however, were still missing. They had either been killed or captured. Two American charities, the American Ambulance Field Service (AAFS) and Anne Morgan’s American Volunteer Ambulance Corps (AVAC), had dispatched drivers, crews and ambulances to France from the early spring of 1940. Americans from all forty-eight states donated a fleet of Chevrolet three-quarter ton trucks with the latest mobile medical facilities. At the end of May, seventy-five American drivers and sixty-six Chevrolets from AVAC and another thirty-eight men and six ambulances from AAFS were at the front. Drivers paid their own expenses and the cost of their equipment. Most were young Ivy Leaguers. One, Robert Montgomery, was a prominent Hollywood actor. When the Germans occupied Denmark on 9 April, the AAFS was attached to the French Tenth Army. Throughout May and June, the Americans went into action to retrieve wounded and evacuate civilians without cars or unable to depart on railway lines bombed by the Luftwaffe. Anne Morgan, although aged 67, led her drivers into the fighting in the Meuse Valley.

One American ambulance driver, 26-year-old Lawrence Jump, was reported dead in May after a German shell struck his ambulance.
Life
magazine declared the Oakland, California, native and Dartmouth graduate the ‘first American casualty’ of the war. Then, on 24 June, two days after the signing of the Franco-German Armistice at Compiègne,
Life
published a letter from his sister, Cynthia Jump Willett: ‘I received a telegram yesterday from the State Department informing me he was in a prison in Weinberg near Stuttgart.’ The American Embassy in Berlin arranged his release.

At least two American drivers were wounded, and nine went missing in action. Four of the missing, presumed dead, belonged to the AAFS unit with the French Tenth Army at Beauvais. Their
chef de section
was Peter Muir, the First World War ambulance veteran who would be captured by the Germans and escape to enjoy Charles Bedaux’s hospitality at the Château de Candé. The four missing drivers were Muir’s immediate subordinate, Donald Quested Coster, a Lawrenceville and Princeton alumnus who had worked in advertising in Montreal, Canada; John Clement of Brookline, Massachusetts; Gregory Wait of Shelburne, Vermont; and George King of Providence, Rhode Island. The last place Muir had seen them was the unit’s forward position at Beauvais: ‘Coster was in the Colonel’s office and spoke to me. He was taking his two cars to Amiens. There had been terrific bombings. The town was in flames. The Germans were coming in. Perhaps we would meet there. Good-by. Good luck. I never heard his voice again in France.’

Muir wrote that ‘with the knowledge that the Germans were in one part of the town, if not all of it, Coster was courageously leading his two cars back for a last load of wounded’. Muir waited all night for the men to return and, in the morning, made several attempts to find them. French soldiers outside Amiens stopped him each time for his own safety. ‘At noon I gave up Don Coster, Gregory Wait, George King, and John Clement as lost in action, and sent a report in to the Paris office to the effect that they had disappeared while carrying out a dangerous mission under orders from their [French] commanding officer, Colonel Soulier. They had been killed, wounded, or captured on duty.’ On 26 May, the
New York Times
reported, ‘Lovering Hill, commander of the American Ambulance Field Service, returned to Paris today after an unsuccessful hunt for four missing American ambulance drivers.’

The French government awarded Coster, Wait, King and Clement the Croix de Guerre with a citation that noted they had been killed in action–
mort pour la France
.

Coster and the others had, in fact, found shelter in the cellar of the Hôpital Châteaudun in Amiens. The city was ablaze, and only its cathedral was unscarred. Taking cover below the hospital with 150 doctors, nurses, wounded soldiers, women and children, Coster heard ‘exploding shells like punches against your chest’. The shelling stopped, but it was followed by a more ominous sound: heavy boots stamping overhead. Everyone remained quiet while they passed. Cautiously, Coster stepped outside. ‘I walked into the courtyard, and there for the first time saw the grey-green soldier’s uniform,’ he wrote. ‘The soldier’s rifle was aimed at a line of French prisoners backed against a wall.’ Fearing the soldier was about to execute the men, but unable to speak German, Coster held up the Geneva identification card that showed he was a civilian ambulance driver and an American. ‘He turned his gun on me, and seemed to be considering whether to squeeze the trigger. But the answer, at least for the moment, was no.’

Fellow driver George King spoke enough German to ask to see an officer. The soldier led them about fifty yards to the main road. ‘There,’ Coster wrote, ‘we were greeted by the most awe inspiring sight I have ever seen.’ It was a Wehrmacht mechanized unit speeding into Amiens.

The German soldier stopped an armoured car and turned the Americans over to its officer, who drove them to his commander. ‘The general was a broad-shouldered, tough, six-foot-three mountain of Prussian efficiency,’ Coster remembered. ‘He listened to us with polite impatience. But either our French or the general’s was not too good because he took us for American
doctors
and scribbled an order that we were to be placed in charge of the Châteaudun Hospital, which we were to put in scrupulous order for use as a “German-American” hospital.’ Coster and his colleagues spent two nights bringing wounded British soldiers off a battlefield. The scene was horrifying in the darkness, but it was worse at dawn of the second day: