Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (13 page)

When Coster asked one wounded Englishman what he thought of the Panzer columns, he said, ‘Beautiful to watch, but terrible to receive.’

A German soldier mistook Coster, whose ambulance uniform was similar to a British soldier’s, for an Englishman and stole his leather gloves. Coster grabbed the gloves back. ‘In the fraction of a second, his revolver was pointed at my stomach. I pointed to the American Field Service band on my arm and explained, “
Amerikanisch
”.’ The officer saluted him and walked off. Other German officers complained of the Americans, ‘Ah–we never see any of you–on our side.’

On 14 June, the day the Germans occupied Paris, the four American ‘doctors’ were still working at the Amiens ‘German-American’ hospital. A Belgian Red Cross delegate and his wife, M. and Mme Alfred Chambon, arrived to visit the wounded. Coster asked if they would take him and his three comrades to Brussels. ‘We hurried to the
Kommandant
. At first his answer was definitely no; but we argued so loudly (and lied so convincingly about the pressure that would be applied by the American Consulate in Brussels when they heard of our plight) that at last he relented.’ The Chambons drove the four Americans in their small Ford to Brussels, where the American Ambassador placed them ‘under the protection of the Embassy’. Wait, King and Clement stayed in Belgium awaiting repatriation to the United States. On 1 July, American diplomat George Kennan, who was visiting from the US Embassy in Berlin, took Coster in his car back to Paris. ‘We were stopped three times,’ Coster wrote of the drive, ‘but Mr. Kennan’s pass and his perfect German took us safely through.’ Kennan wrote that he had given a lift to ‘one of the American ambulance drivers, who was trying to get down to Paris to recover his clothes’. The French peasants along the roads evoked strong sympathy from the two Americans. ‘Refugees were laboriously making their way back northwards, in search of their homes,’ Kennan recorded in his diary. ‘Most were traveling on the great two-wheeled horse-drawn cart of the French peasant, which could accommodate a whole family and many of its belongings.’ Kennan noticed a young girl on one of the carts:

In Paris, Kennan dropped Coster and his luggage at the Hôtel Bristol, ‘a place of refuge for the remaining Americans’. After making a nostalgic tour and dropping his car at the American Embassy after the ten o’clock curfew, Kennan walked to the Hôtel Bristol. ‘At the hotel the ambulance driver and I, feeling much too near the end of the world to think of sleep, cracked out a bottle of rye,’ Kennan noted. ‘We were joined by our next-door neighbor, a female and no longer entirely young. She was a true product of Parisian America and was accepting her privations with such excellent good humor that she kept us in gales of laughter with the account of her experiences.’ The next day, Kennan drove through the city looking up ‘friends of friends’. Having known Paris before the war, he thought the German-occupied city looked the same but was no longer itself: ‘Was there not some Greek myth about the man who tried to ravish the goddess, only to have her turn to stone when he touched her? That is literally what has happened to Paris. When the Germans came, the soul simply went out of it; and what is left is only stone.’

Coster learned that a French officer had seen his Ambulance Number 20 near Amiens, burned out with four charred corpses beside it. ‘This explained why King, Wait, Clement and I had been awarded the Croix de Guerre–posthumously!’ Rather than linger at the Bristol or return to his room at Cité Universitaire, Coster went to the American Hospital at Neuilly. There was no indication that he knew Dr Sumner Jackson, but he asked the surgeon for help.

Donald Coster was more than a naïve volunteer. After his graduation from Princeton in 1929, he moved to Montreal, the nearest venue for American diplomats and others to perfect their French. He worked there as an advertising executive, and he had no difficulty leaving the job in 1940 to serve in France. When he arrived in Brussels from Amiens on 14 June, he had the option of awaiting repatriation with his colleagues. Instead, he went to Paris. Coming back to France after the Germans had arrested him once was a gamble. Under international law, as an American he would not have been apprehended. The Nazis could have arrested him only if they suspected him of being a spy. Coster probably returned to Paris to collect–not his clothes–but information on France, German troop strength or the new escape routes through which British and French soldiers were making their way to England. Dr Jackson, having served in the British and American armies in the last war against Germany, was organizing an underground railroad. When Coster found him, Jackson agreed to obtain the papers he would need to cross the border to Spain. Until the false identity documents were ready, Coster stayed out of sight under the American Hospital.

 

The American Hospital of Paris continued its assistance to the war’s victims after Paris fell under Nazi domination. ‘The Germans permitted Dr. Jackson to set up a dressing station for the French wounded at Fontainbleau [sic] and to evacuate selected patients to the American Hospital,’ wrote Dr Morris Sanders, chief anaesthesiologist at the American Hospital in 1940. Sanders, who called Sumner ‘Dr Jack’, went on the first ambulance to Fontainebleau with Drs Jackson and Gros, and he took part in surgery on the French wounded there. ‘With the Occupation of Paris,’ Sanders wrote, ‘Dr. Jack worked long hours, gave his blood numerous times and slept in the building, and visited his family only on weekends.’

From the first day of the occupation of Paris, the American Hospital expanded its operations from field hospitals to prison camps, where many of the newly interned soldiers were either ill or wounded. Facilities for prisoners were rudimentary, if only because the Germans were not wholly prepared to deal with almost two million captives. Otto Gresser, the hospital’s Swiss superintendent, recalled, ‘An impressive line of ambulances packed with bread and other essential products, all run by American and French volunteers, daily left the Hospital for the prisoner camps in the Paris area, some of them went even as far as Château-Thierry, Chartres and Alençon. From June 15 they visited 250,000 prisoners desperately in need of food.’ Dr Sumner Jackson, who worked without rest, did not believe enough was being done for the prisoners. He blamed what he called the ‘bullshit bureaucracy of old men’, both German and French, for failing to distribute all the American aid intended for the prisoners. The hospital, while providing assistance to demoralized French PoWs, had the most up to date intelligence on the locations, security measures and sizes of all the German camps in the Paris region. Some of the injured prisoners that the ambulances brought to the hospital did not, when they recovered, return to the camps. Dr Jackson made certain that those who walked out of the hospital left no trace for the Germans to follow.

Immediately after the Germans entered Paris, a report prepared by the American Hospital for its US governors in New York concluded, ‘Too much praise cannot be given to Dr. Sumner W. Jackson, who has been a member of the attending Staff since 1925 and who accepted the professional supervision of the wounded for the period of the war.’

 

Dr Thierry de Martel left a nephew, Jacques Tartière, an actor who used the stage name Jacques Terrane. Jacques’ wife was a glamorous, long-legged American actress, Drue Leyton. They had met in New York in 1937, while he was visiting his father and his American stepmother. Drue was acting in a Work Projects Administration (WPA) Theatre Project–‘for I had grown weary,’ she wrote, ‘of the part of the blonde heroine in Charlie Chan mysteries to which I had been confined in Hollywood’. She recalled meeting Jacques, ‘He was a good-looking, tall man, twenty-six years old, six years younger than I. He had been educated in England as well as France and spoke English perfectly.’ They went together to England, where Drue played in Clifford Odets’s
Golden Boy
. They married in London in 1938, the day before Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier ceded Czechoslovakia to Hitler at Munich. When war began in September 1939, Jacques enlisted in the French Army. His weak lungs kept him out of combat, so the army assigned him to liaise with British forces in Brittany. Drue, meanwhile, accepted a theatrical agent’s proposal to work for the Ministry of Information at its international Radio Mondiale. There, she produced programmes that promoted France in America, interviewing the French novelist Colette, the comedienne Mistinguett and American reporters like Dorothy Thompson and Vincent Sheean. Her broadcasts under the name Drue Leyton won the attention of the Nazis. German radio announced in five of its French language broadcasts that, when Germany conquered France, she would be executed.

In late May 1940, 35-year-old Drue Leyton Tartière watched Belgians seeking safety from the Nazis in Paris, ‘grandmothers holding dead babies in their arms, women with parts of their faces shot away, and insane women who had lost their children, their husbands, and all reasons for living’. It was then that ‘we realized that the so-called “phony” war was over, and that horror had begun in earnest’. Her desire to help contrasted with the response of another American, mining heiress Peggy Guggenheim. She had seen the same refugees dragging their meagre belongings through Paris and admitted later that she felt and did nothing for them. She was buying paintings from artists desperate to leave Paris before the Nazis reached it–acquiring for $250,000 a collection that would be worth over $40 million. When she called uninvited at Picasso’s studio, the artist told her, ‘Lingerie is on the next floor.’ Soon, as the Nazis shelled the outskirts of Paris, Guggenheim fled south. Drue Tartière was not far behind.

At ten in the morning on 11 June, the ‘forty-two assorted nationals’ of Radio Mondiale left Paris for Tours in a convoy of cars loaded with heavy bags.

When they reached Tours more than twenty-four hours later, they had to sleep in a bordello commandeered by police for the radio’s staff. ‘In Tours, there was even greater panic than in Paris, and no one seemed to know whether the government intended to stay there or go further south.’ Drue was astounded to observe Prime Minister Paul Reynaud ignoring British envoys Lord Gort and General Ironside. Although the two Britons were supporting him against his defeatist ministers, Reynaud brushed past them to the car of his mistress, Countess Hélène de Portes. The government then left Tours without informing Radio Mondiale. Early on 13 June, Drue and her international colleagues drove south to Bordeaux in pursuit of France’s elusive leaders.

‘From the Bordeaux radio station,’ Drue recalled, ‘we sent out frantic pleas for help for France, and we tried to give people across the Atlantic some picture of the wretchedness of the refugees who were pouring into the temporary capital of France. We described the machine-gunning of these refugees on the clogged roads by low-flying German planes, and we told of the misery of the men and women who were arriving in the atmosphere of panic and confusion which was prevalent in Bordeaux.’ An American named Smitty, who had volunteered to fight for France, found himself working as a broadcaster. At one thirty in the morning on 17 June, as the Germans were bombing Bordeaux, he bellowed over the air to the United States, ‘Hear that, America, the God-damned sons of bitches are bombing us now!’

By dawn, all had changed. Philippe Pétain, dressed in the gold-braided uniform of a Marshal of France, strode into Radio France’s temporary broadcast centre in Bordeaux to deliver an important announcement. At ten o’clock in the morning, the 84-year-old ‘hero of Verdun’ stepped into the studio, where, Drue observed, ‘a boy was arranging the microphone, but he did not do it fast enough to suit the old Marshal. Pétain gave him a kick.’ As the new head of government, he announced, ‘I say that by the affection of our admirable army … [and] by the confidence of all the people, I give to France my person to assuage her misfortune … It is with a broken heart that I tell you today it is necessary to stop fighting. I addressed myself last night to the adversary to ask him if he is ready to seek with me, soldier to soldier, after the actual fighting is over, and with honor, the means of putting an end to hostilities.’ Drue was unimpressed. ‘I had stood next to him in the small broadcasting studio and had seen no signs of the broken heart he said he had when he told the French people that he had asked the Nazis for peace terms.’ Pétain had given up the fight, but Drue Tartière had not.

The scheme that Paul Reynaud and Charles de Gaulle had urged, to fight on from the colonies, did not seem far-fetched to the French people that
New Yorker
correspondent A. J. Liebling met between Tours and Bordeaux. Liebling was driving with fellow American reporters Waverly Root from Mutual Radio and John Elliot of the
New York Herald Tribune
in Root’s ‘old Citroën with a motor that made a noise like anti-aircraft fire’. They stopped for the night in the house of a garage owner in Barbezieux. Liebling wrote, ‘We had our
café au lait
with a professor of the local lycée in the garden of a restaurant the next morning. None of the little people one met, like the
garagiste
and the professor, considered that France might drop out of the war altogether or that Germany might win it. They took it for granted the Government would retain the fleet, go on to North Africa and fight from there. We weren’t so sure. The little people hadn’t seen the ministers and their mistresses.’