Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (62 page)

p. 63 ‘We were a bit’
Ibid
.

p. 63 ‘No one woke’
Ibid
., p. 71.

p. 63 When a German battalion
Roster of the American Field Service Volunteers, French Units, 1939–1940.

p. 63 ‘There were quite’
Peter Muir,
War without Music
, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940, p. 249.

p. 64 He finally found
Ibid.
, p. 262.

p. 64 ‘we had better start’
‘Americans Report Nazis Fill Spain’,
New York Times,
19 July 1940, p. 10.

p. 64 ‘It was then’
Muir,
War without Music
, p. 252.

p. 64 ‘On our arrival’
Carisella and Ryan,
The Black Swallow of Death
, pp. 247–8.

p. 65 At Charles Bedaux’s luxurious
Robert Gildea,
Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation of France, 1940–45
, London: Macmillan, 2002, p. 43.

p. 65 The German army was encircling
Ibid.
, p. 46.

p. 65 The hospital dispatched
Christy,
The Price of Power.
, p. 214.

p. 66 Back in Paris … By the time Bullitt
Dr Charles Bove with Dana Lee Thomas,
Paris: A Surgeon’s Story
, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1956, p. 223. Dr Bove’s account differs slightly from the majority of historians’. He wrote that de Martel took an overdose of Luminal and turned on the gas jets ‘to make doubly certain that he would be dead on the day the Germans entered Paris’. De Martel’s suicide did not come as a shock. Bove found his colleague ‘so deep in melancholy that nothing could arouse him’. Before the German advance on Paris, Bove wrote, ‘Martel had always been one of the jolliest members of staff. He was a debonair dresser with perpetually smiling eyes and a tongue that was always ready to burst into a humorous sally. He was the eternal playboy who had refused to surrender to his years. But now he had become a man transformed. For days he had scarcely spoken a word to us, and then only on business.’

On 10 June, the writer André Maurois had a worrying conversation with de Martel:

‘As for me’, he had said to us, ‘my mind is made up: the moment I learn that they are in the city I shall kill myself.’

And then he explained to us at length that most people do not know how to kill themselves, and bungle the job, but that a surgeon holds the revolver as precisely as he holds a scalpel and always hits a vital spot. Then, half-seriously, he added: ‘If you, too, have no desire to survive our misfortunes, I offer you my services …’

At ten o’clock in the evening, when I was already on the ’plane bound for England, the sound of the telephone interrupted my wife, who was sadly selecting the few objects she could take with her. It was Thierry de Martel.

‘I wanted to find out’, he said, ‘whether you and your husband were still in Paris.’

‘André has been sent on a mission to London’, she replied, ‘and, as for me, I am leaving tomorrow at dawn.’

‘I am going to leave too’, he said in a strange tone, ‘but for a much longer voyage …’

… ‘You can still do so much good’, she said. ‘Your patients, your assistants, your nurses, all of them need you …’

‘I cannot go on living’, Martel said. ‘My only son was killed in the last war. Until now I have tried to believe that he died to save France. And now here is France, lost in her turn. Everything I have lived for is going to disappear. I cannot go on.’

(From André Maurois,
Why France Fell
, translated from the French by Denver Lindley, London: The Bodley Head, 1941, pp. 115–16.)

p. 66 ‘disgustingly stupid novels’
Adrienne Monnier,
The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier: An Intimate Portrait of the Literary and Artistic Life in Paris between the Wars
, translated by Richard McDougall, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976, p. 522.

p. 67 ‘Do not cry!’
Quoted in Charles Robertson,
An American Poet in Paris: Pauline Avery Crawford and the Herald Tribune
, Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2001, p. 32. See also Pauline Avery Crawford,
The Enchanted Isle
, unpublished manuscript, Smith College Archives.

p. 67 ‘one attempt to … His gaze wandered’
Bove,
Paris
, p. 223.

p. 67 ‘I know … We Americans’
Ibid
., p. 222.

p. 67 ‘There is a kind’
Paul Léautaud,
Journal littéraire
, vol. XIII, February 1940–June 1941, Paris,
Mercure de France
, 1962, p. 174.

p. 68 Thomas Kernan, the American editor
Thomas Kernan,
Paris on Berlin Time
, Philadelphia and New York: J. P. Lippincott Company, 1941, p. 162.

p. 68 ‘In him we lost’
Maurois,
Why France Fell
, p. 117. When Maurois reached London, Charles de Gaulle asked him to condemn Maréchal Pétain on a BBC radio transmission to France. Maurois could not comply, because Pétain had defended him years before against anti-Semites in the Académie Française. See Emmanuel Loyer,
Paris à New York: Intellectuels et artistes français en exil, 1940–1947
, Paris: Grasset, 2005, p. 113.

p. 68 ‘The surgeon, who was at the end’
‘Mort du Docteur de Martel’,
Le Matin
, 18 June 1940, from the Archives of the American Hospital of Paris, File: ‘The Second World War’.

p. 69 ‘He wore only’
Clemence Bock,
Souvenirs sur le Docteur Jackson
, quoted in Hal Vaughan,
Doctor to the Resistance: The Heroic Story of an American Surgeon and His Family in Occupied France
, Washington: Brassey’s, 2004, p. 19.

p. 69 Captain Sumner Jackson transferred
General Services Administration, Statement of Service, Date: 19 April 1965, Massachusetts General Hospital Archives, File: Dr. Sumner Jackson. The document shows that Jackson was commissioned a first lieutenant of the US Medical Reserve Corps on 23 July 1917. See also, in the same file, Headquarters, United States Army Cantonment, Camp Devens, Massachusetts Special Orders No. 221, 12 September 1919, Discharge Papers, when Jackson was honourably discharged as a captain.

p. 70 When Jackson left the army
Vaughan,
Doctor to the Resistance
, p. 15.

p. 70 ‘This hospital is a little’
Bove,
Paris
, p. 32.

p. 71 The little hospital that admitted
American Hospital entry in Alfred M. Brace (ed.),
Americans in France: A Directory, 1926
, Paris: American Chamber of Commerce in France, 1927, p. 32.

p. 71 Dr Bove removed his appendix
Bove,
Paris
, p. 60.

p. 71 James Joyce was made
Noel Riley Fitch,
Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties
, New York: W. W. Norton, 1983, p. 141.

p. 71 ‘The permanent American … break into that’
Eric Sevareid,
Not So Wild a Dream
, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946, p. 95.

p. 72 ‘Dean [Frederick Warren] Beekman’
Ibid
., p. 96.

p. 72 His entry in
Americans in France: A Directory, 1939–1940
, Paris: American Chamber of Commerce in France, 1940, p. 126.

p. 73 ‘selected a building’
‘American Hospital to Open New Angoulême Hospital’,
New York Herald Tribune
, 8 June 1940.

p. 73 French General Lannois came
‘The American Hospital of Paris in the Second World War’, an official history prepared by the hospital staff, printed in France, 1940, p. 13, American Hospital of Paris Archives, File: German Occupation by Kathleen Keating and Various Other Histories, 1940–1944.

p. 73 With the general
Vaughan,
Doctor to the Resistance
, pp. 36–7.

p. 73 ‘When the Allies, pushed
Bove,
Paris
, pp. 218–19.

p. 74 ‘It’s only a matter’
Ibid
., p. 220. Vaughan,
Doctor to the Resistance
, p. 37.

p. 75 ‘At the end of May’
‘Ambulances from America’,
Time
, 3 June 1940.

p. 76 One American ambulance driver
‘Driver of American Ambulance Hit by German Shell Missing’,
New York Herald Tribune
, 7 May 1940, p. 1.

p. 76 ‘I received a telegram’
Letter to the editor,
Life
, 24 June 1940, p. 4.

p. 76 At least two American drivers
‘Ambulances from America’,
Time
, 3 June 1940.

p. 76 ‘Coster was in the Colonel’s office’
Muir,
War without Music
, pp. 69–70.

p. 76 ‘with the knowledge … At noon I gave up’
Ibid
., p. 90.

p. 76 ‘ Lovering Hill, commander’
‘Search for Drivers of Ambulance Fails’,
New York Times
, 26 May 1940, p. 29.

p. 77 The French government awarded
George Rock,
History of the American Field Service, 1920–1955
, New York: American Field Service Publication, 1956, p. 7.

p. 77 ‘I walked into … He turned his gun’
Donald Q. Coster, ‘Behind German Lines’,
Reader’s Diges
t, 3 November 1940 (pp. 115–25), p. 117.

p. 77 ‘There … we were …You may may have seen’
Ibid
., p. 117.

p. 78 ‘The general … Beautiful to watch’
Ibid
., p. 123.

p. 78 ‘In the fraction … Ah–we never see’
Ibid.
, p. 120.

p. 79 ‘We hurried to the
Kommandant
’
Ibid
., p. 123.

p. 79 ‘We were stopped three’
Ibid
., p. 125.

p. 79 ‘one of the American ambulance’
George Kennan,
Sketches from a Life
, New York: Pantheon Books, 1989, p. 70 (diary entry for 2 July 1940, Paris–Brussels).

p. 79 ‘Refugees were laboriously … Her dress was torn’
Ibid
., pp. 71–2 (same diary date).

p. 80 ‘At the hotel the ambulance’
Ibid
., p. 73 (same diary date). The next-door neighbour may have been Dorothy Reeder, who was then residing at the Bristol.

p. 80 ‘Was there not some Greek’
Ibid
., p. 74 (diary entry for 3 July 1940).

p. 80 ‘This explained why King’
Coster, ‘Behind German Lines’,
Reader’s Digest
, 3 November 1940 (pp. 115–25), p. 125.

p. 81 Until the false identity
Donald Coster interview with Kathleen Keating, ‘The American Hospital in Paris During the German Occupation’, 19 May 1981, 14-page typescript, p. 6, American Hospital of Paris Archives, File: German Occupation by Kathleen Keating and Various Other Histories, 1940–1944.

p. 81 ‘The Germans permitted Dr. Jackson’
Dr Morris Sanders, ‘The Mission of Dr. Sumner Jackson’,
The News of Massachusetts General Hospital
, vol. 24, no. 5, June–July 1965, p. 6.

p. 81 ‘With the Occupation of Paris’
Quoted in Vaughan,
Doctor to the Resistance
, p. 60.

p. 81 ‘An impressive line of ambulances’
Otto Gresser, ‘History of the American Hospital of Paris’, 28 September 1978, 14-page typescript, p. 4, Archives of the American Hospital of Paris, File: History by Otto Gresser.

p. 82 He blamed what he called
Quoted in an interview with Phillip Jackson, in Vaughan,
Doctor to the Resistance
, p. 48.

p. 82 ‘Too much praise cannot be’
‘The American Hospital in Paris in the Second World War’, printed in France, 1940, p. 31, Archives of the American Hospital of Paris, File: German Occupation by Kathleen Keating and Various Other Histories, 1940–1944.

p. 82 Dr Thierry de Martel left a nephew
‘Drue Tartière, Back from Paris, Tells of Hiding Flyers from Foe’,
New York Herald Tribune
, 7 January 1945, p. 6.

p. 82 ‘for I had grown weary’
Drue Tartière with M. R. Werner,
The House near Paris: An American Woman’s Story of Traffic in Patriots
, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946, p. 9.

p. 83 German radio announced
Ibid
., p. 18.

p. 83 ‘grandmothers holding dead babies’
Ibid
., p. 12.

p. 83 ‘we realized that the so-called’
Ibid
., p. 13.

p. 83 ‘Lingerie is on the next floor’
Brian Moynahan,
The French Century
, London: Flammarion, 2007, p. 271.

p. 83 ‘The day was stifling’
Drue Tartière,
The House near Paris
, p. 16.

p. 84 ‘In Tours, there was even greater’
Ibid.
, p. 17.

p. 84 ‘From the Bordeaux radio station’
Ibid
., pp. 18–19.

p. 84 ‘a boy was arranging … I had stood next to him’
Ibid
., p. 4.

p. 85 ‘old Citroën with a motor’
A. J. Liebling,
The Road Back to Paris
, London: Michael Joseph, 1944, p. 85. See also ‘War Babies’,
Time
, 17 June 1940.

p. 85 ‘We had our
café au lait
’
Liebling,
The Road Back to Paris
, pp. 90–91.

p. 85 Many Frenchmen had already
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
Wartime Writings, 1939–1944
, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986, pp. xiv and 52.

p. 86 ‘The voice spoke of resistance’
Liebling,
The Road Back to Paris
, p. 137.

p. 86 ‘Within three years … the last bare-knuckle’
Ibid.
, p. 98.

p. 89 Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier
Adrienne Monnier,
Trois agendas d’Adrienne Monnier
,
Texte établie et annoté par Maurice Saillet
, Paris:

published ‘par ses amis’, 1960, p. 38.