Authors: Ellen Hampton
Women of Valor (27 page)
The wounded could be counted in scarlet patches of blood on the snow. Edith and Anne were driving in a convoy towards Grussenheim, a long black snake of vehicles across a white blanket, on a narrow road with no cover, when German artillery began picking off vehicles from high ground positions. They finally got into the woods, but it offered no shelter from the lethal hail, and they picked up the wounded and left as quickly as possible. They drove west toward Ostheim, on the main Strasbourg-Colmar route, and saw a pink glow on the horizon that, as they approached, turned out to be the entire village burning. No hospital would take their wounded there. They continued westward, crawling through the smoldering wreckage, to Riquewihr, where a field hospital ostensibly had been set up. They found it, but it was empty of any medical supplies and they were reluctant to leave their wounded there. The locals told them that the mountain pass to Ribeauvillé, the nearest hospital, was blocked with snow. More injured soldiers were waiting to be picked up back at Grussenheim; they had no time to spare. They unloaded the soldiers into the bare room, thinking that at least they were out of danger there. Edith looked at one of them, a young man whose hands were drenched with blood from holding his intestines inside, and thought that if she could get him to a hospital, he might be saved.
2
They had to go back down the treacherous road into the center of the firestorm, and returning to certain danger required purposeful courage. “It was sometimes difficult to think, I’ve got to go back,” Anne said. Back they went, retracing their path through still-burning Ostheim and approaching Grussenheim gingerly, hardly saying a word, watching the flames rise and the mortars fall. Edith, less than ten kilometers from her parents’ home in Colmar, kept thinking that it would be too unfair to die on their doorstep. They got through, picked up the wounded, and took them straight to the hospital at Ribeauvillé this time. Ostheim was little more than ashes as they passed.
When chunks of rubble and smoldering beams fallen from the ruins of buildings blocked their path, the two women got out of the ambulance to push them aside. On their second day of bringing wounded soldiers to Ribeauvillé, they learned that an American field hospital had been set up nearby to relieve the overburdened town hospital. They were glad to take the injured men there instead. Edith and Anne worked nonstop for three days, getting no sleep and eating only a few crackers they happened to have in the ambulance. “It was a nightmare,” Edith said later.
After Grussenheim was taken, de Witasse collapsed with septicemia and tetanus and was hospitalized. He had been getting worse and worse over the previous week, and the effort of the attack was more than he could stand. De Witasse was one of the lucky ones. The division counted 278 dead and wounded, eighteen of whom were officers. Some 250 Germans were killed, and after the war, Grussenheim’s mayor calculated that fifty-two farms were destroyed, and twenty-two civilians and 125 animals killed in the four-day battle.
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Grussenheim had cost the division more casualties than the entire campaign from Baccarat to Strasbourg, and yet it offered no strategic interest whatsoever. Leclerc, back from Paris, was livid. He sent a blistering report on de Lattre’s lack of judgment and leadership to de Gaulle. It was the end of any slightly civil communication the two men had enjoyed.
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On January 31 Jacotte and Crapette left their snowy wood and crawled along roads crowded with burnt-out tanks and armored cars through Elsenheim, where they were hit with some shrapnel, to Ohnenheim. Dr. Alexandre Krementchousky was there; he had set up a field hospital in the village café. The women found a jar of milk and started to stoke up the furnace. They hadn’t been indoors and they hadn’t slept a full night in ten days. The idea of a glass of warm milk was like a vision, a dream. They gathered around the furnace, holding their stiff hands up to its growing bloom of heat, daring to feel the exhaustion in their bones. And the order came: immediate depart for Markolsheim.
They climbed leadenly back into the ambulance. Jacotte asked Crapette to mix her some instant coffee with cold water—anything to stay awake. They sang songs until they got close to the town and the artillery started pounding in, loud and close, and staying awake was no longer difficult. Marckolsheim was the last village west of the Rhine, and apparently its bridge was still intact, and the command staff wanted to push any remaining Germans in the area back across and then seal the access.
They drove into the village at 2:00 A.M., sheltered the ambulance, and were directed to a cellar where a dozen or so other soldiers were waiting out the battle. At morning light, Allied air support destroyed the last German defenses. They emerged from the cellar and realized that they had finished their task: they had pushed the Germans out of the Colmar Pocket and back across the Rhine. “There was an explosion of joy and of satisfaction,” Jacotte said. “It was over.”
They found a small hotel, abandoned, and everyone crowded in as Crapette struck up some silly songs on the piano. They were running on empty, coming out of two weeks of icy horror, and the happiness that erupted was in equal measure to the depth of their exhaustion and despair.
Edith was denied permission to drive the ambulance to Colmar, but a Spahi friend found a Jeep and took her there. First they stopped at her late husband’s parents’ house, and she was pleased to see they were well. She missed her husband, killed in an airplane crash before the war began. Then she went to her parents’ home and the nostalgia of better times. She had to forego a night in her own bed, as they all slept in the cellar, and the Spahi came to fetch her in the morning. It was a brief respite from the brutal edge of the Alsatian campaign.
A week later, the rest of Alsace was in French hands as well. De Lattre announced on February 9 that the last of the German troops had crossed back over the Rhine. The division celebrated the liberation of Alsace in Geipolsheim, on the southwestern outskirts of Strasbourg, with a parade and review by Leclerc. The division was being split between those sent to extinguish an isolated band of Germans on the Atlantic coast at Royan, and others sent on an extended vacation in the center of France. The U.S. Army and de Lattre’s First Army would lead the invasion into Germany, a decision with which Leclerc predictably disagreed. At the same time, the Second Division was broken, battered, and exhausted. They needed a break. “After Alsace, we were shattered,” Jacotte said. “We had suffered greatly, from a lack of sleep, from the injuries and loss of friends, from the cold. And the Germans were very punishing in the end. We never had a respite.”
Jacotte and Crapette took
Tante Mirabelle
in for some repairs, such as replacing the back windows that had been shot out in Lorraine two months before. They counted the shrapnel holes, some of them not so small, and found thirty-five. That was thirty-five times they had been missed by a paper-thin margin. They considered it irrefutable evidence of their incredible luck.
From the end of February to the middle of April, the Rochambelles and most of the division were on leave in the Loire Valley. They visited the monumental chateaux, organized numerous picnics, held many a musical evening, and generally tried to recover from the crushing fatigue of the campaign to liberate France. The first few weeks of enforced rest were practically medicinal, but as the men and women found the top of their form again, they were eager to get back to the war.
Leonora Lindsley, one of the young Americans who had signed on with the Rochambelles in New York and had been working since August 1944 at Val de Grace Hospital, rejoined the Rochambelles in the Loire Valley. She hoped to write about the war from the French perspective. Soon after she arrived, the division was ordered to depart for Germany, and she described the tanks draped with wisteria and lilacs, and the men singing their regimental song, “The March of Chad,” as the convoy rolled out.
A few days later, writing from Germany, Leonora noted that the victory march into Germany so anticipated by the division soldiers and the Rochambelles was turning out to feel a little hollow. Having known the experience of defeat, it was difficult for them not to recognize the pain and loss on German faces. “The French are unhappy. They arrived a little arrogant and sure of themselves. When they crossed the border, after so many years of waiting, standards flying in the wind, they were truly radiant. But battle has not yet taken place on this side of the Rhine.… They became the Conquistadors (for lack of a better term) and are not happy about it,” she wrote. Division soldiers talked loudly in the streets about Nazi atrocities and reassured themselves that their punishing attitude was correct, but they felt a little ugly and very unhappy, she wrote. “We have done a lot of driving since April 25, and it resembles more and more 1940, but this time in reverse. Soon, there probably will be no more resistance and my next letter will have a different tone.”
Leonora Lindsley, April? 1945.
Resistance largely came from the hands of snipers when the division moved into Germany behind the American offensive sweep. Two motorcycle men were shot, and division vehicles had to be kept under guard whenever they stopped. The civilians they encountered were somber, unsmiling: Nazi Germany had been defeated, even if the white flag had not yet flown. The Rochambelles were coasting on a victory wave, but it was not the joyride they had anticipated.
The Second Division crossed the Danube on a pontoon bridge erected by engineers of the Twelfth U.S. Armored Division, following the American advance through Bavaria toward Munich. There the Second Division was ordered to halt and move off the road to let U.S. troops pass by them: the Americans wanted Munich. The French had taken Paris and Strasbourg, and they were told there were fresh American troops who had not yet engaged in combat.
Jacotte and Crapette pulled the ambulance over to the side of the road with the rest of the convoy and watched the parade of every imaginable type of military vehicle: Jeeps, half-tracks, amphibious vehicles, tow trucks, bridge builders, tank carriers, gas tankers, supply trucks, medical trucks, tanks, armored cars, and on and on. It took them all day to pass. When the French got to Munich, snow was on the ground and the city was in Allied hands.
In countryside villages, white sheets began to appear draped from chalet balconies, reflecting the surrounding blanket of snow, and wrapping the entire nation in a symbolic surrender. The German people knew it was over, even if Hitler and the Nazi command were still huddled in their Berlin bunker to the north. The Second Division encountered light and sporadic fighting, more for show than in any serious attempt to repel the Allied forces. In the south, the landscape was pristine, but the roads were crowded with military traffic. Liberated prisoners seemed to be everywhere. Those from the concentration camps stumbled in the snow, clinging tenaciously to life, indescribably fragile.
Zizon had a new partner, as Denise, recovered from her bronchitis, had returned to Paris to finish medical school. They stayed with German families as they traversed the country, and Zizon wrote that she felt that the Germans were trying to pretend that it was only a small minority who had supported the war. She didn’t believe it was true, and said she saw in family albums photographs of Poles hung after being mutilated, and of Germans looting among dead French soldiers. “I was dismayed to see how the people put all the horrible crimes committed by the Germans on the backs of the S.S.,” she wrote. “They look plainly to set themselves apart from those who, so they say, were the only perpetrators of atrocities.”
Janine Bocquentin, who left her hospital duty to rejoin the Rochambelles during their Loire Valley stay, was attached to Commandant Dronne’s tactical group in Germany. There wasn’t much physical fighting, but the psychological battle had yet to be won. She said that they saw German teenagers kicking newly released prisoners, particularly the skeletal concentration camp survivors. She and her partner threw food and clothing out the ambulance window to the ex-prisoners when they passed them in convoy. They also were supposed to find lodging among the German population, and Janine did not find that easy. One woman chased them off a farm with a pitchfork, shouting that the Americans were coming and would teach them a lesson, as though they were on opposite sides. “I never saw an open door, an extended hand, never,” Janine recalled. “I could feel the hatred of that population.”
The men soldiers found a different kind of welcome. Marie-Thérèse said the engines on the convoy would still be warm when groups of German women came around their nightly bivouac. “Those who resisted were really strong, because the girls were literally jumping on them. They were real whores.”
And, as night follows day, venereal disease followed prostitution. Soldiers asked the ambulance drivers for treatment. “I yelled at them,” Marie-Thérèse said, but they didn’t care because penicillin, now available from the Americans, was a quick cure. One soldier had to be hospitalized three times for syphilis, the last time in Bavaria in late April. The Rochambelles had finally gotten clearance for a good night’s sleep under deep down covers, and Marie-Thérèse was ill with what was probably an appendicitis attack. She had been driving stretched out straight so that the bumps in the road didn’t send her into agony, and her belly was swollen up so that she couldn’t button her pants. She was very much looking forward to resting in bed. At 4:00 A.M. there was a knock on the door and a call to evacuate a soldier. “Where was he?” she mumbled. There at the door was the syphilis victim, walking like a duck, his testicles and abdomen swollen up and in severe pain. “We were furious,” she said.