Women of Valor (30 page)

3/ Nicole Mangini m. Michel Carage

4/ Michelle “Plumeau” Mirande m. Jean de Rogaisky

5/ Hélène Langé m. Michel Musnier

6/ Michette de Steinheil m. Alain Rodel

7/ Florence Conrad m. Paul Lannusse

8/ Liliane Walter m. Henri Uzan

9/ Anne-Marie Davion m. Jacques Branet

10/ Zizon Sicco m. Jacques Bervialle

Ten marriages resulted from the European campaign. Those who continued on to Indochina carried on the trend. They were:

1/ Edith Schaller m. Lionel Vézy

2/ Jacqueline Lambert de Guise m. Maurice Sarazac

3/ Geneviève Vaudoyer m. Edmund Grail

4/ Yvonne Negre m. Lucien Berne

5/ Sabine de Saint Martin m. François Sanguinetti

6/ Rosette Trinquet m. Philippe Peschaud

7/ Amicie Berne m. Jean Barnaud

8/ Lucette Brochot m. Zonk Brezina

9/ Ghislaine Bechmann m. Alfred Bergamin

10/ Suzanne Torrès m. Jacques Massu

*   *   *

Anne-Marie and Jacques Branet were married in July 1946, three months after her divorce became final. His family became reconciled to the marriage, despite their misgivings. They adopted two children, and their daughter, Marie-Pierre Branet, said in an interview that the Rochambelles were like surrogate aunts to her while growing up. Edith and her daughter, and Michette and her daughter would join Anne-Marie and Marie-Pierre for ski trips in the Alps in winter, and vacations at the Branet’s country house in Savoie in the summer. “They were very close and they all loved life,” Marie-Pierre said. “I don’t know if it was because they had lived through some very tough times. They didn’t talk about that, they talked about the good times they had.”

Jacques stayed in the army and rose to the rank of general. He died in 1969, and then Anne-Marie died in 1984. It took Marie-Pierre twenty years to finally clean out her clothes and things from their house in Savoie. “I miss them every day,” she said.

*   *   *

Rosette went on to Indochina, where she met her husband, Philippe Peschaud. They were married in Rabat in April 1947. Leclerc served as best man at their wedding, and wrote a dedication in a book on the history of the division: “To the cadet Rosette Trinquet, who, after having taken part splendidly in all the operations of the 2e DB in France and in Indochina, wanted to conserve the spirit … in choosing a husband!” Rosette said that she had developed such strong arms from driving ambulances that when the seamstress was pinning the sleeves on her wedding gown, she inadvertently flexed her muscle and popped all the pins out.

Seven months later Leclerc was in Algeria, posted to his beloved North Africa again. A plane ride, a sandstorm and a mountain brought his life to an abrupt end. He had already said goodbye to the Second Division, when he left its command at Fontainebleau, on June 22, 1945: “I leave you, but I do not leave behind our division insignia. I will keep it: it will be my finest decoration. I ask you, you also, to keep it. When you find your energy flagging, remind yourselves of Koufra, Alençon, Paris, and Strasbourg. Stay with your comrades, find your leaders, and continue to spread through the country the patriotism which has been our strength.” The nation, as well as the division, wept. Leclerc was forty-five years old. Patton preceded him in death, killed in a car accident in Germany in 1945. They were two of a kind, Patton and Leclerc, and neither of them made it to the old soldier fade. If there is an afterlife for stubborn and cantankerous warhorses, they are arguing still.

When the French pulled out of Indochina, the Peschauds returned to Paris. Philippe left the Army and founded his oil transport company. Rosette, after all the years of adventure, was suddenly stranded at home, a wife but not yet a mother, and spent four difficult years trying to find a new footing. Remembering those days of long nothingness wiped the smile off her face. “That was hard,” she said. Then came two children, and she got involved in organizing the postwar division’s associations and especially the Fondation Maréchal Leclerc de Hauteclocque, formed in 1974, serving as its vice president since 1996. The foundation helped set up a museum about the Second Division and the Resistance, as well as a research documentation center, and continues to organize seminars and award prizes. For years, the Rochambelles directed an annual charity sale to benefit veterans’ services and a scholarship fund, giving it up only in 2004 when it simply became too much for them to handle. Rosette also has written several articles for veterans’ publications and has spoken regularly at historical forums about the Rochambelles, keeping the group’s reputation alive and polished.

She noted that a group of army ambulance drivers was formed in 1982 and named itself the Rochambeau Group, after the World War II originals, making the Rochambelles the first women’s unit to begin a tradition in the French Army. Three of the new Rochambelles served in the Balkans in the 1990s. Rosette said she believed Suzanne Torrès and Florence Conrad would have been proud to see their project continue in service.

*   *   *

Toto and Jacques Massu were married in Paris in 1948. After returning from Indochina to France, Toto also worked on the postwar organizations, heading the veterans’ association for a year, before following Massu to various army postings abroad. She and Massu had a daughter, and asked Florence Conrad to be her godmother. Conrad, meanwhile, had married Colonel Paul Lannusse and bought a small chateau at Rouziers-de-Touraine in the Loire Valley. She died there on July 4, 1966, at the age of eighty, and was buried in her Rochambelle uniform with full military honors. For all their shared experiences, Conrad and Toto never had an easy friendship. Conrad’s demands and Toto’s temper brought conflict too quickly to the fore. Still, Toto wrote a laudatory obituary in the veterans’ magazine when Conrad died.

“When I met Florence Conrad in New York in 1945 [sic], she already had the glow, in many American circles and above all in the French community, of a veritable legend, a legend that, if one looks at the sources, did not surpass the reality,” Toto wrote. “I am certain that tomorrow and long after, as long as one of our ‘young ones’ evokes the great moments of her life, Florence Conrad will dominate the scenario with her unforgettable personality.”
3
The young ladies have grown old, and Toto was right: stories about Florence Conrad are still being told.

In 1969, Toto published her memoir, entitled
Quand j’étais Rochambelle
(When I was a Rochambelle), the title taken from the song the women used to make up as they went along while peeling vegetables in that desert tent many years before. Toto died in November 1977, and her daughter a year later, both of them struck by different forms of cancer. Massu, retired from the army at the rank of general, remarried and settled in rural village south of Paris. He said in an interview in 2000 that the Rochambelles had earned the devotion of the entire division. “No one ever saw an ambulance driver crack. They were very courageous to the end,” he said. “Anyone who had any doubts was quickly reassured.” Massu died in October 2002.

Of the fifty-one women who served in the Rochambeau Group in Europe, thirty-six left the group in the summer of 1945, and fifteen went on to Indochina (four new recruits served in Indochina only). In the European campaign, one Rochambelle was killed (Leonora Lindsley), one disappeared (Micheline Grimprel), and six were wounded (Polly Wordsmith, Edith Schaller, Marianne Glaser, Tony Rostand, Lucie Deplancke, and Marie-Thérèse Pezet). Only Polly’s injuries were serious enough to end her career as an ambulance driver; the others bandaged themselves up and kept on going.

*   *   *

Among those who went to Indochina, Janine Bocquentin began training as a paratrooper in order to continue as a nurse with her unit there, but when it came time to jump, the army refused to allow women to participate. She went to the Scouts de France, who helped her train, but again, when it came time to jump, the Scouts’ insurance company said it had to follow the army’s regulations. She and seven other women went to air circuses and exhibitions, and found instructors willing to let them jump without insurance. They got their number of jumps to qualify, and returned to Indochina as paratroopers, working for two months there until the military command discovered that there were women in the unit. Janine was immediately reassigned to a hospital in Saigon. There she met her husband, a Second Division veteran working as a civilian engineer. They were married in 1949 and started on a family that would eventually include eight children. They returned to France from Indochina in 1957.

Janine, a devout Catholic, became involved in helping displaced Algerians after the war for independence there sent many thousands fleeing to metropolitan France in the early 1960s. If she had not been a Rochambelle, she said, she would have gone to Africa as a missionary nurse. She believed that the war shaped her destiny by putting her in a position to help the Algerians in France. “The war allowed me to reach my dreams,” she said.

*   *   *

Edith also went on to Indochina. There, in 1946, she married Lionel Vézy, a Spahi she had met in France, with Leclerc and Toto as witnesses. Edith served as director of the Second Division’s convalescence center in Saigon for a year, caring for a ward of sixty to seventy soldiers at a time. Later she joined her husband on a rubber plantation in Cambodia, where they spent three years. They adopted a daughter in France and then moved to the Ivory Coast to run another plantation. Her husband died in 1995.

Edith published her memoir,
“Gargamelle,” mon ambulance guerrière 2e DB
(“Gargamelle,” my warrior ambulance of the Second Armored Division), in 1994, because she wanted to record some of the lighter moments of the war and not dwell on the pain and suffering. In the book, she outlined many of Lucie’s and her escapades, and noted with pride that she received five citations for bravery and five punishments for disobedience. She also received the Croix de Guerre with palm, the Military Medal, and is an officer in the Legion of Honor. At the age of ninety-five, she was working as a volunteer twice a week in the Documentation Center of the Memorial de Maréchal Leclerc de Hauteclocque. Age neither slowed her step nor softened her sass: Edith remained incorrigible through the years.

Did being a Rochambelle change her? She said it cemented her national identity. As a native of Colmar, she was under German rule as a child, then French as a teenager and young adult, only to watch Alsace become German again in 1939. “I became very French and very patriotic,” she said.

*   *   *

Georges Ratard came to get Arlette in Paris after the liberation of Strasbourg in December 1944, and took her to his mother’s house in Brittany, leaving her with his mother and grandmother, both of whom were convinced that he had married her because she was pregnant. “That annoyed me,” she said. The baby (a boy indeed) was born in May, and Georges was posted to Alençon after the war ended. They lived in a wing of a chateau the army had requisitioned, a building with lovely grounds but neither heat nor running water. They took turns washing the baby’s diapers in a brook, trading off when their fingers froze up.

Georges went to work for NATO, they had two more sons, and then he retired in 1967 and began teaching Latin in a high school in Les Sables d’Olonne, an Atlantic coast resort town where Arlette had found an apartment. They built their own house on a sand dune, and watched development spring up around them. By the end of the century, there were thirty or so division veterans living in the area and meeting for lunch once a month. Having shared the experience of war was the foundation of solid friendship, Arlette said. “We have good memories, of camaraderie, of having had the courage to do it,” she said. “War isn’t pretty, when you see the burned-out tanks, the swollen animals in the fields. If I saw it today it would make me sick. But at the time, we didn’t think about it.” She believed the soldiers were pleased to have women taking care of them if they were suffering or in pain. “They all said the women were more like their mothers, for consoling them, for taking care of them, it’s better than a man,” she said. “Picked up by a Rochambelle, you had a more maternal hand.”

Into her eighties, Arlette traveled every year to visit her youngest son in Brazil, where he ran a small hotel in a coastal village, and bodysurf in the warm south Atlantic waters. She also stayed close to Rosette, who regularly invited several of her old comrades to her vacation home in Corsica, and to Lucie, who came to see her and Georges often at Sables d’Olonne. She frequently found little notes Lucie wrote in books she gave her, all to “Marlette,” short for Mon Arlette. “Lucie was the definition of joy. She was radiant,” Arlette said. “I miss her the most.”

Lucie died in August 1985. The decade of the 1980s took Denise Colin (1980), Marie-Anne Duvernet (1985), Crapette Demay (1987) and Suzanne Evrard (1988) as well. ‘You’ Guerin died in 2000 and Tony Rostand followed in 2001. As of March 2006, there were sixteen surviving Rochambelles who served in the European campaign, some of them ill, others enjoying good health. The youngest of them was eighty-two, the eldest ninety-five. Each of them had received the Military Medal, an honor reserved for soldiers and not for officers, and most of them had won the Croix de Guerre, with palms added for extra valor. They kept their medals wrapped in tissue paper and tucked away in desk drawers, along with fading photographs and occasional souvenirs of the war.

*   *   *

France hurried to remember its heroes of the war, and nearly every town or city has an Avenue du Général Leclerc. Two towns have seen fit to honor the Rochambelles. Vendôme, 200 kilometers southwest of Paris and birthplace of the revolutionary era Comte de Rochambeau, named a major traffic circle Carrefour des Rochambelles in May 1984. Then in September 2002, Argentan, the Normandy town that slipped through the division’s fingers back into German hands and then finally was liberated by the Americans in August 1944, honored the women with a Square des Rochambelles. Assistant Mayor Marie-Joseph Pierre said that town officials in Argentan thought the Rochambelles’ story was fascinating and wanted to do something for them. The officials found a square near the entrance of town that would bear their name, and even if it becomes the inevitable traffic circle in a few years, it will be called the Rond Point des Rochambelles. The town also put up a plaque honoring the memory of Micheline Grimprel, who disappeared forever on the road to Argentan. Edith and Rosette drove out from Paris for the dedication ceremony.