Women of Valor (13 page)

Shortly before dawn, she was awakened by Toto, who murmured that the Germans were there, and not to get out of the ambulance. Raymonde looked out the windshield to see the hulking dark outline of an enormous Panzer, just in front of them. A Jewish Austrian doctor on their team, who took the nom de guerre of Valéry when he fled the Nazis, slipped silently from the back of their ambulance into the forest. Toto got out to talk to the German commander. Raymonde got out as well, and a German soldier approached her.

“He said to me, ‘You know, mademoiselle, war is a sad thing,’” Raymonde recalled. The Panzer was in a convoy of tanks and vehicles covered with soldiers, hanging on every which way they could. The German soldiers began checking the ambulances, and Raymonde knew there was a half-track of men doctors and stretcher-bearers at the back of their convoy. Toto stepped in front of the soldiers forcefully, insisting that there were only women ambulance drivers, no need to bother inspecting.

Those who knew Toto would have no trouble believing that she could single-handedly stop a Panzer division. She had a razor-sharp tongue backed up by steel-plated courage. “She nailed everybody, men, women,” said Rosette. “She was very intimidating.” She also was Jewish. And she stood on the edge of the forest in the misty dawn and faced down the Nazi commander, denying him inspection of her ambulances and demanding right of passage.

The German commander wanted to take the women prisoner, but there was literally no room in his six Panzers and twelve armored vehicles—the remains of the 116th Panzer Division. Toto held her ground, insisting that they were neutral noncombatants with the Red Cross. Raymonde said the problem both groups faced was that there was no room for either to turn around. The German commander finally agreed to leave them, if they would promise not to move for two hours. The sun was starting to come up as the German column pulled out past them. Toto and Raymonde climbed onto the roof of their truck and saw that the convoy was heading in the direction the Spahi unit had taken the evening before. Christiane remembered that Colonel de Langlade’s tactical group was camped nearby, at Montmerrei, and climbed onto the hood of the half-track to lead the convoy of ambulances to safety. It was August 15, the Catholic celebration of the Assumption, and Christiane had begun praying to the Virgin Mary the minute she saw that Panzer. Some of the other drivers thought Toto ought to keep her promise to the Germans and stay put for two hours. She shrugged off their reproaches.

When they reached the tactical unit encampment, Colonel de Langlade, an officer of the old school whose manners were already smooth as silk in that early morning, told Toto in a patronizing way to calm down. “He didn’t believe her at all,” Raymonde said. “He told Toto, ‘You’ve had a fright, dear lady, but that certainly wasn’t the Germans.’”

Commandant Massu, Toto’s bridge-playing boyfriend, knew better. Coffee cup in hand, he interrupted before Toto could lose her famous temper in the direction of a superior officer. “If Madame Torrès says she saw the Germans, it was the Germans,” Massu said. A reconnaissance plane was called to go up and check it out, and the German tanks were found trying to hide in a nearby farm courtyard. Toto and Raymonde and the rest of their group continued on to Ecouché.

The division fought around Ecouché for another week, pushing the Germans into what was becoming known as the “Falaise Pocket,” as its center was the town of Falaise. The pincer movement was turning into a sack, and the Allies were slowly closing the neck of the sack. The remains of German Army Group B were being squeezed inside, but the pincer movement suddenly was halted for several days by the U.S. command staff, and in the delay, some of the German troops slipped out. When the Allies finally closed it, they took 50,000 Germans prisoner. Leclerc wrote a letter to General de Gaulle, who had just arrived in France for the first time since 1940, updating the Second Division’s situation. He reported that in the Falaise battles of the previous week, the division had seen 60 of its soldiers killed and 550 wounded.

During the Falaise battle, the Rochambelles worked around the clock, evacuating wounded soldiers through the hazards of shelling and bombardment. Rosette got a letter from her mother while they were there, admonishing her for having gone rowing on a lake in England with some young officers. It was far too dangerous to the social reputation of a proper young lady, her mother said. Rosette, her helmet on against incoming artillery, had a good laugh. The contrast between past and present dangers was ironic, and Rosette felt the gap widen between her previous life as a civilian and her current station as a soldier. At any rate, neither handsome young officers in rowboats nor lethal artillery barrages would give Rosette pause. She said she was simply too busy to stop and be afraid.

She also had an eye for amusing moments in the war, and her letters to her mother reflected that (and purposefully did not mention times of danger or despair). Driving the ambulance full of wounded soldiers near Ecouché, Rosette ran into the engineering truck in front of her when it turned suddenly off the road. She slammed on the brakes, but the impact still was brutal. “I was full of remorse for the wounded, who added to my despair by insulting me thoroughly: ‘You should be ashamed to be an ambulance driver when you don’t know how to drive!’ I would be, they told me, responsible for their deaths,” she wrote. She and Arlette got the soldiers to the hospital nonetheless, and the doctor said their days were not numbered. “Arlette and I let loose a sigh of relief. We would have to try to be a little less sensitive.”

One day near Ecouché, they had to bury several division soldiers and the chaplain was not there, so Toto asked Christiane to preside. She grabbed her prayer book and went to work. “I said the prayers that came to me. It wasn’t a real mass. But the soldiers were very touched that there were at least some prayers,” she said. If it wasn’t a “real” mass, then it was all right for a woman to say it, following the same pattern of logic that held that the Rochambelles were not “real” women, they were ambulance drivers.

During that intense fortnight, two of Edith’s ambulances were destroyed, and Toto and Raymonde had taken the Spahi-confiscated market truck to help fill the gap in vehicles. What the Spahis didn’t find was the cache of Calvados under the stretchers. The women were pleased: a shot of Calvados—brandy made from apples—would be just what the doctor ordered for the lightly injured. They also were handing out eye drops to relieve the grittiness. It was dry that summer, and the troop movements and heavy vehicles seemed to grind a constant dust into the air.

One morning, in yet another apple orchard, Anne-Marie Davion asked Jacotte and Crapette if they would like some coffee. They were about to have some, to share a pleasantly ordinary moment in the midst of tension and chaos, when the shrieking whistle of an incoming mortar sent them facedown flat on the ground, eating dirt, praying this one wasn’t for them. It wasn’t. But the camp next to theirs had one dead, eleven wounded. “It was in moments like that when you had to gather all your force and know how to dominate your emotions, in order to act in the most efficient way possible,” Jacotte wrote. “Our ‘profession’ included knowing how to cover up your sadness and be brave, but we often had very heavy hearts.”
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Jacotte and Crapette got lost one night around the same area and decided to await the dawn at an abandoned farm rather than wander in the dark. But shots rang out nearby, and shadows seemed to lengthen and twitch. On that night, fear became a motivating factor: they decided they would rather take their chances on the dark road back to the medical company’s tent. The doctor on duty was surprised to see them at that hour, but with one look at their red eyes and tight lips he led them wordlessly back to a couple of empty stretchers. They managed to get a couple of hours’ sleep before the captain charged in at 5:00 A.M. and shouted at them to jump up and follow him.

The lack of sleep was the most difficult thing to overcome for Jacotte. She didn’t mind the hunger and the dirt, or not being able to bathe, but having no sleep for days on end was stretching her nerves. She and Crapette chewed GI-issue gum, smoked cigarettes and drank instant Nescafé to stay awake.

The division relied on fresh food from the local farmers to round out their rations, but the Rochambelles found little cooperation from the Norman peasants. One farmer sent his eight-year-old daughter to sell eggs, milk, and chickens to the army, and one day Zizon asked her if she was pleased that the French soldiers had replaced the Germans. The girl replied “Oh, yes! The Germans were bad to us. They didn’t pay like you do.”
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The First Company counted itself lucky in its cook, an Italian who had had a restaurant in Rabat before the war. Zizon described his method of persuading the Normans to come up with supplies: He went along to farms on their route and announced that he needed food for the troops. The farmers would respond that they had nothing to give him. “That’s no doubt because you sold too much to the
boches!
” he would reply. “Fine, look, I need five kilos of butter, twenty dozen eggs and twelve chickens. The price is such and such, and I’ll pay you that. Think about it. I’ll be back in a half-hour. If you still have nothing, I’ll demand the double and it’ll be free.” He carried a rifle with him and toyed with it in a convincing way while speaking. When he returned, the supplies were always ready.
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The war also brought cultural differences across the regions to light. “In Normandy the peasants certainly weren’t pleased with us,” Anne Hastings said. “What they did say is first there were Germans, then you. They obviously thought we were disturbing them. They never offered us anything, you had to pay for every egg.”

The Canadians defeated the last German Tiger brigade on August 16 and liberated the town of Falaise. The neck of the Allies’ sack closed on the Germans on August 20, and with it, the Battle of Normandy was over. Losses on both sides were high. Some 200,000 Germans were killed and another 200,000 taken prisoner.
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On the Allied side, an estimated 36,000 soldiers died (20,000 of them Americans) and 140,000 were injured in Normandy. A quarter of the deaths occurred on D-Day alone. For the Leclerc division, its first two weeks of war saw 141 dead, 78 missing and 618 injured.
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One of the missing and one of the wounded were Rochambelles.

The Second Division’s experience in Normandy had manifold effects, both consolidating the tactical groups as effective fighting units and the overall division as part of the U.S. Third Army. Another result was an end to the contempt and hostility in which some of the division men had held the women ambulance drivers. Their performance under combat in Normandy erased the most entrenched doubts. “We admired the Rochambelles for their courage and their devotion,” Dr. Guy Chauliac said. “They made a place for themselves even though we didn’t want them. The Rochambelles were excellent, remarkable.”

Among those who changed his mind in Normandy was Leclerc. “He held them in great esteem,” Chauliac said. (François Jacob, the other division doctor from Rabat, was severely injured in the bombing near Ducey, evacuated by ambulance drivers from another unit, and spent a year in hospitals, recovering. He went on to win the Nobel Prize for his research discovering the role of DNA.)

Toto recounted in her memoir that one day a tank regiment officer who had tried his best to block the women from joining the division approached her. “You know what I thought of this female section and the pessimism of my predictions for its behavior under combat? Well, this is what I think now.” He stood at attention, removed his beret and made a deep bow, “à la D’Artagnan.” Toto was touched. He became a good friend, and a few months later, she picked him up wounded off the field and got him to a hospital.
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Colonel Pierre Billotte, who led the tactical unit from August until mid-September, noted in his memoirs that the Rochambelles “rivaled the men in audacity” in the Normandy operations. Audacity seemed to be a Second Division trademark. Luckily for the French, it was a quality Patton admired, both in strategy and in people. Before Normandy was even wrapped up, Leclerc was in to see him about the prize: Paris. “Leclerc of the 2d French Armored Division came in, very much excited … he said, among other things, that if he were not allowed to advance on Paris, he would resign. I told him in my best French that he was a baby, and I would not have division commanders tell me where they would fight, and that anyway I had left him in the most dangerous place,” Patton wrote in his diary on August 14. “We parted friends.”
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Leclerc’s aide, Christian Girard, wrote that in that meeting, Patton promised Leclerc Paris, and that he motioned to his compatriot, Major General John S. Wood, and said, “Look at Wood, he’s even more annoying than you are.”
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Patton wrote that he was in charge of 450,000 men in the war. Leclerc had just 15,000 men—and thirty-three women, at that point—but did not hesitate to make demands on Patton.

Leclerc was in a delicate position. He was on his home turf, but could not hope to win the war alone. He owed everything the division had, from Sherman tanks to Thompson machine guns, to soldiers’ uniforms, boots, and even their rations, to the Americans. But liberating France was in the French soldiers’ hearts as well as heads, and emotion could not be distilled from logic in the heat of the war. Conflicts with the Allied command were inevitable. The question of Paris was one of those points of discord, and by the third week of August, it was on everyone’s mind. Parisians felt the pull of home like a powerful magnet, while the politically inclined were calculating the postwar gains of liberating the capital.

The Allied command did not favor an approach to Paris. It was not strategically significant, it was not practical to send an armored division into an urban setting, and worst of all, the army would then be responsible for feeding and supplying the population of Paris once it was in Allied hands. The Allied command wanted to bypass Paris and push on toward the Rhine. Leclerc and de Gaulle, however, were adamant that the Second Division should take Paris, and take it now. The Resistance in Paris had begun an endgame uprising that could turn into a massacre without military backup, and had sent messengers to Normandy to urge the army to move immediately on the capital. Leclerc ordered a small reconnaissance unit to check out the situation, and then went to see U.S. Army General Omar Bradley. He came back on August 22 with a smile on his face, and, barely out of his Jeep, gave the order: immediate departure for Paris.