Women of Valor (10 page)

Toto’s bridge partners must have been on a different Liberty Ship, because she played poker instead, and lost her monthly salary of 3,000 francs (about $300 at the time) to a lieutenant-dentist from the medical battalion. She started the war with no money, but her nails were perfect.

On the quay at Southampton: The Rochambelles ready to cross to France. Front of the line to back: Florence Conrad, Suzanne “Toto” Torrès, Biquette Ragache, Raymonde Brindjonc, Anne-Marie Davion, Jacotte Fournier.

On board the Liberty ship
Philip Thomas,
crossing to France. Seated, r-l: Edith Schaller, unidentified officer, Anne Hastings, unidentified officer, Suzanne “Toto” Torrès, Colonel Warabiot, Anne-Marie Davion, Dr. Alexandre Krementchousky (with beret and pipe), Jacqueline Lambert de Guise (standing).

Toto getting ready for action.

CHAPTER THREE

Fear and the Back Roads of the
Bocage

The sky and the sea were crowded and jostling off the Normandy coast on August 1, 1944. Balloons were tethered to ships to interfere with potential air attacks, and ships were anchored in the English Channel against the force of the ripping tides. It was nearly the end of Operation Overlord, when 2 million troops and 330,000 vehicles landed on the Normandy beaches in the sixty days following D-Day. The shifting, tension, and energy offshore were matched on the bridge of the liberty ship, where the Second Division waited to disembark. The Rochambelles had sat on the deck of the ship for three days while the ship inched across the channel, three endless days of heads turning south, searching the horizon for a glimpse of coastline. Finally they were anchored off Utah Beach, but it was 2 A.M., and France remained an elusive shadow in the night.

First they had to get off the ship, and that was not as simple as it might sound. The women and men on the bridge had to climb down the side of the ship on a rope ladder, twisting and swaying in the rolling surf, and jump onto a transport barge that was banging sideways into the ship. Rosette counted that descent as her most anxious moment of the entire war. If her timing was off, she would slip into the sea and then be smashed by the barge as it swung back into the ship. “Fortunately there were huge American Negros to catch us on the way and set us, gasping and relieved, on the bridge,” Rosette wrote her mother. Zizon Sicco managed to be the last one in line. With her paralyzing vertigo, she didn’t know how she’d make it down. A captain helped at the top, and then at the bottom one of the Americans grabbed her by the waist and swung her onto the deck. It was over before she knew it.

The division’s vehicles, including the Rochambelles’ nineteen ambulances, had been driven onto the barge from below deck. One of the American soldiers told Edith Schaller to keep the ambulance in first gear through the shallow water and onto the beach, and aim for a narrow path, barely the width of her truck, that climbed up the hillside. She felt a tugboat push the barge close to shore, and at the signal, drove into the breakers.

Toto drove with Crapette Demay and an American officer, moving very fast once they hit land, speeding through darkness on tiny winding roads, noting the “Danger: Mines” signs posted occasionally. American soldiers in the landing area shouted at each newly arrived ambulance to go faster, faster! Rosette barely had time to realize she was back home. Jacotte, her five-year exile at an end, seized the moment. She drove her ambulance onto the beach and stopped dead. “I was almost in an altered state, under the force of emotion. At the foot of the first dunes, I stopped, opened the door, and on my knees, my hands in the sand, I touched my forehead to the ground of my homeland,” she wrote.
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Then they were off into the night. When they stopped at their encampment, a division officer drove by and tossed a few Camembert cheeses and baguettes to Toto. It was a perfect homecoming gift for the expatriates. One of the division soldiers, Sylvain, played guitar and the women sang old familiar songs. It was good to be home again, worth every difficult moment and every daunting obstacle to be there, bivouacked in an apple orchard in Normandy on a warm summer night. At dawn, Edith climbed onto the roof of her ambulance for a better view and saw the sea drenched in a magnificent scarlet glow of sunrise. “The sun was completely red, and so was the sea and all those ships and contraptions,” she said. “It was fabulous.”

It was fabulous, and it was frightening. They were diving into the raging middle of the Battle of Normandy, begun with the D-Day invasion two months before. Since then, the Allies had established an eighty-kilometer-wide beachhead on the coast, liberated the Cotentin Peninsula, and begun pushing towards the south and east. The fighting was heavy and intense. The women weren’t the only ones in the Second Division with no combat experience, and they wouldn’t be alone in finding the meaning of fear.

Leclerc and his command staff had driven straight to Patton’s camp from the coast. Generals Leclerc and Patton had a solid working relationship and a similar military style, and Leclerc told his aide-de-camp Christian Girard that he appreciated Patton and the other American generals there. “They’re a little bit nuts and that’s what it takes to be a good soldier,” he said.
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Over dinner, the French and American commanders conferred on plans for taking back Normandy from the Germans. By early August, U.S. troops had gotten about 100 kilometers south of the coast and taken the town of Avranches.

Leclerc was already in Avranches when the Rochambelles arrived on August 6, camping in an apple orchard between the outlying villages of Ducey and Saint James with the Third Company tanks of the 501st Regiment. The men were in the orchard on the left side of the road, the women on the right. The ambulances were lined up under camouflage netting. A small German plane had circled over them repeatedly during the day, and some of the other units moved. Toto asked the medical battalion commanders whether they should decamp, too, but orders came down the line to stay put, and to sleep beside their ambulances in full dress. Toto issued the order to remain where they were, but said that the women could sleep in their ambulances if they chose.

Zizon and her partner, Denise Colin, were hot and uncomfortable in their fatigues, and then the mosquitoes starting droning in. They decided to move into their ambulance, and Polly Wordsmith, who had joined the group in England, moved her stretcher over to have a little more room. Zizon took off her heavy fatigues and put on the top of her army-issue pajamas. They had just settled in to rest when hell, in the form of antipersonnel cluster bombs, fell from the sky and exploded in the heart of their camp.

Denise pulled a stunned, deafened Zizon out of her sleeping bag. The ambulance was blazing. Shrapnel had sparked the extra gas can. Zizon ran to get a fire extinguisher. Coming back with it she ran into a captain who shouted at her to take off that light-colored top right away. She tried to argue that she was even paler underneath, “but he had his idea, and I really didn’t have the time to insist, so I obeyed and exposed my half-nakedness to the attention of the German pilots.”
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A soldier handed her the heavy part of his helmet when he saw her bare head, and she ran in her underwear and bra, barefoot with the fire extinguisher and a helmet four sizes too big, to put out the fire. She cut the cords of her hanging sack of clothes and threw it out of reach of the flaming ambulance. When the fire was finally out, she realized how ridiculous she looked and had a fit of hilarity, prompting another driver to run to Toto and report that Zizon had lost her mind. She hadn’t. She got dressed and started picking up the wounded. It was the Rochambelles’ baptism by fire, and one of the first problems they faced was that tires had been blown out by shrapnel. The ambulances were of no use if they couldn’t roll. Raymonde Brindjonc found two of her tires shredded by shrapnel; Christiane Petit’s ambulance had lost three. Another woman had parked in a ditch and couldn’t get the ambulance out.

They pulled together what was working, got the injured loaded into ambulances, and started moving toward the nearest treatment center. Most of the injured had been on the men’s side of the orchard, but the women counted one badly wounded among their team as well. Polly Wordsmith’s legs were shattered in the bombing, and she remained crippled for the rest of her life. At first, she refused to be transported until the soldiers all were taken care of, but when Toto saw her condition, she packed her into an ambulance right away. Zizon measured her luck in centimeters. A small banner with the Lorraine Cross, the division symbol, that she had embroidered and hung on the end of her stretcher, was destroyed. “For the first time I was thankful for my small size. If I was just a few centimeters taller, which I often had wished, my feet would have been in the same shape as that flag.”
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Jacotte loaded her ambulance with five bleeding and burned soldiers and got directions to the nearest treatment center. The directions were wrong, and she drove around in the dark, searching. She saw a group of army tents and headed for them, but the American guard, gun in hand, shouted at her, “Password!” She tried to explain in her gentle, British-accented English that she was looking for the hospital. He kept shouting “Password!” at her and getting angrier, so she left and drove on. She flagged down a passing Jeep and got new directions. She found the hospital entrance, but there the guard said the hospital was full and refused to let her in. She parked and went around to a side entrance, found the head nurse and explained that she had wounded soldiers in the ambulance. If she had to go further on, where could she go? The nurse told her to bring the patients in, that she would take them. Jacotte stayed for a while and translated for the soldiers, then returned to the medical unit’s bivouac. It was deserted, dark and empty in the night. A straggler gave her directions and she eventually found the rest of the unit.

It was an ominous start to Jacotte’s career as an ambulance driver, but it drew for her a clear and unmitigated picture of the kind of quick thinking and personal initiative she was going to need. The burden of responsibility for the wounded soldiers was going to fall on the individual drivers, on whether they could get through the obstacles, both physical and bureaucratic, that would be thrown in their paths. And fear, if it got in the way, could become yet another obstacle. She understood that she would have to push past it and keep going.