Women of Valor (28 page)

Marie-Thérèse Pezet with division member and actor Jean Gabin, Germany, May 1945.

Marie-Thérèse drove behind the celebrated actor Jean Gabin and his tank all through Germany. One morning she woke up and the front half of her hair had fallen out on her pillow. It grew back, but white, while the back half stayed dark brown. The doctor said it was the exhaust from the tanks that had scorched her roots. She had to dye her hair for years afterward.

The French troops also were helping themselves to the material spoils of victory. An anonymous donor left the gift of a fox stole on the seat of Zizon’s ambulance, and she threw it out the window on a drive to get rid of it. The next day a soldier came running up, holding the wrap, saying “Look what you lost! I’m so glad I found it for you!” She waited for the cover of night to get rid of presents she did not want.

The division kept moving southward, toward the Austrian border, and engaged in its last fighting on May 4, just northwest of Berchtesgaden. Hitler had committed suicide on April 30 and Berlin had surrendered to the Russians on May 2. Would the remnants of the Nazi army try to defend his Bavarian headquarters at Berchtesgaden? Five army columns, four American and one French, rolled down the
Autobahn,
working together and exchanging supplies along the way.

The division’s Twelfth Company was ahead of the rest, and entered Berchtesgaden at 5:00 A.M. on May 5. Toto was with them. She wrote that they waltzed into Hitler’s abandoned offices with “the drunkenness of pirates,” and began looting and pillaging with a heady enthusiasm. She took Hitler’s personal stationery, and over the next few weeks sent notes to her friends on it. She was trying to stop the Spaniards of the Ninth Company from defacing a Rubens portrait, when suddenly a lieutenant came running, shouting for her to come quickly, quickly! Ambulance! She feared it was a car accident, but the lieutenant grabbed two other men and led them to an unmarked door in a hillside on the grounds. It was Hitler’s private wine cellar, and it was stocked with the best vintages of every country his troops had ravaged, most particularly France. They were loading cases into the ambulance when two American soldiers from the Third U.S. Infantry Division arrived to investigate. Toto steered them toward the stores of sugar, and the French kept piling up the wine cases until the ambulance would hold no more. Toto wrote that if a mouse had been injured, it wouldn’t have fit in the ambulance at that point.
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A captain in the room next to Zizon’s collected an array of sterling silver, platters, teapots, forks, knives, plates, all with the initials A.H. She saw the treasure when she passed by his open door, and couldn’t resist a comment in his direction. He said, “You know my wife’s initials are the same. This will make her very happy.” Another Rochambelle gave her a plate with Hitler’s seal on it, as a soldier had given her two of them. The Third Reich leaders’ houses at Berchtesgaden were stocked with the finest of everything: paintings, silver, books, rugs, wines, and division soldiers took what they could.

Marie-Thérèse was surprised by the reaction of some German women to the division’s presence. She wrote home from Berchtesgaden on May 6: “Curious impression: we are being received by the civilian population exactly like liberators. I personally have been stopped several times in the street by women thanking me for the end of the war!!! A young woman who lost her husband, her father, her brother-in-law and her brother in the war got down on her knees upon learning of the cease-fire in our sector, saying ‘Thank God!’”

Janine and her partner arrived at Berchtesgaden late and tired on May 6. They drank a little champagne to celebrate and then headed off to sleep. The next day they had a look around, and installed the infirmary in an office previously used by Emmy Goering, wife of top Hitler aide Hermann Goering. She picked up and kept some Goering family photos, some letters from Emmy Goering and a Christmas card:
“Weihnachtsgruss des Führers”
(Christmas Greetings from the Führer). An elegantly dressed German man offered to show them the entrance to Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest,” a lookout 1,834 meters up in the Alps. He said he was the Goering’s cook, but Janine didn’t believe him for a minute. “He was very distinguished; he was no cook,” she said. She found more Goering family photos in his desk later, confirming her suspicions that he was a friend or associate.

A group of soldiers wanted to climb up to the Eagle’s Nest, but found that the elevator built into the rock had been disabled. They started to climb, but Janine’s captain complained that his feet were frozen and asked her to accompany him back to the Berghof. Another four or five of their group hiked on up to the top. There was a little shooting in their direction, but the German “cook” shouted at the snipers not to shoot, that the war was over. As Janine was returning to the compound, someone from the division delivered some bad news: Leonora Lindsley had been badly injured. She had been riding in a Jeep crowded with soldiers, they hit a bomb crater in the road and she was thrown out onto her head.

Rochambelles at Berchtesgaden, May 1945. Driving: Crapette Demay; passenger front seat, Toto; rear passengers l-r, Amicie Berne, Biquette Ragache; on wheel cover, Yvonne Negre

Janine went to her and held her through the night, sponging blood from her face, but she never regained consciousness. “Leonora loved France,” Janine said. “She wanted to show the state of spirit of the French soldiers; that was what interested her.”

Leonora was twenty-eight years old when she was buried at the American cemetery at St. Avold, in Lorraine. She is identified there as an American Red Cross worker, a civilian, rather than a Second Division soldier. Her great adventure had ended in a banal accident, and, with painful irony, she died on the day the Germans surrendered.

It was on that day—May 7, 1945—that Jacotte and Crapette pulled into the parking lot of Hitler’s favorite lakeside hotel at Dorf-Königsee. A radio car next to them howled out the news: the war was over; the Germans had officially surrendered. Some nearby soldiers went crazy, shooting into the air every bullet and cartridge they could find. Eight of the Rochambelles happened to be there together, and they whooped with joy at the news. The war was over!

And then, in the midst of rejoicing, a pall fell over the women. If the war was over, so were their careers as ambulance drivers. For most of the women, returning to civilian life did not hold much promise. Options for women, in 1945, were limited and predictable: family, home, maybe a low-paying job, but nothing nearly as fulfilling as what they had been doing. As Rochambelles, they had touched the sky, rocked the earth, and defeated death on a daily basis. They were glad the war was over. But what would they do now?

Toto had an idea. She had heard that once the war in Europe was over, Leclerc was going to organize a volunteer division for the Pacific front, French Indochina in particular. Surely he was going to need ambulance drivers. With that prospect of adventure ahead, the women started celebrating again. Their futures seemed marvelously uncertain.

After Berchtesgaden and the surrender, there was still post-war cleanup to be done, and the Rochambelles were figured into the tasks. Part of the division was sent to rural Bavaria, where Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Anne were dispatched to a large and wealthy farm. There, three women proprietors had been fattening up their one billeted French prisoner of war like a favorite goose. “We were shocked to see that he was the king of the farm,” Marie-Thérèse said. The women’s husbands had been sent to the Russian front, and were not really expected to return alive. The prisoner hoped not, in any case, because he didn’t plan to liberate himself. “He said, ‘I’m just fine here, I’m not going home.’” He was from Béarn, in the rocky French Pyrénées, and had left his wife and three children on a farm smaller and far less productive than the Bavarian farm. Marie-Thérèse reminded him of the difficult life his wife was most likely living, but he said she would get along fine without him.

His attitude was disappointing to the Rochambelles, but it was intolerable to the French officers who had fought their way to Germany to free the comfortable Béarnais farmer. At the same time, the French Repatriation Commission was sweeping through Germany, picking up nearly 1 million French former prisoners, giving them their back pay, demobilizing them officially, and taking them to Strasbourg. Before the commission arrived in an area, a motorcycle messenger posted announcements of the appointed day, hour, and place the officials would be. Any French prisoners in the area were to report in for repatriation, and the large majority were very happy to do so. But in the area where Marie-Thérèse was stationed, about thirty of them hid in the woods when the commission came through, including the Béarnais farmer.

After this happened three times, Marie-Thérèse’s unit commander flew into a fury. The group would be returning to France soon, and he was determined to take the prisoners with him. An officer suggested they throw a party—supplies remained from the sacking of Berchtesgaden—and invite the prisoners and some Rochambelles for dancing. Marie-Thérèse, Marie-Anne, and Raymonde were among the Rochambelles present. “The prisoners came, with no apprehension, to enjoy the party. We let them drink deeply, and when they were ripe, the guards appeared,” Marie-Thérèse said. Twice prisoners now, they were put in the cellar of the officers’ headquarters. A few days later, the column moved out for France, with one prisoner per vehicle, chained to the tank or half-track, and disguised in as much uniform as they could find. No civilians were allowed on the military vehicles; the men had to look like soldiers. They resisted, they said they were better off in Germany, that people were starving in France. Those who had wives said anything could have happened in their prolonged absence, that it didn’t matter anymore. Their protests fell on deaf ears. The French soldiers had fought the war to liberate them and by God, they were taking them home. When they got to Strasbourg, the commanding officer was reprimanded by his superiors, not for bringing the men home against their will, but for violating transport regulations. The prisoners thus were “freed” in Strasbourg, and Marie-Thérèse deeply suspected they returned to Bavaria.

On May 19, the entire Second Division was assembled for the first and only time for de Gaulle to pin the Grand Croix de la Legion d’Honneur on Leclerc near Landsberg, just west of Munich. The oddest group of men the French military had ever seen had pulled off an amazing feat. From New York to North Africa, French soldiers and exiles, Jews and Muslims, Catholics and Communists, aristocrats and workers had come together for a single mission: to help liberate France from the Nazis. One veteran aptly noted: “As with wolves, they tear each other to pieces, but they hunt in a pack.”
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EPILOGUE

Coming Home Is the Hardest Part

At the end of the European war, Leclerc took the Second Division—and some of its ambulance drivers—to Indochina, where Suzanne Torrès eventually commanded 1,200 medical corps troops. Not all of the women were free to follow the front, and many of those who left the division found themselves staring at the flatline horizon of civilian life with a mixture of dread and relief. They were back home, and home was where they belonged. The problem was that most of them had been changed to a point that they could hardly fit back in their previous roles. They were returning to a society in which women had the same legal status as children. They could not open a bank account, enroll in a university course, or sell property without their husband’s permission. They could not vote. Despite their patriotic service, they did not have the rights of full-fledged citizens.

There was a social dimension to their dilemma as well. The Rochambelles had become accustomed to a tremendous amount of personal freedom, even within the confines of a military organization, and an equal amount of responsibility. Returning to civilian life meant scaling back their ambitions and readjusting their sights. It meant, in many small ways, taking a big step backwards. Yet the Rochambelles’ experience in the war and the network of friends they made there also became a springboard for new opportunities. Some of the women found jobs through division friends, and others went to work in veterans’ services that emerged after the war. All of them said that focusing on work and family helped them adjust.