Women of Valor (5 page)
Authors: Ellen Hampton
They needed an airplane, and Torrès soon encountered none other than Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the famed pilot and author of
The Little Prince.
Saint-Exupéry wasn’t encouraging: his plane was not in good shape, he said, and the trip was dangerous. But Torrès brought a lawyer’s powers of persuasion to every argument, a quality that had served her before and would serve her many times in the battles ahead. She convinced the legendary pilot and they got under way, stopping outside Perpignan, where the rest of the French air fleet had taken refuge. Some of the French pilots were ready to take the planes to the relative safety of North Africa, and joined Saint-Exupéry in flight. At the droning of the engines, Torrès fell into an exhausted sleep. Saint-Exupéry seemed annoyed that she could rest so deeply under such extreme conditions, and woke her several times to warn her of imminent danger. His fears notwithstanding, they landed at Oran, and went on to Algiers.
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With the Vichy authorities in Algiers enforcing Nazi dictates, the handful of Free French sympathizers found themselves in an atmosphere of conspiracy and intrigue, and nowhere was safe for very long. Torrès moved to Morocco and then Marseilles and then on to Spain, where she caught a ship to Brazil. She stayed with family in São Paulo for nine months, and then in February 1942 moved to New York. By then, the United States had joined the war, the number of de Gaulle followers was growing, and Torrès hoped she could find transport from New York to rejoin the Free French in North Africa.
In the meantime, Torrès found a job working in an art gallery in the afternoons and helping at the anti-Vichy
France Forever
newsletter offices in the morning. She said later that she felt like a wasp stuck in a jar, hitting against the glass. Then Gustave Gounouilhou, friend of both Conrad and Torrès, invited her to a cocktail reception at Conrad’s home. Torrès did not want to go. She didn’t know Conrad and had begun to hate the frivolity of the New York social scene. Fortunately, for once Torrès wasn’t the only persuasive one. Gounouilhou insisted. As soon as she got inside the door, Conrad grabbed Torrès, sat her down on a couch, and began telling her about the group of women ambulance drivers she was organizing. She wanted Torrès to help run it. Torrès took one look at Conrad, with her halo of curly white hair, thick eyeglasses and intense manner, and dismissed everything she said as the obsession of a society dilettante. The woman could not be serious. Torrès left the party as soon as she could, without even saying goodbye.
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Still, the seed was planted. The idea that she could run a women’s ambulance squad seemed far-fetched. It couldn’t possibly work. Torrès called Gounouilhou. He was completely confident that if Florence Conrad intended to organize an ambulance squad, it would happen. Then Torrès started to complain that the other thirteen French recruits belonged to Giraud camp, while she was devotedly Gaullist. She couldn’t possibly work with them. Florence Conrad raised a skeptical eyebrow to her objections and continued visiting her regularly at the art gallery.
By July 1943, however, as the war deepened and France suffered ever more under the Nazis, cracks in the French exile community began to heal. At the end of summer Torrès felt perhaps she could work with Conrad’s squad, and worried that she was too late, that the group had been outfitted and was ready to go. She ran to Conrad’s office suite to find the group packing, each of them trying to cram uniforms, boots, sleeping bags and cantines into army-style duffel bags. But Conrad knew her woman. She had ordered a complete uniform for Torrès, confident that she would come through in the end.
“It did not take me long to understand that for her, ‘No’ was not an answer and that she did not loosen her powerful jaw from her chosen prey,” Torrès wrote.
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It was the beginning of a friendship that would last for the rest of their lives, even though their relationship was never easy or smooth. They were strong personalities, strangers to compromise, and perhaps too much alike, but they both understood and embraced the mission that united them.
Before Torrès could swallow the news that she was already part of the group, her childhood friend Lulu Arpels jumped up and introduced her as “Toto,” when no one had ever called her that before. It stuck, as a nom de guerre, and long after the war as well.
The group needed a name as well. Jacotte said they wanted a French name that would be easily recognized by Americans, but the obvious one, Lafayette, had been taken by the World War I aviation aces of the Escadrille Lafayette. The Comte de Rochambeau, Jean-Baptiste de Vimeur, who led French infantry troops to Yorktown in 1781 and helped win the American Revolution, was the second-best-known name. The women ambulance drivers would be called the Rochambeau Group.
As the group became officially recognized as part of the Free French forces, a result of hard lobbying by Conrad and Elisabeth de Breteuil, the dozen American women in it were refused permission by the State Department to serve under French command. They were deeply disappointed to be left behind. Leonora Lindsley signed up with the American Red Cross instead, and met up with the French near the end of the European campaign. Conrad got a personal exemption, and the fourteen remaining French members of the group prepared for departure. Commensurate with their positions in the group, Conrad sewed four stripes on her uniform, for major, and Torrès sewed on two stripes for lieutenant. Neither of them had permission from any military authority to do so. They promoted themselves, and kept their stripes all through the war.
The Rochambeau Group left Pennsylvania Station in early September 1943, fifteen women in smart khaki uniforms and overloaded duffel bags traveling by train to Washington, D.C., where they were met by French military officials. They spent two weeks in the women’s quarters at Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia, where they started learning to march and encountered their first PX, or post exchange. There they acquired some GI-issue olive-drab fatigues for everyday work. Then they were taken to the Virginia coast and left on the quay with 6,000 American soldiers and a group of fifteen Women’s Army Corps (WAC) members. All were waiting to board the
Pasteur,
a French passenger liner given over to British command for war transport. It was a long wait. Red Cross volunteers served coffee and a jazz band played to entertain the troops. When the band learned there were French among them, they struck up “La Madelon” and “Sambre et Meuse,” two old French standards. “It was so unexpected and so touching that we wanted to go thank them,” Jacotte wrote.
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But the crowd started moving toward the gangplanks. It was time to board.
Laure de Breteuil had a sudden twinge of doubt. “When we boarded the transport ship I said, ‘What the hell am I doing here? We’re a bunch of fools.’” Jacotte also had wrestled with doubt. Could she hold up under pressure? Was she too sensitive for this work? Before they left New York she had spent a night awake, pacing the floor, staring out the window, holding her conscience and her fortitude up for raw examination. “Would I have the necessary courage, the surface calm? Would I do what needed to be done, would my nerves be truly solid? And if I broke down? What shame, what contempt I would endure, having presumed to have strength, and be unable to face it! I would be crushed.… By the time dawn crept in, I had decided: if ever I was to be afraid, let it be that night and never again. With the grace of God, I would make it.”
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On board the
Pasteur,
the men were given hammocks strung around the different decks, and slept in eight-hour shifts. For the women, several small cabins had been assembled into a dormitory with thirty bunks, from ceiling to floor, stacked so close together the women slid into them on their backs and could not turn over once in. They were ordered to wear their lifejackets at all times, and once a day they had an evacuation drill in case of attack. It was claustrophobic even for those who didn’t know the meaning of the word. Jacotte exercised every day by climbing the stairs between the decks, and Toto found some bridge-playing officers on the upper deck. There was nothing to do, but the weather was calm and clear. The ship changed direction every seven minutes; Jacotte heard that it took a submarine seven minutes to fix a position and launch a torpedo.
Neither the women nor the men had any idea where they were going. One soldier thought maybe the women would be better informed, and asked Jacotte surreptitiously if she knew their destination. Eleven days later, they found out. A crowd had gathered on the quay to watch them disembark. They were in Casablanca.
An old Berber fishing port spun by cinema into a world capital of romance, the town was named Dar el-Beïda by the Arabs in the 1770s, translated by a Spanish shipping company into Casablanca. It is the largest city in Morocco, renowned for its Art Deco architecture, revered for its grandiose Hassan II Mosque, yet Casablanca will always be haunted by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. The film was released in 1943, and at the very moment Hollywood was celebrating its newest studio fiction, the Rochambeau Group was on the hard cold ground of reality, camping in an empty school in Casablanca. Things were not looking romantic in the least.
Morocco would be the beginning of a great many changes for those already in the Rochambeau Group, and for the dozen women who would join the group there. It was where all of them would shed their civilian identities and become soldiers, where they would learn to override their instinct for the individual and act as an entity. It also was where the women of the Rochambeau Group became known as “Rochambelles,” a sobriquet that went beyond beauty to a hint of belonging, in their case, to the Second Armored Division. Changes were afoot in many and unimaginable ways.
Except for three or four among them who had friends or relatives in Casablanca, the women stayed at the school, sleeping on straw pallets in a first-floor classroom. Dinner was an unidentifiable murky soup, then lentils or split peas, and sometimes an orange. They had managed to cross the Atlantic, no small feat in wartime, but they had no assignment; they belonged to no one’s army as yet. Still, they were in good spirits. When Jacotte saw the morning raising of the French flag outside the school, her heart soared. She was on the right track at last.
Around 9 o’clock on their first morning there, Anne Hastings stuck her head out of her sleeping bag and picked up an imaginary telephone from an imaginary nightstand, and ordered herself a luxury room-service breakfast: “Scrambled eggs and bacon, fruit juice, pancakes with maple syrup, toast and marmalade, cereal with cream and a large of pot of coffee,” she said, “and make it snappy!” They all burst out laughing. There wasn’t going to be any breakfast and probably not any lunch either. Conrad and Toto had gone to Algiers to find an army unit for the Rochambeau Group, and the women’s mission was to wait at the school. Murky soup and lentils were delivered every evening by the Free French army.
With nothing better to do, they toured Casablanca. It was Jacotte’s first time in Morocco and the first visit to the African continent for most of the women. Morocco had become a French protectorate by treaty in 1912, with a Moroccan sultan and French military governor ruling in tandem. It was, and though independent since 1956, remains, largely French-speaking in the cities. It also was full of French and other Europeans who had fled the Nazi occupation. Women walking around the city in a military uniform caused no reaction from the locals, but they nonetheless avoided the medina, the old Arab labyrinth of market stalls and houses, if they were alone.
One day, Anne and Jacqueline hitchhiked to Rabat, the nation’s capital sixty kilometers north, and said it was easy, that all the traffic was military. Jacotte and Hélène decided to go as well, although neither of them would ever have considered hitchhiking in the past. For a solid hour, not one vehicle passed. They were about to give up when a Jeep stopped and a general got out and asked where they were going. They told him and he apologized, he wasn’t going that far. They were both blushing with embarrassment and apologizing as he drove off, feeling as though they’d somehow been caught at risqué behavior. Then a Red Cross staff car picked them up, and offered to bring them back to Casablanca that afternoon. Jacotte and Hélène walked the ancient stone ramparts along the coast and sipped mint tea, savoring the freedom of being in new territory.
The women had met some U.S. Army officers on the ship over, and were invited by them to dine at their mess hall from time to time. The men were happy to socialize with Jacotte and Lulu Arpels and the other English-speaking women, and the women were pleased to avoid the murky soup and lentils. But after one dinner, Jacotte awoke with a fever and diarrhea, a serious case of food poisoning. Three days later she was still sick, and so weak she could hardly walk. Some of her dinner partners also had fallen ill with food poisoning, but none as severely as she. Lulu came to the school with a pony cart and took her to the friends’ house where she’d been staying, a room with a real bed and sheets, and called one of the officers, a major-doctor in a U.S. medical battalion. He brought medicine, and after three or four days she felt better. The major took her out for walks and bicycle rides to build her strength back up, and found her a family home with an extra room to stay in while she recovered. She stayed a week or so, and then one of the women came to get her in an ambulance, as the group had been moved to Rabat while Jacotte was recovering.
Conrad and Toto had found a job for the Rochambeau Group, a plum assignment with the Free French forces. Conrad had gone to see Free French General Marie-Pierre Koenig, whom she knew from her work in the early part of the war. Koenig became a hero in his own right in June 1942, when he led his French troops, outnumbered and surrounded by German and Italian armies, to safety at Bir Hakeim (Libya). Now Koenig was in Algiers, organizing the North Africa veterans into an army fit to invade the European continent. Conrad described their unit and equipment and asked for an assignment. Koenig said he could try the Fifth Division, part of General Jean-Marie de Lattre de Tassigny’s First Army, or the Second Division, being assembled under General Leclerc. Conrad didn’t hesitate. She wanted to serve under Leclerc.
