Women of Valor (17 page)

One day at the hospital, an officer from the Second Division who had lost both his legs asked for their help. Another soldier had passed by his open door and recognized him from early in the war, when he had been a pro-Nazi militiaman and had arrested the soldier’s father. He begged them to get him out of there before the soldier took revenge. They borrowed the hospital guard’s civilian jacket and took him to Leonora’s apartment, but they had no way of providing the constant care he needed. “It was crazy, what we did,” Janine recalled. At that very heated moment, accusations were flying, people were being shot on the street. “It was terrible, all those arrests. Leonora wanted to save him,” Janine said. At the liberation, she had seen an older German soldier hiding in doorways, trying to escape, and the FFI tracking him down. “They trapped him like a rat, and they killed him. It was horrible.” The ex-militiaman eventually turned himself in to the authorities and was tried and acquitted, largely because Leclerc testified on his behalf. Janine said he told her later that the officials interrogated him by dropping him repeatedly on the stumps of his legs. Leonora Lindsley’s mother got in touch with him after the war and bought him a wheelchair.

The division’s presence in Paris attracted fresh recruits, bringing its total up to 16,000, including a handful of new ambulance drivers. Leclerc formed four new companies and two squadrons from the ranks of Resistants and others, and a new tactical group was organized to encompass them. Another 100,000 former FFI nationwide had joined the First French Army, under the command of General Jean-Marie de Lattre de Tassigny. The French have a saying that describes those late summer days of 1944:
Voler au secours de la victoire:
that is, Fly to the aid of victory. There were perhaps 20,000 FFI members in the Paris area in August 1944, but more than 123,000 Parisians applied for official recognition of their resistance work once the war was over.
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The myth making had begun: every French man and woman was a Resistant, few if any had collaborated, and the nationalist beat went on. De Gaulle encouraged the attitude in the interest of social cohesion. “Il faut savoir oublier,” he said. One must know how to forget.

When attractive, intellectual Marie-Thérèse Pezet went for her interview with Suzanne Torrès, Toto looked at her name and asked if she knew Ernest Pezet. Of course, Marie-Thérèse replied, he’s my father. Toto was delighted; Ernest Pezet, a longtime deputy, lawyer, center-right party founder, and foreign affairs specialist, was a friend of her husband’s. Toto asked if she didn’t have any good friends who wanted to join the Rochambelles. She nodded toward a group of women in the waiting room. “Have you seen these marvels who want to sign up? I am not going to accept just anybody.”

Marie-Thérèse, politically astute from the cradle, understood. “She was afraid of taking on women who had slept with Germans and wanted to launder their reputations a little. Also she had to beware of women who wanted something else. She needed young women or girls with a good education, but not too good, if you know what I mean. You had to be friendly with the boys, be a little bit of a social worker.”

Marie-Thérèse called her childhood friend Marie-Anne Duvernet, a registered nurse, and asked if she would like to join Leclerc’s division. Marie-Anne shouted with joy. They became partners in the ambulance group, and made a good team. Marie-Anne had been living in an attic room to avoid her sister and brother-in-law, who had cozied up to the Nazi command and had been entertaining German officers regularly in the Duvernet parents’ spacious apartment. Marie-Anne couldn’t stand it, and joining the army was a perfect riposte to their misplaced loyalty.

First, Marie-Thérèse had to tell her father she was leaving. Ernest Pezet was a larger-than-life personality who dominated his family as well as his political party. A member of the Lille Group of the Resistance, which had gathered many intellectuals and political elites, he and Marie-Thérèse had skirted danger more than once during the occupation. But she felt she lived in her father’s shadow, and the Rochambelles offered a way for her to strike out on her own. She packed her bag and left it with the concièrge, and then told her parents she was joining the Second Division. Her father remarked only that she wasn’t such a pillar in the face of blood. She said it didn’t matter. “That’s how I got out from under his paternal authority. My personality was thus detached from him.” He wouldn’t say it, but he was enormously proud of her, and sent dispatches of her ambulance career to the local Brittany newspaper whose district he represented in the National Assembly.

A spunky, freckle-faced redhead from Caen, in Normandy, also joined the group. Danièle Heintz was a twenty-two-year-old nursing student when Allied bombs began crashing down on Caen at 1:30 P.M. on D-Day. She and her brother, André, went straight to Bon Sauveur Hospital, helping to carry wounded and assist the surgeons. With each enormous blast of a bomb, the meter-thick walls of the hospital tilted, shuddered, and then righted themselves. Danièle met a nun who had been buried in rubble by one explosion, and disinterred by the next. They urgently needed a signal to the bombers that the building they kept trying to destroy was a hospital. André suggested putting a big red cross out on the hospital grounds, but where would they find red cloth? Danièle took some white sheets down to the operating room and drenched them on the bloody floor. They were quickly red. They made a cross of them in the garden, and as they finished, an Allied Piper Cub flew overhead, circled, and tilted its wings in recognition. The hospital was not bombed again.

Caen, however, endured daily Allied bombing from June 6 through July 9, destroying 80 percent of the town and killing an estimated 10,000 persons. All through Normandy, American and British bombers had pounded the German installations, but in the process also destroyed many ancient towns, St. Lô, Le Havre, and Valognes among them. An estimated 50,000 civilians were killed in the bombing throughout Normandy.
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Historian John Keegan quoted a British soldier who walked into Caen after the battle and found “just a waste of brick and stone, like a field of corn that has been plowed. The people gazed at us without emotion of any kind; one could hardly look them in the face, knowing who had done this.”
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Some French remain resentful of what they believe was overkill on the part of the Allies. Danièle was philosophical about the destruction. “At that point, the method was to crush. So they crushed. At the time, that was the tactic,” she said. German resistance remained strong in and around Caen, and so the bombs fell, and the town residents fled, took to their cellars, or died.

Danièle got a taste of ambulance driving while still in Caen. One day a haggard man walked into the hospital and begged the staff to send aid to a group hiding in the Carpiquet quarry on the outskirts of town. They had been bombed and strafed by an airplane several days before. Danièle helped load medicine and bandages into two Red Cross ambulances, both driven by women. A doctor and nurse joined them, and they set out with Red Cross flags flying. They would have to cross the front between the Germans and the Allies to get there, and they had gone only a few kilometers before a mortar came smashing down next to the ambulance. They jumped into the roadside ditch, counting two flat tires on each of the ambulances. The firing stopped, and they started off again, driving slowly on the ruined tires. Once at the quarry, they spent two hours treating injuries and infection, and made the difficult choice of eight patients they could transport back to the hospital. But they made it back, and Danièle was hooked.

“That mission probably decided my engagement beyond Normandy,” she wrote in an unpublished memoir. “I had gotten through the Battle of Caen, luckily for me, without being a victim. I had endured, for better or for worse, the ‘baptism of fire.’ Confronted with all the violence and suffering, I had done my best. Fear certainly had not spared me, but the thought of dying didn’t scare me either. I must, it seemed to me, continue to help others.”

Danièle and her brother spent a month after the Battle of Caen helping to uncover, identify and rebury bodies, and then they read that the Second Division was moving toward Paris. Danièle hitchhiked to Rambouillet and ran into a neighbor and director of the Caen Red Cross. He sent her to Florence Conrad, who asked if she could drive. She lied and said of course. Her first time behind the wheel was driving a 1.5-ton Dodge ambulance from Rambouillet to Paris. She did all right. “I had watched my father drive,” she said.

While the war was not won in Paris, its liberation had turned the political tide within France in favor of the Allies. On the ground, German troops were still entrenched in eastern France. The division lined up in convoy once again on September 8, eastward bound. Leclerc had sworn on March 2, 1941 in Koufra, Libya, during the fighting for North Africa, that he would not lay down arms “until the day when our colors, our beautiful colors, fly above the Cathedral at Strasbourg.” Strasbourg, the easternmost city in France, was the capital of the Alsace region, which had been annexed by the Germans. Leclerc’s goal became known as the Oath of Koufra, and the division members considered it their mission and duty to carry it out.

The Rochambelles’ route through Lorraine, September 9-November 17, 1944

CHAPTER FIVE

Romance, the River, and a Few Close Calls

The war picked up again outside Paris with a battle at Andelot, a town northeast of Chaumont in the Champagne-Ardennes region, just east of the Marne River. Commandant Jean Fanneau de La Horie’s tank regiment took the town and some 800 prisoners, who were seated in rows, elbow to elbow, in a meadow when Toto and Raymonde arrived. It was too much for one regiment officer, a Jew whose family had been deported to concentration camps. He ran toward the German prisoners and began slapping and kicking them individually, going down the line. His friends brought him gently away, and he collapsed in tears.

Between Chaumont and Andelot, Edith and Lucie were driving down a narrow road, closely watching the forest for a sign of the enemy. They came out of the woods into a clearing, a muddy field where a tank regiment was beginning an attack on a German-held village. A couple of division soldiers waved them over to tell them there were some injured soldiers down a dirt road a few hundred meters back. They needed to turn around, and Edith got out of the ambulance to guide Lucie. The shoulders of the road might be mined, and so they had to be careful not to go off the paved surface. Soldiers in a vehicle in front of them shouted encouragement, and Lucie executed the narrow turns with precision. Edith suddenly felt her eardrums blow and saw a fountain of flames shooting up under the ambulance, which flew up into the air and landed on its nose. Lucie, ashen, was gripping the steering wheel. Edith ran over and jerked open the door and slid her out of the driver’s seat. The blast had come from an anti-tank mine designed to blow up a couple of tons of armored steel. It was in the middle of the road, where twenty or so military vehicles had already passed safely until Lucie triggered it in turning. The ambulance was shredded with shrapnel, as were both of their sacks of clothing, jammed under the front seats. The duffel bags had blocked the direct spray, saving Lucie from serious injury. She was deafened, shaken, and in shock, and soldiers in a nearby Jeep offered to take her to the field hospital straight away. Edith stared at the ambulance in disbelief, and then looked around and saw two bodies on the ground, spread-eagled. It was the young men who had waved them over. She had been standing practically next to them, and she was uninjured. She realized that the front wheel had blocked the exploding shrapnel from hitting her, but the young men had been struck straight on.
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Lucie spent a week resting in a hospital, and Edith was assigned her third ambulance of the war.

Driving across the same field, Raymonde and Toto’s ambulance got stuck in the mud. They carried metal sheets hung on the inside walls of the ambulance for that eventuality, and put them under the wheels to get it out.

Danièle and her partner Hélène Langé, known as “La Grande Hélène” to distinguish her from Hélène Fabre, were in a convoy not far behind Edith and Lucie, and they too had been warned about mined shoulders. Her tactical group had identified a circular route to use if the ambulance needed to take someone back to a treatment center. Danièle drove carefully, the convoy inching along the narrow road, both sides bordered with tall hedges, until it suddenly opened onto a wide field. On the other side of the field stood the village, where the church spire was now in flames. As they reached the field, the twenty or so tanks in front of them spread from a single line into a fan formation, heading for the village in a ballet of armored steel. It was Danièle’s introduction to combat, and she found the beauty in it somehow disconcerting. She was still a novice when she and Hélène were sent to pick up some wounded soldiers at a nearby intersection. When they arrived, no one was there. Artillery fire rained down nearby, so they clung to the sides of the ambulance “like complete idiots,” Danièle said. A Jeep pulled up and an officer with a walking stick shouted at them: “Put your helmets on! What are you doing here! Your role is not to hang around, get the hell out of here right now!” And he sped away. A soldier approached and asked if they knew who that was, and they said they didn’t. That was General Leclerc, he said. Before they had time to be impressed, shrapnel from a nearby explosion struck the soldier down. Danièle and Hélène had found their victim at their feet. They picked him up and took him to the treatment center. “It was a great lesson in movement, in usefulness, in not standing still. Leclerc gave us that lesson at the start,” Danièle said in an interview. “Action was the secret. You had to move. You couldn’t stand there wallowing in fear.”