Women of Valor (2 page)
Authors: Ellen Hampton
The American Civil War saw service by an estimated six to seven hundred little-known women, many of them disguised as men, as well as those who served as food suppliers and nurses.
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After the turn of the century, the U.S. Army and Navy established the Nurse Corps, a women’s unit, and with the First World War, the navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard recruited women auxiliaries. Auxiliaries could replace male workers in various support jobs, but would not have military status, and thus not have military pay or benefits. The army and navy eventually allowed women to join officially as nurses, and many worked in Belgium, Italy and England during World War I. By 1918, more than 30,000 women had served in the U.S. military.
Ambulance driving perhaps first took on a certain cachet in World War I. Both men and women volunteers—with the American Field Service, the Norton-Harjes group, and the American Red Cross—included many well-known writers who had physical exemptions from military service but wanted to see the war (Hemingway and Dos Passos, for example). Ivy League colleges and prep schools also raised money to buy ambulances and recruited drivers from their campuses, and society women from New York, London, and Paris vied to outdo each other with relief efforts and aid organizations. For example, some 25,000 American women went to France to work in the social services association founded in badly damaged Picardy by Anne Tracy Morgan, sister of banker J.P. Morgan Jr. Because the war had a static front, combat was localized and usually could be avoided. The risk of women volunteers being killed by shelling or shooting was reduced.
By World War II, the idea of women joining the war effort was promoted in the United States, and the number of participants grew to tenfold the number of those in World War I. Much of the female participation was on the civilian home front, as women filled positions vacated by men departing to become soldiers. Before the end of the war, 350,000 American women also served in the military, most of them in the United States but as nurses, communications workers and dieticians overseas as well. In June 1943, Congress agreed to incorporate the U.S. women’s army auxiliary into the regular army, with pay and benefits, and coordination of command was one of the main arguments for doing so. The World War II Women’s Auxiliary Corps (WAC) members, however, were forbidden to serve in combat areas. Many of them came under fire, and some ended up on the front lines, but none of them served regularly in combat units. Even the Army Nurse Corps, a women’s group whose members did accompany invading combat forces on beachheads in Tunisia, Normandy, and Anzio, normally was assigned to hospitals behind the lines.
Today, women in the American armed forces are restricted from assignment to infantry, armored, or ground artillery battalions in an attempt to remove them from the risk of combat. Because recent wars have tended to urban terrain and guerrilla tactics, even support and maintenance units have ended up under intense fire, rendering the restriction fairly meaningless. Army officers quoted in the
Washington Post
in May 2005 said that they got around the policy by declaring women soldiers “attached in support of” a forbidden unit rather than “assigned” to it.
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In 1943, General Leclerc pulled a similar end run around U.S. Army officials who refused to let the Rochambelles onto a military transport ship. “They’re not women, they’re ambulance drivers!” he snapped, and they were allowed to board with the rest of their division.
The Rochambelles weren’t the only French women who joined the Second World War. Because France was occupied, participating in the armed forces of liberation required leaving the country, and some 3,500 women managed to do so and join the French auxiliary forces abroad. Thousands of others stayed home and braved great danger by working with the Resistance and the Maquis, groups who worked undercover in society or lived secretly in the brush (the maquis) to carry out guerrilla raids. Other women joined the medical corps of the French First Army, and served in the invasion of Italy and in the south of France as doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers. The army women’s auxiliary counted 18,300 members in 1945. But the Rochambelles were the only women’s group constituted as such and assigned to a combat unit on the European front. That is where they broke through a barrier and landed in a position of historical significance.
The Rochambelles did not join the Second Division to change the role of women in the military, or to upset preconceived ideas about women in combat. They did not describe themselves as early feminists or militants for women’s rights. They joined the army because they wanted to help restore France to independence. They were young, idealistic, and they acted on patriotic instinct. At the same time, their generation was raised to be modest and discreet, not to trumpet their achievements. Almost to a woman, when asked about their war experiences, the Rochambelles insisted that they had done nothing the least bit interesting, and denied that they had anything to say that anyone would want to hear. Only three of the fifty-one women who eventually served in the group in Europe published a memoir.
Thus their story has been overlooked, swept aside in the flood of memoirs from the 2 million Allied men who served in the war. In terms of historical narrative, World War II was monopolized by men until recently, when several memoirs by U.S. Army nurses have been published. The women’s memories of war are markedly different from the men’s. First, as noncombatants, the Rochambelles were not distracted by having to fight the war itself. Their stories are not about strategy and armament, except for what it often did to the human body. Second, as women, they noticed and reported on aspects of the war that the men did not. They concerned themselves with relationships within the division and the relationship of their group to other division units. They also interacted more with the civilian population than did the soldiers. Civilians learned long ago to fear groups of men in uniform; women in uniform did not present the same threat.
The Rochambelles also were the forerunners of women in combat, and it is important to understand their experiences as a base line for what followed. The values and expectations of that “Greatest Generation” may have been different from those of young people today, but women soldiers in Iraq, for example, have faced many of the same problems and prejudices that were on the horizon sixty years ago. Not only have women soldiers fought in combat situations in Iraq, but they have had a second front in Washington with Congress debating whether they are strong enough to represent their country at war. As recently as the 2006 Defense Authorization Bill, a House Armed Services Committee amendment attempted to further restrict women’s roles in the armed forces. French military women have faced their own bureaucratic battles, but in 1998 the government opened the door to women in all military posts except on navy submarines and in some special forces units. There is no interdiction against women in combat positions, and their deployment is decided by unit commanders rather than by the National Assembly.
The Rochambelles occupied an unusual situation in a war that was unique in history, and with a little bit of luck, will remain so. They were a minuscule part of the enormous Allied war machine assembled in the face of Adolf Hitler’s 1940 invasion of Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and eventually, France. The French army on its eastern front was quickly overrun and Paris was occupied by the Nazis on June 14, 1940. World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain took over the French government and bargained for a shared occupation of the country between the Nazis and what became known as the Vichy government, because it set up in the spa town of Vichy. The surrender and occupation led thousands of French to try to escape the country, fleeing to French colonial territories in North Africa, or to England, or to North and South America. From their four corners of the world, these expatriates were gathered by General Charles de Gaulle to form the Free French, initially an opposition political group based in London, and then a provisional government-in-exile based in Algiers. The Free French established a military wing under then-Colonel Leclerc in 1942 which eventually was equipped by and attached to the U.S. Army as the French Second Armored Division. That is where the young women who became known as the Rochambelles landed and began their military careers.
The French Second Armored Division became home to soldiers from all over the world, including Germans come to fight against the Nazis. It was as varied a group as could be, and women were part of the complexity of the division. The liberation of Europe was not carried out single-handedly by the Americans, but by the British, Poles, Canadians, Australians, and the French as well. The American contribution was decisive and its leadership extraordinary, but America did not act alone.
After the war, during which the women had a certain freedom and great responsibility, many of the Rochambelles had trouble adjusting to civilian life. Some turned to work, some to family. All of them considered serving in the war the greatest gift they could have had; it laid a foundation of lifelong friendship among the women, and also with the male veterans, even those they met years later at Second Division reunions. The Rochambelles say they speak a language among themselves that defies outsider understanding. They share the bond of many veterans—that of having lived through the worst, and having done it well.
Rochambelle Anne Hastings summed up the experience: “War is something that you can’t quite describe. It’s bad and horrible but there were strong and good moments. It’s a mixed bag.” And afterwards, were colors a little flat, conversation a little trivial? Not for her. “I didn’t find life dull at all after that, but it would have been difficult to find anything as exciting, except having babies.”
Most of the Rochambelles were single, some were married, two had left their husbands, and one was a lesbian. In other words, they were an ordinary sample of women. What was extraordinary was their response to the times in which they lived: the chaos of the war opened a space for action that previously had been closed to women. It suddenly was possible to participate in changing the course of history, and they all felt very strongly that they should do so. Setting aside their personal comfort and security was the first, and perhaps most difficult, sacrifice. Once they were on their way, and once in the midst of war, they did what had to be done.
I first met the Rochambelles when Rosette Trinquet Peschaud, Raymonde Jeanmougin, and Jacqueline Fournier came to speak to the Paris chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and their talk left me astounded. Like General Leclerc, I had never heard of women in a World War II armored division. I definitely had never heard of women on the front lines of World War II in Europe, and I had heard plenty of stories about the war. Two of my uncles served there, and their tales of combat and glory were regular family fare. But women weren’t in those stories. Women waited at home, often for the worst.
The Rochambelles waited only for an opportunity. They stepped forward when their country needed them, overcame numerous obstacles to do so, and stood firm in the face of danger and adversity. We can all hope to find ourselves in their story.
The idea of summer in the woods of Michigan, staying in a cabin on Cedar Lake, greatly appealed to Jacqueline Fournier. A fresh lake breeze and a simple way of living would be a fine alternative to the sophistication and culture that were her habits in Paris. She packed her water-skis and summer clothes, and boarded the luxury French Line flagship
Normandie
at Le Havre, unaware that she was stepping into a five-year exile. Like the rest of the world in that spring of 1939, Jacqueline did not see the shadow of hardship that lay ahead, or the twists in the path that eventually would lead her back home.
She was twenty-nine years old and single, with blue eyes, short, dark brown hair, and a quiet and serious manner. She had been working as secretary to a Paris-based writer, Jean Pellenc, for seven years. His wife was American, and in May 1939, they asked if she would join them for a four-month vacation in the States to help care for their three-year-old son. They were going to spend the summer at Cedar Lake and then visit Pittsburgh. Jacqueline had sailed the Adriatic and the Aegean; she had visited England and Switzerland, but crossing the Atlantic was a voyage of a larger order. That was further afield than she had ever been, and she was thrilled at the idea.
They docked in New York harbor after six days at sea. Skyscrapers! She had never seen them before. They seemed to tilt for a day or two after she got off the ship. They took a train to Detroit, and a car was waiting there to take them to Cedar Lake. She spent the summer swimming and playing tennis; the boat turned out to be not powerful enough to pull a skier. The family had given her a car to use, and she drove into a nearby town for an occasional milkshake. So much was new. The drugstore, the five-and-ten. Hamburgers. Cafeterias. The wooden cabin in Michigan was the antithesis of the elegant Paris apartment where she grew up, where meals were formal, education was strict and classical, and she and her two younger sisters were looked after by an English nanny. Even as a grown woman with a job, Jacqueline was tied to the rather rigid structure of bourgeois family life. But in the woods of Michigan, everything was easy, and she felt free and relaxed. It was as pleasant a summer as she could imagine.
The idyll was shattered in early September, with the news that France and Britain had declared war on Germany. Summer was over. They packed up and drove to Pittsburgh, where Madame Pellenc’s family had a home. There was no question of going back to France, even if they could find trans-Atlantic transport, which had disappeared into the breach of the war. They would be stuck on the American side of the Atlantic for quite a while. None of them dreamed it would be five years.
The Pellencs offered lodging and support for as long as she liked, but Jacqueline felt that she should strike out on her own. She went to New York and took a room at a women’s hotel on Madison Avenue, stayed for two weeks, and then found lodgings with a French family that had emigrated to the States before the war. In November, she found a job in the military mission of the French consulate, buying explosives and chemicals. She didn’t know anything about the materiel, but at least it was work, and if the salary was low, she had enough to eat. Missing music, she started scrimping and saving her meager pay—based on the weakened franc—to buy a radio. She had looked at different models, and had her eye on one with a wooden cabinet, which she thought would have a nicer sound. On Christmas Eve, 1939, she went to the store and bought it, took it home, and set it next to the chimney to find the following morning, a Christmas gift to herself. It was a small, cold Christmas, but at least she could finally listen to the world. She waited until the after-Christmas sales to buy a winter coat. She had arrived with no warm clothes, and it was already below freezing.
