Women of Valor (8 page)

Meanwhile, Lulu had fallen seriously ill with typhus and had to be hospitalized. Convinced that she had caught it from the rats on the houseboat, she refused to return to it upon her recovery. Instead, she left Rabat and the Rochambeau Group to join the Free French headquarters in Algiers.

In all, twenty-two women signed on in Morocco, bringing the total to thirty-two, including Conrad and Toto. At this point a division in the group was clear. There were the “Archi-Pures,” or those who had created the group in New York, and the “Moroccans,” who had signed on in Morocco. Within the “Moroccans” were those who had grown up in the country, some of whom spoke fluent Arabic, and those who had arrived as a consequence of the Nazi occupation of France. They all mixed well together, but everyone knew who belonged to which group. “That memorable houseboat was the melting pot where lasting friendships were forged, where the finally completed group could successfully face all the obstacles put in its way, by chance or by the concern of the hierarchy over having enlisted women in an armored division,” Jacotte wrote in her memoirs.

When the division’s toughest infantrymen, the March of Chad Regiment (RMT), arrived at the Temara training camp and heard that there were going to be women in the division, they were appalled. A division colonel, Michel Malagutti, gave the infantrymen a stern lecture: “Here are these women, these young girls, who were in complete security in the United States, living a comfortable life, who chose to leave it all behind to participate in their country’s war effort, and who accept in advance the hard life of a combatant.… We must adopt them, and help them to succeed.”
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The colonel, commander of one of the division’s three tactical groups, invited a few of the Rochambeau Group at a time to lunch or drinks with his officers, and insisted that they become familiar with the tank structure so that they could more easily evacuate a wounded soldier from within. “He was really nice with us,” Jacotte said. “He gave us a lot of moral support.” Their instructor took the lesson a step further, and taught Jacotte to drive a tank.

The women’s training with the Medical Battalion in Morocco included timed evacuations of “wounded” soldiers, the heavier the better, to test their physical strength. They also underwent simulated air attacks on a convoy to practice getting the ambulances off the road and scattering into the underbrush. And they had division-wide exercises that lasted two to three days. One day it poured rain and the ground turned to mud, trapping all manner of vehicles in the muck. Jacotte said it was like driving in a river of chocolate. Edith wrote in her memoirs that she came back with mud encrusted up to her eyeballs from trying to dig out her ambulance. Never had the houseboat’s sole, pressure-less shower felt so good. They also had demining practice, in which one person buried a mine in the sand, and another had to uncover it, following precise instructions. Edith was pleased at the time that they were using dummy mines. She would find out about the real thing soon enough.

General Leclerc came to dinner on the houseboat once, bringing U.S. General Allen Kingman, commander of the U.S. Army’s Second Armored Division. Kingman led a group of American military officials to inspect the French Second Armored Division, and Leclerc thought Kingman should meet his women’s ambulance corps. Toto exercised her renowned wit and charm for the brass, while Jacotte was simply awed at getting to serve Leclerc at table. The visit and inspection were successful, because the French Second Armored Division was then officially incorporated into the U.S. Army. The Americans requested, however, that the division’s black African troops be left behind. The French army was not racially segregated, and its colonial Senegalese troops had been heroes in 1870, in the First World War, in the 1940 invasion, and across North Africa, but the American army was segregated, and the French commanders were asked to “whiten” their ranks. The valued Senegalese soldiers were transferred to the French First Army, which was not under U.S. command. The American command apparently chose to overlook the fact that women were part of the Second Division, since women were not allowed in combat units in the U.S. Army.

The American and French officers mixed fairly well together, despite many cultural divergences. Jacotte and Edith often were asked to accompany Conrad and Toto to American receptions because they spoke English well, and Edith remarked how different in tone the American parties were from the French ones. The American officers were much more casual and rowdy than the French officers, she noted. “Those evenings were always very lively, dotted with stories about their lifestyles, quite different from ours. But, from what I heard on more current subjects, I realized the measure of the phenomenal war effort, in materiel deployed, but also physically and morally, by that vast nation that had come to save us, and had done so with good humor and unlimited kindness,” she wrote.
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One day Edith slipped in the shower and her foot went through a hole in the half-rotten floor, leaving a grapefruit-sized bruise. She limped around for three days, trying to hide the injury, but her leg turned blue and swollen. Toto noticed and sent her to a doctor, who ordered three weeks of immobility. And then, with Edith flat on her back, the division’s imminent departure from Morocco was announced.

The Rochambeau Group was given the task of rounding up all the convalescents staying with families, and told to do so in twenty-four hours. At 6 A.M. the next day, twelve ambulances took off to get the recovering soldiers and deliver them to their regiments. The division had 140 names on its list, and the Rochambeau Group had the locations of only 100, but the word spread, and the soldiers all managed to get back to the training camp before departure. Some of the ambulances had to be driven to Casablanca for shipping to Algeria, and Jacotte was assigned to one, driving in a convoy of tanks. She returned to the houseboat at 8 P.M. from Casablanca, and then turned around at 4 A.M. and left in another ambulance for same city. The back-and-forth driving was good training for her life about to come.

On April 11, 1944, the Rochambeau Group left the houseboat behind, driving in convoy with the rest of the division to their destination, an army camp in Algeria. Edith rode on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance driven by Raymonde. Jacotte drove with Lucie. They were the last in the line, and the accordion rhythm of the convoy’s twenty-five kilometer-an-hour pace kept the driving from becoming monotonous. They also had the mission of picking up anything that fell out of vehicles in front of them. Every now and then they’d stop for a bucket, or a tool, and once, Lucie swept up a brilliant green lizard as well. It took them several days to get to their destination, a windswept hilltop called Assi Ben Okba. The women quickly nicknamed it “Bald Mountain.” It had no endearing qualities, no tents for the women, and worst of all, no plumbing.

The women didn’t mind sleeping on stretchers in the back of their ambulances. But one night Conrad heard a soldier prowling around, an American, and came tearing out of her ambulance shouting at him: “You want my girls?” The soldier, facing a tall, angry white woman, said, “No, I want your wine.” Conrad went to the command staff and got tents for the women. Their tents, six women in each, looked no different from those of the other soldiers, except for the ever-present lines of lingerie drying, and the hair styling going on from time to time. On the edge of the camp, there were holes in the ground for latrines, and their helmets served as sinks for splashing up.

The American troops had a circular tent with shower heads installed, and offered to lend it to the women. They used it only once or twice, but the last time, the women lined up to go in to the shower tent, and then had to wait outside as a unit of American soldiers was showering. When it was the women’s turn, they undressed as a group and lathered up. The wind blew sand onto their wet skin, but it felt so good to be clean that they didn’t care. Then one of the women screamed: Someone was peeping through a hole in the side of the tent. And another! Hysteria spread quickly. Toto ordered them to dress and line up, right away. They marched out in formation, surprising some lingering soldiers. No one wanted to go to the American showers after that. Instead, they got permission to go swimming at nearby Crystal Beach, and that helped keep their spirits up, even though the Mediterranean was cold in April.

Assi Ben Okba, near Oran, Algeria, was the temporary home of thousands of soldiers, French, British, and American, all waiting to invade the European continent. The Rochambeau Group was not the only female unit there: groups of American WACs and army nurses also came and went. The French officers, however, were giving the Rochambeau Group no breaks. Every morning, the women rose to complete their physical training: a jog around the camp perimeter, to the jeers and jibes of division spectators. They spent an hour drilling and marching, and then two hours peeling the medical battalion’s daily vegetables. After lunch, they had drill practice again, then vehicle maintenance, then peeling duty again, until 5 P.M. There was one hour allotted per day for “visiting,” but the women were restricted to their area of the camp, and no man, whether officer or soldier, was allowed to speak to them without special permission. A command staff adjutant hovered over them, adding new restrictions on a daily basis. At first, the rule was no sitting in the ambulances with a visitor, and later the rule forbade visitors within twenty meters of the vehicles. The hostile atmosphere led to an absolute minimum of casual contact.

The women were, however, permitted to accept invitations to dinner with division officers, and occasionally the American officers asked them to a dinner-dance. They particularly enjoyed the food on those outings, as their daily rations were neither good nor plentiful. At one American dance, a young officer brought Christiane Petit a plate of sandwiches, and then watched in amazement as she ate them all. The American officers who had befriended Madeleine Collomb’s family at Safi also were in the area, and took her and Rosette to dinner one evening at an elegant mansion in the nearby port of Mers El Kebir.

At night in the camp, they usually went to bed after dinner. Rosette remarked that if the women had to cross the camp at night, they were greeted with catcalls and insults, the men pretending they were prostitutes from the nearby bordello. “They treated us like whores,” she said. “It didn’t bother me, I was so innocent.” She didn’t understand their implications, and when the rude remarks came in Arabic, she didn’t understand anything at all. But Madeleine understood Arabic, and the insults were coming through loud and clear. She said she cried over it, and swore she was going to quit the army. “We heard the soldiers saying things like, ‘at least we’ll get some girls…’ They made a lot of remarks at the beginning; they didn’t know what to think about women in the Army. But we were thinking, ‘We signed up to be treated like this?’”

Toto ordered the women to ignore the taunts and insults from the enlisted men, and maintain a respectful attitude toward officers. She wanted at all costs to avoid a charge of insubordination, and possible dismissal from the division that could be the result. They were still on probation with Leclerc; they still had to prove that they could make it in the military. She organized the women into a choral group, with the division’s Catholic chaplain, Father Jean-Baptiste Houchet, directing, and scheduled rehearsals during kitchen duty. Before long, the kitchen tent had standing-room-only crowds listening in.

Drilling exercises also drew an audience of spectators. One day when the Rochambeau squad was marching past the colonel on their right, a cheeky officer called “Heads, left!” and they turned the wrong way on the colonel. Another time another officer reversed the left-right call until the women were completely out of step. “It didn’t take much to make us laugh,” Jacotte recalled.

Edith, still recovering from her accident, observed the drilling practices, and noted that the marching and stiffness of parading was the polar opposite of the way the women moved naturally, which was with suppleness and grace. The lessons they were learning had little to do with anything they had known in their civilian lives, not even the way they moved.

Some evenings at Assi Ben Okba, Toto and Rosette and some of the others played bridge in the back of an ambulance, with the dummy hand responsible for keeping the truck’s battery charged so they had a little light. Captain Jacques de Witasse, who would command a tank company in the war, was a regular player. He wrote in his memoirs that the division’s men didn’t really know what to make of the women at first. “We learned to appreciated those remarkable women who were our ambulance drivers during the campaign. For the moment, we just considered them as kind of fancy comrades, whose presence created the kind of charming ambiance we had forgotten,” Witasse wrote.
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One evening, after dinner and a session of bawdy songs with the officers of the Second Battalion of RMT, Toto found a new bridge partner in Commandant Jacques Massu. He was a tough young officer from the center of France who had been with Leclerc through his Africa campaign. He was a far remove from the witty Parisian intellectuals Toto was accustomed to, but somehow, Massu put a gleam in her eye. They began an affair that shocked some of the younger women in the group, particularly those in their early twenties who were not yet married and had never had a sexual relationship. Toto was completely unconcerned.

Christiane Petit was among the young and innocent. She accompanied Toto one evening to a dinner with division officers and met a fellow there who seemed interested in her. He even wrote her a letter after the dinner. But when Toto asked her to join the group for dinner another time, Christiane refused. She did not want to get involved with the young officer. Toto was annoyed, but Christiane dug in her heels. “I was a very serious girl. I was not a flirt, fluttering here and there,” she said. The young man ended up being killed in the war, but Christiane didn’t remember where.

The men’s hostility began to fade in the face of the women’s relentless good humor and determination to succeed. When a unit of American WACs came through Assi Ben Okba with scintillating military discipline, the French soldiers began to refer to the Rochambeau Group as “our girls.” It was a short step from there to the nickname that has stuck with the women for sixty years: the Rochambelles. In choral sessions, they invented a song that began “When I was a Rochambelle” and made up new verses as they went along.