Women of Valor (9 page)

By early May, Conrad believed that they would be leaving North Africa soon, and so invited the women to the town of Oran to visit the hairdresser’s and then have lunch at the American Red Cross club. The hairdresser was wonderful—it felt great to have clean, styled hair for the first time in months—but lunch at the club turned out to be peanut-butter sandwiches, which went down less well with the French. On the way back to Assi Ben Okba, a sandstorm swept in and ruined all the hairdresser’s efforts—so much for their ladies’ day out. But they had passed Leclerc’s test of training, and while he remained skeptical of their performance in the face of combat, he agreed to take them on until Paris, where he said he could find male replacements.

Departure from North Africa was set for May 20, 1944, from Mers El Kebir. The night before they left, a German submarine was captured off the coast, waiting to torpedo northbound troop shipments. The news fueled the tension in the air and underscored the knowledge that the convoy would be in grave danger of attack by German submarines patrolling the Atlantic. Then, as the Second Division prepared to board the U.S. Army transport ships, the American officers in charge tried block the Rochambelles from boarding, citing regulations against women on military transport. Leclerc intervened personally to get them on. “He said, ‘They’re not women, they’re ambulance drivers!’” and the Rochambelles were allowed to board, according to Anne Hastings.

Army transport consisted of two former Cunard luxury liners, the
Capetown Castle
and the
Franconia.
The Rochambelles were on the
Capetown Castle,
along with nearly 5,000 men of the division. They slipped anxiously through the Strait of Gibralter and out into the Atlantic Ocean, joining a convoy of seventeen Allied ships, including two aircraft carriers, on their way to England. Jacotte climbed up in the webbing to watch the fleet for hours on end. As on the previous Atlantic crossing, there was little to do. Rosette was pleased to get a bath every day, even if it was in salt water. They had two meals a day, at 9 A.M. and 5 P.M., and Jacotte remembered being hungry all the time in the fresh salt air. It was, nonetheless, a nice change from the desert.

The ship also provided empty hours for socializing between division men and the Rochambelles, now that the adjutant was no longer hovering. Jacques Branet, a dashing captain from the Third Company, noted their presence in his journal with a sort of happy wonder that women were there at all. One of the Rochambelles, Anne-Marie Davion, particularly caught Branet’s eye. “I am seeing the gayest and prettiest (in my opinion) of all these ‘Rochambelles,’” he wrote.
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Branet’s luck was holding, because Anne-Marie seemed to find him attractive as well.

Shipboard orders were to wear life jackets and uniforms, including boots, at all times. That included bedtime. All the women except Christiane and Jacotte disregarded the order and slipped into the crepe de chine pajamas they had picked up at Saks. Toto did a midnight bed check and handed out detentions to the women wearing pajamas. Thus was born the response to all discipline inquiries in the Rochambeau Group: “If you weren’t prepared to accept army discipline, you should have joined the Russian ballet!” In other words, no prima donnas allowed. It also led to Toto’s Rule No. 5:
Never forget that you are not on a cruise and that you are not part of the Russian Ballet.
Toto’s Rules of Rochambelle Order (see appendix) gathered the lessons and experiences of their time at war into a wry and amusing commentary on “What one must do, not do, and had better know about.”

The fleet sailed the north Atlantic without incident, and the
Capetown Castle
docked at Liverpool on May 30, greeted by an English brass band. They were transported from Liverpool to Hull, where they saw bombing damage caused by the Luftwaffe, the first they’d seen since the 1940 surrender in France. It was a sobering reminder that their mission would be grim. The women were assigned to a small mansion called Tudor House, in the village of Cottingham, five kilometers from Hull. England seemed so green, so damp after the sepia tones of Morocco and Algeria. The chestnut trees were blooming, and it rained nearly every day. The Rochambeau Group had not been paid in two months, and found the exchange rate of one British pound to 200 French francs was not going to get them far when they did have money. They spent mornings working on the ambulances in the garage, and afternoons in first-aid courses with the battalion doctors.

There was also time to play, and the English were quick to organize dances and dinners for the French troops and drivers. The village mayor and staff were all women, as were most of the workers they met, and were delighted to hold dances for the handsome young doctors of the medical battalion. One evening a French officer was overheard responding to a telephone inquiry about a scheduled dance that “There will be the Rochambelles as well as real women.”

“The French are receiving a really terrific welcome from the English,” Rosette wrote her mother. “They say there is one man for every seven women, and you can imagine the kind of sentiment they easily inspire.”

The Rochambelles were a pretty solid group by this point, but class divisions among them still chafed. Most of them came from the upper classes or the bourgeosie and had similar definitions of politesse. Others did not. In her memoir, Marguerite Marchandeau, whose father was a factory worker, said she always felt like an outsider. As a “simple daughter of the people … the social differences that separated me from the majority of the girls did not motivate me to form friendships with one or another,” she wrote.
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Zizon Sicco recounted that Conrad asked her to take one of the women in hand and teach her some proper manners. Zizon protested, “Why me? You know I let slip a curse more often than I should.” Conrad replied, “Exactly, my dear Zizon, it is absolutely necessary that she learn to say
‘merde’
like a woman of the world.”
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Conrad’s motive was that the woman could end up marrying an officer after the war and would need to do him credit. The woman, whom Zizon did not name, did not marry an officer after the war and Zizon thought her “lessons” had been largely ineffective. But swearing correctly seemed to be on Conrad’s list of things proper young women should know how to do.

Conrad was also concerned about the women’s nutrition. She raided the British and American post exchanges for vitamin supplements and vegetables, scarce on the public markets. The women were introduced to K-rations, wax-covered cardboard boxes containing tinned ham, crackers, some chunks of chocolate, and portions of toilet paper. If they were impressed by the efficiency of K-rations, they soon tired of its contents, and took to calling all army-issued food “beans.” They also took advantage of good English tailoring to have the rest of their army-issue fatigues and uniforms cut to fit them. And they practiced parading.

On the morning of June 6, 1944, an English neighbor arrived at their door with a map in hand and a radio. “It’s your country…” she said. The women were touched, and they all sat down to listen and cry over the D-Day invasion. Tears for not being there, tears for those who were there, tears for those who lost their lives there. It was the beginning of the war to take back the continent from Hitler and his henchmen, and suddenly, France seemed within reach. There were few dry eyes in the Second Division that day.

Leclerc was headquartered at Dalton Hall, a fifteenth-century country estate in Yorkshire. At the end of June, General George S. Patton Jr. came to visit and inspect the troops. Colonel Paul de Langlade described his larger-than-life appearance: Patton wore his habitual jodhpurs and riding boots, equipped with Mexican-style rowel spurs, but the cowboy camouflage was not that of a fool. De Langlade noted that Patton’s “gaze was direct and more piercing than the blade of a sword…”
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The Rochambelles on parade review with the division at Dalton Hall, England.

The French, with their admiration for panache, adored Patton. He went down the ranks, asking soldiers which individual weapon they preferred. After several had answered this gun or that carbine, he stopped and declared that these were not the responses he expected of Frenchmen. His favorite arm was the bayonet, he said, lunging in demonstration, because when you had finished using it, your target
boche
was right in front of you, dead. And he laughed, and they laughed together. Patton, a devoted swordsman, had attended the elite French Cavalry School at Saumur. He spoke French, and he understood the culture. “The French officers whom circumstances constrained to wearing a foreign uniform under foreign command, remember with emotion that great figure of a soldier and remain honored to have served under his orders,” de Langlade wrote.
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In early July the entire division was called to Dalton Hall, and each member received the division insignia pin, the gold Lorraine cross on a blue field. They held a formal parade and review of troops, and the Rochambelles looked smart in their dress uniform, a dark skirt and jacket, white blouse, tie, gloves and hat. But while waiting for the ceremony to begin, Rosette and Arlette began idly tossing a “balloon” back and forth. The army did not offer balloons in its K-rations, but it did sometimes include condoms. Toto noticed it at the same time as several of the tank regiment officers. Captain de Witasse described the incident wryly in his memoir: “Toto burst into fury and popped the offending body, which, in turn, caused everyone there to burst into laughter, just at the moment when the Authorities arrived. That gave birth, one imagines, to a thousand jokes of more or less doubtful taste.”
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While they were stationed in England, Rosette was assigned temporarily to the 501st tank regiment for transport of soldiers to the American hospital nearby. When she reported to the regiment commander, she found that he had not been told she was coming. “For five whole minutes he thought it was a joke,” she wrote home. Persuaded that it was serious, the commander set about figuring out where to house her, the only woman in the regiment. He finally put her tent between that of the priest and the doctor. When she went into the mess tent for dinner, all the officers stood up, and she said she quickly took her place at the commander’s table, her cheeks bright red with embarrassment. In the mornings, Rosette was assigned to help the doctor, but he had two male nurses and she felt in the way.

“I think my presence is more or less bothersome, since the majority of the patients are there for venereal disease, so I stay in my tent,” she wrote.

Three women joined the Rochambelles in England. Polly Wordsmith was a freckled, strawberry-blonde American, now safely out of the reach of State Department dictates; Ghislaine Bechmann had escaped France via Spain, and ended up in London; and Micheline Grimprel was a former Resistant who was spirited out of France after the Gestapo arrested members of her network. They were sent from the Free French organization based at Covent Garden, and while they did not have the advantage the other Rochambelles had in the North Africa training, the three were welcomed into the ranks.

Toward the end of July, in a predeparture move, the division was sent to camp in the mud of a secret bivouac camouflaged in a forest. The battalion doctors’ tent was next to Rosette’s, so close that she could hear the men snoring in the night. The Americans organized entertainment for the troops, a Western film in English. Rosette, bored, left at the intermission. But they were on their way to France, and they knew it. No amount of English rain or dull films could dampen their spirits.

The Second Division was mobilized for crossing the English Channel on July 30th. It would have been even later, but Patton ordered the division to join his Third Army in Normandy immediately. One of the Rochambelles’ favorite officers would not make the trip, however. Colonel Malagutti, who had taken the time to teach the women about tanks, was relieved of his command by Leclerc days before the Channel crossing; they had had ongoing disputes since North Africa and Leclerc dismissed him summarily from the division.

The 15,000-person Second Division left many Englishwomen, all “fiancées” of division soldiers, waving handkerchiefs goodbye. Zizon, who was fluent in French, English, and Arabic, had to translate the last-minute promises between couples who had shared perhaps a great deal, but not a language. Zizon was afraid of being seasick and deeply frightened of heights. But as her ambulance was last to be loaded on the ship, she was posted, to her great relief, on the bridge.

There is a photograph of the Rochambelles on the liberty ship (so-called because it and others like it were delivering freedom to the continent)
Philip Thomas,
crossing the channel, in which Toto is filing her nails, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. They all smoked then, everyone but Christiane and Conrad. The women’s faces were lit with anticipation, with a certain bright, attentive expression of leaning forward into the future.