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.
In the spring of 1940, she and a Swiss office-mate called Ellen Gautier rented an apartment together, “furnished” with a sad couch and two twin beds, but a large empty living room that suited them perfectly. Their first move was to rent a baby-grand piano and put it in the center. They struck a deal: the first one home from work got an hour, not a minute more, on the piano, and then it was the other’s turn. They had musician friends as well and got together to play as often as possible. Around Jacqueline, music was always in the air.
“I liked my life there,” she said. She walked and walked the streets of the city, discovering it bit by bit. She ice-skated at Rockefeller Center and played tennis at a friend’s apartment-house courts. She and Ellen met a fellow who took them water-skiing and horseback-riding. Sports and music kept her from missing her family too much, or feeling too alone in the big city. “I loved New York. I still have it under my soles,” she said years later.
The Nazis invaded France in May 1940, and with the French surrender in June, the consulate in New York closed. Jacqueline had “government official” stamped on her passport because of her work there, and needed a civilian visa in order to find another job. It wasn’t easy. She had to go to Montreal to apply for entry into the U.S. as a civilian. She managed to accomplish that by October 1940, and through friends, found work at Roger & Gallet, the cosmetics company. But back in New York at last, Jacqueline discovered that the French were now being treated as “enemy aliens” because of the Nazi occupation of their country and the Vichy government’s collaboration. French friends with pleasure boats suddenly had their licenses confiscated; American friends in the U.S. military suddenly could no longer see them. Not only were the French in exile, they found themselves isolated socially and treated with mistrust.
The reports from France were bleak. She had no more news of her family, and could only imagine their suffering. In fact, her father’s export business had been closed by the Nazis, leaving the family with no income. Her maternal grandfather, who had lived through the German occupation of France in 1870, and had lost both his sons in the First World War, now lost his family home in Herblay to Nazi occupation. Going to collect his sons’ portraits and military medals from the house, he collapsed suddenly and died. Jacqueline’s sister Suzanne said he died of chagrin, that he simply could not face a third round of tragedy. Many in France felt the same way. The devastation of the First World War was not yet in the past, but an enduring sorrow in every village, in nearly every family. The rapidity of the French surrender in 1940 was in large part due to this legacy of loss.
Jacqueline would not hear of her grandfather’s death until four years later. Once the Nazis occupied France, she was cut off from her family. Through a friend in Lyon, they managed to send her a Red Cross postcard, limited to twelve words and censored by the Nazi authorities. It arrived in New York in August 1943, fourteen months after it was mailed. Jacqueline’s reply on the back of the same card, again limited to twelve words, took eighteen months more to get back to Paris. In the end, she got there before it did.
In November 1942, the Allies invaded North Africa, the first step in staging an assault on the European continent. In response, the Nazis took over all of France, eliminating the previous demarcation line that had left the south of the country relatively undisturbed by the occupation. Now the fig leaf of Vichy’s autonomy was removed, and the entire nation was being pressured to produce for the German war effort. Conditions slid from bad to worse, and there was nothing to be done about it from the other side of the Atlantic. Jacqueline began to feel trapped and helpless, far from those she loved, cut off from contact. Trying to overcome the feeling of despair, she searched for a way to contribute to the war effort. She had no training as a nurse, and did not want to spend three years in nursing school. She thought of learning to drive an ambulance, as many young women had done in the First World War. She signed up for a First Aid course, and then a U.S. Army Motor Mechanics’ course. She was allowed to take the classes and learn the skills, but as a French citizen, she was barred from working with U.S. troops in military installations.
In The New York Times, Jacqueline read a few lines about a Colonel Leclerc, whose skeletal column of soldiers had wrested much of the French African empire over to the cause of the Free French, the political and military arm of those who opposed the Vichy collaboration and fought for an independent government. As the Allied campaign continued to roust the Germans from North Africa and the former French empire cast off its Vichy chains, the possibility of liberating France began to seem within reach.
Jacqueline was determined to be an active part of the cause. She wrote a letter to General Marie Béthouard, chief of the Free French mission in Washington, stating that she wished to serve as an ambulance driver in the Free French army. She carefully avoided saying she was a qualified and experienced bilingual secretary, looking to avoid the trap of office work. Nonetheless, Jacqueline received a response from his office saying that any volunteers would have to be men. Time and again, she hit nothing but brick walls, as the newspapers piled up in her apartment and another winter set in.
And then, like a bolt from the blue, a dynamic woman named Florence Conrad called her on the telephone. Conrad was organizing a women’s ambulance corps to help the Free French. Was Jacqueline interested?
* * *
Florence Conrad made a strong impression on everyone she met. She was tall, imposing, strong-willed, and attractive. She had been widowed twice and had a surfeit of both money and energy. She was American, and though she had been raised in France since childhood, she retained a strong American accent when speaking French. Her accent threw people off balance, and that, in turn, helped Conrad get what she wanted. Conrad was an artist of persuasion, a master of verbal combat.
She also had seen real combat. Conrad had married at age nineteen and had a daughter, but was widowed early. When the First World War began, she went to work as an army nurse, serving three kilometers behind the front at Saint Quentin. She was not alone; the war had interrupted France’s Belle Epoque, and many French women of the upper classes devoted their energies to support services. Conrad was among the 25,000 American women who joined them, serving in France as ambulance drivers, nurses, and social workers.
“We were all young women of a time and a world of insouciance and gaiety,” Conrad wrote in 1942. “We had relegated our riding skirts, our tennis rackets and evening gowns to the back of closets that wouldn’t be reopened until after victory. Immaculate poplin blouses, hard on the skin, had replaced silks and muslins. We put our good will to the service of the doctors who battled death for the existence of young men wounded while fighting, our dancing and sporting partners themselves perhaps wounded as well, and cared for by still-inexperienced nurses like us.”1
After the war, she married again and was widowed again. But her second husband, Henry Rosenfeld, left her wealthy. In the 1930s, the widowed Conrad lived in a mansion in Paris and led a very social life, until the next war awakened her sense of duty. She didn’t wait for the hostilities to begin. From the declaration of war in September 1939 to the German invasion of May 1940—a period of tension and uncertainty that became known as the Phony War—Conrad was a whirlwind of action.
She had a car, a rare enough possession in Depression-era France, and a deep sense of the value of France’s cultural treasures. Conrad badgered friends among the conservators at the Louvre until they agreed that she could help move precious artworks to safety, in case Paris was bombed. She was assigned to lead a convoy of trucks to a chateau in the countryside, carrying no less than the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
The convoy departed smoothly and all was proceeding apace when, on the outskirts of Paris, Conrad spotted a line of army artillery trucks heading toward the city. The army had the right of way on all roads, but she was afraid that if the Louvre trucks were forced to the side, they would slide into the drainage ditch and the statues would be broken. She also knew that explaining to army drivers that art should take precedence over artillery would be a waste of breath. So she “lost control” of her car and came to a halt in front of the army column, which abruptly ground to a halt, and the Louvre trucks kept going forward. She played the incompetent woman driver the soldiers expected to see, and did not manage to get her car back in gear until after the Louvre trucks were safely by. “In war, as in love, anything goes,” she noted.2
In that long pause between September 1939 and May 1940, the French believed their Maginot Line of eastern defenses would hold against the Germans. The army was installed along the line, ready to defend the nation, but no invasion came, and autumn turned to winter, winter to spring. An idle army is a depressed army, and Conrad found in the soldiers’ lack of occupation an opportunity to get involved. She got permission from a friend at the Préfecture of Paris to drive to the restricted zone in the east, and went from general to general until she found one who allowed her to set up a canteen where off-duty soldiers could gather. She chose Etain as its location, as it was closest to the front, and wrote a check for 10,000 francs to get it going. She said she made her money back in a month. By December, an army general invited her to lunch to find out why her canteen worked so well and the army-run centers did not. As usual, Conrad wasted no words. Men didn’t know how to look after men, she told the officer. The soldiers needed mothers, sisters, and friends to listen to them. Boredom was their biggest enemy of the moment: waiting for the worst to happen was more agonizing than living through it.
The general said the army wanted to avoid letting private efforts get in the way of the war as they had in World War I. The canteen would have to become part of the army system in order to continue, but Conrad would have a free hand to set up others and operate them as she liked. She opened another canteen at Verdun for Christmas, and then at Charny, calling in friends to help run them. One friend, Georgette Bentley Mott, arrived from Biarritz driving an ambulance full of gifts for the soldiers. Conrad learned that the soldiers were freezing at night because of a lack of blankets, that pneumonia had already killed several of them before the war had even started. She sent Mott to Paris with a blank check and told her to buy as many blankets as she could. When Mott questioned whether Conrad should spend her own money, Conrad replied that she was taking a page from Saint Theresa: “Do immediately what needs to be done, and find the means later.”3
Conrad and her friends opened their sixth and last canteen at Aumetz, just across the Belgian border, in the spring. Shortly afterward, Conrad was named “godmother” to an army regiment—complete with a red, white, and blue ribbon and medal—and given the honorary rank of corporal by the new regimental commander and her old friend, Captain Gustave Gounouilhou, in civilian life the owner of the Petite Gironde newspaper in Bordeaux. The ceremony happened to take place square on the Maginot Line, northeast of Etain. Conrad laughed out loud when she realized it.
On May 3, 1940, an army doctor asked if Conrad could take care of the local Aumetz clinic when the offensive began, because he would be working on the front lines. She and her friend Françoise Verhille, who had helped set up the string of canteens, drove up there and spent the following nights with one ear cocked for the sound of artillery. It came soon enough. Conrad awoke on the night of May 11 to the doctor’s wife pounding on her door with news that the long-awaited invasion had begun. She made sure her car, and those of her friends, had full tanks of gas, and then ran to the clinic.
The first soldier was carried in by his comrades, his intestines spilling out. She gave him a shot of morphine so that he would die peacefully, and then she went outside. She tripped over a body, a young man who’d been shot through the eye. There, in the chilling night, she felt the echo of the damage and destruction she had lived through twenty-five years before. Once again, eastern France would be soaked with the blood of a generation of young men. On the eve of the Debacle, as the French collapse came to be called, Florence Conrad knew she would see hell twice in a lifetime.
In the first night of fighting alone, 900 wounded arrived at the hospital in Sedan. Conrad decided that driving an ambulance would be more useful than assisting in a clinic, but the one ambulance at her disposal, a rattletrap Renault with no shock absorbers, starter, or brakes, wasn’t going to go far. She sent Françoise Verhille to Paris with a blank check to buy another ambulance, meanwhile persuading the Defense Ministry and the newly organized Service Automobile Féminine Française, or S.A.F.F, to approve her addition to the corps. The Citroën car factory agreed to furnish some more ambulances, and Conrad was named liaison for ambulance services.4 There were other ambulance groups, including the Assistance Sanitaire Automobile, with 180 women drivers and nurses working along the Maginot Line until June 1940, and several private individual efforts. During this hectic opening episode of the war in France, individuals wanted to help, and the army attempted to fit them into an official structure, but it was all happening far too quickly. The Germans were pouring across the Maginot Line as though it were made of sand rather than stone. On May 20 Saint Quentin fell, and on the following day Péronne was taken. In the first two weeks of the war, the S.A.F.F. lost six ambulances: three without trace, a fourth taken prisoner, a fifth blown up by a mine, and the sixth bombed in a convoy just behind Conrad and Verhille.
“I suppose we should be afraid,” Verhille said flatly.
“Afraid of what?” Conrad asked. “Afraid to leave this dirty world, as rotten as it is? We’ve had more than our share of good times. Women like us don’t want to die of old age, so why not here and now?”5
By early June, they were moving the wounded from treatment centers along the front to hospitals westward, as bombing and artillery attacks reached further into France. On the evening of June 11, the doctors left as well, and Conrad and Verhille worked through the night, the wounded coming in like a rising tide. In the morning they packed the ambulance full and left for Bar-le-Duc. From June 11 until June 19, when France surrendered to the Germans, just about everyone got up from the east and tried to get to the west. Soldiers struggled under the weight of seventy-pound packs on their backs, farmers drove livestock ahead of them, women brought babies into the world on wagons by the roadside, and children were separated from their families and lost. There was no food and no water. Conrad drove soldiers when she could, when the ambulance wasn’t full of wounded. The retreat was a Boschian scene of panic and despair, the shuffling columns moving west one day, south another, chased by stories of German atrocities.
Conrad tried to cross the Moselle River westward but the bridge had been blown out. She drove her ambulance along the river and fell straight into a German roadblock. She surrendered immediately and showed her U.S. passport. The officer in charge told a soldier to accompany her to the nearest post. He got in, and she drove to the post, where the soldier got out, telling her to wait there. “What an idiot! Naturally I was not going to ‘wait there,’” she wrote.6 She took off into the deepening dusk, driving north along the river, hoping the bridge at Charmes was still intact. She found it, and started across, but halfway there she screamed and slammed on the brakes. The bridge had been blown out in the middle. German soldiers came running.
The Germans made her drive west to Dompaire, to a prisoners’ camp. She was so tired when she arrived that she crawled onto a stretcher in the back of her ambulance and slept through the night. In the morning she found 20,000 French prisoners in the camp, plus two ambulances from her unit. She went to see the camp commander, and showed her U.S. passport again. She was free to leave: the Americans were not yet belligerents in the war. The commander allowed her to take some wounded prisoners to the hospital at Thaon, where the nuns showed her to a room and she slept straight through for twenty-four hours. She was exhausted.
But she wasn’t going to give up. Conrad got an Ausweis, or official pass, from the German authorities to run the ambulance between Etain and Paris, transporting wounded French soldiers. She drove across Paris the night the surrender was signed, and there was not a French soul on the streets. She saw only four German guards.7
Back home in the chic Passy neighborhood of the 16th arrondissement, Conrad was unable to rest. She saw long lines of people outside the Red Cross offices: no one knew the fate of their relatives in the army. Were they still alive? Had they been taken prisoner? She had an idea, and drove east with it. She called on the German command staff and asked if she could collect mail from the prisoners. She designed a simple card that had no more than the address of the camp, a simple message: “Ma chérie, Je suis en bonne santé. Je t’embrasse. (My dear, I am in good health. I send a kiss.)” And the prisoner’s signature. She began at Lunéville, where among the prisoners she found her honorary regimental commander Gustave Gounouilhou. She later would help him escape occupied France. She then visited camps at Baccarat and Sarrebourg. The prisoners could write nothing else, she had promised the German officials, otherwise the cards would all have to be read by a censor, and it would take weeks. The point was to let families know as soon as possible that their men were alive.
Returning to Paris with lists of prisoners and 100,000 cards in the ambulance, she panicked: how was she going to send them? The banks were closed, and she couldn’t get 100,000 francs to buy stamps. She thought of the Red Cross, and the Office of Prisoners of War. Finally the American Red Cross took charge of distributing the cards, and Conrad worked with the director of the National Archives on a form for the soldiers to fill out with their personal and family information. In all, Conrad visited seventy prisoner-of-war camps and hospitals that summer, and brought back 100,000 pieces of mail each time. She took dried sausages and canned food with her to distribute to the prisoners, bringing the last twenty cans of American soup from the gourmet food store Hédiard at Place Madeleine. By the end of the summer, the Germans had put in place a formal system of communication, and she was no longer needed. She went back to Paris.
In September 1940, a friend at the U.S. embassy called with a warning. The Gestapo was spreading a rumor that she had carried weapons in her ambulance. She brushed it off. Then an army contact called and asked if she would help in sorting out wounded soldiers who could be released from hospitals from those who needed a longer stay. The Germans wanted to release them all where they were, and the French wanted to get the serious cases to Val de Grace Hospital in Paris. As an American, Conrad had room to move where the French did not. She went. While she was in Reims, Jeanne Krug of the champagne family came to ask for help. She had taken in 300 babies during the retreat but had trouble finding milk for them all. She said the cows were giving bad milk because of the chaos, and she could not find condensed milk. Conrad called the Civil Aid Services in Paris, who took charge of the babies’ milk. Conrad took prisoner after prisoner from eastern hospitals to Paris, driving a thousand kilometers every few days.
In November 1940 she went south to Vichy, where government officials had retreated to maintain a French state during the German occupation. Conrad wanted to organize her financial affairs between France and the United States. She visited some old friends and had tea with Madame Pétain, wife of the marshal who was now head of government. The following month, on one of her runs to the prisoners’ camps, she saw the men barefoot in the snow. She went back to Madame Pétain for help, and a committee was organized to make wooden clogs for them. Conrad also visited a British women’s prison camp in Besançon. The women were sleeping on a concrete floor covered with a little straw, with no heating and few blankets. There were five toilets for 7,000 people. When they arrived, the camp was filthy and lice-infested. The women of Besançon had come and provided them with cleaning materials, but the prisoners were still freezing. Conrad promised to try to help. She took the visit as a personal warning as well: if the United States entered the war, she would be interned in similar quarters. For a woman of Conrad’s energy, being sidelined from the action would be punishment even more difficult to endure than the tough conditions of a prisoner-of-war camp.
In early 1941, a French general with whom she was friendly asked her to go to the States and inform the Americans about the situation in France. But when she visited Marshal Philippe Pétain, the aging Vichy leader, he tried to dissuade her, denying the implications of “collaboration” with the Nazis. He preferred to think of it as a “barter system,” he told her. Conrad believed that Pétain was wrong, and packed her bags for New York. “It took all of my courage to leave,” she wrote.8
The expatriate French she found in New York had become bitterly divided into two camps: those who supported General Henri Giraud and his First Army and those loyal to General Charles de Gaulle and his Free French Forces. Giraud and his group represented conservative, traditional, Catholic France, while the Gaullists considered themselves the vanguard of a more inclusive future. The Lorraine Cross with two horizontal bars, symbol of the Gaullists, was viewed with outright hostility by the Giraud group. From 1940 to 1943 inter-French squabbling served as background static in the exile community, with each group vying for international recognition as the official Vichy opposition.
Conrad didn’t pay much attention to the fuss. She knew that any gathering of the French would result in cultural fission, a search for differences between one another rather than the finding of common ground. With the Allied victory in North Africa in May 1943, Conrad sensed a larger battle in the offing. Naturally, she wanted to help, and she had both an idea and the connections to make it happen. Conrad decided to organize an ambulance corps, and to have it trained, equipped and prepared for duty when the battle to liberate France would begin. That wasn’t all: Conrad wanted women to drive the ambulances, because that would free up the men for fighting. She remembered what her friend the general had said about keeping volunteer efforts from getting in the way of the war. If the women were part of the army, they would not be treated as meddling civilians. The greatest difficulty, she understood perfectly, would be getting a women’s ambulance corps attached to an army. Conrad embraced the challenge, and the chance to contribute to her dearest cause: the liberation of France.
She started by asking for money from wealthy friends. Donating funds to buy ambulances was very much in fashion in New York at the time, and civic associations, high school clubs, and citizenship groups all were participating in the effort. Conrad soon had enough money to buy nineteen brand-new Dodge model WC 54 1.5-ton, four-wheel-drive ambulances. Built by the Wayne Society of Richmond, Indiana, and assembled on a Dodge chassis, they had no armor plating, no weapons, a double-clutch gearshift, and a top speed of eighty-five kilometers per hour.9 Conrad then began recruiting drivers, spreading the word among friends and posting advertisements in the French departments of local universities.
From Bryn Mawr College came Germaine de Bray, a professor of French. From the Parsons School of Design came Laure de Breteuil and Anne de Bourbon-Parme, both eighteen-year-old art students. Laure’s mother, Elisabeth de Breteuil, also signed up, partly to keep an eye on the two young women.
“All the boys around us were leaving for the army, the Americans to the American army, the French to England or Canada,” Laure de Breteuil said in an interview. “It was natural. I was not going to just sit there and wait for things to happen.” But the War Department had other ideas about women joining the war effort, and the Free French military leaders weren’t supportive, either. “They weren’t interested, and why should they be?” Laure said. Conrad and Elisabeth de Breteuil went several times to Washington to try to persuade Free French army officials that their project had merit.
Anne Ebrard Hastings was working on a doctorate in government at Harvard University at the time. She was born in Paris in 1915, and married an American, Wendell Hastings, in France in September 1940. They moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and when the United States entered the war, Wendell Hastings went into the Office of Secret Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Anne wanted to do something, but what? “I thought, one becomes a nurse,” she said. “That’s what happened to the other generation.”
She took a nurses’ training course, and then her husband saw Conrad’s notice recruiting ambulance drivers for the Free French. He suggested she get a driver’s license and see if she could join. “I thought I’d like the adventure, and I thought it’d be awful to stay in the States cozily, doing nothing. Before [the war] I loved mountain-climbing, rock-climbing really, the harder the better,” she said. “I wanted to prove myself, and see if I would be afraid.” She also was motivated by her family history. Her father had died in a German prison camp during the First World War.
Lulu Arpels, of the Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry family, and Marianne Glaser, an Austrian who was desperate for news of her adult daughter in France, signed up with Conrad’s team. Jacqueline Lambert de Guise, a great beauty, and Hélène Fabre, heiress to a shipbuilding fortune, also joined, as did Marie-Louise (nicknamed “You” from childhood) Courou-Mangin, and several others. Jacqueline Fournier, finally escaping her secretarial destiny, signed on and became known as “Jacotte,” to distinguish her from the other Jacqueline.
The women began ambulance training at the old World’s Fair grounds in Flushing, Queens. Training included mechanics’ courses, stripping down engines, repairing small breakdowns, and changing tires. They also took army-run medical training in first aid, which involved bandaging, giving shots, and taking temperatures, and they worked as volunteers in New York hospitals to broaden their medical knowledge. All the training was well thought-out and useful, and contributed to turning them into short-term health professionals.
The mechanics part was somewhat less successful. Laure de Breteuil was not the only one to be intimidated by the exercise of changing a truck tire. “I looked at one of the wheels and said ‘If I have to change that damn thing I’ll never be able to,’” she explained. “That’s when I decided to be more on the nursing side of things.” The women mastered cleaning out carburetor jets, which frequently jammed up and stalled the engine, replacing spark plugs and removing fan belts.
Conrad kept recruiting, signing up a dozen Americans, among them Leonora Lindsley, who had lived in Paris with her journalist parents before the war. Together, the women went to Saks Fifth Avenue and Brooks Brothers to order their gear: long underwear, a dress uniform, fatigues, a pale blue mechanics’ jumpsuit they took to calling “the evening gown,” and a heavy trenchcoat.
Conrad was as tireless in organizing her new corps as she had been in France in 1940, and in the Great War twenty-five years earlier, when she was a young nurse. But now she was fifty-seven years old, and conscious of the difference in age from her new charges, most of whom were in their early twenties. She knew she needed a younger subordinate officer to run the squad while she oversaw their duties and served as liaison with U.S. and French military authorities. A friend thought she knew the ideal candidate.
* * *
Suzanne Rosambert Torrès was thirty-five years old, a smart, no-nonsense lawyer, born and raised in Paris, but fluent in English because her mother was American. She was separated from her husband, a well-known Paris lawyer and World War I veteran named Henri Torrès. When the new war was declared, Henri left France for New York, but Suzanne went straight to the eastern front, helping run one of the volunteer ambulance services and acting as liaison between the volunteers and the military command. She was devastated by the surrender, and when she heard Charles de Gaulle’s June 18, 1940 speech urging the French to fight on from abroad, she was determined to do exactly that. But first she had to find a way out of the country. Meeting up with like-minded friends, she traveled to Bordeaux, and then looked for a route to the French colonies in North Africa.
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.10
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.11
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.12 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.13 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.”14
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.