Fear and the Back Roads of the Bocage
The sky and the sea were crowded and jostling off the Normandy coast on August 1, 1944. Balloons were tethered to ships to interfere with potential air attacks, and ships were anchored in the English Channel against the force of the ripping tides. It was nearly the end of Operation Overlord, when 2 million troops and 330,000 vehicles landed on the Normandy beaches in the sixty days following D-Day. The shifting, tension, and energy offshore were matched on the bridge of the liberty ship, where the Second Division waited to disembark. The Rochambelles had sat on the deck of the ship for three days while the ship inched across the channel, three endless days of heads turning south, searching the horizon for a glimpse of coastline. Finally they were anchored off Utah Beach, but it was 2 A.M., and France remained an elusive shadow in the night.
First they had to get off the ship, and that was not as simple as it might sound. The women and men on the bridge had to climb down the side of the ship on a rope ladder, twisting and swaying in the rolling surf, and jump onto a transport barge that was banging sideways into the ship. Rosette counted that descent as her most anxious moment of the entire war. If her timing was off, she would slip into the sea and then be smashed by the barge as it swung back into the ship. “Fortunately there were huge American Negros to catch us on the way and set us, gasping and relieved, on the bridge,” Rosette wrote her mother. Zizon Sicco managed to be the last one in line. With her paralyzing vertigo, she didn’t know how she’d make it down. A captain helped at the top, and then at the bottom one of the Americans grabbed her by the waist and swung her onto the deck. It was over before she knew it.
The division’s vehicles, including the Rochambelles’ nineteen ambulances, had been driven onto the barge from below deck. One of the American soldiers told Edith Schaller to keep the ambulance in first gear through the shallow water and onto the beach, and aim for a narrow path, barely the width of her truck, that climbed up the hillside. She felt a tugboat push the barge close to shore, and at the signal, drove into the breakers.
Toto drove with Crapette Demay and an American officer, moving very fast once they hit land, speeding through darkness on tiny winding roads, noting the “Danger: Mines” signs posted occasionally. American soldiers in the landing area shouted at each newly arrived ambulance to go faster, faster! Rosette barely had time to realize she was back home. Jacotte, her five-year exile at an end, seized the moment. She drove her ambulance onto the beach and stopped dead. “I was almost in an altered state, under the force of emotion. At the foot of the first dunes, I stopped, opened the door, and on my knees, my hands in the sand, I touched my forehead to the ground of my homeland,” she wrote.1
Then they were off into the night. When they stopped at their encampment, a division officer drove by and tossed a few Camembert cheeses and baguettes to Toto. It was a perfect homecoming gift for the expatriates. One of the division soldiers, Sylvain, played guitar and the women sang old familiar songs. It was good to be home again, worth every difficult moment and every daunting obstacle to be there, bivouacked in an apple orchard in Normandy on a warm summer night. At dawn, Edith climbed onto the roof of her ambulance for a better view and saw the sea drenched in a magnificent scarlet glow of sunrise. “The sun was completely red, and so was the sea and all those ships and contraptions,” she said. “It was fabulous.”
It was fabulous, and it was frightening. They were diving into the raging middle of the Battle of Normandy, begun with the D-Day invasion two months before. Since then, the Allies had established an eighty-kilometer-wide beachhead on the coast, liberated the Cotentin Peninsula, and begun pushing towards the south and east. The fighting was heavy and intense. The women weren’t the only ones in the Second Division with no combat experience, and they wouldn’t be alone in finding the meaning of fear.
Leclerc and his command staff had driven straight to Patton’s camp from the coast. Generals Leclerc and Patton had a solid working relationship and a similar military style, and Leclerc told his aide-de-camp Christian Girard that he appreciated Patton and the other American generals there. “They’re a little bit nuts and that’s what it takes to be a good soldier,” he said.2 Over dinner, the French and American commanders conferred on plans for taking back Normandy from the Germans. By early August, U.S. troops had gotten about 100 kilometers south of the coast and taken the town of Avranches.
Leclerc was already in Avranches when the Rochambelles arrived on August 6, camping in an apple orchard between the outlying villages of Ducey and Saint James with the Third Company tanks of the 501st Regiment. The men were in the orchard on the left side of the road, the women on the right. The ambulances were lined up under camouflage netting. A small German plane had circled over them repeatedly during the day, and some of the other units moved. Toto asked the medical battalion commanders whether they should decamp, too, but orders came down the line to stay put, and to sleep beside their ambulances in full dress. Toto issued the order to remain where they were, but said that the women could sleep in their ambulances if they chose.
Zizon and her partner, Denise Colin, were hot and uncomfortable in their fatigues, and then the mosquitoes starting droning in. They decided to move into their ambulance, and Polly Wordsmith, who had joined the group in England, moved her stretcher over to have a little more room. Zizon took off her heavy fatigues and put on the top of her army-issue pajamas. They had just settled in to rest when hell, in the form of antipersonnel cluster bombs, fell from the sky and exploded in the heart of their camp.
Denise pulled a stunned, deafened Zizon out of her sleeping bag. The ambulance was blazing. Shrapnel had sparked the extra gas can. Zizon ran to get a fire extinguisher. Coming back with it she ran into a captain who shouted at her to take off that light-colored top right away. She tried to argue that she was even paler underneath, “but he had his idea, and I really didn’t have the time to insist, so I obeyed and exposed my half-nakedness to the attention of the German pilots.”3
A soldier handed her the heavy part of his helmet when he saw her bare head, and she ran in her underwear and bra, barefoot with the fire extinguisher and a helmet four sizes too big, to put out the fire. She cut the cords of her hanging sack of clothes and threw it out of reach of the flaming ambulance. When the fire was finally out, she realized how ridiculous she looked and had a fit of hilarity, prompting another driver to run to Toto and report that Zizon had lost her mind. She hadn’t. She got dressed and started picking up the wounded. It was the Rochambelles’ baptism by fire, and one of the first problems they faced was that tires had been blown out by shrapnel. The ambulances were of no use if they couldn’t roll. Raymonde Brindjonc found two of her tires shredded by shrapnel; Christiane Petit’s ambulance had lost three. Another woman had parked in a ditch and couldn’t get the ambulance out.
They pulled together what was working, got the injured loaded into ambulances, and started moving toward the nearest treatment center. Most of the injured had been on the men’s side of the orchard, but the women counted one badly wounded among their team as well. Polly Wordsmith’s legs were shattered in the bombing, and she remained crippled for the rest of her life. At first, she refused to be transported until the soldiers all were taken care of, but when Toto saw her condition, she packed her into an ambulance right away. Zizon measured her luck in centimeters. A small banner with the Lorraine Cross, the division symbol, that she had embroidered and hung on the end of her stretcher, was destroyed. “For the first time I was thankful for my small size. If I was just a few centimeters taller, which I often had wished, my feet would have been in the same shape as that flag.”4
Jacotte loaded her ambulance with five bleeding and burned soldiers and got directions to the nearest treatment center. The directions were wrong, and she drove around in the dark, searching. She saw a group of army tents and headed for them, but the American guard, gun in hand, shouted at her, “Password!” She tried to explain in her gentle, British-accented English that she was looking for the hospital. He kept shouting “Password!” at her and getting angrier, so she left and drove on. She flagged down a passing Jeep and got new directions. She found the hospital entrance, but there the guard said the hospital was full and refused to let her in. She parked and went around to a side entrance, found the head nurse and explained that she had wounded soldiers in the ambulance. If she had to go further on, where could she go? The nurse told her to bring the patients in, that she would take them. Jacotte stayed for a while and translated for the soldiers, then returned to the medical unit’s bivouac. It was deserted, dark and empty in the night. A straggler gave her directions and she eventually found the rest of the unit.
It was an ominous start to Jacotte’s career as an ambulance driver, but it drew for her a clear and unmitigated picture of the kind of quick thinking and personal initiative she was going to need. The burden of responsibility for the wounded soldiers was going to fall on the individual drivers, on whether they could get through the obstacles, both physical and bureaucratic, that would be thrown in their paths. And fear, if it got in the way, could become yet another obstacle. She understood that she would have to push past it and keep going.
Jacotte wasn’t the only one who had a difficult first night. Florence Conrad had gotten lost as well and had driven sixty kilometers out of the way trying to find the field hospital. Crapette Demay, returning to the orchard in the dark, had run over four Moroccan stretcher-bearers who were sleeping on the ground. Fortunately, none was seriously injured.
When Zizon returned to the campsite at dawn, she found her ambulance a smoldering wreck and her clothes and possessions strewn around the muddy ground. Her suede boots had been run over by a tank. Shrapnel had ripped up the interior of the ambulance and sliced through their fatigues. Christiane’s ambulance also had taken a beating, and shrapnel had cut through her sack of clothing as well. She unfolded her army pajamas and found a hole run through them from top to bottom, like a paper cutout. She sewed them up and wore them for years after. It was a costly lesson for the group, but one they applied to future operations. They never parked their ambulances in one place again. “It was a mistake to have put all the ambulances in line,” Arlette said in an interview. “It was a target.”
That night near Ducey, Conrad handed over command to Toto. Conrad was tired, her usual energy flagging. She retreated to serving as liaison with the military bureaucracy and let Toto run the show, which was easier for everyone. The women all had enormous respect for Conrad, but most of them felt she was out of touch, still living in the era of the First World War and insisting on an anachronistic formality of manner. Toto had been running interference between Conrad’s old-fashioned ideas and the day-to-day possibilities for several months. Taking charge officially would be simpler for her as well.
“You” Courou-Mangin Guerin also left the Rochambeau Group in Normandy. She was pregnant again, and didn’t want to lose the baby. She most likely joined the Army’s social services programs being set up to help civilians behind the lines. She was disappointed to leave the ambulance corps, but pleased to be expecting a baby, according to her team partner, Rosette.
The division moved out the next day. The Rochambelles were assigned to the tactical unit commanded by Colonel Louis Warabiot, heading in a southeasterly direction toward Le Mans, with the division’s 4,000 vehicles in two columns. The way south wound through fields of dread and horror. Bodies of dead German soldiers lay rotting in the summer sun, no one willing to bury them for fear of booby-traps. Dead cows and horses, their bodies swollen, their legs stiff in the air, dotted the fields like a harvest of the macabre. The odor of death hung in the air, suspended in dust clouds kicked up by the tank convoys and commingled with the black fumes of their exhaust. Not a single house along the road was left undamaged; families shoveled out the rubble and patched the holes as best they could. Peaceful, verdant Normandy had been shattered in the struggle of the two colossal armies.
Toto and Raymonde were first in a line of ambulances when they came upon a motorcycle soldier who had hit a mine. He had been blown up into a tree, and was hanging there, his legs smashed and bleeding. Raymonde said they put the ambulance under the tree and climbed on top to get him down, but the maneuver blocked the progress of the convoy. Leclerc himself came striding up the line to see what was causing the delay, and poked Toto on the rear with his walking stick. They quickly got the soldier down—he lived, but lost both his legs—and moved the ambulance. “Toto said, well, if he’s given me a bruise, I think I’ll keep it!” Raymonde recalled. The incident led to Toto’s Rule No. 50: When one sees the General nearby, in operations, do your best to warn the lieutenant, so she can get her ass out of the way of his walking stick!
Ahead of the French were the Seventy-Ninth U.S. Infantry Division and the Fifth U.S. Armored Division. In a parallel move to the east, the First Canadian Army and the First Polish Armored Division were moving south from Caen, where the long and devastating battle for possession of that city was finally over. The French and Americans were ordered to maneuver in a fishhook, coming up from the south between Alençon and Carrouges, to create a pincer movement and trap the German Army Group B, with its eleven Panzer divisions and forty infantry divisions. It was Patton’s plan, and it had the signature of his style, requiring speed, audacity and several good armored divisions. “We are having a hell of a war here.” Patton wrote in his diary.5
The Second Division targeted a handful of villages on the outskirts of the Ecouves Forest, a 25,000-hectare (10,000-acre) nightmare for the tank regiments. The Ninth Panzer Division had come up from the south of France and hid, camouflaged in the forest, waiting for the 116th Panzer Division to push the French troops into range of its guns. On their western flank, the Second Panzer Division blocked the town of Carrouges. The French edged warily into the woods, with their Second Company tanks leading. Suddenly shells burst straight-on into the first tank in line. Two of its crew were killed and two were badly burned. Company Captain Jacques de Witasse came running, but could not tell who they were, so badly were their faces burned. Jules Boddaert, the gunner, wrote an account of that day. “It was only by saying my name that he recognized me, and his last words were, ‘Quickly, old Boddaert, go get yourself fixed up.’ I was immediately transported in an ambulance. First aid was given by Madame Torrès, known as ‘Toto.’ With a great deal of tenderness and gentleness, she reassured me. Afterwards, for me it was a complete blank.”6
It took seventeen operations in an American military hospital to give Boddaert back a human face. He had third-degree burns over most of his body. Unfortunately, his injuries were not unusual. If a tank was hit, it burned, and the men inside often burned with it. It was perhaps a miracle that any of them survived. The Rochambelles were working night and day to give them that possibility. And not all the injured were French.
Arlette, carrying the torch of her father’s hatred for the Germans, found herself taking care of a wounded German soldier through the warm night of August 12. He was the first patient she didn’t simply transport, but sat up with and got to know. He showed her photographs of his family, and she had studied enough German in high school to understand what he was saying. “I took care of him. He talked to me all night about his wife, and his little children, and at dawn he died. It broke my heart, and all the hatred, that was gone,” she said. “Hate cannot stand in the face of suffering.”
The Rochambelles understood early on that suffering was not confined to the Allied forces, and that many of the German soldiers were conscripts forced to fight for the Nazis. Nonetheless, they were the enemy, struggling desperately against the tightening Allied vise, in a terrain that favored defense. Where it wasn’t forest, it was cleared fields, but the fields were divided by thick, raised hedges, a Norman system called “bocage” in French. The tank divisions kept getting stuck in the fields and attacked by squads of bazooka-armed Germans.
The ambulance drivers weren’t having a much easier time of it. On the back roads of the bocage, it was vital that the drivers find their way without getting lost, and it was nearly impossible to do so. They had to find where the triage-treatment centers had been set up, while driving in the dark, on unmarked country roads, along invisible borders of German or liberated territory. Directions often conflicted or led straight into enemy lines. Signposts had been removed or reversed: confusion to the enemy resulted in chaos for the Allies as well. Jacotte and Crapette, now ambulance partners, took turns driving, but Jacotte’s night vision was better, and she usually took the wheel after dark. They had to remember the way there, and then the way back, and an error in either direction could spell the end not only for them, but also for the wounded soldiers they carried. Jacotte said she searched constantly for landmarks to remember(a white rock by the roadside, an unusual bush, a tree. It was tense and tiring driving.
Jacotte Fournier in her ambulance.
Sometimes Crapette would sleep on a stretcher in the back while Jacotte drove. Crapette could fall asleep anywhere, and did. Even back at their bivouac, Jacotte would lie awake, listening to not-so-distant artillery. Sleep was in short supply. Either they were in service, or airplanes were buzzing or artillery falling or later in the war, it was just too cold. “That was the worst,” Jacotte said. “I was always anxious.” But she pushed past it, and kept going.
From August 12 to 15, the Second Division concentrated on pushing the Nazi forces out of the Argentan area toward the north, into the trap being laid by the Allied forces. The German commanders pleaded with Hitler to allow them to slip out of the noose, but he refused, and ordered them to fight on.7 For a thirty-kilometer radius south of Argentan, the towns were a patchwork of occupation forces. Whose army held which village was life or death information for the ambulance drivers.
One night Edith, now partnered with Micheline Grimprel, who had joined the group in England, were taking a wounded soldier to Carrouges, and were held up by a long column of American tanks. Edith waited to cross, and at one point thought a tank driver had slowed and signaled them to go. She inched out and then heard a loud crunch, and the ambulance was shoved back off the road. The tank didn’t stop or give any sign of having noticed the encounter. The ambulance’s front right bumper was twisted and the wheel bent. After the tanks passed, an army Jeep stopped and the driver agreed to take Micheline back to their unit while Edith tried to get the soldier to the hospital. Micheline stood and waved goodbye as they sped off. Edith limped into Carrouges, turned the soldier over to the hospital, and went looking for a garage.8 She found one with a promise of an overnight repair, and checked into a small hotel (a bed!) and had a big omelette for dinner (no rations!). Edith’s love of comfort and good food would lead her into trouble time and again during the war, and she didn’t regret a moment of it.
The next morning, the ambulance repaired, she stopped at the hospital to pick up bottles of rubbing alcohol, ether, and other medications. Then she set off to find Micheline and their reconnaissance unit, called “the Spahis” from their formation in North Africa. A motorcycle soldier had a map and tried to help, but wasn’t up to date on the latest troop movements. She continued on, feeling the emptiness of the streets like a shiver down her spine, but an occasional pedestrian assured her that Allied troops had been through that way. Then, at the entrance of a village, she felt a deafening blast. She floored it to get into the village and stopped at the first house, where an old man sat on a stoop, and asked if the French soldiers were around. He turned and went into the house without answering. She continued into the village square, and German soldiers poured out of a building, guns drawn and pointed in her direction. She ducked her head out of instinct and a shot rang off her helmet. She jumped out of the car.
“Ach, es ist eine Frau.” The lieutenant who had just shot at her became positively polite and agreed to take her to the commandant when she unleashed a torrent of German at him. Raised in Alsace, Edith was fluent in French and German as well as English. The three would serve her well in the war. She argued to the German officers that she belonged to the International Red Cross, was not a belligerent party, and should be released immediately. After a short discussion, they agreed to let her go, escorted by two soldiers who would take her beyond the German lines, if she promised not to reveal that they were there. “I promised. A German promise is not a French promise,” she wrote. Edith and the officers returned to the ambulance, which had been stripped of its equipment and the bottle of ether smashed, an event they could smell from several meters away.9
The lieutenant asked for two soldiers to accompany Edith, and an older one stepped forward right away, followed after hesitation by a younger one. Ten kilometers down a tiny, winding road, the older German leaned over and pointed out three American soldiers on the edge of a wood. They were part of the Fifth U.S. Armored Division. Edith got out, arms held high, and ran to them, shouting her unit identification as she approached. They told her the French troops were on the other side of the forest. They all turned as the two Germans came running toward them, arms in the air, to surrender. The Americans didn’t want them, they were going on an attack. They suggested that the Germans run back to their lines, and said they wouldn’t shoot until after twenty paces. Edith, translating from English to German and back again between the men, stopped, horrified. She said she could take them to the rear lines of the American troops and turn them over as prisoners there, and they all agreed to that. The younger one scowled a bit and got an elbow in his ribs from the older one. It seemed to Edith that being taken prisoner was the older German’s hope and desire all along. She dropped them off in a prairie full of Americans and wished them luck, then slipped back into the French troop convoy just as a whistle sounded the departure. With barely a moment to let out her breath, boom! Her windshield went flying, shattered from inside out. She was hit by a bit of shrapnel behind her right ear, and the back of the ambulance was shot to pieces. The soldier in the vehicle behind her had accidentally stepped on the firing pedal of his 37mm mortar launcher when he jumped in to go.10
Edith sat on the edge of the road for a few minutes, waiting for the ringing in her ears and the shaking in her hands to stop. She had been shot twice that day, and had had the amazing luck to have no injury more serious than a piece of shrapnel lodged behind her ear. She also had been taken prisoner by the enemy, talked her way free, and turned over two German prisoners, leading to Toto’s Rule No. 34: Know how to spend a few hours with the Germans without deserving to have your head shaved. It had been enough to unsettle any soldier, but Edith did not scare easily. And at the moment, her main concern was finding Micheline.
Born Marie-Louise Charbonnel, nicknamed Maryse, using the nom de guerre of Micheline, she was twenty-six years old and strikingly beautiful. The daughter of a career army officer, she had driven an ambulance on the eastern front in 1940 and then worked for the Resistance during the occupation under the code name of Scarabee. She married another Resistant, Jean-Marie Grimprel, and became Maryse Grimprel. She was the only Rochambelle to take a nom de guerre, a tactic sometimes used as a measure of protection against reprisals on families. It is quite a stretch to imagine that the Nazis would identify the medical battalion’s ambulance drivers and then seek to punish their families. But the clandestine and the imaginary had been the tools of Micheline’s previous career, and perhaps she did not notice that the terrain had changed.
While a Resistant, Micheline’s network had been broken up by the Gestapo and she was forced to flee to avoid arrest. She was airlifted from Angers, France, to London in March 1944, along with an injured British pilot and a French Resistant carrying the seventeen-meter-long map of the Normandy coast and Nazi gun emplacements that became a key to D-Day planning. In London, she argued heatedly with the Resistance group leader Marie-Madeleine Fourcade that she should be sent back into France, and Fourcade refused.11 Micheline quit the Resistance in a pique, worked in the Free French offices in Covent Garden for several months, and then joined the Rochambelles in England in July 1944, just before they crossed over.
Now Micheline was missing, and Edith was getting very worried. With her ambulance out of action, she got a ride with an army Jeep into Ecouché and found three ambulances parked outside the hospital. She ran over to ask a couple of stretcher-bearers if they had seen Micheline Grimprel. They hadn’t, but before the conversation could continue, a blast of mortars slammed down around them. Edith dove under an ambulance and waited for it to end. She slid out and found the two stretcher-bearers she had spoken to moments before dead on the ground. Later she learned that the bombardment was from the Americans, shooting over the heads of her Spahi unit to dislodge the Germans still occupying Ecouché. She had driven too far into town.
She eventually found her unit, but no Micheline. She worried through the night. Micheline should have been back, should have hooked up with the unit, or at the least, been seen by someone by now. At dawn, Edith set out on foot, tracing the route Micheline might have followed. Argentan was four kilometers away. Finally, off the side of the road, she saw a dark shape with a red cross visible on the side. It was an ambulance, destroyed, the hood smashed, the interior partly burned. A dead man was on a stretcher in the back. No sign of Micheline. She walked into Argentan and knocked on the doors of empty houses. A group of old men hiding in a cellar told her all the women and children had left town, and that in the night they had heard tanks. The village priest said the Germans had pulled out in the night, but that he had not seen any uniformed women. She walked back to the Spahi bivouac in yet another apple orchard, and sat down in a corner to cry. She was starting to fear the worst.
Florence Conrad went out and interrogated every villager she could find, and ended up with two possible versions of what happened to Micheline: The first story was that an armored car attacked the ambulance, she got out, hands in the air, and was taken away by the Germans. The second story was that she was taken dead from the ambulance and buried on the spot, but no one knew where. The second story made no sense, as the Germans were not taking the time to bury anyone.
Micheline had told Edith that she was carrying papers for the Resistance, and Edith suggested that that was unwise. Edith thought Micheline was impulsive and rash. “She didn’t think, she just acted.” During the attack on the orchard near Ducey, Edith and Micheline were a couple of fields over, and Micheline tried to run right into the bombing. Edith told her to wait until the attack was over to go help. Edith said she felt older, wiser, more experienced than Micheline, and she regrets not having insisted that Micheline get rid of those papers. But were the papers her downfall? At that point in Normandy, Resistants were joining the Second Division and action was overt rather than covert. Edith also felt a little guilty that they had separated, against the rules. Micheline might not have run into trouble had she stayed with Edith.
Micheline may have gotten wrong directions on where to take her patient, or may have gotten lost and wandered into enemy territory. The distinction between German and Allied turf was changing all the time. On the afternoon she disappeared, August 13, a squad of Spahis sneaked into Argentan and hung the French flag at the town hall, but then had to pull a quick retreat, outnumbered and outgunned by the Germans. Did Micheline drive into the retaken town unknowingly? Two days later, U.S. troops took the town. “It all went so quickly,” Edith said. “One didn’t know where the Germans were.” The fluidity of possession created great peril.
There was some indication that Micheline joined the 10,000 French women held as political prisoners at the Ravensbruck concentration camp north of Berlin, but none of her names was recorded there on the Germans’ meticulous lists. She supposedly then was taken to the Soviet Union by the Russian troops who liberated the camp. More than 50,000 French men from Alsace and Lorraine who were conscripted into the German army also were missing at the end of the war, fate unknown. Many thousands were believed to be held in prison camps in the Soviet Union, but the Stalin regime left little room for discussion of the issue. Raymond Dronne, a division veteran and assembly member after the war, brought up the possibility of Micheline Grimprel being in Russia to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during a 1950s visit to France, but Khrushchev denied the existence of prison camps. Reports of a French nurse meeting Micheline’s description in Soviet camps surfaced in the 1950s, and a note in her handwriting slipped under her mother’s door in Paris in 1961 fueled the belief that she was still alive, but she never was found.
Zizon Sicco (l), Denise Colin
Micheline’s disappearance and Polly’s terrible injuries put a somber and frightening frame around the ambulance drivers’ activity from the start of the war. Some of them had thought long and hard before joining the group about whether they would be able to face the fear; others found out about it when fear was sitting on their shoulder, making their hands shake and their imaginations run wild. It was at that moment that all of them found the essence of courage.
“When I was ignorant of the real dangers of the war and when I willfully abstained from thinking about it and focusing on it, I imagined that fear had no place in an honest character. I would willingly class warriors into two categories: the ‘good guys’ who were never afraid, and the others, the cowards, worthy of all scorn,” Zizon wrote. “Now I know that fear is not incompatible with the greatness of a soul, and that heroism and the composure of the brave often mask some hard-repressed trembling.”12
Zizon discovered the insidious onset of fear and panic, alone one night in an apple orchard. “At night there were so many real and imagined dangers. At night you dreaded everything, even on a night as lovely as when we arrived at Ecouché.” It was a beautiful, clear evening: Denise was sound asleep in the ambulance, and Zizon was trying to fall asleep outside. Then she saw four men in the field next to theirs, creeping strangely toward the company’s camp. Why were they acting so oddly? If they were French, they had nothing to hide. And if they were not French, they must be German! She must alert the doctors. But the men would see her if she moved. She was slipping into a state of panic, heavy breathing, heart pounding, reason fleeing. The light was fading; she couldn’t see them anymore. Where had they gone? She slid off the stretcher onto her stomach and began crawling toward the doctors’ tents. A rocket burst in the sky and she took advantage of the brief glow to try to spot the men. They had not moved from their initial position. They had not moved because they were not four German soldiers trying to sneak an attack on the medical company. They had not moved because they were apple trees, cut to strange shapes by the bombing and silhouetted in the darkening sky. She crawled back to her stretcher, mortified, glad she had not arrived at the doctors’ tents, grateful for the rocket burst, and hoping she would not hallucinate like that again.13 Fear, she realized, was just another state of mind.
Summer days were long, with daylight fading between 9:00 and 10:00 P.M., but once it was gone, there was no illumination at all. They had to drive without lights at night to avoid drawing enemy fire, and a twelve-kilometer corridor between Sées and Le Cercueil (French for “the coffin,” and for many, it boded ill) was particularly hazardous. The carcasses of burned-out tanks, half-tracks and Jeeps littered the shoulders and sometimes the middle of the road, and driving through it in the pitch night was a blind man’s bluff. Zizon and Raymonde were each driving with stretcher bearers one night as Toto and Denise had set up a medical station to treat the many wounded from intense fighting there. Raymonde said she was driving slowly in the dark, with an ambulance full of burn victims, when suddenly Zizon came barreling down the middle of the road and ran smack into her. Zizon was a little near-sighted. “She only saw me at the last moment,” Raymonde said. The collision jammed Raymonde’s gears, and she couldn’t get the truck moving again. “The wounded soldiers started complaining like crazy.” Finally she got it going in third gear and roared off down the road.
But Zizon’s ambulance was immobile. She and the stretcher-bearer, Henri, would have to wait for help to come. She was getting jumpy sitting like a target on that road. Crack, crack—what was that? Only Henri chewing gum. He told her not to worry, and pulled out a revolver. It only has two bullets, he said, so if the Germans approach, I’ll shoot you first and then myself. She explained the Geneva conventions on medical personnel being unarmed, that they could be shot just for having that gun.
She became more worried that Henri would panic and shoot her than she was over the possibility of Germans in the area. Finally Raymonde returned to pick them up, and Zizon took the wheel, as Raymonde was exhausted. Before they could move, something smashed hard into the ambulance and Zizon heard Denise’s voice: “It’s her, captain!” Denise had persuaded Captain Ceccaldi to come looking for Zizon and they had crashed into her in the dark. Denise was bruised in the wreck, Ceccaldi uninjured. His Jeep had lost a wheel and ended up in a ditch. The ambulance’s radiator was smashed and pouring water, and gas was leaking as well. They sent Henri and his revolver to walk the eight kilometers back to camp and bring help, while they sat and stared morosely at the three new wrecks on the corridor. Division mechanics, working at the speed of light, had them up and running the following day.14
At that point, Zizon wondered if she would have signed on as an ambulance driver if she’d known how gory it was going to get. “All the blood, the wounds, the dead, could I really stand it? Had I ever imagined that I would be picking up men blown to pieces, be spattered with their blood, and then have it dried on my hands for hours afterward? Had I ever realized what war wounds were like, the burns that transform a man into a swollen monster, and all this repairing of flesh and bone that is the surgery of war?”15
The next day, Zizon and Denise were ordered to join a tactical unit nearby, but there was a mix-up in instructions, and they started in the direction of Argentan. A motorcycle soldier stopped them just before the village and turned them around. It was still in German hands. They went back the way they came and tried another direction, toward a village called Fleuré. Another motorcycle soldier cut them off and asked if they’d lost their minds, Fleuré was still in German hands. They went back whence they came and on the way saw a tent in a field, the advance general headquarters. A captain suggested they get out of there before Leclerc found them parading up and down the front line looking for their unit. They returned to Ecouché and found everyone there except Toto and her team.
Toto and Raymonde had been working thirty-six hours with no rest. On August 14, they led a convoy of a half-dozen ambulances from Sées, where the bombing was intense, to Ecouché, where the tactical unit was camped. They were driving a market truck, converted into an ambulance by the Germans and confiscated by the Spahis, marked with a big red cross on the sides, but no national insignia. Night fell before they could reach Ecouché, and Christiane Petit insisted that they stop rather than blunder about in the darkness. Toto called a halt in the woods by Saint Christophele-Jajolet. Raymonde was so exhausted she was shaking, and she was afraid if Toto saw her trembling, she would cut her from the ranks. Raymonde slumped against the ambulance door and fell into a deep sleep.
Shortly before dawn, she was awakened by Toto, who murmured that the Germans were there, and not to get out of the ambulance. Raymonde looked out the windshield to see the hulking dark outline of an enormous Panzer, just in front of them. A Jewish Austrian doctor on their team, who took the nom de guerre of Valéry when he fled the Nazis, slipped silently from the back of their ambulance into the forest. Toto got out to talk to the German commander. Raymonde got out as well, and a German soldier approached her.
“He said to me, ‘You know, mademoiselle, war is a sad thing,’” Raymonde recalled. The Panzer was in a convoy of tanks and vehicles covered with soldiers, hanging on every which way they could. The German soldiers began checking the ambulances, and Raymonde knew there was a half-track of men doctors and stretcher-bearers at the back of their convoy. Toto stepped in front of the soldiers forcefully, insisting that there were only women ambulance drivers, no need to bother inspecting.
Those who knew Toto would have no trouble believing that she could single-handedly stop a Panzer division. She had a razor-sharp tongue backed up by steel-plated courage. “She nailed everybody, men, women,” said Rosette. “She was very intimidating.” She also was Jewish. And she stood on the edge of the forest in the misty dawn and faced down the Nazi commander, denying him inspection of her ambulances and demanding right of passage.
The German commander wanted to take the women prisoner, but there was literally no room in his six Panzers and twelve armored vehicles—the remains of the 116th Panzer Division. Toto held her ground, insisting that they were neutral noncombatants with the Red Cross. Raymonde said the problem both groups faced was that there was no room for either to turn around. The German commander finally agreed to leave them, if they would promise not to move for two hours. The sun was starting to come up as the German column pulled out past them. Toto and Raymonde climbed onto the roof of their truck and saw that the convoy was heading in the direction the Spahi unit had taken the evening before. Christiane remembered that Colonel de Langlade’s tactical group was camped nearby, at Montmerrei, and climbed onto the hood of the half-track to lead the convoy of ambulances to safety. It was August 15, the Catholic celebration of the Assumption, and Christiane had begun praying to the Virgin Mary the minute she saw that Panzer. Some of the other drivers thought Toto ought to keep her promise to the Germans and stay put for two hours. She shrugged off their reproaches.
When they reached the tactical unit encampment, Colonel de Langlade, an officer of the old school whose manners were already smooth as silk in that early morning, told Toto in a patronizing way to calm down. “He didn’t believe her at all,” Raymonde said. “He told Toto, ‘You’ve had a fright, dear lady, but that certainly wasn’t the Germans.’”
Commandant Massu, Toto’s bridge-playing boyfriend, knew better. Coffee cup in hand, he interrupted before Toto could lose her famous temper in the direction of a superior officer. “If Madame Torrès says she saw the Germans, it was the Germans,” Massu said. A reconnaissance plane was called to go up and check it out, and the German tanks were found trying to hide in a nearby farm courtyard. Toto and Raymonde and the rest of their group continued on to Ecouché.
The division fought around Ecouché for another week, pushing the Germans into what was becoming known as the “Falaise Pocket,” as its center was the town of Falaise. The pincer movement was turning into a sack, and the Allies were slowly closing the neck of the sack. The remains of German Army Group B were being squeezed inside, but the pincer movement suddenly was halted for several days by the U.S. command staff, and in the delay, some of the German troops slipped out. When the Allies finally closed it, they took 50,000 Germans prisoner. Leclerc wrote a letter to General de Gaulle, who had just arrived in France for the first time since 1940, updating the Second Division’s situation. He reported that in the Falaise battles of the previous week, the division had seen 60 of its soldiers killed and 550 wounded.
During the Falaise battle, the Rochambelles worked around the clock, evacuating wounded soldiers through the hazards of shelling and bombardment. Rosette got a letter from her mother while they were there, admonishing her for having gone rowing on a lake in England with some young officers. It was far too dangerous to the social reputation of a proper young lady, her mother said. Rosette, her helmet on against incoming artillery, had a good laugh. The contrast between past and present dangers was ironic, and Rosette felt the gap widen between her previous life as a civilian and her current station as a soldier. At any rate, neither handsome young officers in rowboats nor lethal artillery barrages would give Rosette pause. She said she was simply too busy to stop and be afraid.
She also had an eye for amusing moments in the war, and her letters to her mother reflected that (and purposefully did not mention times of danger or despair). Driving the ambulance full of wounded soldiers near Ecouché, Rosette ran into the engineering truck in front of her when it turned suddenly off the road. She slammed on the brakes, but the impact still was brutal. “I was full of remorse for the wounded, who added to my despair by insulting me thoroughly: ‘You should be ashamed to be an ambulance driver when you don’t know how to drive!’ I would be, they told me, responsible for their deaths,” she wrote. She and Arlette got the soldiers to the hospital nonetheless, and the doctor said their days were not numbered. “Arlette and I let loose a sigh of relief. We would have to try to be a little less sensitive.”
One day near Ecouché, they had to bury several division soldiers and the chaplain was not there, so Toto asked Christiane to preside. She grabbed her prayer book and went to work. “I said the prayers that came to me. It wasn’t a real mass. But the soldiers were very touched that there were at least some prayers,” she said. If it wasn’t a “real” mass, then it was all right for a woman to say it, following the same pattern of logic that held that the Rochambelles were not “real” women, they were ambulance drivers.
During that intense fortnight, two of Edith’s ambulances were destroyed, and Toto and Raymonde had taken the Spahi-confiscated market truck to help fill the gap in vehicles. What the Spahis didn’t find was the cache of Calvados under the stretchers. The women were pleased: a shot of Calvados—brandy made from apples—would be just what the doctor ordered for the lightly injured. They also were handing out eye drops to relieve the grittiness. It was dry that summer, and the troop movements and heavy vehicles seemed to grind a constant dust into the air.
One morning, in yet another apple orchard, Anne-Marie Davion asked Jacotte and Crapette if they would like some coffee. They were about to have some, to share a pleasantly ordinary moment in the midst of tension and chaos, when the shrieking whistle of an incoming mortar sent them facedown flat on the ground, eating dirt, praying this one wasn’t for them. It wasn’t. But the camp next to theirs had one dead, eleven wounded. “It was in moments like that when you had to gather all your force and know how to dominate your emotions, in order to act in the most efficient way possible,” Jacotte wrote. “Our ‘profession’ included knowing how to cover up your sadness and be brave, but we often had very heavy hearts.”16
Jacotte and Crapette got lost one night around the same area and decided to await the dawn at an abandoned farm rather than wander in the dark. But shots rang out nearby, and shadows seemed to lengthen and twitch. On that night, fear became a motivating factor: they decided they would rather take their chances on the dark road back to the medical company’s tent. The doctor on duty was surprised to see them at that hour, but with one look at their red eyes and tight lips he led them wordlessly back to a couple of empty stretchers. They managed to get a couple of hours’ sleep before the captain charged in at 5:00 A.M. and shouted at them to jump up and follow him.
The lack of sleep was the most difficult thing to overcome for Jacotte. She didn’t mind the hunger and the dirt, or not being able to bathe, but having no sleep for days on end was stretching her nerves. She and Crapette chewed GI-issue gum, smoked cigarettes and drank instant Nescafé to stay awake.
The division relied on fresh food from the local farmers to round out their rations, but the Rochambelles found little cooperation from the Norman peasants. One farmer sent his eight-year-old daughter to sell eggs, milk, and chickens to the army, and one day Zizon asked her if she was pleased that the French soldiers had replaced the Germans. The girl replied “Oh, yes! The Germans were bad to us. They didn’t pay like you do.”17
The First Company counted itself lucky in its cook, an Italian who had had a restaurant in Rabat before the war. Zizon described his method of persuading the Normans to come up with supplies: He went along to farms on their route and announced that he needed food for the troops. The farmers would respond that they had nothing to give him. “That’s no doubt because you sold too much to the boches!” he would reply. “Fine, look, I need five kilos of butter, twenty dozen eggs and twelve chickens. The price is such and such, and I’ll pay you that. Think about it. I’ll be back in a half-hour. If you still have nothing, I’ll demand the double and it’ll be free.” He carried a rifle with him and toyed with it in a convincing way while speaking. When he returned, the supplies were always ready.18
The war also brought cultural differences across the regions to light. “In Normandy the peasants certainly weren’t pleased with us,” Anne Hastings said. “What they did say is first there were Germans, then you. They obviously thought we were disturbing them. They never offered us anything, you had to pay for every egg.”
The Canadians defeated the last German Tiger brigade on August 16 and liberated the town of Falaise. The neck of the Allies’ sack closed on the Germans on August 20, and with it, the Battle of Normandy was over. Losses on both sides were high. Some 200,000 Germans were killed and another 200,000 taken prisoner.19
On the Allied side, an estimated 36,000 soldiers died (20,000 of them Americans) and 140,000 were injured in Normandy. A quarter of the deaths occurred on D-Day alone. For the Leclerc division, its first two weeks of war saw 141 dead, 78 missing and 618 injured.20 One of the missing and one of the wounded were Rochambelles.
The Second Division’s experience in Normandy had manifold effects, both consolidating the tactical groups as effective fighting units and the overall division as part of the U.S. Third Army. Another result was an end to the contempt and hostility in which some of the division men had held the women ambulance drivers. Their performance under combat in Normandy erased the most entrenched doubts. “We admired the Rochambelles for their courage and their devotion,” Dr. Guy Chauliac said. “They made a place for themselves even though we didn’t want them. The Rochambelles were excellent, remarkable.”
Among those who changed his mind in Normandy was Leclerc. “He held them in great esteem,” Chauliac said. (François Jacob, the other division doctor from Rabat, was severely injured in the bombing near Ducey, evacuated by ambulance drivers from another unit, and spent a year in hospitals, recovering. He went on to win the Nobel Prize for his research discovering the role of DNA.)
Toto recounted in her memoir that one day a tank regiment officer who had tried his best to block the women from joining the division approached her. “You know what I thought of this female section and the pessimism of my predictions for its behavior under combat? Well, this is what I think now.” He stood at attention, removed his beret and made a deep bow, “à la D’Artagnan.” Toto was touched. He became a good friend, and a few months later, she picked him up wounded off the field and got him to a hospital.21
Colonel Pierre Billotte, who led the tactical unit from August until mid-September, noted in his memoirs that the Rochambelles “rivaled the men in audacity” in the Normandy operations. Audacity seemed to be a Second Division trademark. Luckily for the French, it was a quality Patton admired, both in strategy and in people. Before Normandy was even wrapped up, Leclerc was in to see him about the prize: Paris. “Leclerc of the 2d French Armored Division came in, very much excited … he said, among other things, that if he were not allowed to advance on Paris, he would resign. I told him in my best French that he was a baby, and I would not have division commanders tell me where they would fight, and that anyway I had left him in the most dangerous place,” Patton wrote in his diary on August 14. “We parted friends.”22
Leclerc’s aide, Christian Girard, wrote that in that meeting, Patton promised Leclerc Paris, and that he motioned to his compatriot, Major General John S. Wood, and said, “Look at Wood, he’s even more annoying than you are.”23 Patton wrote that he was in charge of 450,000 men in the war. Leclerc had just 15,000 men—and thirty-three women, at that point—but did not hesitate to make demands on Patton.
Leclerc was in a delicate position. He was on his home turf, but could not hope to win the war alone. He owed everything the division had, from Sherman tanks to Thompson machine guns, to soldiers’ uniforms, boots, and even their rations, to the Americans. But liberating France was in the French soldiers’ hearts as well as heads, and emotion could not be distilled from logic in the heat of the war. Conflicts with the Allied command were inevitable. The question of Paris was one of those points of discord, and by the third week of August, it was on everyone’s mind. Parisians felt the pull of home like a powerful magnet, while the politically inclined were calculating the postwar gains of liberating the capital.
The Allied command did not favor an approach to Paris. It was not strategically significant, it was not practical to send an armored division into an urban setting, and worst of all, the army would then be responsible for feeding and supplying the population of Paris once it was in Allied hands. The Allied command wanted to bypass Paris and push on toward the Rhine. Leclerc and de Gaulle, however, were adamant that the Second Division should take Paris, and take it now. The Resistance in Paris had begun an endgame uprising that could turn into a massacre without military backup, and had sent messengers to Normandy to urge the army to move immediately on the capital. Leclerc ordered a small reconnaissance unit to check out the situation, and then went to see U.S. Army General Omar Bradley. He came back on August 22 with a smile on his face, and, barely out of his Jeep, gave the order: immediate departure for Paris.
When most women go to Paris, they think about what they’re going to wear. The Rochambelles were no exception. Zizon was in a particular fix because her dress uniform had been shot up and burned at Ducey. All she had were fatigues. Toto said she could take advantage of a lull in the action to run to a PX the following day and get a new uniform. She would have to leave at 5:00 A.M. and get back early. “I went to sleep with the comforting perspective of being able to contribute to edifying the Parisians on the well-known elegance of the Rochambelles,” she wrote.24
But she was awakened at 3:00 A.M. They were moving out for Paris, and the army did not care how Zizon would look when she got there.
The Rochambelles’ route to Paris, August 24-25, 1944