From the end of February to the middle of April, the Rochambelles and most of the division were on leave in the Loire Valley. They visited the monumental chateaux, organized numerous picnics, held many a musical evening, and generally tried to recover from the crushing fatigue of the campaign to liberate France. The first few weeks of enforced rest were practically medicinal, but as the men and women found the top of their form again, they were eager to get back to the war.
Leonora Lindsley, one of the young Americans who had signed on with the Rochambelles in New York and had been working since August 1944 at Val de Grace Hospital, rejoined the Rochambelles in the Loire Valley. She hoped to write about the war from the French perspective. Soon after she arrived, the division was ordered to depart for Germany, and she described the tanks draped with wisteria and lilacs, and the men singing their regimental song, “The March of Chad,” as the convoy rolled out.
A few days later, writing from Germany, Leonora noted that the victory march into Germany so anticipated by the division soldiers and the Rochambelles was turning out to feel a little hollow. Having known the experience of defeat, it was difficult for them not to recognize the pain and loss on German faces. “The French are unhappy. They arrived a little arrogant and sure of themselves. When they crossed the border, after so many years of waiting, standards flying in the wind, they were truly radiant. But battle has not yet taken place on this side of the Rhine.… They became the Conquistadors (for lack of a better term) and are not happy about it,” she wrote. Division soldiers talked loudly in the streets about Nazi atrocities and reassured themselves that their punishing attitude was correct, but they felt a little ugly and very unhappy, she wrote. “We have done a lot of driving since April 25, and it resembles more and more 1940, but this time in reverse. Soon, there probably will be no more resistance and my next letter will have a different tone.”
Leonora Lindsley, April? 1945.
Resistance largely came from the hands of snipers when the division moved into Germany behind the American offensive sweep. Two motorcycle men were shot, and division vehicles had to be kept under guard whenever they stopped. The civilians they encountered were somber, unsmiling: Nazi Germany had been defeated, even if the white flag had not yet flown. The Rochambelles were coasting on a victory wave, but it was not the joyride they had anticipated.
The Second Division crossed the Danube on a pontoon bridge erected by engineers of the Twelfth U.S. Armored Division, following the American advance through Bavaria toward Munich. There the Second Division was ordered to halt and move off the road to let U.S. troops pass by them: the Americans wanted Munich. The French had taken Paris and Strasbourg, and they were told there were fresh American troops who had not yet engaged in combat.
Jacotte and Crapette pulled the ambulance over to the side of the road with the rest of the convoy and watched the parade of every imaginable type of military vehicle: Jeeps, half-tracks, amphibious vehicles, tow trucks, bridge builders, tank carriers, gas tankers, supply trucks, medical trucks, tanks, armored cars, and on and on. It took them all day to pass. When the French got to Munich, snow was on the ground and the city was in Allied hands.
In countryside villages, white sheets began to appear draped from chalet balconies, reflecting the surrounding blanket of snow, and wrapping the entire nation in a symbolic surrender. The German people knew it was over, even if Hitler and the Nazi command were still huddled in their Berlin bunker to the north. The Second Division encountered light and sporadic fighting, more for show than in any serious attempt to repel the Allied forces. In the south, the landscape was pristine, but the roads were crowded with military traffic. Liberated prisoners seemed to be everywhere. Those from the concentration camps stumbled in the snow, clinging tenaciously to life, indescribably fragile.
Zizon had a new partner, as Denise, recovered from her bronchitis, had returned to Paris to finish medical school. They stayed with German families as they traversed the country, and Zizon wrote that she felt that the Germans were trying to pretend that it was only a small minority who had supported the war. She didn’t believe it was true, and said she saw in family albums photographs of Poles hung after being mutilated, and of Germans looting among dead French soldiers. “I was dismayed to see how the people put all the horrible crimes committed by the Germans on the backs of the S.S.,” she wrote. “They look plainly to set themselves apart from those who, so they say, were the only perpetrators of atrocities.”
Janine Bocquentin, who left her hospital duty to rejoin the Rochambelles during their Loire Valley stay, was attached to Commandant Dronne’s tactical group in Germany. There wasn’t much physical fighting, but the psychological battle had yet to be won. She said that they saw German teenagers kicking newly released prisoners, particularly the skeletal concentration camp survivors. She and her partner threw food and clothing out the ambulance window to the ex-prisoners when they passed them in convoy. They also were supposed to find lodging among the German population, and Janine did not find that easy. One woman chased them off a farm with a pitchfork, shouting that the Americans were coming and would teach them a lesson, as though they were on opposite sides. “I never saw an open door, an extended hand, never,” Janine recalled. “I could feel the hatred of that population.”
The men soldiers found a different kind of welcome. Marie-Thérèse said the engines on the convoy would still be warm when groups of German women came around their nightly bivouac. “Those who resisted were really strong, because the girls were literally jumping on them. They were real whores.”
And, as night follows day, venereal disease followed prostitution. Soldiers asked the ambulance drivers for treatment. “I yelled at them,” Marie-Thérèse said, but they didn’t care because penicillin, now available from the Americans, was a quick cure. One soldier had to be hospitalized three times for syphilis, the last time in Bavaria in late April. The Rochambelles had finally gotten clearance for a good night’s sleep under deep down covers, and Marie-Thérèse was ill with what was probably an appendicitis attack. She had been driving stretched out straight so that the bumps in the road didn’t send her into agony, and her belly was swollen up so that she couldn’t button her pants. She was very much looking forward to resting in bed. At 4:00 A.M. there was a knock on the door and a call to evacuate a soldier. “Where was he?” she mumbled. There at the door was the syphilis victim, walking like a duck, his testicles and abdomen swollen up and in severe pain. “We were furious,” she said.
Marie-Thérèse Pezet with division member and actor Jean Gabin, Germany, May 1945.
Marie-Thérèse drove behind the celebrated actor Jean Gabin and his tank all through Germany. One morning she woke up and the front half of her hair had fallen out on her pillow. It grew back, but white, while the back half stayed dark brown. The doctor said it was the exhaust from the tanks that had scorched her roots. She had to dye her hair for years afterward.
The French troops also were helping themselves to the material spoils of victory. An anonymous donor left the gift of a fox stole on the seat of Zizon’s ambulance, and she threw it out the window on a drive to get rid of it. The next day a soldier came running up, holding the wrap, saying “Look what you lost! I’m so glad I found it for you!” She waited for the cover of night to get rid of presents she did not want.
The division kept moving southward, toward the Austrian border, and engaged in its last fighting on May 4, just northwest of Berchtesgaden. Hitler had committed suicide on April 30 and Berlin had surrendered to the Russians on May 2. Would the remnants of the Nazi army try to defend his Bavarian headquarters at Berchtesgaden? Five army columns, four American and one French, rolled down the Autobahn, working together and exchanging supplies along the way.
The division’s Twelfth Company was ahead of the rest, and entered Berchtesgaden at 5:00 A.M. on May 5. Toto was with them. She wrote that they waltzed into Hitler’s abandoned offices with “the drunkenness of pirates,” and began looting and pillaging with a heady enthusiasm. She took Hitler’s personal stationery, and over the next few weeks sent notes to her friends on it. She was trying to stop the Spaniards of the Ninth Company from defacing a Rubens portrait, when suddenly a lieutenant came running, shouting for her to come quickly, quickly! Ambulance! She feared it was a car accident, but the lieutenant grabbed two other men and led them to an unmarked door in a hillside on the grounds. It was Hitler’s private wine cellar, and it was stocked with the best vintages of every country his troops had ravaged, most particularly France. They were loading cases into the ambulance when two American soldiers from the Third U.S. Infantry Division arrived to investigate. Toto steered them toward the stores of sugar, and the French kept piling up the wine cases until the ambulance would hold no more. Toto wrote that if a mouse had been injured, it wouldn’t have fit in the ambulance at that point.1
A captain in the room next to Zizon’s collected an array of sterling silver, platters, teapots, forks, knives, plates, all with the initials A.H. She saw the treasure when she passed by his open door, and couldn’t resist a comment in his direction. He said, “You know my wife’s initials are the same. This will make her very happy.” Another Rochambelle gave her a plate with Hitler’s seal on it, as a soldier had given her two of them. The Third Reich leaders’ houses at Berchtesgaden were stocked with the finest of everything: paintings, silver, books, rugs, wines, and division soldiers took what they could.
Marie-Thérèse was surprised by the reaction of some German women to the division’s presence. She wrote home from Berchtesgaden on May 6: “Curious impression: we are being received by the civilian population exactly like liberators. I personally have been stopped several times in the street by women thanking me for the end of the war!!! A young woman who lost her husband, her father, her brother-in-law and her brother in the war got down on her knees upon learning of the cease-fire in our sector, saying ‘Thank God!’”
Janine and her partner arrived at Berchtesgaden late and tired on May 6. They drank a little champagne to celebrate and then headed off to sleep. The next day they had a look around, and installed the infirmary in an office previously used by Emmy Goering, wife of top Hitler aide Hermann Goering. She picked up and kept some Goering family photos, some letters from Emmy Goering and a Christmas card: “Weihnachtsgruss des Führers” (Christmas Greetings from the Führer). An elegantly dressed German man offered to show them the entrance to Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest,” a lookout 1,834 meters up in the Alps. He said he was the Goering’s cook, but Janine didn’t believe him for a minute. “He was very distinguished; he was no cook,” she said. She found more Goering family photos in his desk later, confirming her suspicions that he was a friend or associate.
A group of soldiers wanted to climb up to the Eagle’s Nest, but found that the elevator built into the rock had been disabled. They started to climb, but Janine’s captain complained that his feet were frozen and asked her to accompany him back to the Berghof. Another four or five of their group hiked on up to the top. There was a little shooting in their direction, but the German “cook” shouted at the snipers not to shoot, that the war was over. As Janine was returning to the compound, someone from the division delivered some bad news: Leonora Lindsley had been badly injured. She had been riding in a Jeep crowded with soldiers, they hit a bomb crater in the road and she was thrown out onto her head.
Rochambelles at Berchtesgaden, May 1945. Driving: Crapette Demay; passenger front seat, Toto; rear passengers l-r, Amicie Berne, Biquette Ragache; on wheel cover, Yvonne Negre
Janine went to her and held her through the night, sponging blood from her face, but she never regained consciousness. “Leonora loved France,” Janine said. “She wanted to show the state of spirit of the French soldiers; that was what interested her.”
Leonora was twenty-eight years old when she was buried at the American cemetery at St. Avold, in Lorraine. She is identified there as an American Red Cross worker, a civilian, rather than a Second Division soldier. Her great adventure had ended in a banal accident, and, with painful irony, she died on the day the Germans surrendered.
It was on that day—May 7, 1945—that Jacotte and Crapette pulled into the parking lot of Hitler’s favorite lakeside hotel at Dorf-Königsee. A radio car next to them howled out the news: the war was over; the Germans had officially surrendered. Some nearby soldiers went crazy, shooting into the air every bullet and cartridge they could find. Eight of the Rochambelles happened to be there together, and they whooped with joy at the news. The war was over!
And then, in the midst of rejoicing, a pall fell over the women. If the war was over, so were their careers as ambulance drivers. For most of the women, returning to civilian life did not hold much promise. Options for women, in 1945, were limited and predictable: family, home, maybe a low-paying job, but nothing nearly as fulfilling as what they had been doing. As Rochambelles, they had touched the sky, rocked the earth, and defeated death on a daily basis. They were glad the war was over. But what would they do now?
Toto had an idea. She had heard that once the war in Europe was over, Leclerc was going to organize a volunteer division for the Pacific front, French Indochina in particular. Surely he was going to need ambulance drivers. With that prospect of adventure ahead, the women started celebrating again. Their futures seemed marvelously uncertain.
After Berchtesgaden and the surrender, there was still post-war cleanup to be done, and the Rochambelles were figured into the tasks. Part of the division was sent to rural Bavaria, where Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Anne were dispatched to a large and wealthy farm. There, three women proprietors had been fattening up their one billeted French prisoner of war like a favorite goose. “We were shocked to see that he was the king of the farm,” Marie-Thérèse said. The women’s husbands had been sent to the Russian front, and were not really expected to return alive. The prisoner hoped not, in any case, because he didn’t plan to liberate himself. “He said, ‘I’m just fine here, I’m not going home.’” He was from Béarn, in the rocky French Pyrénées, and had left his wife and three children on a farm smaller and far less productive than the Bavarian farm. Marie-Thérèse reminded him of the difficult life his wife was most likely living, but he said she would get along fine without him.
His attitude was disappointing to the Rochambelles, but it was intolerable to the French officers who had fought their way to Germany to free the comfortable Béarnais farmer. At the same time, the French Repatriation Commission was sweeping through Germany, picking up nearly 1 million French former prisoners, giving them their back pay, demobilizing them officially, and taking them to Strasbourg. Before the commission arrived in an area, a motorcycle messenger posted announcements of the appointed day, hour, and place the officials would be. Any French prisoners in the area were to report in for repatriation, and the large majority were very happy to do so. But in the area where Marie-Thérèse was stationed, about thirty of them hid in the woods when the commission came through, including the Béarnais farmer.
After this happened three times, Marie-Thérèse’s unit commander flew into a fury. The group would be returning to France soon, and he was determined to take the prisoners with him. An officer suggested they throw a party—supplies remained from the sacking of Berchtesgaden—and invite the prisoners and some Rochambelles for dancing. Marie-Thérèse, Marie-Anne, and Raymonde were among the Rochambelles present. “The prisoners came, with no apprehension, to enjoy the party. We let them drink deeply, and when they were ripe, the guards appeared,” Marie-Thérèse said. Twice prisoners now, they were put in the cellar of the officers’ headquarters. A few days later, the column moved out for France, with one prisoner per vehicle, chained to the tank or half-track, and disguised in as much uniform as they could find. No civilians were allowed on the military vehicles; the men had to look like soldiers. They resisted, they said they were better off in Germany, that people were starving in France. Those who had wives said anything could have happened in their prolonged absence, that it didn’t matter anymore. Their protests fell on deaf ears. The French soldiers had fought the war to liberate them and by God, they were taking them home. When they got to Strasbourg, the commanding officer was reprimanded by his superiors, not for bringing the men home against their will, but for violating transport regulations. The prisoners thus were “freed” in Strasbourg, and Marie-Thérèse deeply suspected they returned to Bavaria.
On May 19, the entire Second Division was assembled for the first and only time for de Gaulle to pin the Grand Croix de la Legion d’Honneur on Leclerc near Landsberg, just west of Munich. The oddest group of men the French military had ever seen had pulled off an amazing feat. From New York to North Africa, French soldiers and exiles, Jews and Muslims, Catholics and Communists, aristocrats and workers had come together for a single mission: to help liberate France from the Nazis. One veteran aptly noted: “As with wolves, they tear each other to pieces, but they hunt in a pack.”2