Authors: Ellen Hampton
Marie-Thérèse and her partner, Marie-Anne, also were brand-new on the job.
Marie-Thérèse recalled her first evacuation, picking up two wounded soldiers and then putting a third soldier, who was dead, in the ambulance as well. She gripped the steering wheel and cried for the dead soldier the whole way back to the infirmary. “I cried for that young man, for that young life cut so short,” she said. “It was a moral shock, I think.” When Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Anne arrived at the infirmary, set up in a school on the village square, medical battalion staff yelled at them for having transported a dead person. It was against the rules. Another division unit was in charge of picking up bodies, confirming identification and notifying families. One of the doctors said to her afterwards, “Marie-Thérèse, you’re brave but an idiot. You should have told them he died in transit.”
Marie-Thérèse wrote her family that she had simply wanted the soldier to have a decent burial. And he did. When the village priest buried the soldier later that day, all the village inhabitants turned out to honor him, though he was a complete stranger to them.
The division continued in an eastward direction, liberating Vittel, the prewar spa town. Its previously chic hotels had been turned into barbed-wire prison camps for thousands of British and American women civilians caught in France when their nations joined the war. Leclerc greeted them with warmth. “In 1940, we were admirably received by the English. The Americans have given us arms. We are particularly happy that it has fallen to us to deliver you,” he said.
2
Across the plains of Lorraine from Vittel, the Germans began consolidating troops from the south and west, keeping the Vosges Mountains at their backs. It may have felt like the war was over in Paris, but since time immemorial, eastern France has made the call. Patton knew it, and marched eastward with his Third Army. He was repelled at Pont à Mousson with a loss of nearly 300 men. The French Second Division advanced in a parallel south of the Americans, and met the Germans at Dompaire on September 12.
Madeleine Collomb and her partner were sent to a U.S. heavy artillery unit that was helping the French at Dompaire, as the Americans had no ambulances there and had requested backup. When they reported for duty, the American commander said, “I didn’t ask for a nurse, I asked for an ambulance driver.” Madeleine persuaded him that they were in fact ambulance drivers, but the American doctor couldn’t get used to working with women. “The doctor was so afraid for us, being women, that he went with us on each evacuation,” Madeleine recalled. “After two days, he said, look, I don’t want the death of women on my conscience. Go back to the French.”
The night before the attack at Dompaire, Danièle was talking to Lieutenant Louis Gendron, a tank commander, about life, religion, philosophy. Danièle had been a prize-winning philosophy student in high school, and she was an ardent Catholic as well. Gendron shrugged at her ideas. “He said, ‘At any rate, I’ll be dead tomorrow. I’ll be wounded, and I’ll die.’” Danièle was shocked at his certainty. She argued against his fatalism, she argued for the existence of God, she fought his conviction with weapons of eloquence and reason, but she could not shake it. The following day, the battle erupted around Dompaire. The Germans had been swinging up from a base at Epinal, attempting to attack the American troops from behind. Instead, they met Jacques Massu and Pierre Minjonnet’s tank regiments and were torn apart. Some sixty German tanks were left on the field, burnt shells.
After the fight, Danièle asked after Lieutenant Gendron. He had indeed been killed. “I felt ill,” she said. “I wasn’t able to do anything, either to help him die, or to help him believe [in God].” She doesn’t believe Gendron was suicidal. Morale in the division was sky-high at that point. “I believe his death was not voluntary, but was somehow destined,” she said. “I think it’s extraordinary to be able to have a premonition of that sort.”
Patton was so pleased with the Second Division’s performance at Dompaire that he invited Leclerc to lunch with General Wade Haislip in a muddy field nearby, and popped a bottle of champagne. His men had captured a stock of 50,000 bottles, and Patton wrote in his diary that he had distributed it to the troops. Haislip, as commander of the U.S. Army’s Fifteenth Corps, had been Leclerc’s boss since Normandy, and they had become good friends. After lunch, Patton strode over to his Jeep, laid his cigar carefully on the hood, dug into a bag, and pulled out two medals. He called Leclerc over and pinned them on, and gave him a pack of five Silver Stars and twenty-five Bronze Stars to distribute to his men for the Dompaire operation. Leclerc, who loathed fuss and praise, seemed bothered, and Haislip grinned at him. “But you have done great things for the honor of the American Army,” he said.
3
Leclerc returned the favor before the end of the war, pinning the French Croix de la Legion d’Honneur on Haislip. The March of Chad Regiment also made Haislip an honorary corporal, backhanded praise from the regiment’s rugged infantrymen.
In front of the division lay the Moselle River, a 500-kilometer-long, meandering waterway that had served through history as the gateway to the resource-rich plains of Lorraine and Alsace. Patton had been there in another wet September, twenty-six years before, and knew that getting across the river was critical, difficult and dangerous. Now he wanted the U.S. Seventy-ninth Infantry to cross at Charmes, and the Second Division to traverse further south, at Châtel-sur-Moselle, a bombed-out village of some 1,400 inhabitants.
On September 15, Captains Jacques Branet and Raymond Dronne led their tank and infantry companies across the river, wading through water up to their thighs. The bridge had been blown by the Germans when they pulled back to the east. Jacotte stopped her ambulance on the western bank of the Moselle to remove the engine’s fan belt before crossing the river, as she had been taught in the mechanics course in New York. Crapette and Dr. Alexandre Krementchousky and Raymond Worms, a nurse, were with her as they drove up the river bank into Châtel and stopped beside an old hospice built atop the buried ruins of a medieval fortress. It would do for an infirmary for the medical company.
The village mayor, Pierre Sayer, greeted the French troops with enthusiasm. He was thirty-seven years old, the town doctor, and head of the local Resistance group. Châtel’s residents had heard about the liberation of Paris three weeks before, and of the Allies’ victorious sweep toward eastern France, and hoped it was their turn. Dronne sent out some men from his Ninth Company to check who was in the area, and the mayor called out the village men to rebuild the bridge. Soldiers strung a footbridge across the river in the meantime, and marked the ford crossing for vehicles with two stakes and a white cord tied across the river. The patrols brought back a few German prisoners and reports of a splintered enemy presence to the east, but nothing more than rain looked imminently menacing.
The next day, U.S. intelligence reported that 142 Panzers were massing at Rambervillers, twenty-five kilometers due east of Châtel. It was thought that their direction would be north to the city of Nancy, where the Seventy-ninth U.S. Infantry Division would be going once it crossed the Moselle. But to the south, a German Panzer company still held the town of Epinal, seventeen kilometers away and on the western bank of the river. The Second Division companies were in a precarious position, with only a few hundred men and a dozen tanks, but they decided to stay put.
Rain was still falling the following day. At the time of day the French call between dog and wolf, that elusive moment of transition from day to evening, a woman called the mayor’s home: Panzers were pouring into her farmyard! Branet radioed his tank company, and they blasted away, destroying the German tanks as well as the woman’s farm. The Germans had gotten to within a kilometer of the Second Division’s perimeter, and from there, they launched a barrage of mortars, aiming for the half-finished bridge.
Jacotte and Crapette sheltered behind the hospice’s thick wall, pinned down by the mortars on one side and a German machine gunner shooting from the other side, covering the approach to the footbridge. Wounded soldiers started streaming in, some on foot, some carried by the medical company’s stretcher bearers, until there were too many to fit in the hospice. They had to put several soldiers on the ground outside, just as the rain started up again. They covered up the men as best they could. They had the only ambulance east of the Moselle, but there was nowhere they could go until the shelling and shooting let up.
Branet’s tanks began pushing the Panzers back into the woods. The two companies opened up with all the artillery they had. Mortars echoed with deafening percussion, machine guns spat and sputtered, tracer bullets cut fiery arcs across the darkening sky. The Germans had fifteen to twenty Panzers and their heavier version, the Tiger. One of Branet’s Shermans lost its tread; another was mired in the deep forest mud, but suddenly the Germans stopped firing and seemed to pull back. Branet was pleased.
Jacotte and Crapette loaded the ambulance and drove it down to the footbridge across the river. It was quiet. If the machine-gunner was still there, he gave no sign. They handed the injured soldiers over to stretcher-bearers, who carried them across the bridge to ambulances waiting on the other side. Other Rochambelle teams would drive the soldiers to the nearest field hospital. Jacotte and Crapette made a dozen trips back and forth. At midnight, the medical company cook came and found them. He had made a rabbit stew, it had been sitting since the beginning of the attack, and they had better come eat it right now! There were a couple of cardinal rules to army life, and one of them was: Don’t upset the cook. They followed him.
But Branet got a call from regiment commander de La Horie, who was on the western side of the river. Orders were to evacuate Châtel immediately. “I thought I’d misunderstood!” Branet wrote later.
4
But another Panzer brigade and two German infantry battalions were on their way to Châtel. Branet and Dronne would be encircled if they stayed on the eastern bank. Orders were clear: pull back, now.
Jacotte and Crapette had just sat down to eat by the light of a single candle, numb with fatigue. Before they could take a bite, Krementchousky threw open the door and yelled, “Drop everything, we’re pulling out!” Jacotte and Crapette piled in the ambulance. Sayer’s wife, Marie-Thérèse, and their six-year-old son, Bernard, were put in the back. Branet urged Sayer to come with them as well, but he refused to leave: he felt it was his duty as mayor to stay. A half-track—a sturdy armored vehicle that was half-Jeep, half-tank—hooked up to tow the ambulance through the river. With the rain, the river had risen too high to drive across. Branet’s tank company was behind the ambulance, and everyone moved in the dark, as silently as possible, trying not to give the enemy a fresh target.
At the western bank of the river, the half-track slipped in the mud and, unable to back up with the ambulance in tow, maneuvered around in a circle to re-approach the bank where the ground was more solid. Jacotte kept the line taut between them; that was all she could do to help get them to ground. She also kept glancing behind her. The grinding column of tanks had entered the river and was coming up fast. Could the drivers see her in the dark? Unlikely. She thought, this is the end of the ride. After all the bombings, the attacks and the bullets, I’m going to be crushed by our own tanks. The first tank in line bumped her fender and then slowed, just in time. The half-track clambered up the bank and pulled Jacotte’s ambulance with it. They had made it, by a split second.
After the war, the village of Châtel put up a granite monument to the men who didn’t make it that night. The monument names thirty-five soldiers from the Second Division, and Pierre Sayer. On Monday morning after the retreat, Sayer was carried off by a group of French militiamen, as the Nazi collaborators called themselves, and was turned over to the Gestapo. He was shot the following day, along with four other Resistance members, their bodies left in a nearby forest.
5
Fifty-five years later, his son Bernard Pierre Sayer read an account of the struggle for Châtel at the Leclerc Memorial in Paris, and called to thank the ambulance driver who took him across the river that night. It was Jacotte.
Danièle and Hélène were having a difficult time with the river as well. They were asked to pick up some wounded soldiers on the eastern side of the river between Charmes and Châtel. They were to cross the river at the old Roman ford, a wide and shallow crossing that was marked in Roman times by a sculpture of a man on a horse, both riding on the back of a man-serpent. The statue, removed to a museum, had been replaced for the moment by an army sentinel. Danièle started across the ford into water about a meter deep, and Hélène, a more experienced driver, said “Slow down!” Danièle’s immediate and mistaken reaction was to brake. The ambulance stalled out and would not restart. A Jeep passed them going in a westward direction and a soldier shouted at them to move: the tank company was retreating with German Tigers in pursuit. Danièle and Hélène would very much have liked to move, but the ambulance resisted all effort. A half-track driver spied them sitting there and came to their rescue. As they were towed up the riverbank, the water spilled out of the exhaust and they were able to restart the engine. They picked up the wounded soldiers and followed the dozen tanks back westward across the river. That night, they slept in a school in Nomexy, on tables that were even less comfortable then their stretchers.
“It was the first time we had retreated,” Danièle said later. “It seemed strange to us. We had always gone forward before.”
Rosette and Arlette had arrived at Nomexy to find the town draped in Lorraine crosses and French flags. Arlette was not feeling well, and was getting very jumpy under fire. They were called to an evacuation at the village of Iqney, and followed a doctor’s Jeep through a hail of 88mm mortars, feeling like a painted target on the empty road. They found the house they were looking for, and a young boy, injured by the bombing, lay in bed bleeding. His parents stood on either side, watching him bleed to death. The doctor asked angrily why they could not at least have put on a tourniquet and saved his life. The parents were ignorant peasant farmers, Rosette said, and had no idea of what to do. She felt sorry for the boy, who died.