Women of Valor (6 page)

Leclerc was forty-one years old in 1943, a career Army officer who had built a solid reputation in the North Africa campaigns across Chad, Libya, and Tunisia. He had been twice captured and had twice escaped the Germans in the French Debacle of June 1940, and then slipped into Africa to bring Cameroon to the Free French side as early as August 1940. From abroad, de Gaulle appointed him military commander of Chad territory, and he spent the next three years quilting together an army from the remains of French colonial troops, Foreign Legionnaires, Republican veterans of the Spanish Civil War, and civilian escapees from Vichy France. With the Allied victory in 1943 in Tunisia, North Africa became a staging ground for an assault on the European mainland.

De Gaulle decided that Leclerc’s troops would form an armored division based on the American model, with four regiments of tanks and artillery, one antitank company, one light artillery company, one transport squadron, two engineering companies, two heavy mechanics companies and one medical battalion. The newly formed Second Armored Division, known in French as the 2e DB (Deuxième Division Blindée), would be equipped, supplied and attached to the U.S. Army.

Leclerc was the nom de guerre of Philippe de Hauteclocque, taken to protect his wife and five of their six children, who remained at their Picardy chateau during the Nazi occupation (his eldest son joined the division). Leclerc was a natural leader, the kind of officer who demanded as much from himself as from his troops, who was visible at the front lines, seeming to be everywhere at once, pointing the way forward with his ever-present walking stick. He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, and was so thin the soldiers wondered if he even ate. He had a fearsome temper and a modicum of patience, and was so respected that to this day his memory can bring tears to the eyes of gray-haired veterans. “There are certainly differences between General Leclerc and the good Lord above, but I would have trouble naming them,” one veteran who worked closely with him quipped. Leclerc was also fiercely independent. When asked the secret of his success in 1943, he snapped: “The absence of the telephone and the distance from all superior authority.”
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Leclerc did not bother with verbosity, and the comments he did make tended to sting. In an October 1943 speech to his officers in Morocco, Leclerc laid out the political scene as he saw it: “Before 1939, one part of the leadership class brought the country to the abyss into which it has fallen. Since 1940, another part has missed the opportunity of reinforcement from the Empire, thus directly or indirectly assisting Germany’s game. When tomorrow you meet a notable, you can always ask yourself if he was an incompetent before 1940, or a coward since.”
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Leclerc, naturally, had his enemies. The elder General Henri Giraud was quoted as saying, with a sneer, “For me, General Leclerc will always remain Captain de Hauteclocque.” Some veteran army officers refused to serve under him because of his young age. Those who did, however, did so with absolute loyalty. And Conrad, with her unerring instinct for people, wanted the Rochambeau Group in Leclerc’s division. “He had been victorious everywhere, he was terrific,” Jacotte said in an interview. “He already had a sort of halo by that time.”

2nd Armored Division insignia

Still, it was a gamble. The Fifth Division was slated to invade Italy, while plans for the Second Armored Division were vague and ill defined. If the Rochambeau Group went with the Second Division and it was not assigned to duty in Europe, they would be stuck. “We didn’t know if he would take us from Morocco or anywhere,” Jacotte said. “We were afraid we wouldn’t get to go.”

With Conrad and Toto in his office, Koenig called Leclerc. Leclerc thought he had misheard. Women? In an armored division? Never heard of it. Leclerc said he’d take the ambulances, but he did not want any women drivers. Conrad said he couldn’t have the ambulances without the drivers. Leclerc balked. Women in his division! Conrad held firm. Leclerc relented, temporarily. He would see how the women did in training and maneuvers in North Africa. If they held up, he would accept them in the division. “Florence pulled off a master coup,” Jacotte recalled. “For her, nothing was impossible. It was a waste of time to tell her no.”

Leclerc did not want women in the division because he feared they would cause dissension and rivalry between the men soldiers, according to Guy Chauliac, a colonial troops doctor who joined Leclerc in 1940 in Chad. Chauliac, a lieutenant at the time, commanded the Thirteenth Medical Battalion’s Third Company. The medical battalion counted some 450 members, 104 of whom were doctors, divided into three companies. Ambulance drivers were split among the three companies: the Rochambeau Group in one; a group of male British Quakers, conscientious objectors, in another, and some Navy auxiliary members (including eight or nine women called “Marinettes”) in a third.

“We thought the women were going to cause trouble,” Chauliac said in an interview. “When you put 300 men with 10 women, there will be trouble. There was hostility towards them on the part of the brass. Leclerc was afraid they would complicate things.” Other male members of the medical battalion were less concerned. François Jacob was a twenty-year-old Parisian with two years of medical school behind him in 1940, when he left France to join the Gaullist forces. He got on a ship sailing to try to liberate Dakar with members of the rough-hewn Foreign Legion, and there were a few women volunteer nurses aboard. The Legionnaires got a little too interested in the women, and the captain had to post a sentinel with a bayonet outside their door. The attack on Dakar failed, but so did the Legionnaires. Three years later Jacob was working in the division hospital at Rabat as an auxiliary doctor. “By the time the Rochambelles arrived, things had become a little more civilized,” Jacob recalled.

Jacob said the military command may have been opposed to women in the division, but the doctors by and large didn’t mind. “We were sort of happy to see some women,” he said in an interview. And the doctors soon asked for a regular group of six nurses to be assigned to the hospital instead of to drive ambulances. The women had made themselves not only useful, but necessary.

Conrad promised Leclerc that the women would not be trouble, and she sat on them like a mother hen to make sure they weren’t. Conrad enforced a strict formality of military manners, requiring snappy salutes to superior officers and correct uniform appearance, as well as the proper use of rank in verbal address. The women, like all civilians new to the military, had to learn the ranking code of stripes, stars, and epaulets, and which color beret signified which unit (red for Spahis, black for the 501st Tank Regiment). Conrad would not allow the women to socialize with enlisted men—only with officers—and then only under supervision.

The Rochambeau Group was assigned to the medical battalion’s First Company, and found their commander, Captain Charles Ceccaldi, even more exacting than Conrad. Ceccaldi, whom Toto nicknamed “The Corsican” for his family origins, sat in wait for the women to step out of line. Ceccaldi was not pleased to have landed the women’s group in his company, and was tougher on them than on the men.

The Rochambeau Group moved onto a houseboat at the formerly chic Nautical Club on the Bou Regreg River at Rabat, their ambulances lined up neatly on the quay. The houseboat had one sink, holes in the floor, and rats in the hull. It was neither clean nor comfortable, but the women looked back on their time there with fondness. Jacotte used to gaze at the harbor leading to the Atlantic Ocean and at the Moroccans, with their measured pace and white robes against the cerulean sky, and gauge the distance from New York, with its bustle and hurry and gray steel and brownstone. She had changed continents, shifted latitudes, and most of all, entered a whole new mental landscape.

Obey. Follow. Obey. Military life, for an independent, intellectually gifted woman such as Jacotte, wasn’t easy. No one told her anything: information was compartmentalized and guarded, given out only in tiny meaningless bits. She had to get used to doing what she was told without asking questions, and it went against her grain. “Obedience, then: do what you’re told to do, and don’t ask why.” She faked it until she could do it without flinching.

Not everyone in the group was able to adjust, and at the end of 1943 some of the women left. Elisabeth de Breteuil, Anne de Bourbon-Parme, and Germaine de Bray went to Algiers to work for the Free French government, convinced that the Rochambeau Group would never leave North Africa. Their departure brought the group’s ranks down to eleven, plus Conrad and Toto. They were Jacotte’s best friends from New York, and they tried to persuade her to join them, but she refused, holding tight to the idea that she would be of some use in liberating France if she stayed. She missed their company, but Laure de Breteuil stayed behind to work at the military hospital in Rabat, and they became good friends despite their difference in ages. At eighteen, Laure was the youngest of the Rochambeau Group, and Jacotte, at thirty-three, one of the oldest. Both came from families of culture and wealth, both had had their cozily assured futures hijacked by the war, and both women were enjoying it thoroughly. Laure was as tiny as Jacotte, with an elfin smile and gravelly, Lauren Bacall voice.

Laure was among the six women assigned to nursing duty at the hospital run by the Thirteenth Medical Battalion when they arrived. The hospital was installed in the former music conservatory, with segregated wards for black and white patients. It was support work with few supplies, no more than a few bedsheets reserved for the most feverish of patients. “Changing” a bed meant shaking out a straw pallet.

“It only had the name ‘hospital,’” Laure said. They treated victims of car accidents, people with malaria and other illnesses, and then men started arriving in bad shape from prison camps in Spain. (Many of the French who escaped over the Pyrénées were imprisoned in Spain for as long as six months before being released to Morocco.) Laure’s passion was art, but the army needed nurses, not artists. She was transferred at one point to the hospital’s sterilization service, where they used fuel stoves that reeked when they worked and blew up when they didn’t. “They used to call me the witch. I’d come out black in the face and screaming,” she said. But the stoves also provided hot water for the British Quakers’ tea, and in exchange, they helped her with the sterilizing. And she preferred the sterilization service to the venereal disease ward, where Ceccaldi sent Hélène Fabre, one of the younger and more innocent of the group.

Along with nurses, the Rochambeau Group had brought some basic medical supplies from the States, such as thermometers, pencils and charts, cotton, gauze, bandages, and compresses. Their contribution to the hospital was badly needed.

“The result was positive,” Jacotte wrote in her memoirs. “Florence won the first round: the doctors, after one week, had to admit that our presence was not as nefarious as they had wanted to believe.” Nonetheless, when Laure had a friend in Tangiers send a package of syringes and thermometers to the hospital, Ceccaldi lectured her angrily for having gone outside military procedures of procurement.

At this point, there were not enough women to provide a team of two drivers for each of the nineteen ambulances. Conrad began spreading the word among French families living in Morocco that the group was looking for more members, and sending her drivers to transport recovering soldiers to family homes instead of the hospital: it was good driving practice for the women, and an effective way to look for new recruits.

Toto went as far as Algiers looking for candidates, and ran into Antoine de Saint-Exupéry again there, shortly before his fatal last flight. She had trouble finding candidates for the group because the Auxiliaires Féminines de l’Armée de Terre (the unfortunately named A.F.A.T.), or women’s auxiliary army corps, also was recruiting. The women’s auxiliaries took support jobs, often secretarial, and were not given military status. They were civilians hired by the army, and were not likely to see any fighting. Being an ambulance driver would pose much more risk.

When Toto returned from Algiers, she found Raymonde Jeanmougin Brindjonc waiting for her on the houseboat. Raymonde was married. Her husband was working in England as an airplane mechanic with the Free French, and their five-month-old baby had fallen ill and died in July. She then signed up for the army nursing squad in Algiers, and had gotten orders to join General de Lattre’s First Army, ready to depart for Italy, but she refused to go: she was a de Gaulle supporter and she wanted to go with Leclerc. Her shocked colonel explained that in the army one did not choose one’s assignment, and sent her home. She cried for ten days, sure that she had ruined her chances of helping with the war, and then got new orders. She was afraid to open them, but when she did, they were for Leclerc’s division, the Thirteenth Medical Battalion. She got on a train that took five days to get from Algiers to Rabat, the only woman on a train full of soldiers. She walked five or six kilometers to Temara, where the division was bivouacked south of Rabat, only to be told that the medical battalion was in the city. A sympathetic soldier gave her a ride back in his Jeep, and she finally found the houseboat.