Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940–44. Charles Glass
Читать онлайн книгу.
dispatched drivers, crews and ambulances to France from the early spring of 1940. Americans from all forty-eight states donated a fleet of Chevrolet three-quarter ton trucks with the latest mobile medical facilities. At the end of May, seventy-five American drivers and sixty-six Chevrolets from AVAC and another thirty-eight men and six ambulances from AAFS were at the front. Drivers paid their own expenses and the cost of their equipment. Most were young Ivy Leaguers. One, Robert Montgomery, was a prominent Hollywood actor. When the Germans occupied Denmark on 9 April, the AAFS was attached to the French Tenth Army. Throughout May and June, the Americans went into action to retrieve wounded and evacuate civilians without cars or unable to depart on railway lines bombed by the Luftwaffe. Anne Morgan, although aged 67, led her drivers into the fighting in the Meuse Valley.
One American ambulance driver, 26-year-old Lawrence Jump, was reported dead in May after a German shell struck his ambulance. Life magazine declared the Oakland, California, native and Dartmouth graduate the ‘first American casualty’ of the war. Then, on 24 June, two days after the signing of the Franco-German Armistice at Compiègne, Life published a letter from his sister, Cynthia Jump Willett: ‘I received a telegram yesterday from the State Department informing me he was in a prison in Weinberg near Stuttgart.’ The American Embassy in Berlin arranged his release.
At least two American drivers were wounded, and nine went missing in action. Four of the missing, presumed dead, belonged to the AAFS unit with the French Tenth Army at Beauvais. Their chef de section was Peter Muir, the First World War ambulance veteran who would be captured by the Germans and escape to enjoy Charles Bedaux’s hospitality at the Château de Candé. The four missing drivers were Muir’s immediate subordinate, Donald Quested Coster, a Lawrenceville and Princeton alumnus who had worked in advertising in Montreal, Canada; John Clement of Brookline, Massachusetts; Gregory Wait of Shelburne, Vermont; and George King of Providence, Rhode Island. The last place Muir had seen them was the unit’s forward position at Beauvais: ‘Coster was in the Colonel’s office and spoke to me. He was taking his two cars to Amiens. There had been terrific bombings. The town was in flames. The Germans were coming in. Perhaps we would meet there. Good-by. Good luck. I never heard his voice again in France.’
Muir wrote that ‘with the knowledge that the Germans were in one part of the town, if not all of it, Coster was courageously leading his two cars back for a last load of wounded’. Muir waited all night for the men to return and, in the morning, made several attempts to find them. French soldiers outside Amiens stopped him each time for his own safety. ‘At noon I gave up Don Coster, Gregory Wait, George King, and John Clement as lost in action, and sent a report in to the Paris office to the effect that they had disappeared while carrying out a dangerous mission under orders from their [French] commanding officer, Colonel Soulier. They had been killed, wounded, or captured on duty.’ On 26 May, the New York Times reported, ‘Lovering Hill, commander of the American Ambulance Field Service, returned to Paris today after an unsuccessful hunt for four missing American ambulance drivers.’
The French government awarded Coster, Wait, King and Clement the Croix de Guerre with a citation that noted they had been killed in action – mort pour la France.
Coster and the others had, in fact, found shelter in the cellar of the Hôpital Châteaudun in Amiens. The city was ablaze, and only its cathedral was unscarred. Taking cover below the hospital with 150 doctors, nurses, wounded soldiers, women and children, Coster heard ‘exploding shells like punches against your chest’. The shelling stopped, but it was followed by a more ominous sound: heavy boots stamping overhead. Everyone remained quiet while they passed. Cautiously, Coster stepped outside. ‘I walked into the courtyard, and there for the first time saw the grey-green soldier’s uniform,’ he wrote. ‘The soldier’s rifle was aimed at a line of French prisoners backed against a wall.’ Fearing the soldier was about to execute the men, but unable to speak German, Coster held up the Geneva identification card that showed he was a civilian ambulance driver and an American. ‘He turned his gun on me, and seemed to be considering whether to squeeze the trigger. But the answer, at least for the moment, was no.’
Fellow driver George King spoke enough German to ask to see an officer. The soldier led them about fifty yards to the main road. ‘There,’ Coster wrote, ‘we were greeted by the most awe inspiring sight I have ever seen.’ It was a Wehrmacht mechanized unit speeding into Amiens.
You may have seen photographs of a Panzer column. But you haven’t seen the endless stretch of it. You haven’t seen its speed – roaring down the road at forty miles an hour. German tanks with officers standing upright in the turrets, sweeping the landscape with binoculars. Mean little whippet tanks. Armored cars with machine-gunners peering out through the slits. Motorized anti-aircraft cannon with their barrels pointed upward and crews ready for action. Armored touring cars with ranks of alert soldiers stiffly pointing rifles. Guns of every caliber, on pneumatic tires or caterpillars. Motor boats and rubber rafts mounted on wheels; fire engines; camouflaged
trucks loaded with petrol – all ready at the first sign of resistance to disperse across the fields and take up positions of defense or attack. Over-head were reconnaissance planes.
Near where we were standing the French had thrown a pitiful wooden barricade across the road, which the column had mowed down like matchsticks; nothing yet invented by man, you felt with a shock of despair, could possibly withstand this inhuman monster which had already flattened half of Europe.
The German soldier stopped an armoured car and turned the Americans over to its officer, who drove them to his commander. ‘The general was a broad-shouldered, tough, six-foot-three mountain of Prussian efficiency,’ Coster remembered. ‘He listened to us with polite impatience. But either our French or the general’s was not too good because he took us for American doctors and scribbled an order that we were to be placed in charge of the Châteaudun Hospital, which we were to put in scrupulous order for use as a “German-American” hospital.’ Coster and his colleagues spent two nights bringing wounded British soldiers off a battlefield. The scene was horrifying in the darkness, but it was worse at dawn of the second day:
Under a hot, cloudless sky lay a wide field of high grass, simply covered with the English dead and wounded, and wounded and dead cattle. The British boys had been massacred by the tanks, as they had no artillery, only a few light machine guns to supplement their rifles – about as effective against a tank’s armor as a peashooter … Here, as last night, we didn’t find a single dead or wounded German. Out of possibly 300 British, we picked up maybe 25 or 30. The rest had all been killed.
When Coster asked one wounded Englishman what he thought of the Panzer columns, he said, ‘Beautiful to watch, but terrible to receive.’
A German soldier mistook Coster, whose ambulance uniform was similar to a British soldier’s, for an Englishman and stole his leather gloves. Coster grabbed the gloves back. ‘In the fraction of a second, his revolver was pointed at my stomach. I pointed to the American Field Service band on my arm and explained, “Amerikanisch”.’ The officer saluted him and walked off. Other German officers complained of the Americans, ‘Ah – we never see any of you – on our side.’
On 14 June, the day the Germans occupied Paris, the four American ‘doctors’ were still working at the Amiens ‘German-American’ hospital. A Belgian Red Cross delegate and his wife, M. and Mme Alfred Chambon, arrived to visit the wounded. Coster asked if they would take him and his three comrades to Brussels. ‘We hurried to the Kommandant. At first his answer was definitely no; but we argued so loudly (and lied so convincingly about the pressure that would be applied by the American Consulate in Brussels when they heard of our plight) that at last he relented.’ The Chambons drove the four Americans in their small Ford to Brussels, where the American Ambassador placed them ‘under the protection of the Embassy’. Wait, King and Clement stayed in Belgium awaiting repatriation to the United States. On 1 July, American diplomat George Kennan, who was visiting from the US Embassy in Berlin, took Coster in his car back to Paris. ‘We were stopped three times,’ Coster wrote of the drive, ‘but Mr. Kennan’s pass and his perfect German took us safely through.’ Kennan wrote that he had given a lift to ‘one of the American ambulance drivers, who was trying to get down to