Malaria returns and Murphy confronts “Old Army” authority
My Mother and Audie Murphy ch. 12
January 1944. The squad is engaged in simulated combat. For three days they storm a dummy beachhead. They leap from landing craft and, falling, crawling, and firing, advance upon assigned objectives. Then the maneuvers end abruptly. The men are placed on strict alert, confined to the company area, and given one day of rest except for a final inspection of equipment. They recognize the signs. Everyone whispers “tomorrow.” Chaplains hold services. Letters are written with particular care. Still, no one knows the destination.
Murphy is sick again with malaria. Refusing to complain, worried that it will seem he’s trying to avoid combat, he’s finally turned in by a man in his squad. With a temperature of 105, he’s sent to a hospital in Naples.
Then, after less than a week in hospital, Murphy is among a boatload of replacements headed for Anzio. Murphy can’t wait to rejoin his squad. He has missed the first several days of the Anzio attack.
From a Life Magazine story in Flo’s album
Ignoring orders to stay in camp, he walks toward the front. In a farmhouse where the command post has been set up, he learns that several men in his squad have been killed or maimed. Just as he feared, the Nazis have devastated his group, soldiers who have become like family after surviving the hell of war together.
At divisional headquarters, Murphy encounters the old hierarchy of the Army. A regular army sergeant, irritated by the informality of wartime soldiers, confronts him and orders him to unload his pack for a work detail. Murphy refuses. The sergeant threatens discipline; Murphy tells him to come find him at the front if he wants to press the issue. Slinging his carbine over his shoulder, he turns and heads up the road marked with the blue diamond of his regiment.
Americans at home depended on Life Magazine for news of the war.
That night, on the way to Cisterna, Murphy leads another reconnaissance patrol behind enemy lines. They discover that the Germans are moving tanks in–an ominous sign.
He reports to the lieutenant’s dugout. The lieutenant sits in a deep muddy hole, the roof made of poles, grass, and sod. Water seeps in from the sides. Bandoleers of cartridges and a case of grenades lie stacked in the corner. He looks as though he has not slept in days.
This, now, is home. A foxhole. Mud, cold, and the sound of artillery. The front line stretches ahead into darkness, and there is no certainty of what tomorrow will bring—only that tomorrow is coming.
“Loose lips sink ships.” That was the mantra drilled into the heads of American Red Cross (ARC) women during their training in Washington, D.C. If the FBI discovered that a secret had leaked because of something you said or wrote, you were sent home.
One instructor drove the point home with a cautionary tale: An ARC worker had called her parents in Montana, mentioning that she was in Colorado on her way to San Francisco. Her mother told the butcher, who told someone else, and within three hours, the FBI had traced the leak back to her. As a result, an entire convoy was delayed.
Flo took these warnings seriously. While she wrote to her mother in Yakima regularly, she was careful never to include anything that might be considered classified.
The Pentagon, opened 1943, displaced a Black town.
Fast-Tracked for War
The usual six-week training program had been slashed to just two weeks to push the women through faster. The military issued them canteens, helmets, and web belts, alongside yet another round of security warnings. Phone calls and letters were discouraged. Training even covered how to handle a poison gas attack, complete with gas mask drills.
Flo and her cohort began training on April 17, 1944. By May 8, they had their embarkation orders. On a warm May morning, the ARC women, clad in winter uniforms, marched two abreast to Union Station, where they boarded a train to New York City. From Penn Station, they were shuttled by bus to Brooklyn and housed at the massive St. George Hotel. There, they waited—alongside countless other uniformed Americans—until it was time to ship out.
No one knew where they were going. Not even the ship’s officers were told their destination. Only the captain held that information, as wartime security dictated.
The HNHS Atlantis
Aboard the HMHS Atlantis
Flo’s ship, the HMHS Atlantis, was a British hospital vessel that had already survived encounters with German U-boats. The Germans ignored Geneva Convention rules that forbade attacking hospital ships—these vessels made tempting targets. During submarine alerts, the Atlantis would zigzag wildly to evade torpedoes.
Once aboard, Flo learned that her destination was Italy, where she had been assigned to the North Africa theater. The ship carried British engineers, fellow ARC workers, and stacks of Italian phrasebooks. Flo tried to pick up a bit of the language during the long voyage.
Crossing the Atlantic took nearly three weeks. To pass the time, Army journalists produced a daily mimeographed newsletter, Red Cross Currents, a few copies of which Flo saved in her scrapbook. She also kept menus and records of shipboard activities, which included: horse racing (the cardboard variety), a contract bridge tournament, shuffleboard, deck quoits, “angell golf”, ping pong and deck tennis. Prizes were cartons of cigarets.
Horserace program
Flo documented her voyage with snapshots—sunbathing with English engineers, uniformed officers on deck. Among the clippings in her album was an image of the newly built Pentagon, a source of national pride. What the public hadn’t been told, however, was that its construction had wiped out Queen City, a thriving Black town in Arlington, Virginia. The residents of the town were descendants of the residents of Freedman’s Village, which had been established by the federal government during the Civil War as a home for displaced freed slaves.
Letters, Friendships, and Missed Meetings
Flo befriended an Irish engineer who worked on the ship, R.H. Wilkinson. They kept in touch throughout the war, attempting—but failing—to meet again. In August 1945, after the war had ended, Wilkinson wrote to her, reminiscing about their time on the Atlantis and asking for copies of photos to complete his scrapbook. He had since been deployed to the Pacific and was now stationed on the India run, where, as he put it, it was “very hot!” If she ever made it to Belfast, he promised, she would receive a true Irish welcome.
Flo never did make it to Ireland.
Sunning on the deck. Flo in the middle
First Glimpse of Naples
As the Atlantis steamed past the lush, romance-laden Isle of Capri into Naples harbor, the passengers got their first look at war-torn Italy. The harbor was in ruins, bombed repeatedly during the Allied campaign to drive out the Germans. Though much of the destruction was confined to the waterfront, Naples itself—dirty, crowded, and overrun with American troops—had changed dramatically.
A military-issued guide described the city in blunt terms:
“The city of 1,000,000 still is the filthy, teeming tourist town, and now prices have trebled with the advent of thousands of Americans. There are gimcrack souvenirs, phoney tortoise-shell, dangerously bad wine and brandy, poor but expensive waterfront restaurants.
There are trips to Pompeii and Herculaneum, tours of Naples, and excursions up the slopes of Vesuvius (ARC trips). There’s an Allied Officers’ Club (dinner, drinks, dance, romance), an 82% venereally infected civilian population, an opera company and a symphony; buses, cabs, suburban trains; oranges, tangerines, grapes, lemons, and apples.
And 50 miles to the northwest there is a war, of which occasional bombers remind Neapolitans on infrequent nights of the dimout.”
Stamped at the bottom:
NO – SORRY – YOU CAN’T MAIL THIS PAPER HOME.
From a Life Magazine story pasted in Flo’s album
A New Reality
Flo later wrote to her mother, “The Rock of Gibraltar was the only stop our ship made on the way over, and it looked exactly like all the pictures we’ve seen. The Isle of Capri, I saw in a very early morning light, and it looked even more romantic that way.”
In lovely spring weather they sailed into Naples May 27, 1944. Allied bombing over the course of many months had destroyed much of the ancient city. Of course, the port had been a prime target and so what the passengers of the Atlantis saw when they first laid eyes on Italy was the ruins of war, patched ably by the American engineers. For Naples was now in Allied hands. The Nazis had retreated north.
In event of capture, she will be treated as a captain.
Autumn, 1943. After many weeks on the front lines, Audie Murphy and his squad are given a reprieve.
Crawling with filth and exhausted to the bone, they are pulled out of the lines in mid-November. The valley below is now clear of the enemy; Mount Lungo has fallen. From its heights, they look toward Cassino. The war drags north, its roar receding into the distance. Burial squads already move across the slopes, searching for the bodies of men who have received their final order to go forward.
As the squad makes its way on foot down a shell-torn road, the relief is almost intoxicating. Despite the lateness of the season, the day is bright and mild. A breeze whispers through the trees, and the solid earth beneath their boots feels strangely kind. The simple rhythm of marching renews their spirits. They look at one another with foolish affection, aware that they have been handed back life.
They are transferred to a camp with tents and two full meals a day. Orders soon come down: amphibious training at a beachhead near Naples. Discipline tightens, and day and night they drill against an unseen enemy. Fully armed, they wade through surf up to their hips and crawl belly-down through marshes, their clothes crusted with salt and mud.
Bombing of Naples
None of the troops know what the training will lead to. Rumors fly. Are they being prepared for an assault on southern France, to be sent to England for a cross-channel D-Day, for assault on some new beachhead? The dogface soldiers are always strangers to the plan.
The mood darkens. Many are certain they are being prepared for slaughter. Tempers fray, and old comrades come to blows over small provocations.
Murphy’s squad gets overnight passes to Naples.
Poor Naples. The city endures relentless bombing raids from 1940 into 1944. While under German control, the Allies bombard it continuously—first the French, then the British, and finally American bombers. Italy surrenders to the Allies on September 8, 1943, but the Germans refuse to relinquish their hold, murdering civilians and those who resist the ongoing occupation.
Then, the citizens of Naples rise up against the Nazi forces. They successfully disrupt German plans to deport Neapolitans en masse to work camps, destroy the city, and block the Allies from securing a strategic foothold. A spontaneous insurrection erupts, and despite limited weapons and organization, the Neapolitans force the German troops to retreat just before Allied forces arrive.
This dramatic rebellion is later depicted in Nanni Loy’s 1962 film “The Four Days of Naples”, which earns Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Film and Best Screenplay.
Even after Naples falls to British and American forces on October 1, 1943, the bombing continues. The Germans respond with a scorched-earth campaign, destroying communication and transportation networks, water and power grids, and mining buildings. They burn the state archives of Naples and the national library, sink ships in the harbor, and leave devastation in their wake. Within a week of its capture, however, the Allies manage to reopen the port, restoring vital access to the city.
On the night that Murphy and his squad rest and recreate in Naples, there is an air raid. Murphy doesn’t drink or smoke, but his men get drunk, and one gets rolled by a hooker, returning to camp without his coat, gear and money. Murphy is set up with a date, but he sleeps through it and the air raid as well.
Winter settles over Naples. The clock strikes three. Light from a low January sun creeps along stone walls and rooftops. The war is still close enough to feel—but for the moment, Murphy and his men live, rest, and wait for whatever comes next.
From Life Magazine October 18, 1943
“Last week Italy’s autumn rain was soaking the plain of Campania. It dripped on the date and peach trees, on vineyards heavy with unharvested grapes, and on the rich bottom lands north of Naples. It trickled down the necks of British and American soldiers slogging across the marshes toward the Volturno river and chilled the Germans, dug into foxholes across the river, in the shadow of Mount Massico. Somewhere in that area in the rain, the Germans would try to halt the relentless Allied advance. If they failed, the road to Rome would be open.
Behind the lines, Naples, slowly and painfully returned to normal. But the wounds of battle would not be healed for many months. The city was still practically without water, gas or electricity. In one terrible explosion on October 7, more than 100 civilians were killed when a delayed-action German mine destroyed the post office. Hungry, homeless children wandered the streets, and there was no medicine in the hospitals. German demolition squads have made a shambles of the waterfront. Shops were looted, the telephone building blown up, the University fired, and the tourist hotels ruined by Nazi troops before their retreat.”
On Monday morning April 17, 1944 the three women from Washington state reported for training at the American University campus. They checked into a large classroom full of milling women and immediately lost track of each other. In the din Flo could hear accents from all over the country, and as she met and talked with the recruits, she was impressed by their high level of education and abilities.
At graduation, Flo was photographed with her Washington State counterparts–the Suksdorf twins and a woman from Seattle, Josephine Ryan. Flo at right.
That first day was mostly filled with speeches from ARC directors, none particularly memorable. Then, the trainees fell into a routine: up at 6am, lectures and exams starting at 8am.
One instructor they dubbed Theda Bara. She was a thin older woman, hair drawn severely back from her face, who had served in France during “the last show” as she called the Great War. She warned of the pitfalls and perils women face in situations where they are sometimes outnumbered by men 100 to 1.
The women were admonished to date only officers and to “be careful not to let your heads be turned by all the attention.”
“As ARC staff assistants you are considered officers if captured, the equivalent of second lieutenants, and you are covered by the international rules of war,” she told them.
The women were allowed extra time to shop and they needed it. They hadn’t realized there was so much shopping involved–at their own expense. They were given one set of summer and winter Class A uniforms (dresses and skirts only; no pants), which they would need to have fitted. Flo was also issued a trench coat type raincoat, and a heavy topcoat with removable red lining. The Red Cross paid for the uniforms, but the women had to pay for a long list of required clothes and equipment. The list specified exactly how many white blouses, socks, cotton underpants, girdles, and cotton gloves they would need, plus odd items like canteen, web belt, musette bag (a shoulder bag, like a purse), boots, duffle bag and foot locker, leaving them to scurry all over town to track down every item on the list.
In her new uniform with “uncle” Alf
Once she had been fitted for her new uniforms, Flo paid a visit to “Uncle” Alf. The Wick family’s dear old friend, Alfred May, lived in Washington and Flo had telegrammed him of her arrival. She hadn’t seen her gay “uncle” since he had visited the family in 1929 when her father was still alive. Uncle Alf had been her father Ben’s partner in the family chicken farm business in Oregon and he was a presence in the four daughters’ lives until the business went bust and he joined the Navy in WWI. Alf, the son of a costume making English family–whose clients it was said had included the Queen–had dressed the girls and himself in Shakespearean outfits and produced plays. Flo had made a quite passable Hamlet. Alf was still living with the family who had taken him in, though he had retired from his job at the Naval Academy. Flo and Alf were photographed together in front of Alf’s apartment.
Back at the training school, a teacher admonished the women. “Once you get orders you’re incommunicado until you reach your destination, which might take as long as two months.”
October 1943. Murphy lands at Salerno during the Allied invasion of the mainland.
Clip from a Life Magazine story pasted in Flo’s WWII album
Italy has surrendered, and the road to Rome appears deceptively simple. Yet, the journey is anything but straightforward. Many thousands of lives will be lost on the road to the Eternal City.
“We land with undue optimism on the Italian mainland near Salerno. The beachhead, bought dearly with the blood and guts of the men who preceded us, is secure….We are prepared for a quick dash to Rome,” wrote Murphy in his autobiography, To Hell and Back.
This was far too optimistic. The Third Division will be fighting and dying on the Italian beaches and mainland until May, 1944.
The troops of the Third Division must first push through Salerno, cross the Volturno River, and take Anzio, Mignano, Cassino, and Cisterna before they can approach Rome.
Audie Murphy leads a small, diverse squad of men. Among them are an Italian immigrant, a Cherokee Indian manning the machine gun, an Irishman, a Pole, a Swede, and a Smoky Mountain bootlegger.
Members of Murphy’s squad begin to fall almost immediately. One soldier hesitates under heavy Nazi fire as he runs for a bridge and is cut down. The squad carries his body to the highway where it can be easily found.
“In death, he still bears the look of innocent wonder. He could not have lived long after tumbling. The bullet ripped an artery in his throat,” wrote Murphy.
Another fighter takes out a German machine gun nest and a foxhole with grenades, killing five Germans.
From Flo’s WWII album
The small victory is short-lived.
Later, the five remaining men find themselves trapped in a cave, surrounded by the enemy. The cave is infested with fleas, and the men are bitten mercilessly as they wait, parched and desperate.
We come to know and care for the men in Murphy’s squad, only to witness their deaths or injuries that force them out of the fight. Murphy becomes the last man standing at the end.
“All my life I wait to come to Italy,” says the Italian soldier. “I write my old man that the country stinks. Wait till you get to Rome, he says. Wait’ll you see your grandfather’s place. Then you’ll see the real Italy.”
The Italian never makes it to Rome. After three days without water, he breaks under the strain, running out of the cave only to be hit and killed by enemy fire. “He has come home to the soil that gave his parents birth,” wrote Murphy.
Finally, American troops break through the German lines and rescue the remaining men. Relief arrives with rations, water, and ammunition.
The next morning, they cross the Volturno River and join the push toward their next major objective: the communications center at Mignano.
Quotes are from Audie Murphy’s autobiography, To Hell and Back.
They nicknamed him Baby and he couldn’t shed the tag. Audie Murphy had to fight for his place in combat. From the beginning of his military journey, he faced skepticism at every turn. Rejected by the Marines and paratroops, he was finally accepted by the infantry.
Battle route of the Third Infantry Division
Immediately his first commanding officer tried to shove him into a cook and baker’s school where the going would be less rough.
“That was the supreme humiliation. To reach for the stars and end up stirring a pot of C-rations. I would not do it. I swore that I would take the guardhouse first. My stubborn attitude paid off. I was allowed to keep my combat classification; and the Army was spared the disaster of having another fourth-class cook in its ranks,” he wrote in his autobiography.
In training, officers took one look at his skinny body and boyish face and tried to steer Murphy away from the front lines. At Fort Meade, one well-meaning officer attempted to save him from combat altogether by assigning him a clerical position at the post exchange. Again he stuck to his guns.
In July, 1943 he made it to the front in Sicily, but his youth and appearance worked against him even there. He was transferred to headquarters to serve as a runner. But Murphy wouldn’t stay away from the action. He repeatedly sneaked off on patrols and scouting missions. His determination eventually forced his commander’s hand. He was promoted to corporal.
Life Magazine photo essay posted in Flo’s album
By then, Murphy had already missed his chance to fight in North Africa. His convoy had docked in Casablanca only after the battles were over. Instead of combat, he endured more training—much to his frustration. “I just wanted to fight,” he later said.
Murphy finally got his chance in Sicily, but it was far from the glory he had imagined as a boy.
On his first day in combat, a mortar attack killed a young soldier sitting nearby. A boom, a whistle, the earth shakes, and the boy falls from the rock where he was sitting, just taking a break. As simple as that. One minute you’re sitting on a rock. The next minute you’re dead.
This was not the war Murphy had dreamed of. He had imagined men charging gallantly across flaming hills. Bugles blew, banners streamed, and the temperature was mild. Enemy bullets always miraculously missed, and his trusty rifle always hit home. As a kid, the dream was his escape from a grimly realistic world of poverty.
But now, as he trudged across the Sicilian battlefield, sweat soaking his uniform, his boyhood fantasies were shattered.
“Maybe my notions about war are all cockeyed. How do you pit skill against skill if you cannot even see the enemy? Where is the glamour in blistered feet and a growling stomach? And where is the expected adventure? Well, whatever comes, it was my own idea. I had always wanted to be a soldier,” he wrote.
His skill with a rifle, however, did not go unnoticed. In one skirmish, Murphy shot two German officers from their horses with two clean shots. He had shed his first blood. But he felt nothing except a weary indifference.
Even as malaria struck and forced him into a field hospital for a week, Murphy returned to the lines. The disease would haunt him throughout the war, but it didn’t stop him.
He had loved the idea of war, but it didn’t take long to hate the real thing.
“The Sicilian campaign has taken the vinegar out of my spirit. I have seen war as it actually is, and I do not like it. But I will go on fighting,” he wrote.
*Quotes are from Audie Murphy’s autobiography, To Hell and Back
The photo album that my mother, Flo Wick, shared with Audie Murphy when they reconnected in 1955 is massive. The scrapbook is filled with photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, and travel paraphernalia and it tells the story of Mom’s two years as an American Red Cross (ARC) “donut girl” in Europe during World War II.
It also tells the story of the Third Infantry Division, the only American division that fought the Nazis on every front—North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany. “The Fightin’ Third” had more casualties—nearly 35,000—than any other division, and it holds the record for high combat citations.
Throughout our childhoods my brothers and I pulled out the album, looked through it, and listened to our mother’s war stories. We kids especially liked the sketches by Flo’s comrade Liz Elliott of the everyday lives of the “donut gals.”
When my mother died in 1983 at the age of 70, I claimed the album and it’s been stored in garages and closets ever since, occasionally brought out for perusal by relatives or friends with an interest in World War II. For a time, it lived in a mold-infected storage room and so it was infected along with other archives. I exposed each page to sunlight in an effort to reduce the mold and that helped, but when I really wanted to examine the book, I donned a respirator to avoid breathing in clouds of invisible mold spores.
Mom was a scrapbook maker and for that I am now grateful as I try to piece together the events of her life during the war. Perhaps she had the idea for the album even before she sailed to Europe on a hospital ship in May 1944. I do know that the act of putting it together when she returned home after the war in 1946 salved her sadness at the deaths of so many and helped her readjust to life stateside where it seemed Americans had moved on and no longer wanted to think or talk about the war.
Recently I went through the album page by page, photographing all. That’s when I discovered that Flo had had a friendship with Audie Murphy that began somewhere in France when she served him donuts and continued after the war.
This story follows two narratives: one chronicles Flo Wick and the other chronicles Audie Murphy. They were both attached to the Third Division but mostly in different parts of the North African and European theaters. Their paths intersect in the Vosges mountains of France and as the Third pushed its way into Germany. For Audie’s tale I’m referencing his autobiography To Hell and Back, as well as letters and artifacts saved in Flo’s album.
A Little Background
She came of age during the Depression
Born in 1913, Florence Wick had graduated high school at 16 after being allowed to skip ahead a grade. Her class graduated in 1929½. Flo was excited about the prospect of going to college. She planned to enroll at the state college, but the Great Depression intervened. Instead, she completed a secretarial course at a trade school. At 17 she started working to help support her family. In 1931 she found a job as a stenographer for the Washington State Department of Highways.
Flo (R) at the Highway Dept.
By the time she learned about the ARC program, Flo had been working full time at that job for more than a decade. No doubt she was ready to do something else—maybe anything else. This seemed like an opportunity to travel outside of Washington State and to see other places in the world. And she was anxious to help the war effort.
He always wanted to be a soldier
Flo’s photo of Audie 1945
Even as a little boy Audie Murphy had wanted to be a soldier. His share cropper father abandoned his mother and their children leaving the family destitute. Then, when he was 16, his mother died. Born in 1925, the seventh of twelve kids, Audie tried to provide for the others, dropping out of school in fifth grade to pick cotton for a dollar a day. But he knew he had to get out of Farmersville, Texas. He tried to join the paratroopers and the Marines, but was told he was too short at five feet five. The Army took him and trained him to be a soldier. The baby-faced kid earned the nickname Baby. He was already a good shot, having fed the family with wild game. He couldn’t wait to shoot the enemy.
Murphy was assigned to the Third Division, then part of the Third Army under the command of General George Patton. He joined them in Sicily in 1943, on the way from Morocco and North Africa. They would fight their way through Italy and France into Germany. Murphy would be one of a very few of his company left standing and would become the most decorated American soldier of the war.
“When are we going to get some more donuts?” asked Audie Murphy of the photographer after he received the highest of all military honors, the Congressional Medal of Honor, in the field in Salzburg, Germany.
Flo’s photo of Audie Murphy receiving the Congessional Medal of Honor
It was 1945 and the photographer was my mother, Florence Wick. She had been serving as a Red Cross “donut girl” with the Third Infantry Division in the Europe. She had met Murphy and served him donuts somewhere in France.
That photograph was the only one taken of Murphy at the awards ceremony and it was published worldwide and used to recreate the scene for the movie of his life story, “To Hell and Back.”
1955 Flo and Audie reconnected on the movie set of To Hell and Back. Photo by Rollie Lane. The photo at top is the one taken by Flo at the awards ceremony in Salzburg in 1945.
The most decorated soldier of WWII, Audie would cross paths with Flo again ten years later when he came to our hometown of Yakima, Washington to film the movie. There at the Yakima Firing Center the two of them looked through the scrapbook Flo had compiled of her adventures and heartbreaks in the European theater.
Now I have that scrapbook. It’s gigantic and weighs 25 pounds. I have wanted to use its contents to tell my mother’s story, but the project is overwhelming. Maybe I can start with Audie.
Audie Murphy was known worldwide after the war. He had a huge fan club and maybe still does (he died in 1971). One of his fans recently got in touch with me and asked if I could supply more stories and pictures. Yes! Flo stayed in touch with Audie. She corresponded with his biographer, his associates and those putting together a memorial in Texas. She saved mementos and newspaper clippings.
As for her photo that became famous, she gave it freely and others took credit. A post-war letter she saved warns that others are charging for the use of her photo. She never received credit.
tradeswomn musings 