Stratford-upon-Avon, as we all know, is the 16th-century birthplace and burial place of William Shakespeare. The medieval market town in England’s West Midlands is about 100 miles northwest of London. The Royal Shakespeare Company still performs his plays in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and adjacent Swan Theatre on the banks of the River Avon. Flo visited in mid-June, 1945.
She attended the Shakespeare FestivalStratford-on-Avon Red Cross club. Photos from Flo’s albumShakespeare’s houseFlo didn’t identify this woman, her host at the Red Cross clubSailing back to the Continent. Leaving England for Dieppe at the end of the week-long leave.
Stratford-upon-Avon had faced the threat and effects of the Blitz through scattered incidents and as a sanctuary, rather than being a central target for sustained bombing like larger industrial or military centers. During the war the town provided refuge, with people from heavily bombed areas like Birmingham coming to Stratford for quiet and respite from the relentless night raids.
Flo arrived in London in June, 1945 for a seven-day leave. In a postcard to her family Flo wrote:
“London is huge and interesting. Not as badly bombed as I had thought. Weather much like Seattle. Have walked holes in my feet. Everything terribly expensive.”
She ran into a friend from Seattle, Jim Quitslund, who was staying across the street from her billet.
With Jim Quitslund, the Army friend from Seattle, billeted across the street in London.
Big Ben. Photos by Flo WickParliamentTower of LondonTower of LondonSt. Paul’s CathedralThe wax museumGovernment buildings seen from across the Thames
The Blitz focused on London
Starting on September 7, 1940, London faced 57 straight nights of bombing by Nazi Germany, part of a concentrated eight-month campaign known as the Blitz.
Flo wrote that the bombing damage was not as bad as she had thought, but she may not have made it to the East End, which sustained the most bombing. The Luftwaffe raids were aimed at disrupting the British economy by targeting docks, warehouses, and industrial areas. The damage was devastating, characterized by massive fires, widespread destruction of working-class housing, and high civilian casualties there.
An estimated 18,688 civilians in London were killed during the war, 1.5 million were made homeless. 3.5 million homes and 9 million square feet of office space were destroyed or damaged.
When Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, the U.S. Army in Europe suddenly had to shift from fighting to occupying a defeated nation. More than two million soldiers now had to be sorted into three paths: those who would stay in Germany as an occupation force, those who would be sent to the Pacific for the expected invasion of Japan, and those who would finally go home. Because the Army had more men than it needed for occupation and redeployment, it also had to begin discharging veterans fairly and quickly.
General George C. Marshall had foreseen this challenge. Drawing on hard lessons from the chaotic demobilization after World War I, he ordered the Special Planning Division in 1943 to craft a method that would release soldiers on an individual basis rather than by entire units. With divisions in Europe filled with late-war replacements, unit-based demobilization was impossible—and delay risked unrest among idle troops.
After gathering input from commanders worldwide, the army created the Adjusted Service Rating Score, universally known to GIs as the point system. It offered an objective way to determine who went home first. Points were awarded for time in service, time overseas, combat campaigns, decorations, wounds, and dependent children:
1 point per month in the Army
+1 point per month overseas
5 points per campaign
5 points per decoration for merit or valor
5 points per Purple Heart
12 points per dependent child (up to three)
This system became the backbone of America’s demobilization in Europe.
Janet and Flo hand out the last donuts to soldiers as they board the train for homeSalzburg train station. Photos from Flo’s album
Flo stayed on in Europe until March, 1946, and I had assumed she signed up to serve in the Red Cross during the occupation. But I think she was just as anxious to return home as all the other American soldiers and staff–she just couldn’t get out any sooner. It’s not clear whether Red Cross workers received points, or whether they even fell under the rating score system.
Flo stood at the border and looked across the Alps into Austria
My Mother and Audie MurphyCh. 77
In May, 1945, just after the end of the war, Flo must have been excited to summit the Brenner Pass and see into Austria. Brenner Pass has long been a strategic gateway through the Alps, and its role intensified during World War II. After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, the pass suddenly lay deep inside Hitler’s expanding Reich. Two years later, on 18 March 1940, Hitler and Mussolini met there to reaffirm their Pact of Steel.
When Italy signed an armistice with the Allies in 1943, Germany moved quickly to seize the pass and push the border with Mussolini’s new puppet regime far to the south. By 1945, American troops occupied the area, and the pass was returned to Italy once the war ended. In the chaotic aftermath, Brenner Pass also became one of the escape routes, part of the “ratlines” used by fleeing Nazi leaders. After the war, the pass once again marked the border between Italy and the newly independent Republic of Austria.
The sign shows the hard road from Salerno to AustriaSeen from the other sideGreat views from up there!
On June 25, 1945, Flo turned thirty-two, and her friends gathered to give her a proper birthday celebration. She spent the day with her clubmobile partner, Janet Potts, along with Janet’s boyfriend, Capt. Lloyd (Jens) Jenson, and Flo’s own boyfriend, Lt. Col. Chris Chaney. All four arrived in uniform as they wandered through the fortress castle that served as headquarters for the 15th Infantry above Salzburg. The women wore their Red Cross-issued dresses; the men their Army greens. They teased one another, snapped photographs in the grand corridors, and convinced Flo to pose in the old stocks for a laugh.
Later, they changed into civilian clothes and headed out for a picnic. Indoors, there was a birthday cake, and they captured more pictures—two couples who looked close, relaxed, and hopeful in the early summer after the war’s end.
These became the last images, and the last mention, of Flo’s relationship with Chris Chaney. The photographs made them seem comfortably paired, and although Janet and Jens eventually married, Flo and Chris did not stay together. She kept no letters from him after the war.
What became of him remained unclear. The two had talked about traveling to Paris and England, plans that never materialized. Most likely, he received an early chance to go home and took it. As a highly decorated officer with a Silver Star, he would have been near the front of the line for repatriation. Flo’s life moved forward, and whatever they had envisioned together faded with the summer.
Flo, Chris and JensJanet and JensRailroad tracks leading down from the fortressFlo posing in the ancient stocksFlo on her 32nd birthdayJanet and Jens at the picnicWhat did Chris do to deserve this?Or this?Celebrating war’s endThird Infantry Division buddiesHappy Birthday FloThere was even a birthday cake
Flo and Janet got leave to travel to Brussels probably in June, 1945. In her inscriptions on this page in her album, Flo doesn’t indicate how they travelled the 450 miles from Salzburg, stopping in Cologne, nor whether they went with the soldiers in these pictures.
The War in Brussels
Belgium had been under German occupation since 1940, but Brussels was freed in early September 1944. The city of nearly a million people did not expect liberation to come so quickly, and enormous crowds poured into the streets, slowing the Allied advance as they welcomed their liberators. At the same time, Belgian railway workers and the resistance foiled a German attempt to deport 1,600 political prisoners and Allied POWs to concentration camps on the so-called “ghost train.”
The city escaped the widespread destruction seen elsewhere in Europe; it was not subjected to systematic or heavy bombing. The rest of the country was liberated by February 1945.
Flo and Janet in Brussels with the boysFlower market in Brussels
Cologne Cathedral Survived
When American troops entered Cologne on March 6, 1945, the Cologne cathedral was one of the few major structures still standing. The Gothic landmark became the backdrop to a famous tank battle as U.S. forces took the western part of the city and the Germans withdrew across the Rhine, holding the eastern bank for another month.
Remarkably, the cathedral survived both the battle and years of Allied bombing. Construction began in 1298, but the cathedral wasn’t finished until 1880. Just sixty years later, Cologne was hit by the first of 262 RAF air raids. Nearly a quarter of the city’s 770,000 residents fled after that initial attack, and the population continued to drain away until only about 20,000 remained by the final raid on March 2, 1945.
The cathedral’s twin spires even served as a navigational point for Allied bombers. Though struck 14 times and heavily damaged, the great structure endured, towering over the ruins of the city.
Cologne cathedral across the RhineCologne. Photos: Flo Wick
In May 1945 the clubmobilers settled in an apartment in Salzburg. They were attached to the 15th Infantry Regiment which had taken over a fortress above Hitler’s ruined mountain headquarters at Berchestgaden as their command post. Flo’s photos on this page in her album show scenes of Salzburg, the fortress and the surrounding hills, her sister clubmobiler Janet Potts and Lt. Col. Lloyd (C.P.) Ramsey with dog Baler. In a picture taken from the fortress, Flo drew an arrow pointing to the women’s apartment.
Salzburg, with a population of 36,000, had suffered heavy damage in the war: Allied bombs destroyed nearly half the city and killed 550 people. Much of its Baroque center survived, but rebuilding loomed large.
On May 5, 1945, Salzburg surrendered to advancing U.S. forces without a fight. Many residents greeted the Americans as liberators, relieved that 5½ years of war were finally ending—even if it meant accepting defeat. But the U.S. Army arrived as an occupying power as well. For years, no major political, cultural, administrative, or economic decision could be made without its approval.
Postwar life was marked by severe shortages, especially housing and food. More than 1,000 buildings had already been damaged or destroyed in the 1944–45 bombings, and the U.S. occupiers requisitioned many remaining properties for their own use.
The fortressFlo drew an arrow to the apartment (on the river near the center).Photo taken from the fortressThe fortress command post taken from the apartmentJanet Potts in the clubmobileLt. Col. Ramsey with Flo and Baler
There is still debate over which Allied unit can claim credit for capturing Berchtesgaden in May 1945. The most reliable historical accounts indicate that the 3rd Infantry Division, specifically the 7th Infantry Regiment, commanded by Maj. Gen. John “Iron Mike” O’Daniel, reached the town on May 4, 1945, and accepted its surrender without resistance. They were the first American combat troops to enter the town itself.
However, popular history has sometimes credited the 101st Airborne Division’s Easy Company—made famous by Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers—with the “liberation” of Berchtesgaden. Easy Company did arrive on May 5, the day after the 3rd Division. Their presence, and the power of their postwar memoirs, contributed to the widely repeated but inaccurate claim that they captured the town.
Flo adjusts her camera. Platterhof hotel in background
Complicating matters further, elements of the French 2nd Armored Division, advancing from the south, also reached the Obersalzberg at nearly the same time. French armored troops were already present at the SS guardhouse near the entrance to the Obersalzberg complex when the Americans arrived on May 4. So while the 3rd Infantry Division is generally recognized as having taken Berchtesgaden, the French made the first approach to the mountain enclave.
What is clear is that Flo arrived very shortly after the area had fallen to Allied forces, when the military presence was still active and the ruins still fresh.
Views from Hitler’s mountaintop retreat. All photos by Flo Wick.
Berchtesgaden and the Obersalzberg Complex
Berchtesgaden, in the Bavarian Alps, served as Hitler’s alpine headquarters and a central site of Nazi state power. The Obersalzberg complex above the town contained residences, administrative buildings, and security installations used by Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking Nazi leaders, including Martin Bormann and Hermann Göring.
Key components included:
• The Berghof: Hitler’s primary residence, significantly damaged in a massive Allied bombing raid on April 25, 1945. • The Eagle’s Nest (Kehlsteinhaus): A mountaintop chalet and diplomatic reception site, built for Hitler’s 50th birthday. • SS Barracks and Guard Posts: Securing the restricted zone around the leadership compound. • Underground Bunker System: An extensive network of tunnels, shelters, offices, and storage areas designed to protect leadership during air raids and potential last-stand scenarios.
The Berghof was heavily bombedDestroyed barracks The main entrance road, Bormann’s house on the hill. It was thought he had escaped, but DNA from remains discovered in Berlin in 1972 point to May 2 as the day of his death.The Platterhof hotel was bombed and then burned by retreating NazisInside the Berghof was the “great room” with the “grand picture window” with a view of the Untersberg Mountains.Another view of the bombed BerghofThe barracks housed hundreds of SS guardsWhat a view!
We think this is where Flo found or was given Hermann Göring’s armband and a Nazi flag that she saved in her album.
Current status: Much of the Obersalzberg complex was demolished after the war. Today, the site is home to the Dokumentationszentrum Obersalzberg, a research and educational museum focused on the history of Nazism and the regime’s use of the mountain retreat. The Eagle’s Nest still stands and is now a tourist site with panoramic views and a restaurant. The surviving bunker tunnels are accessible through the documentation center.
Pictures of Officers at the 3rd Battalion Headquarters
My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 69
Photos from Flo’s album. Schloss Klessheim served as 3rd Division HQ in Salzburg. Salzburg was occupied for ten years by American forces. It was the central HQ of the American Occupation Authority.Lt. Col. Chaney (Flo’s boyfriend)Capt. Jenson, Maj. PerkinsMajor PridgenC.O. 3rd Bn3rd Bn staff Salzburg
Also on this page of the album is a damaged picture of Flo and Capt. McFalls who became a friend and corresponded with Flo after the war.
Clubmobilers are some of the first to see the camp
My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 68
The Dachau concentration camp near Munich was liberated by the US Army on April 29, 1945. There is no page in Flo’s album dedicated to Dachau, but the Red Cross women were there. Flo didn’t talk about the Holocaust, possibly because she thought no one would believe her.
In the 1970s she organized a writers group at the Yakima Senior Center where she worked. The group published a chapbook, Leaves of Sage, in which two of her stories appear. Then she was finally able to write about her experience. Here is her story.
Holocaust 1945
By Florence Martin
The long struggle to free the world of Hitler and his horrors was coming to an end; it was 1945 and Munich had fallen. The US Army’s famous Third Infantry Division, which had pursued the Nazis relentlessly through North Africa, Sicily, Italy and southern France into central Germany itself, had figured prominently in the capture of Munich and the liberation of the infamous concentration camp at Dachau. Armed with captured Zeiss-Ikon cameras, the four Red Cross Clubmobile gals, attached to the Third Division since Anzio in Italy, were eager to shoot scenes of the city which had been a Nazi stronghold and of the concentration camp prisoners, some of whom could still walk away from this 20th century torture chamber.
Photo: Dogface Soldiers Collection
We had not reckoned with the results of the swiftness of the Allied attack which had prevented the Nazi jailers from destroying the evidence of their hideous and unspeakable atrocities to Semitic citizens of Germany whose only crime was being a despised JEW. Left behind were literally stacks of human bodies–piled up like so much cord wood–only skin covering their skeletons. A year on the battlefields of Italy, France and Germany had toughened us to these sights of violence and death, and we almost calmly focused cameras on the neatly stacked corpses. I had snapped several views and was focusing on the bottom “layer” when I caught the movement of a human hand through the camera’s viewfinder. Thinking that my imagination was playing tricks on me, I moved closer to the subject, only to confirm that some of the skeletons did indeed still contain life and that several arms and legs were still moving. Sickened and horrified, my sudden scream brought the others running toward me.
Although there was still some movement, it was, of course, too late to resuscitate or rescue anyone. With revulsion we left the whole hellish scene. Later as I retched in a nearby ditch, I wondered how many potential Mendelsohns and Einsteins were there among those wretched skeletons, and if, perhaps, the great Goethe might be turning in his grave about this modern and depraved Mephistopheles, Adolf Hitler, and what he had done to Goethe’s Germany.
Hitler died April 30, 1945. Photo: Dogface Soldier
Postscript: this is a true experience; The pictures that were taken that day were somehow conveniently lost in development in a German photoshop–only these shots among several rolls of film were missing, and it was not until television elaborated the Holocaust more than 30 years later that my personal experience could be proved.
tradeswomn musings 