My mother Florence Wick – tradeswomn musings

Goodbye to the High Pointers

Clubmobilers bid farewell to soldiers going home

My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 80

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 home

Salzburg 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.

At the Summit of Brenner Pass

Flo stood at the border and looked across the Alps into Austria

My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 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 Austria

Flo didn’t ID these soldiers

Ch. 78: https://mollymartin.blog/2025/12/12/3rd-division-salzburg-rodeo/

Birthday Party June 25, 1945

Flo Celebrates with Chris Chaney, Janet and Jens

My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 76

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.

Railroad tracks leading down from the fortress

Trip to Brussels and Cologne

Flo and Janet Get Leave

My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 74

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.

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.

Ch. 75: https://mollymartin.blog/2025/12/01/occupied-salzburg-summer-1945/

Settled in Salzburg

Clubmobilers fall in with 15th Infantry

My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 73

In May 1945 the clubmobilers settled in an apartment in Salzburg. They were attached to the 15^th 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.

Flo drew an arrow to the apartment (on the river near the center).

The fortress command post taken from the apartment

Ch. 74: https://mollymartin.blog/2025/11/27/trip-to-brussels/

Who Liberated Berchtesgaden?

The 3rd Division gets credit and Flo was there

My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 70

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 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 Nazis

Inside the Berghof was the “great room” with the “grand picture window” with a view of the Untersberg Mountains.

The barracks housed hundreds of SS guards

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.

Ch. 71: https://mollymartin.blog/2025/11/15/ve-day-may-8-1945/

With the 30th Infantry in Salzburg

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.

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.

Ch. 70: https://mollymartin.blog/2025/11/11/who-liberated-berchtesgaden/

The Liberation of Dachau

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.

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.

Ch. 69: https://mollymartin.blog/2025/11/07/with-the-30th-infantry-in-salzburg/

Fighters Honored at Zeppelin Stadium

How can these people be loyal to such a leader?

My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 66

Flo’s letter home was published in her hometown newspaper, the Yakima Republic.

Miss Wick in Germany: Sees Yanks Parade in Hitler Center

Parades in Hitler’s former stamping ground and presentation of congressional medals to brave American boys in a big Nazi stadium formerly ornamented with swastika flags, are among the sites witnessed by Miss Florence Wick, who is with the American Red Cross in Germany.

“General Patch presented five congressional medals of honor in the exact spot where Hitler used to ‘sell’ his theories to the Germans,” Miss Wick writes her mother, Mrs. Gerda Wick. “I have seen one of the biggest and most famous of Nazi cities in complete ruin. We drove in jeeps down streets which air corps and artillery have reduced to rubble.

War Messy

“War is a mess and how these people can be loyal to a leader who led them into it and brought about such destruction is more than I can understand. It is really something to drive through town after town and see white flags flying from windows.”

Hitler’s Zeppelin Stadium. Photo: Flo Wick

The doughnut business continues good, Miss Wick wrote three weeks ago. The Red Cross workers had been steadily on the move but serving doughnuts all of the time. Germany is beautiful now, especially in the places where the fruit trees bloom and everything is neat and clean, she says. Mail is slow when Red Cross workers, like the soldiers, are on the move. The weather was so warm they were wearing spring cotton uniforms, Miss Wick said.

“The cotton dresses are so welcome because I get tired of uniforms and can wear the dresses after work and when I go out or have company,” Miss Wick commented upon receiving some clothes from home. “We have to do our own laundry and it is a task with no conveniences, but cotton clothes make it simpler.”

Stars and stripes raised above the swastika at Zeppelin stadium. Photo: Flo Wick

Women Find Home

Most of the time the Red Cross workers have been living in tents although Miss Wick and her roommate found a room in an empty German house on their last move and were enjoying the comforts of a regular dwelling.

We have lovely days in between showers and the countryside is beautiful. We had a picnic in a patch of woods just below an old castle the other evening. We marveled that we were eating fried chicken and hard boiled eggs on a picnic in the woods of southern Germany.”

Ch. 67: https://mollymartin.blog/2025/10/29/around-munich-and-salzburg/

A Visit from Marlene Dietrich

She “spent more time at the front lines than Gen. Eisenhower”

My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 64

April 1945. Marlene Dietrich was a huge movie star. Flo was star struck and delighted to meet her when she visited soldiers and the clubmobile crew in a field somewhere in southern Germany.

Dietrich was also a WWII hero. She became an active participant in the American war effort after renouncing her German citizenship and refusing to cooperate with the Nazi regime. She sold war bonds, raised significant funds for the troops, and performed hundreds of morale-boosting shows for Allied soldiers—often close to the front lines—through her USO tours.

Flo wrote: “Marlene up front. We took her picture. The GIs took ours.“

Dietrich was a humanitarian. She housed German and French exiles, provided financial support, and advocated for their American citizenship. In the late 1930s, she co-founded a fund with Billy Wilder and several other exiles to help Jews and dissidents escape from Germany. In 1937, she placed her entire $450,000 salary from Knight Without Armor into escrow to assist refugees. Two years later, in 1939, she became an American citizen and formally renounced her German nationality.

After the U.S. entered World War II in December 1941, Dietrich was among the first public figures to help sell war bonds. From January 1942 through September 1943, she toured the United States, and was reported to have sold more war bonds than any other Hollywood star.

“Danube River (It ain’t blue)”

During two extended USO tours in 1944 and 1945, Dietrich performed for Allied troops in Algeria, Italy, the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands, and later entered Germany with Generals James M. Gavin and George S. Patton. When asked why she risked being so close to the front lines, she simply replied, “aus Anstand”—“out of decency.” Billy Wilder later remarked that she had spent more time at the front than General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In 1944, the Morale Operations Branch of the OSS launched the “Musak Project,” a series of musical propaganda broadcasts designed to weaken enemy morale. Dietrich recorded several German-language songs for the project, including “Lili Marleen,” a tune beloved by soldiers on both sides of the conflict.

Dietrich’s return to West Germany in 1960 for a concert tour was met with a mixed reception. Despite negative press, bomb threats, and protests from those who considered her a traitor, her performances drew large crowds. In Berlin, demonstrators shouted, “Marlene, go home!” Yet she also received warm support from others, including Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt, who, like Dietrich, had opposed the Nazis and lived in exile during their rule. Emotionally drained by the hostility she faced, Dietrich vowed never to return to West Germany—though she was warmly welcomed in East Germany.

Her contributions earned her numerous honors, including the American Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honour. For her efforts to improve morale among troops and aid those displaced by the war, she received additional honors from the United States, France, Belgium, and Israel.

More photos from this page in Flo’s album

30th Infantry Regimental Review

Captured Kraut plane

Nurnberg burning

Ch. 65: https://mollymartin.blog/2025/10/25/nurnberg-burning/

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