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.”
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.
Flo and Janet
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.
Janet hands out donuts“Three donuts, one grin”
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.
When Donald Trump illegally designated Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, my concern for the future of our democracy deepened.
Antifa is not an organization, just a loose movement with no leaders. Because Antifa lacks structure, Trump’s move could target anyone the government assumes to be part of the movement, which could be you or me. I declare I am an antifascist. I object to the fascist takeover of my country.
Whatever you think of antifascists, probably you don’t think of the US government. But there was a time when the villains of US foreign policy were fascists. It was after the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39, in which the US refused to intervene, letting the fascists win with the help of Hitler, Mussolini and US oilmen (see Spain in Our Hearts by Adam Hochschild). It was before the CIA incorporated Nazi war criminals into its organization and focused our wrath on communists and the Soviet Union after WWII (see The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot).
Mom in uniform
In the aftermath of WWI, European writers sought to alert the world about the fascist threat and Americans—if they were paying attention—knew about what was happening in Europe. My mother, Florence Wick, was paying attention. What cultural influences caused her to join the American Red Cross (ARC) and serve in Europe during the second world war? What can we learn today from antifascist art?
Watch on the Rhine
In the years before television, theater played an influential role in shaping the culture. Visiting New York City in 1941, my mother saw Watch on the Rhine, an antifascist play written by Lillian Hellman. The popular play won the New York Drama Critics prize that year and was still on Broadway when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941. Made into a movie starring Bette Davis in 1943, Watch on the Rhine was representative of a genre of antifascist art popular in the US during the early years of WWII whose purpose was to persuade isolationist Americans to get involved in the European war. It certainly influenced my mother’s decision to join the Red Cross and go to war. I think it may have been one reason she chose to join the ARC, which promised a job overseas, rather than other slots that opened for women, which may have kept her behind a desk back in the States.
Playbook saved by Mom in 1941
I watched the movie and several others with similar messages. Some are just naked propaganda with unbelievable characters and dialog. Others, like Hellman’s, seek to educate Americans about the crisis in Europe, about class and about anti-Semitism. Hellman, who had briefly joined the Communist Party, wrote the play in 1940 following the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939. Her call for a united international alliance against Hitler contradicted the party’s position at the time. She was labeled a “premature antifascist” by the Communist Party, ironically later a moniker used by the FBI during the McCarthy purges to target communists. Her lover, Dashiell Hammett, who had also joined the Communist Party, wrote the screenplay.
His introduction reads: In the first week of April 1940 there were few men in the world who could have believed that, in less than three months, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland and France would fall to the German invaders. But there were some men, ordinary men, not prophets, who knew this mighty tragedy was on the way. They had fought it from the beginning, and they understood it. We are most deeply in their debt. This is the story of one of these men.
The man is Kurt Muller, a German who has devoted his life to the antifascist movement. We learn that he and many of his comrades fought in international brigades along with the Spanish Republicans to defend Spain’s democratically elected government against Francisco Franco’s fascists. They and others have constructed an underground antifascist organization in Europe. Watch on the Rhine shows us that fascists come in many shades; that Americans, naive about world politics, haven’t moved so far from slavery; that Bette Davis (bless her heart) excelled at overacting. The part played by Davis, Muller’s American wife, was expanded for the movie to make use of her star power at the box office.
The play is set in the Washington DC mansion of the wife’s family, whose dead patriarch had been a respected US Supreme Court justice. The family matriarch, Mama Fanny, runs it like a plantation, overseeing Black servants with strict control. When Joseph, the male servant, is summoned, he answers “Yasum.”
But Joseph gets some good lines. When Mama Fanny orders, “That silver has lasted 200 years. Now clean that silver,” Joseph says, “Not the way you take care of it Miss Fanny. I see you at the table and I say to myself, ‘There’s Miss Fanny doing it to that knife again.’ “
Hellman uses the three Muller children, sophisticated, language rich and worldly, to teach Americans about the outside world. “Grandma has not seen much of the world,” says the oldest, Joshua. “She does not understand that a great many work most hard to get something to eat.”
We learn that the antifascist movement is nonviolent. The youngest kid, Bodo, says, “We must not be angry. Anger is protest and should only be used for the good of one’s fellow man.”
The movie is both a critique of American culture and an attempt to school Americans about developments in Europe. Hellman did deep research for her script, and I thank her for helping me to understand this historical period and the forces that shaped it. Like most films from this era, it’s not available on Netflix, but I was able to check it out from the San Francisco Public Library.
The Moon Is Down
During Hitler’s rise, Nazis were winning the propaganda war. Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, was and still is much admired. Alarmed artists approached the US government with proposals for antifascist plays, movies and books, among them the famous writer John Steinbeck. The result of his effort, the novella, The Moon is Down, was published in March 1942. The next month it played on Broadway and a year later premiered as a movie. Its purpose was to motivate the resistance movements in occupied countries. The sinister title comes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
I accidentally discovered the thin book in a friend’s library and read it with great interest. It describes life in a town that has been invaded and occupied by the German fascist army.
There is bloodshed. Orders are followed. People resist, are arrested and executed. People flee. Some people collaborate. Others form an underground to communicate with those on the outside. At the end of the book, the war is still going. But the invaders have been surrounded and we are very aware that the invaders have become the harassed. In a way, the occupiers have become the occupied.
Steinbeck acknowledges the humanity of the enemy. We learn as much about the motivations and humanness of the invaders as the invaded. For that reason the book was criticized mercilessly in the US and Steinbeck’s patriotism questioned. But Europeans loved it. It was translated into many languages and became the most popular piece of Allied propaganda in WWII.
Five Came Back
Things weren’t looking good for the Allies as the US joined the war effort after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Germany and Japan were conquering Europe and the Pacific. The US had only just started to gear up its factories to make war materiel and Europe feared we wouldn’t get it there in time to stop the Nazi advance. It was during this time that the US antifascist propaganda machine went into high gear.
From 1942 to 1945, Frank Capra directed a series of seven antifascist propaganda films, narrated by the actor Walter Huston. The series, called Why We Fight, was produced by the War Department to make the case for US involvement in WWII. These films can now be accessed online. I also saw Five Came Back, a three-part Netflix series about five American film directors, including Capra, who produced propaganda for the US government during the war. The others were John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, and George Stevens.
Making movies of the war changed the filmmakers as well as audiences. We learn that they were haunted by what they saw. Wyler was shocked by racism against Black soldiers and refused to make a film meant to recruit Blacks. Stevens, at Dachau, realized he should be there to film evidence of crimes against humanity, not propaganda. Ford turned to drink after witnessing the bloodbath on D-Day. Huston took on PTSD only to have his film suppressed by the government. Racism was present in these films. While Germans were depicted as humans, Japanese were often seen as subhuman caricatures. The government worried, rightly, that violence against Japanese Americans would result. Then, in 1942, it incarcerated them until the end of the war.
Women in WWII: 13 short films featuring America’s Secret Weapon
Most of these are US military propaganda films whose purpose was to convince women to join the WACS or other service, and also to persuade men that women could do the work. Some were written by Eleanor Roosevelt and narrated by famous actors like Katherine Hepburn. The American Red Cross, in which my mother served, wasn’t mentioned, but there was a picture of an ARC club in North Africa.
I wish the government had made films like this for women in the trades. In one scene a couple of men are talking on their front porch about how one’s sister wants to join the WACS and they think she’s crazy. It’s a man’s war, they say. Then the film counters their sexism and shows competent women doing all sorts of jobs. However, these films also endeavored to persuade women that they were taking men’s jobs and they needed to go back home after the war and relinquish their war jobs to returning soldiers. It was made clear that the jobs belonged to men.
I don’t know if my mother saw any of these films, but it was this sort of government propaganda that propelled her and her generation into World War II. When the enemy was fascism, she was “as patriotic as they come,” according to her sister. Only after the war did she begin to question the government-constructed enemies of the state.
Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust
Released in 2004, this film makes the case that the story of the Holocaust has been told to the world by films made in Hollywood, starting with Warner Bros. Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939, then MGM’s The Mortal Storm in 1940. Neither of these films used the word Jew. The Jewish studio heads wanted to stay in the closet and just be known as Americans. Also, the movie industry made a lot of money from selling its films to Germany during the early years of Hitler’s takeover. Some historians now view studio directors as Nazi collaborators.
Finally in 1940 Charlie Chaplin used the word Jew in The Great Dictator, which he made with his own money. Imagining that an antifascist film can also be hysterically funny might be difficult until you see The Great Dictator. Chaplin slays as Adenoid Hynkel, a thinly disguised Hitler. Jack Oakie’s spoof of Mussolini inspires hilarity. This film is testament to Chaplin’s comic genius. In the globe scene, Chaplin/Hynkel performs a ballet dance with a balloon earth, achieving perfect domination. Chaplin impersonates Hitler to great comic effect. He watched Riefenstahl’s propaganda film Triumph of the Will to learn Hitler’s speech patterns and body movements. Chaplin later said that if he had known the extent of Nazi atrocities, he wouldn’t have made the film. I’m so glad he did.
My mother told us kids stories about her time in Europe during the war, but she never talked about the Holocaust and we were not taught about this historical period in school. So I didn’t learn until 1970 that she had been present at the liberation of Dachau. What finally got her talking was an American TV mini-series, QB VII, about a British court case involving concentration camp crimes. It exemplifies how American media jogged the memories and imaginations of war survivors even 25 years after the war.
Night Will Fall
In 1945 a team of British filmmakers overseen by Alfred Hitchcock went to Germany to document the Nazi death camps. Their documentary, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, was suppressed and then lost for seven decades. Night Will Fall, a 2014 documentary directed by Andre Singer, chronicles the making of the 1945 film and includes original footage. These images are hard to watch, but I think we need to see them, to witness the consequences of fascism.
The death camp films were suppressed partly because they were thought too graphic for British and American tastes. And American tastes had changed almost as fast as superstate enemies revolved in Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984. The Germans, our most recent deadly enemy, had become our friends. The Soviet Union, our recent ally, and communism, was now our mortal enemy.
With my neighbors at the No Kings demo in Santa Rosa October 18
Flo titled this page of her album “With the Q.M. in all the best fields in Germany.“
The Quartermaster Corps was responsible for supplying the essentials—food, clothing, and equipment—to soldiers on the front lines. They ran supply depots, managed transportation networks, and made sure the troops had what they needed to keep operations moving.
Fritzie and BillTypical German village streetOur donut boysGerman shrineWith the QM in all the best fields in GermanyRelieving a patrol!The crew’s dog TD
This page of the album is packed with photos. What do they reveal on closer look?
Spring has arrived in 1945. The grass is green again, and Flo is wearing her summer uniform in one picture. Fritzie has a soldier boyfriend—or maybe a husband—named Bill! Even though the crew has its own clubmobile, they still rely on a team of “donut boys” to do the actual frying. These clubmobilers may never have had to cook donuts themselves. Which kind of makes sense; they gave out thousands of donuts daily and needed a whole crew to make them. Flo got to relieve a patrol—she’s still in the regulation Red Cross skirt. The dog, T.D., remains a star attraction. The group has been able to get into German towns. The pictures suggest that the women are camped here with the Q.M. They’re back to living in tents—or maybe sleeping in their clubmobile again.
Searching through archives kept by my cousin Gail (our mothers were sisters), I was delighted to find two letters written by my mother, Flo, to her mother, Ruth–one in August, 1944 and the other dated February 1, 1945. These have helped to give a more personal perspective to the ARC women’s lives. Here Flo muses about death and war while describing everyday life of the clubmobilers in the French mountains. She reveals that the wedding rings her fiance Gene had ordered from home had arrived the day after he died.
February 1, 1945
Dearest Ruth:
“Your letter of December 4 just reached me a few days ago – mail has had no priority and many of my Christmas greetings and cards arrived just now. However, packages came through well and I had all of yours from home in time. Thanks for the grand gifts, Ruthie – they were so appreciated. The sweatshirt was the envy of everyone (we wear them with our clubmobile uniforms) and I love the slip and underwear. Was down to “Rock bottom.” Your cake was eaten so quickly, all I can remember was that it was very good.
(Flo admires pictures of Ruth’s three girls)
“Thanks for the sympathy and your philosophical comments. I’ve “recovered” if you can call it that, but it was a cruel shock, and I wouldn’t want to go through it again. We see friends “go” so often these days that death is close always, though it never ceases to be tragic and futile. Gene’s first sergeant, a fine, handsome boy, who has a lovely wife and darling three-year-old daughter, and who was always so good to me, has been killed in the last few days. That’s the way it goes – they leave one by one, particularly in a combat outfit like theirs and my division. The few who have survived almost 3 years of constant fighting, are very tired and should go home, but probably won’t until the war is over.
“Gene’s family write to me often and find it hard to believe he is gone. They are sending me the rings he bought and which arrived over here the day after he was killed and were returned to them. Somehow, I don’t want them, but they think I should have them.
“We are in the mountains and have had a lot of snow the last month but a very welcome chinook wind has melted much of it, which makes driving on these roads less hazardous. Evidently the French ski a great deal around here and there are some attractive ski places, as well as good slopes. I never seem to have time to try them out, but some of the boys did and had a fun time.
Drawing by Liz Elliottneeds no explanation
“Our infantry is “busy” as usual, and we are waiting to see them and feed them donuts again. It is always hard, after a session in the lines, to see them again and find friends are missing.
“After a brief session of gaiety in Strasbourg our social life has been reduced to practically nil. Contrary to many ideas, we do not indulge in much social activity; the men are pretty well occupied, you know, and it is only when they have a brief rest that we have a dance or two.
“We continue moving frequently and just made another one today. Lately we have been living in French homes and are coming to know the natives quite well. I can’t speak much French, but can understand it quite well when they slow down to 50 mph instead of 90.
“Right now we have rather cramped quarters in a home which is filled with refugees who were burned out of their homes when the Germans left. Many of these people have lost everything and many, of course, being Alsatian, are torn between being Frenchmen or Germans.
“We’ve been “up front” a few times – within a few hundred yards and within firing range, but it looks no different from any other place, unless the towns have been shelled (and most of them have). There are no trenches, like the last war, And much of the time, it moves so fast, there are no foxholes either, though they “dig in” if they are holding a line. We were shelled in one of the villages the other day, though it happened so quickly, we didn’t have time or sense enough to be frightened. It isn’t fun, even if it seemed funny afterwards.
“There have been setbacks for the Americans in France, but we are happier about the situation now and the Russian drive is encouraging too. I doubt if I will be home for some time yet, but then, I certainly won’t be among the first to leave.
“My package – sent to Mom – with gifts for you all should have reached you by now. I hope they serve the purpose; it is difficult to find anything worthwhile here – their stores and supplies have been hard-hit.
“I like to hear about your kids and other news of the people at home. Betty doesn’t write very often, but mom is wonderfully faithful and takes care of me over here almost as well as she did at home.
“If there are any of my clothes – hats, shoes etc. that you can wear and want to, help yourself, because they will be out of style when I get home and I’d like to have you get some use out of them. Just go down and see what you can use.
You had to be a mechanic too. Drawing by Liz
“Very seldom see a movie (last one was “A guy named Joe” which I saw with Gene and which he didn’t like; he was killed a few days later and the show haunted me).* They have very few good ones and very few period. Read seldom, too, and even more seldom hear a radio, so you see my mode of living and entertainment has changed considerably.”
*(This was a popular war movie starring Spencer Tracy, Irene Dunne and Van Johnson about an American pilot who is killed when his plane goes down after bombing a German aircraft carrier. Then he is sent by “the general” back to earth to train a pilot in the South Pacific war. At the end he’s still dead. The Irene Dunne character gets to fly planes too. The screenwriters were Dalton Trumbo and Frederick Hazlitt Brennan.)
“We have the fellows at the 2.M. (not sure what this means) in quite a bit, toot around the country in our jeep whenever we can and manage to never be bored, which keeps us happy, I suspect.
“I like the work and love the boys. Life gets very simple and fundamental, if you can understand that, and we share many of the same experiences, which makes everyone a friend.
“Eve was fine but busy, and Paris is the same lovely lovely city, though they have food shortages, little fuel and all that. It didn’t seem too unusual to see Notre Dame Cathedral on Christmas morning, but in years to come it will be quite a recollection. Eve and Janet were very good to me and it was like home to see them. Janet’s husband was wounded tho not seriously and she was quite upset. I hope to go back in the spring– It would be even nicer there then in the lovely parks.
“Maybe my own luck will change one of these days; at least I can share sorrow and sincerely sympathize with others who are hit by the tragedy of war. It makes me even a worse “softie,” but there are many to share it with.“
ARC Women the Only American Females to Shoot in WWII
My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 54
The page from Flo’s album
American women were strictly forbidden from shooting guns during WWII or serving in any combat position. The WACs, the Women’s Army Corps, were disparaged because Americans thought they would be too close to war and women should be protected from war. The ARC women flew under the radar because they were referred to as volunteers (even though it was a paying job), and as “girls” and because they primarily worked as nurses. Their carefully crafted image was as noncombatant helpers of soldiers, humanitarian aid workers, not fighters.
the American Red Cross worked hard to establish these women as safe and non-threatening to the social norms of the time. In so doing, it allowed them to gain access to battle and combat to an extent no American women had before.
The Allies and Germany had lost such extensive manpower during the First World War that women were allowed much more active military roles in the Second World War. Unlike American women, Soviet women were fighters on the front lines of the war.
“Janet and our jeep”
As it turned out, the ARC clubmobilers may have been the only American women in the war who actually shot guns. They were closer to the front lines of the war than any other women.
They also experienced many close escapes during their tour of duty with the Third Division.
Flo and her comrades got the chance to shoot in the freezing winter of 1944-45, during some of the hardest fighting of the war. In the Colmar Pocket outside of Neuf-Brisach they volunteered to go on patrol on the Rhine with an artillery and mortar FO (field operations) party. They also visited the mortar OP (observation post) and threw a smoke screen from the sand-bagged position.
Because the clubmobilers saw the soldiers and worked with them daily, the women were seen as part of the team. The men wanted to show them what it was like on the front line and the women wanted to be part of the action. Their comrades showed the women how to shoot.
Photos of her from that day show she was wearing the ARC regulation uniform—a skirt—while lying in a trench aiming a rifle.
“Ostheim, Alsace”
I don’t know whether Flo had ever shot a gun, but she was part of a hunting and fishing culture in the Northwest, so she may have. I have a picture of her posing with a deer carcass and holding a rifle taken after the war.
Flo was quoted in a newspaper article: “We all had a case of scratched knees, mud casts, and aching muscles after that.”
Still another time after they had sweated out the ride to the battalion CP (command post) the men refused to come out of their holes for donuts because of the heavy shelling.
It was during this trip while darting in and out of the smoke screen, that they went into a town that was ominously quiet. Recognizing the symptoms, they hastily left the place. That afternoon they found out the town had just fallen. It had been occupied by the Krauts during their visit.
When the Seventh Regiment was in Beblenheim, Alsace, the clubmobilers visited and fed a novel, so-called, “Doggie Rest Camp.” There two men at a time came in from their positions for a few minutes each to wash up, and put themselves in shape.
“Colmar”
According to the newspaper report, “The quartet is not now up to combat strength as Miss “Fritzie” Haugland, Berkeley, Calif. is hospitalized, but her three running mates are doing a fine job…. They are just what their patch proclaims—part of the outfit.”
The letter from another admirer Flo pasted on this page
Letters from Third Division friends confirm that the clubmobilers’ exploits were dangerous and put them in the line of fire.
On Jan 31, 1945, Lt. Col.Chaney wrote: Please don’t be as reckless as you have been, and stay out of range of shell fire.
Sincerely, Chaney
On March 5, 1945, Mel wrote:
Yes, I can well imagine your time is not your own, particularly when the Div. is getting their well-earned respite from the 88’s. Your own “combat time” was hardly a surprise to me. To me, you were the type that would do such a thing, just for the hell of it! Stick to your donuts, honey, and let others do the OP shift—I’d hate to lose such a good letter writer so soon—believe me!
After the war Larry Lattimore wrote:
Oh yes, Agolsheim, did you know that was the second big attack in which I had acted in the capacity of C.O.? Golly! But after things finally quieted down, I enjoyed that little town. That was the first time we ever had any fun on the Rhine River. About that big white goose—we did cook it, we did eat it, and it was good! Do wish Col. Chaney had let you stay long enough to have some. Do you remember that little courtyard in front of my C.P.? About 15 minutes after you left, three 120 MM mortar shells landed in the center of that courtyard. Lucky no one was hurt but those shells sure shot hell out of our rations. I shudder to think what would have happened had those shells come in while you were still there. C’est la Guerre!
The only photo on this page, of the shelled St. Die, was presumably taken by Flo. There is also a copy of the Third Division FrontLine newspaper which tells the story of a soldier from Seattle who killed several Nazis in hand-to-hand combat. Probably Oscar Amundson was someone she knew from her home state of Washington.
Photo: Dogface Soldier Collection
The FrontLine newspaper was started in World War II. Published weekly, it is still the official periodical for the Third Infantry Division.
Flo and crew attend officers party at Division Headquarters
My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 50
In January, 1945, the Third Division headquarters moved to the town of Sainte-Marie-Aux-Mines, known for its iron mines from the time of Roman occupation. This region of Alsace-Lorraine has been passed back and forth like a football between empires for centuries and is still characterized by a blend of German and French influences. After the 1870-71 Franco Prussian war, Alsace was annexed by Germany and became a part of the unified German Empire as a formal Reichsland, or imperial territory. After World War I the victorious Allies detached it from Germany and the province became part of the Third French Republic. Occupied and annexed by Germany during World War II, it was returned to France by the Allies at the end of the war.
I don’t see Flo in these pictures, so perhaps she was the photographer. She wrote that she was using a captured German camera so she may have had it at this point. There’s Liz sitting next to Gen. Iron Mike O’Daniel, who is also pictured dancing with two different women I don’t recognize. The other clubmobilers must have been there but their backs are turned to us.
“Total damage: one volkswagon and 1500 donuts,” so read unit B’s report of accident. Back of the simple statement, however, was more than meets the eye.
Sent to serve an artillery unit of the infantry division to which they are attached, Florence Wick and Janet Potts took off for the assignment in their captured German jeep or volkswagon.
Liz and Flo with the captured VW jeep. Later it became The Thing
Down the road they went, bounding happily along in the mud. The car ran smoothly while the girls served their coffee and then things began to happen.
“After covering part of the battalion,” Miss Wick reports, “our car caught on fire from a short in the wiring system, and a few minutes after we had gone out the only door in front that worked, the gas tank exploded and threw gasoline across the highway and held up traffic for several minutes.”
Nothing daunted, the girls thumbed a ride back to their donut shop, a little shaky, then started out again with more donuts and covered the balance of their day’s assignment.
After the war, Flo still drove Volkswagens
Flo developed a hatred for Germans; they killed her fiancé and many of her friends. But she wasn’t one of those war survivors who refused to drive German-made cars after the war. She hated krauts, but she loved their cars.
At the start of their service the clubmobilers were told they would be issued a 2 ½ ton truck retrofitted with a kitchen and equipment for making coffee and donuts. But they travelled through Italy and France before they finally got their truck in Germany. Until then the women had to scrounge vehicles in which to carry their donuts to the troops. They used any vehicle they could get their hands on; for a while it was a recommissioned ambulance. Later they used a captured German Volkswagen. It seems this was not the vehicle that blew up. Flo notes that they left the Volks behind when they crossed the Rhine into Germany.
Flo sent the photo to Wagen Wheels, the Volkswagen magazine, in 1973. She wrote to them:
“Leaning on their ‘donut delivery wagon’ are Liz Elliott of Manhattan, New York, and Flo Wick of Yakima, Washington, donut gals with the American Red Cross in World War II. They were attached to the famed Third Infantry Division which left from home base at Fort Lewis, Washington in 1942 for North Africa, thence to Sicily, Anzio, Rome, France and Germany, ending the war in Salzburg, Austria in 1945 and with more Congressional Medals of Honor than any other unit in World War II (a majority posthumous). Most famous Congressional Medal holder, Audie Murphy, later made his movie, “To Hell and Back” in the Yakima area.
“Their vehicle is an original People’s car (Volkswagen) which the German people bought, contributed to the Fatherland for the war with the promise that after the war (and victory, of course), their car would be returned to them.
“Fortunately, the American and British armies were able to spoil their plans and when this particular VW “German jeep” was captured in France in 1944 it was presented to the 3rd Division’s four Red Cross girls who converted it into a donut wagon in which they delivered Red Cross donuts to units of the combat division in all the best mountains and fields of France. Later, after crossing the Rhine into Germany and leaving the Volks behind, they had a more military vehicle in which to deliver donuts—a 2 ½ ton clubmobile truck.
“Flo Wick, Red Cross Clubmobile Captain, from Yakima, Washington is now Mrs. Carroll Martin of that city—mother of a daughter and three sons—daughter and eldest son college students. She is the happy owner of a VW Squareback in which she commutes from her home in Yakima’s West Valley to her office in Selah, some 15 miles, every day. There are two other VWs in the Martin family—one, another Squareback, used by the 19-year-old son, and the other, a red Beetle, operated by the youngest son, a junior in high school. None of these, however, can match the ugly little original for stamina and glamor. After all, not many VWs have “fought” on both sides of World War II!”
In 1944, while in France, the Third Division “liberated” one of the Wermacht’s famous Kubelwagens. A second incarnation was called The Thing.
Flo’s story was published in the 1973 Wagen Wheels magazine.
Flo had written her mother after Gene’s death that she planned to go to Paris to visit her sister Eve who worked as an Army nurse in a hospital there. She may have done so but there is no record of it in her diary or album. Her final three diary entries note that she attended a dance in Epinal on Nov. 1. Then she visited with boys from Gene’s company Nov. 11 and 12. If she traveled to Paris in the meantime, it can’t have been a happy trip, but she would have been glad for comfort from Eve and her ARC friend Janet Tyson, who traveled with her.
The last three entries in Flo’s diary
November 1944 in the Vosges mountains was cold and rainy, presaging a bad winter. In a letter to her mother published in her hometown paper, Flo celebrated the dogface soldiers and chastised Americans and the media in the States for thinking the war was near its end.
Florence Wick Writes
Miss Florence Wick, who is with the American Red Cross in France, writes to her mother:
“Things have slowed down considerably now though, and the boys are having a tough fight. The weather is cold here, and winter looks discouraging in that respect. It rains a lot, which makes it miserable, but we get used to it, and to wading in mud. Every once in a while the sun will come out, and that’s wonderful.
We are up quite far and are serving doughnuts every day, and keeping very busy. It is hard to see these boys come out of the lines dirty, cold, tired and old, but we do have a chance to spread a little cheer before they have to go back again. God bless the ‘dog faces’. They are winning this war mile by mile, and dying too. There is none like them. They are so sick of it all, but they are good soldiers, and everyone at home should appreciate what they are doing and pray for them all daily. They have a very hard fight ahead of them, and in winter, that’s tough.
People at home shouldn’t take the papers too literally–the war is definitely not over yet, and they had better carry on as they have been doing and not relax any effort. I wish they could see their own boys for just one day during combat, or eat the C ration these kids eat, and they wouldn’t talk of an early end to the war.”
Liz Elliott’s drawing illustrates a typical challenge for the clubmobile workers
tradeswomn musings 