Category: My mother Florence Wick

Stockholm: First Stop in Sweden

Flo Requests Compassionate Leave to Visit Relatives

My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 110

Sweden maintained official neutrality in the war but made pragmatic concessions to Nazi Germany—exporting crucial materials and allowing troop transits to occupied Norway and Finland—while also expanding its military, sheltering thousands of Jewish and political refugees, training Norwegian resistance fighters, and sharing intelligence with the Allies. As the war turned, Sweden steadily curtailed cooperation and nearly ended trade with Germany by late 1944. Historians debate this legacy: some see pragmatic neutrality that preserved independence and enabled humanitarian acts; others criticize compromises that prioritized economic interests over moral responsibility.

Flo and I traveled to Sweden and Norway in 1979, and we visited all the Swedish relatives still living that Flo saw in 1946. We saw Flo’s mother Gerda’s birthplace, and the towns Flo had visited. From talking to Norwegians I got the feeling then that they had not yet forgiven the Swedes for cooperating with the Nazis during their five-year occupation of Norway. In 1979 there were still those, like my mother, who remembered the war. Perhaps the younger generations no longer hold a grudge.

Request for Compassionate Leave
“This is the best place I’ve been in all Europe,” wrote Flo

Flo’s Photos of Stockholm February 1946

Changing guard at palace in snowstorm
Guards at the palace Midsommer 1979

Postcards of Stockholm

I’ll have the Smor, Brod & Varmrätt

Ch. 111: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/04/06/visiting-relatives-in-sweden/

Mary McAuliff Revealed

A Reader Helped Find More Infomation About the Clubmobiler

My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 109

Mary McAuliff  joined Captain Flo’s clubmobile crew at the end of 1945. Aside from the pictures in Flo’s album, I could find no information about her. Then a reader from Asturias, Spain reached out with more particulars. He sent some pictures and news stories, and also details about his research.

Mary McAuliff in the clubmobile. Photo: Flo Wick

Mary McAuliff, born August 27, 1920, was from Brooklyn, New York. Her father was a doctor. She had departed for England in February, 1945. She sailed back to the U.S. from Le Havre, France arriving May 28, 1946. She was married in 1947 to William Robert Palmer at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Flatbush. They had two daughters. William died in 1959. Mary died at 99 in 2019.

Most clubmobile and WWII American Red Cross archives were destroyed in a fire. The only accessible list of clubmobilers is in the book The ARC in the Storm, by Marjorie Lee Morgan, but the book does not include all the women. I learned that the best way to find the clubmobilers not listed in the book is from ships manifests. Here are the passenger lists that included Mary and Flo.

Mary’s is the last name on the list, which tells date of birth and address
Here is the passenger list from Flo’s ship. She is fourth from bottom

Ch. 110: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/04/04/stockholm-first-stop-in-sweden/

At the 7th Infantry House

Hershfield Germany

My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 105

Flo did a good job of identifying the people in pictures on this page in her album relaxing at the 7th Infantry house. I’ve no idea where the child came from.

Maj. Win Whall (Kent WA)
Jens and Janet
Lt. Col (CP) Ramsey
Maj. Kenneth Wallace
Whose child is this?
Flo and Maj. Wallace
Lt. Col. Ralph Flynn, 3rd Div, 7th Inf.

Flo pasted some ephemera on this page which includes a newspaper story about her receipt of an award. Flo was later awarded a bronze star. This is an award called a service star. The story reads: Miss Florence Wick of Yakima, who served with the American Red Cross in the European war theatre, has received the presidential citation ribbon with four bronze battle stars on the European theatre of war ribbon for her service with a division at the front. She is now in Germany and hopes she will be able to come home by Christmas.

Flo’s 3rd Div. officers club membership card 
Army exchange ration card
What’s the difference between L. soap and T. soap?
In February 1945 the clubmobilers were issued new uniforms
This currency was issued by the Allied Military Government during the occupation, replacing the German Reichsmark. It was used for transactions in the occupied zones of Germany and was a part of the effort to stabilize the economy and control inflation after the collapse of the Nazi regime. Fünfzig Pfennig means fifty pfennigs in German. AI says this type of currency is collectible and significant in the context of post-war German history.

Ch. 106: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/03/23/clubmobiling-in-occupied-germany-1946/

Traveling in Switzerland

Flo meets up with some GI buddies on their Swiss leave

My Mother and Audie Murpy Ch. 104

Visiting Ascona Switzerland on the Italian border
Shrine at Sacred Mountain
“CP” Ramsey and Danny Wickersham on their Swiss leave
Lee Hanson

Ch. 105: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/03/19/at-the-7th-infantry-house/

Christmas & New Year’s 1945

Gen. Schmidt’s New Year’s party celebrates Third Division

My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 99

The card shows the route of the 3rd Division from Africa to Germany
Third Infantry Division New Year’s party
Flo captioned this “Blackmail material”
Flo didn’t ID these guys
General Schmidt hosted the party
Christmas ‘C’ company 30th Infantry

Ch. 100: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/03/03/front-line-publishes-special-edition/

Images of War-Torn Berlin

Flo and comrades get a look at the German capital

My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 97

By the end of World War II, Berlin was no longer a city so much as a vast field of ruins. After enduring 363 air raids and a final, catastrophic ground assault, the German capital lay shattered—famously described by its own residents as a heap of rubble. Street by street, block by block, the urban fabric had been torn apart, leaving behind a landscape of collapsed buildings, twisted steel, and drifting ash.

Flo at the Brandenburg Gate, built in 1791. It would soon be incorporated into the Berlin Wall, dividing the city into East and West sectors during the Cold War.

Nearly 80 percent of Berlin’s city center had been destroyed. Across the wider metropolis, some 600,000 apartments were reduced to dust and broken brick. Infrastructure collapsed alongside homes: in the final days of fighting, 128 of the city’s 226 bridges were blown apart, a quarter of the subway system was deliberately flooded, and running water, electricity, and rail transport virtually ceased to function. Iconic landmarks suffered the same fate as ordinary neighborhoods. The Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate were battered by artillery and close-quarters combat, while along the grand boulevard Unter den Linden, only 16 of its 64 buildings remained standing.

Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and the city center

The human cost was staggering. Civilian deaths from bombing raids alone are estimated at between 20,000 and 50,000. During the final Battle of Berlin, another 125,000 civilians are believed to have died amid the chaos of street fighting, shelling, and firestorms. At least 450,000 people were left homeless, and the city’s population collapsed from 4.3 million in 1939 to just 2.8 million by the war’s end—a mass exodus of refugees, evacuees, and the dead.

All photos from Flo’s album

Unlike many cities that later erased the physical traces of war, Berlin chose to preserve parts of its devastation as visible memory. Bullet holes and shrapnel scars still mark walls in districts like Mitte and Charlottenburg. The shattered spire of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church stands deliberately unrepaired, a permanent anti-war monument rising from the city center. Elsewhere, mountains of rubble were piled into artificial hills—Teufelsberg and Volkspark Humboldthain—turning the wreckage of war into silent landmarks.

Some monuments survived

These images of destruction are not only records of ruin. They are reminders of the scale of collapse, the human suffering beneath the debris, and the deliberate choice to remember, rather than forget, what war reduced Berlin to in 1945.

The grand boulevard of Unter den Linden
The Berlin Cathedral
Major Dan Wickersham in the US zone

Ch. 98: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/02/23/parachute-regiment-throws-a-party/

To Berlin for a Football Game

Mary McAuliffe Joins the ARC Crew

My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 96

By command of Gen. Schmidt permission to attend a football game in Berlin
Love the car.
Mary McAuliffe, ARC; Gen. Schmidt; Flo Wick
Having a little snack before taking off. Flo and Mary
No fair getting photographed while eating!
Mary McAuliffe, Major Wickersham, Lt. Col. Ramsey
Gen. Schmidt saw them off.
The Third Division played the 82nd Airborne at Hitler’s Olympic stadium Nov. 11, 1945.
The brass section
Attention! The gigantic stadium, built for the 1936 Olympics, survived the bombings.

Ch. 97: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/02/19/images-of-war-torn-berlin/

The US and USSR Sign a Peaceful Pact

The agreement marked a territorial change in the occupied zones

My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 93

The meeting took place at the Russian and American liaison headquarters in Wanfried.

Flo attended the historic Russian–American conference in Wanfried, Germany, where the Wanfried Agreement was signed on September 17, 1945. The agreement was a post–World War II territorial exchange between U.S. and Soviet occupation authorities, finalized in English and Russian, to resolve a logistical problem along the Bebra–Göttingen railway. A roughly 2.7-mile stretch of this crucial rail line briefly crossed into the Soviet zone near Wanfried, disrupting traffic vital to U.S. connections between southern Germany and the American-controlled port of Bremerhaven. To secure uninterrupted U.S. control of the line, two villages in Soviet-occupied Thuringia were exchanged for five villages in American-occupied Hesse. The agreement, informally known as the “Whisky-Vodka Line,” stands out as a rare, peaceful, and highly localized negotiation between the two superpowers in the tense early months of the occupation.

Figuring out the new borders between occupations zones
Flo’s head sticks out on the left. It looks like there was one other female at the table. At least one participant wore a gun to lunch.
Flo sitting next to Russian regimental CO. Col. Michael Paschchenko. Flo told me she had a big crush on this handsome guy but neither spoke the other’s language.
Agreement signed! Russian general and Gen. Sexton toast.

Ch. 94: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/02/07/english-americans-russians-party/

A Visit to Stratford-upon-Avon

Flo gets to see some Shakespeare too

Ch. 84 My Mother and Audie Murphy

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 Festival
Stratford-on-Avon Red Cross club. Photos from Flo’s album
Shakespeare’s house
Flo didn’t identify this woman, her host at the Red Cross club
Sailing 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.

Ch. 85: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/01/04/audie-murphy-comes-home/

Seeing the Sights in London

“Have walked holes in my feet”

Ch. 83: My Mother and Audie Murphy

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 Wick
Parliament
Tower of London
Tower of London
St. Paul’s Cathedral
The wax museum
Government 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.

Ch. 84: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/01/01/a-visit-to-stratford-on-avon/