Gen. Schmidt’s New Year’s party celebrates Third Division
My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 99
Ch. 100: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/03/03/front-line-publishes-special-edition/
Christmas & New Year’s 1945
Category: Third Infantry Division
Parachute Regiment Throws a Party
They celebrate Armistice Day in occupied Berlin
My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 98
While they were in Berlin for the football game between the Third Division and the 82nd Airborne, Flo and her comrades were invited to a party hosted by the 504th Parachute Regiment. To celebrate Armistice Day in occupied Berlin must have been especially poignant so soon after the end of this second world war.
Flo saved the wine list which listed no wine, but more cocktails than I knew existed. I recognize a few—Manhattan, Martini, Gin Fizz—but not most. I wonder if modern bartenders are still making any of these drinks. The list notes that champagne and beer are available, but there is no mention of wine, at least on this page. Maybe Americans were just not partial to wine in the year 1945.
Ch. 99: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/02/27/christmas-new-years-1945/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Ch. 97: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/02/19/images-of-war-torn-berlin/
English, Americans, Russians Party
The gathering took place in Kassel, Germany near the border between Soviet and U.S. occupation zones.
My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 94
Ch. 95: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/02/11/cagney-picks-up-murphy/
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
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.
Ch. 94: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/02/07/english-americans-russians-party/
Around Witzenhausen, Autumn 1945
My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 92
Witzenhausen, Germany, lay within the American occupation zone near the border with the Soviet zone, making it strategically important for intelligence and personnel transfers. In 1945, U.S. forces used the town during Operation Paperclip to evacuate German rocket scientists, including Wernher von Braun, from Bleicherode to prevent their capture by advancing Soviet troops, underscoring Witzenhausen’s role in the emerging Cold War. The town became a U.S. Army garrison, with military bases integrated into local life, a pattern seen across West Germany. This long American presence left lasting marks on language, consumer culture, and infrastructure, making Witzenhausen a microcosm of the broader U.S. occupation experience.
Ch. 93: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/02/03/the-us-and-ussr-sign-a-peaceful-pact/
Flo Goes to a Football Game
Third Division vs. 29th
Ch. 91 My Mother and Audie Murphy
The football games were part of a sports program organized to occupy restless American and Canadian troops awaiting discharge. In August 1945, the U.S. Army had staged the “GI Olympics” in Nuremberg, with high-ranking Russian observers in attendance. Events included a baseball game played in the former Hitler Youth Stadium—an unmistakably symbolic reclaiming of Nazi space. That same day, news of Japan’s surrender crackled over the loudspeakers, unleashing a roar that seemed to lift the roof as GIs tossed caps, coats, and red-white-and-blue programs into the air, hugging, kissing, and celebrating the war’s end. The festivities continued into the night with performances by Hal McIntyre at the amphitheater and Bob Hope at the Opera House, drawing thousands of cheering troops in a city freshly transformed from fascist spectacle to victorious release.
Ch. 92: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/01/30/around-witzenhausen-autumn-1945/
Friends at the 3rd QM
“Our home for two years”
Ch. 90 My Mother and Audie Murphy
Flo didn’t identify the soldiers on this page of the album. We see ARC clubmobiler Janet Potts in one picture and I’m guessing the man standing next to her is her fiance Jens Jenson. Flo is holding tightly onto one tall handsome man’s hand in several photos. Apparently she has a new boyfriend.
Ch. 91: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/01/26/flo-goes-to-a-football-game/
Austria During American Occupation
The Geműtlichkeit was riddled by flashes of bitterness
Ch. 88 My Mother and Audie Murphy
Flo pasted this page from an English language newspaper in her album. The story gives more details about what it was like for Americans and Austrians alike during the occupation. It mentions that the Red Cross had a club in the Mirabell casino in Salzburg and it’s a good bet Flo spent time there. She may have had to work serving coffee and donuts there.
Ice cream and jitterbugging
(In Vienna the Army) set up replicas of US drugstores where GI’s could take their Austrian girls for a soda (daily ice cream consumption of the US army and friends in Vienna now runs to 60,000 scoops.) Among venerable establishments, Broadwayish nightclubs sprouted. Racily named Esquire, Zebra, and Heideho, they offered in neat, cultural synthesis US style jazz and Viennese style wine instead of hard liquor.
Better than Vienna, GI’s liked Salzburg with its mossy stone and patinated copper. The Red Cross had moved into the Mirabell casino and the GI’s listened to symphony concerts in the Mirabell castle’s gardens. Then, oblivious to the echoes of Mozart’s minuets, they jitterbugged in the old, staid Hotel Pitter….
Nearby, built directly against the rough mountainside, was the Festspielhaus, through whose cavernous yard had boomed the theatrical damnation of Dr. Faust. The GI metamorphosis had turned it into a movie house nostalgically named the Roxy. And around Salzburg’s Bierjodelgasse (beer-yodel street) GI’s noisily scouted for beer gardens.
The favorite outdoor sport was chamois hunting in the mountains hovering over the city–where the game poacher has always been a highly respected member of society, and where one of Austria’s most important bits of national philosophy originated: If you hadn’t climbed up you wouldn’t have fallen down.
Krauts and cokes
Although Americans had made a better impression on Austrians than any other people in Europe, the Geműtlichkeit (good feeling) was riddled by flashes of bitterness. Usually broad minded, the Viennese grew jealous, called girls who fraternized with the chocolate-bearing GI’s “chocoladies.” The sprinkling (5%) of combat veterans among US troops called the Austrians just plain krauts only softer.
Last month soldiers in the US zone were booked for 32 assaults, 5 rapes, 3 disorderly conducts, and one house breaking. Cracked an MP officer: “Now that we’re getting quantity supplies of Coca-Cola maybe our boys will get back to behaving.” But most GI’s in Austria already had passing marks for behavior; and many were living up to their orientation slogan, “Soldier, you are helping Austria.” The first crop of Austrian babies fathered by helpful GI’s is sizable.
Ch. 89: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/01/18/report-on-the-occupation/
tradeswomn musings 