He was a war hero—THE most decorated hero of World War Two—and that was his epithet, even as he became a Hollywood movie star with more than 40 movies to his credit.
What no one, and especially the US military, wanted to talk about was the degradation of his life because of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and, I would argue, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Audie Murphy survived the war but not his invisible injuries.
To understand Audie Murphy’s post-war life, I’ve created a timeline that will help me explore the details in future posts.
Audie Murphy Post-War Timeline
Flo’s famous picture of Audie when he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in the field May 12, 1945
On this page of her album Flo attached icons from Northwest and United Airlines, pictures of herself and her mother at their home in Yakima and several newspaper articles.
We Think Spokane is where Our Parents Met
Our parents told us kids that they met in the Spokane airport. They said Flo was ill and Carroll, our dad, helped her. But we never learned when this happened. My theory is that it was in April, 1946 when Flo flew back from Washington DC where she had been debriefed by the Red Cross. The United Airlines map on this page shows the flight going to Spokane, where she must have had to transfer to Northwest Airlines for the final leg to Yakima. Flo and Carroll carried on their relationship in Seattle where she moved in the fall of 1946. She worked for the publisher of the Seattle Times as a secretary. He worked at a gas station which was on her way as she walked to work. They married in November, 1947 and moved to Yakima.
The page from Flo’s album
Here are some excerpts and quotes from the news stories. It’s interesting that all the newspaper stories refer to Flo as a girl. One of the second wave feminist movement’s demands was that media stop infantilizing women. She was 32 when she returned from Europe.
Awarded the French Fourragère
“One Yakima girl is entitled to wear the fourragère awarded by France for distinguished service by an army unit. Miss Florence Wick as one of the four Red Cross girls attached to the Third Division was officially given the right to wear the coveted fourragère in full uniform. Certainly no one who knows of Miss Wick‘s work, which often led her to the firing line, will doubt in the least her right to the emblem of honor. Her friends are certain she was as gallant a soldier as any of her brothers in arms.”
Surprised at American Apathy
“Miss Florence Wick, who recently returned from overseas Red Cross service, is back home after a short stay in Seattle. Miss Wick is following the news of overseas needs with great interest but has no great faith of permanent peace in Europe under present conditions. She is, also, somewhat surprised at the seeming apathy with which world affairs are considered by most persons.”
Visited Families
She visited the town of Walla Walla to see the parents of two men that she was stationed with in Germany. (The men) are stationed at Bad Wildungen, and are expected to remain in Germany until late summer.
She Spoke Publicly About the War
She spoke to the Lions Club luncheon in the Commercial Hotel about “the combat history of the third infantry division that had the most casualties and fought the most battles. She celebrated the fall of Rome from a Roman villa amidst flabbergasted and excited Italians and VE day in the Salzburg Castle, where Hitler and Mussolini met near Brunner Pass. Describing the food situation on the continent as tragic when she left six weeks ago, Miss Wick told of people starving and of shelves bare of bread, soap, fat, oils, and sweets. The only food available, she said, was through the black market with a good meal costing $25 in Paris. Sweden and Belgium seem to have plenty, she pointed out, but the remainder of Europe is starving.”
She Stopped in DC to be Cleared
“She arrived Tuesday in New York. She telephoned her mother that she will go to Washington DC to be cleared by the Red Cross before leaving for her home here. She visited relatives in Sweden. 20 relatives from different parts of Sweden attended a reunion upon her arrival.”
Yakima Girl Returns With Four Battle Stars on Dress
“Miss Wick served in artillery range during Voge mountains fight. The slender vivacious, former Yakima business girl was one of four Red Cross workers who drove a clubmobile and served coffee and as many as 6000 donuts a day to weary dog faces and artillery men. They were with the rear echelon, lived in tents and were able to pack, take down their tents and move in 20 minutes when the army was on the go. Six GIs, battle fatigue cases, made the donuts which the four girls distributed.”
The Only Division with a Presidential Citation
“We have lots of mosts in our division,” says Miss Wick, whose pride in the division is tremendous. “We even had the most casualties.” She added that is to be expected because the units were in some of the toughest fighting. “We were the only infantry division to have a presidential citation for the whole division.”
On V-E Day Sadness Mixed with Rejoicing
Miss Wick says (V-E Day) was quite exciting, of course, but “I don’t believe there was one person there who wasn’t thinking of the ones who weren’t there, the ones who made the victory possible. There was sadness mixed with rejoicing.”
What Was Germany Fighting For?
“’The German people had so much more than the other people in Europe, it made the Americans wonder what the Germans were fighting for.’ The Yakima girl says she earnestly believes all the Germans should be held morally responsible for the war. They certainly do not feel this, she says. They think they are just unfortunate to have lost the war. Miss Wick visited Dachau prison and Landsberg, where the Jewish concentration camp was and says stories of these horrors are not exaggerated.
“Switzerland and her mother‘s native Sweden, which Miss Wick visited on leave after hostility ceased, she found peaceful and beautiful, strangely so after the rubble and ruin of Italy, Germany, and France and the damage in England from the blitz. “Among Miss Wick‘s most interesting souvenirs is a Gestapo camera, a machine about 2 1/2 inches long and an inch high and an inch wide. She has not yet decided upon her future plans although she could go either to Europe or the Pacific area with the war department if she wishes.”
Flo sailed into New York City at the end of March 1946, and she partook of as much culture as she could in a few short days. She saved the playbills from several shows. She heard music at Carnegie Hall, saw the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at the City Center of Music and Drama, and caught a play at the Cort on Broadway.
I love this ad! Flo was a career girl.Carnegie Hall lineup
She connected with a friend, Dr. Edward Dunlap, who was starting his medical practice at New York Hospital, and she included his announcement, a picture of the hospital, and a picture of him. He could have been someone she knew during the war, but there are no other pictures or mentions of him in the album.
Dr. Eddie, his announcement, and the New York Hospital on East 68th Street.
Did she see her lesbian girlfriend, Edna Lauterbach, while in New York? Probably, but there’s no mention of “Eddie.” They had seen a show together when Flo visited in 1941, so it’s likely they reconnected — or maybe their friendship had ended by this time. Edna was definitely smitten with Flo, and I can imagine that Flo may have felt uncomfortable in the situation. I wrote about their relationship after discovering love letters from Eddie saved in another scrapbook. https://mollymartin.blog/2016/09/03/my-mothers-lesbian-affair/
In Sweden, afternoon coffee is a daily ritual, and my grandmother Gerda carried the tradition with her to America. We often joined her at her tiny house in Yakima and later at her apartment in a senior housing complex across from the Presbyterian church.
As Grandma arranged homemade butter cookies on her little table and poured coffee into delicate cups, she reminisced about sailing into New York Harbor and seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time in 1905. She had been herded toward the line marked Aliens. The statue, rising above the harbor, filled her with emotion. Forty-four years later, after returning from a visit to Sweden, she saw it again. This time she joined the line marked American Citizens.
Flo on the deck of the USAT George Washington crossing the Atlantic
For Gerda, the Statue of Liberty symbolized America’s welcome to immigrants.
“I could only think, This time I’m a citizen,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.
My mother, Flo, sailed into New York Harbor in 1946 as she returned from Europe after the war. For her, the statue carried different memories. It reminded her of enormous loss—her fiancé and many friends had been killed—but also of pride. She and her generation had fought fascism and prevailed.
“When I saw the Statue of Liberty, I thought about all the people who died in that war,” Flo said. “The Americans were fighting for democracy.”
Ship dinner menu for March 25, 1946
Her face crumpled. A tear rolled down her cheek. Soon both my mother and grandmother were crying. To me, it seemed almost hysterical.
Flo loved history and liked to imagine the future.
“Maybe by the turn of the twenty-first century,” she sniffled, “war will be history.”
Lounging on deck. It took the Geo Washington about ten days to sail from France to NYC
Both women were unabashed patriots. Flo flew the American flag every Fourth of July, though by the early 1970s she had also become deeply troubled by America’s conduct in Vietnam. Gerda proudly displayed both the American flag and the blue-and-yellow Swedish flag in her home. She liked to say that she had voted in every election open to women since becoming a citizen.
I was not a flag waver. I was a flag burner—metaphorically. I never actually set fire to a flag, but my brother and I once cut up an American flag to sew a shirt. It was illegal then; today it might pass as a right-wing fashion statement. To me the flag represented a country whose foreign policy included overthrowing democratically elected governments, assassinating foreign leaders, and installing compliant dictators.
A musician entertains the crowd of GIs on deck
I had never seen my grandmother cry before, but I had often seen my mother cry, usually over war. During the Vietnam War she would call me in tears, saying her generation had failed to end war and now the responsibility belonged to mine. She carried the suffering of the world on her shoulders.
I vowed never to be like her. I wouldn’t cry. Crying was weakness—or so the culture taught me. Men didn’t cry, and men held the power. I wanted to be like them.
That afternoon, what struck me as sentimental nostalgia repelled me. I had never sailed into New York Harbor and never would. When I looked at the Statue of Liberty, I didn’t see freedom. I saw the thousands of Southeast Asians killed in a war my country was waging, the millions of tons of bombs dropped on civilians, villages burned, children scarred by napalm.
A finger points to the sign on shore reading “Welcome Home. Well Done.”
Years later, I began to wonder whether my mother’s extraordinary empathy exacted a physical toll. She was repeatedly hospitalized with severe asthma attacks. The disease eventually killed her at seventy.
Later still, I came to believe that Flo had probably returned from the war with what we now recognize as PTSD. The government had little interest in acknowledging psychological trauma, even among combat veterans, much less civilian war workers like my mother.
In NY harbor the Transportation Corps sign reads “Welcome Home.”
Like so many Boomers, I had grown up with a parent emotionally wounded by war.
At the time, though, I understood none of that.
All I felt was embarrassment at her tears.
The Statue of Liberty had meant hope to my grandmother, sacrifice to my mother, and hypocrisy to me. It took me a while to understand that all three meanings could be true at once.
Now, when I see the statue and read the Emma Lazarus poem, I’m the one who’s crying. I still cry for the people we kill in endless needless wars, for the immigrats we imprison, murder and deport, and I cry for our democracy and all that we have lost.
Photo by Tom Coe on UnsplashThe famous inscription mounted inside the statue
Flo Boards the USAT George Washington at port of Le Havre
Chapter 115 My Mother and Audie Murphy
Flo and her cohort of Red Cross workers and G.I.s boarded the USAT George Washington at the port of Le Havre, France for the trip to New York. The ship was commissioned by the US Navy for troop transport in both the first and second world wars.
Orders. Flo was hoping to accompany her friend Janet Tyson on the ship home but it appears they missed each other. Flo wanted to visit relatives in Sweden first.Waiting to board the ship homeAt the port of Le Havre where most US ships departed fromLifeboat on the USAT George Washington“Nissen huts at Le Havre”Many flags. Photos by Flo Wick
An ocean liner built in 1908 for the Bremen-based North German Lloyd, at that time the George Washington was the largest German-built steamship and the third-largest ship in the world. Built to emphasize comfort over speed, she was sumptuously appointed in her first-class passenger areas and could carry a total of 2,900 passengers. Intended for Bremen to New York passenger service, the ship was named after the first president of the United States as a way to make the ship more appealing to immigrants, who then made up the majority of transatlantic passengers and believed formalities on arrival would be easier on a ship with an American name. After a fire, the ship was sold for scrap in 1951.
Chapter 114: Continuing the story of My Mother and Audie Murphy
On March 6, 1946, my mother, Florence Wick, received travel orders to go to Paris from Kassel Germany by rail for the purpose of returning to the U.S. She had been in Europe almost two years working as a Red Cross “donut girl.” She must have been delighted to be going home, and also to have the opportunity to visit Paris one last time. It would indeed be the last time she saw Paris.
Travel orders March 6, 1946
This is what as a child I remember Flo telling me about Paris. The fragrance on the overcrowded trams overwhelmed; people doused themselves with perfume to cover body odor. The public urinals were everywhere, except they were only for men. There was no place for women to relieve themselves. What were women supposed to do? she wondered.
One of the ubiquitous pissoirs. Photo: The Guardian
In the Louvre she got up close enough to the Mona Lisa to see that the painting was surprisingly small and covered with tiny cracks. She also said the only French most American soldiers learned was coucher avec moi, or “sleep with me”, probably asked as a question. But in general she was smitten with the romantic city.
She went to the Moulin Rouge and Tabarin where women danced bare-breasted. She visited famous museums. She saw fashion shows. And she recorded it all in her WWII album. She included pages from LIFE magazine’s feature about post-war Paris.
Paris was occupied by Nazi Germany from June 14, 1940, until its liberation on August 25, 1944. The occupation was marked by strict regulations, food rationing, and significant hardships for the civilian population, including the persecution of Jews.
Despite the oppressive conditions, a network of resistance groups emerged, engaging in acts of defiance against the occupiers. The liberation of Paris began on August 19, 1944, with an uprising led by the French Resistance and the Communist Party, culminating in the city’s liberation by Allied forces on August 25, 1944. This marked a significant turning point in the war and the end of the Nazi regime’s control over the city. To read more, I recommend the book The Liberation of Paris by Jean Edward Smith.
It Belongs Also to Parisians: Photographs for LIFE by Edward Clark Quoting from LIFE:“Paris, the grand courtesan of cities, is all things to all men, and this may be one reason why American soldiers and Parisians have been getting along so badly since World War II. The G.I. grew up in a generation when Paris to most Americans was a cheerful bawd: the Paris of Maxim‘s, the Ritz bar, the Moulin Rouge, the Scheherezade, and Boeuf sur le Toit, the Folies Bergéres, long-haired Montparnasse, feelthy pictures, the Quatz’ Arts Ball, and the Sphinx. To the young man who had seen this Paris in pictures who had read about it in Fitzgerald and Hemmingway, who had overheard wise conversations between his father and his uncle Tom, the Paris in which he found himself these last two winters was a grim and depressing disappointment. He found people who were cold, hungry, confused and tired–above all tired–who were too busy keeping themselves alive to bother much about entertaining him, who, because they were proud and sensitive to the shame through which their country had passed, resented his slurs and his swagger. And the G.I., in turn, felt cheated. Where was the Paris he had heard about? Where were the naked women?”
Paris was the capital of the fashion world. The industry started to come back to life in 1945 after the war. There was one fashion show but too little fabric. Then in 1946 the shows were bigger and better with a wider choice of fabrics. Flo attended several fashion shows and included stories about them in her album. It’s interesting to learn about the fashion industry scene right after the war. Paris was worried that it might move to the U.S. where it had moved during the German occupation.
Paris Makes Fashion Comeback
Quoting from LIFE magazine:“The haute couture of Paris, in a do or die bid for fashion leadership of the world, last month held its first complete fashion showings in seven years. During the fortnight in which the season reached its peak fashion, starved Parisians, important customers and a few foreign buyers were dashing to half a dozen shows a day from Lelong to Maggy Rouff to Rochas to the new wonder boys like Fath and Balmain.
The showings brought back the elegance of years that seemed long past. There were champagne and delicacies and soft music. French princesses came as did the Duchess of Windsor and the King of Egypt’s sister. What they saw made the experts feel that Paris had successfully regained the world fashioned leadership, which had passed by default during the war to the U.S. An analysis of the portfolio of photographs by LIFE‘s Nina Leen, first to reach the U.S., shows that the general trend is away from the “woman-cut-in-two” look toward a better proportioned silhouette. The new clothes follow body contours. Daytime skirts are a little longer and less full. Jackets dip in back. Shoulders are more natural. In afternoon and evening dresses the deep-cut fronts and bared shoulders (“bathtub decolletages”) reveal almost as much bosom as Restoration fashions. Reversing itself, Paris this year showed more colors and patterns than solid blacks. The luxury and glitter of the Paris showings made a strange contrast with the arrival in Washington of Léon Blum to beg a $2 billion loan. But, actually, the fashion export business is a big item in France’s trade. Last week all Frenchmen hoped that the prodigal shows would pay off in orders from all over the world, especially the U.S.”
Corduroy: A lowly, rugged fabric is used in new and elegant Paris styles
From LIFE:“For the past hundred years corduroy has been the sturdy, dependable fabric for work clothes. From the farms of Missouri to the vineyards of France, farmer and peasant have chosen it for its warmth and ruggedness. Made of cotton with raised ridges, it is almost indestructible. Like the tread on a tire, the ridges, which are called wales, protect the basic fabric against wear and tear. In the early 20s U.S. college boys began to wear slacks of corduroy and later college girls adopted it for jackets and skirts. But it retained its lowly character.
This spring the French haute couture took a good look at corduroy and discovered it offers more than wearability. It also has beauty. It has a velvetlike pile and good design possibilities in its ridges. Furthermore Cosserat et Cie., which since 1850 has been making all the corduroy in France, this year came out with bright new pinks, yellows and greens. As a result corduroy has now become a fabric for elegant Parisian clothes.”
Where the correspondents hung out
From the LIFE caption:The Scribe Hotel barroom is the headquarters and the hangout of correspondents in France. Here artist Floyd Davis found old acquaintances of the Time and LIFE European staff. At the table in center the New Yorker’s Janet Flanner, broadcaster William Shirer, and novelist Ernest Hemingway. Every other day, the bar served brandy, and then the place was crowded with correspondents who drank the brandy, they insisted, just to keep warm. Correspondents rushed out to the front to get stories. Disheveled correspondents rushed back from the front to file their stories. At any time, reporters could be heard complaining about sensors, brass hats, editors.
For the past year and a half, I’ve been tracing the life of my mother, Florence Wick, her service as a Red Cross clubmobiler, and her improbable intersection with the war hero Audie Murphy. Flo made a huge scrapbook after the war and I’ve been using that and her war diary to tell the story. I’m also telling Audie Murphy’s story using his autobiography To Hell and Back.
I’m pausing now to catch my breath, but the story is far from over.
45th Infantry Div. patch5th Army patch10th mountain division.Tenth Corps patchFlo’s dog tag30th Infantry insignia15th Infantry badge7th inf Reg. Wiling and Able
Patches and insignia of some of the combat groups Flo served with, along with her dogtag, tacked onto the inside covers of her scrapbook
To recap:
In May 1944, Flo joined the American Red Cross Clubmobile program and sailed for Naples on a hospital ship. A month later, she stood in the streets of Rome as it was liberated, alongside General Mark Clark. By high summer, she was at an army camp near Pozzuoli, leading a four-woman crew, serving doughnuts and coffee to soldiers on the brink of the invasion of southern France.
By late August, they were in France, chasing a front that refused to hold still. Somewhere in that rush, Flo fell in love—with a lieutenant named Gene. They planned to marry in October. A mortar shell ended that future before it began.
Winter came hard—1944 into ’45—frigid, dangerous, unrelenting. Flo and her crew followed the Third Infantry Division through France, often within earshot of the guns. It was here she handed coffee and doughnuts to a young soldier named Audie Murphy—not yet a legend, but already carrying the weight of one.
He would become the most decorated American soldier of World War II. Flo, meanwhile, captured something just as lasting: she took the only photograph of Murphy at a field awards ceremony. The photo became a famous icon.
In January, the division crossed the Rhine and drove into Germany. Flo kept working—serving men rotating through rest camps, offering small comforts in a landscape torn apart. At the war’s end, she witnessed the liberation of Dachau concentration camp and Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s alpine retreat.
She stayed on through the occupation, stationed in Austria and Germany. When she could, she traveled—Switzerland, England, German cities and towns, Brussels, Copenhagen, Paris—brief glimpses of a world trying to knit itself back together. She ended her stay with a visit to relatives in Sweden.
And that’s where we are now.
There is still much to tell. Flo’s scrapbook is bursting with post-war miscellany. How did Flo and Audie adjust to peacetime back in the USA? How did the war affect them and those who fought in combat? How did Audie Murphy become a movie star?
I’ll come back to the rest—after a little rest of my own.
Flo got leave to visit Swedish relatives in Feb 1946. She and I returned in 1979. The family grave at LugnåsWe visited it in 1979.Church and cemetery at Lugnås. The church was built in the 12th century.Grandma’s family home at Stora MyranIt was still there when we visited in 1979.“Skiing (?) in Lugnås”The farm at Stora Myran
Lidköping
Flo visited cousin Karin in Lidköping and we saw her again in 1979. She was a lesbian who adopted her younger caregiver. They traveled the world together.
Vener Canal, LidköpingTown square Lidköping. “500 years old in 1946”Still there 1979. Smokestacks are gone.Flo and I with her first cousins Greta and Elizabeth, Ingebritt and son“Land of the midnight sun”
Our Swedish relatives live near the southern shores of the two great lakes, Vänern and Vättern. Our grandmother, Gerda, grew up on a farm called Stora Myran, near the village of Lugnås.
Gerda’s father, Lars Persson (d: 1910) was first married to Sara Jonsdotter, who died in 1871. His second wife was Sara Nyberg (d: 1924). Altogether they had 16 children, and you can see why I have trouble keeping track of them all. Some died and most, including Gerda, emigrated to the US. Two daughters, Julia and Amalia, stayed in Sweden.
Luggage tags from Flo’s travels in SwedenThe Swedes gathered in Mariestad to welcome FloFlo captioned these pictures “Mariestad, Sweden (Aunt Amalia’s home)”. This is where she stayed while visiting the relatives.Sometimes they traveled by ski. Cool contraption to replace poles, maybe like training wheels?Aunt Amalia (I think), one of the two daughters who did not emigrateCousin Britta threw a party and made a cake that says Welcome FlorenceCake and coffee reprise. Cousin Ingabritt, Molly and Flo visiting in Jönköping, 1979. Flo died four years later in 1983.
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 StockholmFebruary 1946
Changing guard at palace in snowstormGuards at the palace Midsommer 1979
tradeswomn musings 