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/
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