Tag: post war

London Leave

Flo travels to Paris in C-47 with kraut generals

My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 83

In June Flo got a seven-day leave to travel to the UK. In a postcard dated June 11, 1945 she wrote her mother that she flew from Austria to Paris on a C-47. On the plane she photographed “kraut generals, fellow passengers en route to prison.” 

Flo stopped in Paris for a couple of days to visit her sister Eve who was still working as a nurse at an army hospital there. Then she traveled to London by boat.

On the C-47, Flo captioned this picture “Kraut generals, fellow passengers en route to prison.”
Flo’s postcard to her mother on her birthday. Bob is Flo’s sister Eve’s husband, also in the military and stationed in England.
Flo’s sister, Eve, with the C.O. of the 203rd general hospital in Paris.
Flo and her sister Eve who worked as a nurse at the 203rd general hospital in Paris
London welcomes the US Armed Forces
From the postcard back: American Red Cross Rainbow Corner, whose doors never close (opened Nov. 11, 1942) welcomes and serves the American Forces with food, entertainment, information, tours and hospitality. Rainbow Corner is the meeting place of Americans in England.

Red Cross Service Clubs

During WWII in England, the American Red Cross ran numerous “Service Clubs” and “Aeroclubs,” like the famous Rainbow Corner Club in London, serving millions of GIs with food, lodging, and recreation, with numbers constantly changing as troops arrived and departed, but focusing on large operations near bases.

London was the biggest city in the world

At the beginning of the war in 1939, London was the largest city in the world, with 8.2 million inhabitants. It was the capital not just for the United Kingdom, but for the entire British Empire. London was central to the British war effort.