World War II Love Stories

by Gill Paul

  Life got considerably brighter for Bob in August 1944 when a cheerful, very attractive Californian girl came to join the American Red Cross in Southampton. Every morning Rosie Langheldt popped in to his office to find out about ships going in and out that day, and they always exchanged a bit of banter before she went on her way. But he didn’t dare ask her out. How could he? His situation was far too complicated.

  Volunteering for the ARC

  Rosie had grown up in Berkeley, California, with her parents and her sister, Marty. When America entered World War II, she had been working in a luxury goods store selling mink coats and designer shoes, but that felt wrong when men and women were losing their lives overseas. She tried to volunteer for the American Red Cross only to be told that she had to be 25 years old; so she waited and, in due course, on May 4, 1944, a letter arrived telling her she could report for duty. She might have been sent anywhere in the world—the girls weren’t told where they were heading even after setting sail from New York—but she arrived in London, England, on July 21st to be greeted by the sirens that meant a V-2 rocket alert. Out of the train window she watched a little plane in the sky “trailing a smoky fiery tail” and counted to ten before there followed an explosion that made her ears ring.

  SECRET HARBORS

  One of the problems the Allies faced when planning their landing on the European mainland was that the Germans had heavy defenses in all the Channel ports. So they decided to build floating harbors, known as Mulberries, in Britain and tow them to France. Mulberries were made of hollow concrete breakwaters with floating steel roads on which military vehicles could drive to the shore, and adjustable legs that would be anchored into the seabed. Most work on Mulberries was done in top secrecy in the port of Southampton, the majority of workers having no idea what they were making. Two Mulberries were towed across the Channel on June 9th; one was destroyed in a storm, but over the next ten months the other was used to land half a million vehicles, 2.5 million men, and 4 million tons of supplies at Arromanches in Normandy.

  October 23, 1944: a large truck driving over a Mulberry onto Omaha beach.

  Wartime London was a culture shock. After a couple of weeks, Rosie wrote home saying, “The food so far is fair to dreadful,” and requesting that her parents send a food parcel. By the time she got back to her lodgings in the evening there was often no hot water for a bath, and they had to feed coins into a meter to get half an hour of heat. They heard the scratching of rats at night and found the weather depressing even in summer, but right from the start she loved the work and all the people she met through it.

  Rosie was relocated to Southampton, where she was trained to drive large vans known as Clubmobiles, which had side panels that could be lifted, allowing the girls to serve hot coffee and donuts to the troops disembarking or setting out. She and her friends would chat with the men, trying to lift their spirits and soothe frayed nerves, and she was obviously good at it because by Christmas 1944 she had been promoted to captain and in August 1945 she was made a supervisor. The job had its difficult aspects: she waved farewell to the crew of SS Leopoldville on December 23, 1944, and was devastated to hear the next day that it had been sunk in the Channel with the loss of 763 lives. Also, during that damp, cold English winter she succumbed to pneumonia, but carried on working because she knew how much she was needed.

  Autumn 1944: Rosie and her best friend Ski in a Clubmobile they called “The Joker.” They served their coffee and donuts through a hatch in the back.

  Rosie (center left) watches the “Millionth Yank Ceremony” at Southampton Docks, October 1944. The soldier in question, a private from Pennsylvania, was overwhelmed by the fuss made of him.

  During their training, all the American Red Cross girls had been warned about the “pitfalls and perils” they might face working in places where there were several hundred men to each woman. Nevertheless, Rosie’s best friend Isabel (known as Ski) and many other girls fell for the men they were dating. Rosie was the sensible one who advised them to wait till after the war and then invite the men home before making a decision. “If it’s really love, it will last,” she said sagely. It’s not that she didn’t date—she loved dancing, and was always happy for the chance of a fun night out—but she made it clear to all the men that she wasn’t interested in anything serious.

  “I filed him mentally under ‘fine type’—some woman is very lucky.”

  When she first met Bob Norwalk, she thought, “He’s a person you can’t help noticing,” but a friend warned her he was married. As she later wrote to her parents, “I filed him mentally under ‘fine type’—some woman is very lucky.”

  THE RED CROSS

  Women who worked for the Red Cross during World War II were not nurses, as had been the case in World War I. Instead, they helped to look after the armed services and civilian populations in any area affected by the war. This included sending parcels to prisoners of war, helping them to get word home to loved ones, and inspecting conditions in prison camps. Red Cross volunteers worked in homes where battle-weary troops could go for rest and relaxation, wrote letters for the wounded, and arranged social activities for troops overseas. When the Greek people were starving after the Occupation in April 1941, it was the Red Cross that organized emergency shipments of grain. They were only able to do their work in countries that had signed the Geneva Convention, however, which ruled out intervention in either Japan or Russia. After the war, they helped to locate missing persons and organized transport for war brides to reunite them with their husbands.

  Red Cross volunteers fulfilled many different roles during the war. Serving coffee and donuts to homesick boys, some as young as 18, was an important morale booster.

  The Time of Their Lives

  It was January 1945 before Bob plucked up the courage to ask Rosie out. She hesitated before saying, “Sorry, but I don’t go out with married men.” An older Red Cross advisor called Pop, who knew Bob’s situation, urged Rosie to accept the invitation, which would be a double date with her friend Ski and his friend Tom. At last she agreed and they all went dancing at Southampton’s Polygon Hotel, where Rosie found that Bob was an excellent dancer. He confessed that his older sister, wanting to improve her own dancing, had made him stand in as her dance partner every morning while they waited for the school bus. It was a fun evening, but still Rosie was worried. Many men were looking on the war as “time out” from their marriages, a chance to “kick up their heels.”

  Rosie and Bob had only been on a few dates when he took her for a long walk one evening and explained that he and his wife Beatrice were getting a divorce on his return. He blamed himself for marrying too young and for the wrong reasons and seemed distraught that it would be difficult to keep in touch with his son in the future. Rosie sympathized and agreed to continue dating him, though with the proviso that they shouldn’t get too serious. This, of course, was easier said than done.

  It was a laugh a minute, but all the time their feelings for each other were growing stronger.

  They had a busy social life—dancing with friends and exploring the countryside in their time off—and Rosie soon fell for Bob’s strong personality and sense of humor. They went to a Church of England service for the first time and heard the singsong chanting, and afterward, on their walk back to the mess hall, he intoned in a high-pitched chant, “Play anybody here a game of dominoooooes…” It was a laugh a minute, but all the time their feelings for each other were growing stronger. They traveled to Scotland, where they enjoyed a romantic stay on the banks of Loch Lomond. For his part, Bob was overwhelmed by this amazing woman who seemed to become friends with everyone she met. And, although she made him do all the running, she was soon writing to her family that she was in love.

  At the end of October 1945, Bob wrote to her parents asking their permission to marry Rosie: “I can say honestly that I have never met anyone to compare to her and that I’ll devote my life to her happiness.” They replied that they were delighted to welcome him to
the family.

  Four Months to Think about the Future

  On December 12, 1945, Bob was demobilized and sailed back to the United States. Rosie wrote in her journal, “The weather this morning matched my mood. It was absolutely miserable.” She knew he was going to sort out his divorce so that they could be married on her return—she didn’t doubt that for a second—but she missed his lively presence.

  At least the days were full, so she didn’t have time to mope. She was deeply honored on December 19th when presented to the Queen at an afternoon party at Buckingham Palace and she was very moved in January 1946 when she visited the concentration camp at Dachau while helping to set up Red Cross services in southeastern Germany.

  On the sea crossing back to the United States in April 1946, she mused in her journal about Bob’s good and bad points—but the only bad ones she could think of were that he put ketchup on everything, and he added salt and pepper to a meal before tasting it! His good ones included “those eyes that twinkle with amusement as quickly as they glow with love,” and his honesty and strength of character. As soon as she disembarked, she caught a train to Chicago to be reunited with him, and they fell into each other’s arms. He was able to tell her that his divorce had come through and that nothing now stood in the way of their happiness.

  First they traveled to Indianapolis to meet his family, who adored her right away, and then they went to California where they married at her parents’ home on July 30th. They spent their wedding night in the plush Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco’s Nob Hill, then traveled around California before heading back to St. Louis, where Bob had a job lined up. In 1951, Rosie’s sister Marty arranged for Bob to meet the Rabel family, who owned the Star Machinery Company in Seattle, and he was offered a position selling their machines and tools. Rosie was delighted because it meant they could live on the West Coast closer to her family. Bob was promoted from sales agent to sales manager to vice president—which his family thought was richly ironic, since he did not have a technical mind and was incapable of operating the tools and machines himself! Rosie got work in Seattle as an advertising copywriter, and they had two children, Martha and Tom. Bob always paid child support for Bobby, his son from his first marriage, but his attempts to see him were met with such resistance that, with sadness, he eventually gave up trying.

  Bob and Rosie’s wedding on July 30, 1946 in California. His family wasn’t able to attend, but they loved Rosie from their first meeting.

  At Buckingham Palace, Rosie met the King and Queen, Princess Elizabeth, and Princess Margaret Rose. “They were such a beautiful family group, I almost felt dizzy,” she said.

  For their parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, Martha and Tom put together a video of old photographs from their parents’ time in Southampton through to the present day, with a soundtrack of their favorite music. After Rosie died in 2002, Bob was diagnosed with dementia and his memory deteriorated, but every night until the end of his life, without fail, he liked to watch that video. He had a tear in his eye and a smile on his lips as he recalled the extraordinary woman with whom he had shared most of his life after their meeting in war-torn Southampton all those years before.

  During her time in Southampton, Rosie collected badges from different branches of the services and sewed them inside her jacket. Decades later, it remained a prized possession.

  Raymond & Lucie Aubrac

  Lucie Aubrac in 1943, when she was working as a teacher in a Lyons school.

  The first time French Resistance hero Raymond Aubrac was arrested by the Germans, his wife Lucie helped him to escape; the next time she negotiated his release; then, after he was rearrested and sentenced to execution, she masterminded a daring jailbreak.

  Lucie was a clever child. She shone academically, achieving the prestigious agrégation in history that allowed her to teach in high schools or at university level, and in 1938 she had just been awarded a fellowship to study in the United States when fate intervened. Mutual friends in Strasbourg, where she was teaching, introduced her to Raymond, who had recently returned from a year’s scholarship in civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was doing his military service in the engineering corps. She asked him about his experiences in America, they started talking, and romance flourished.

  Lucie and Raymond came from quite different backgrounds. Her parents were Burgundy winemakers and as a result she’d grown up in the countryside; his parents were Jewish shop-owners in Vesoul, a town in the neighboring department of Haute-Saône. Both had leanings toward communism, seeing it as the only way to resist fascism and racism, and each found their thoughts and feelings reflected in the other. On May 14, 1939, they became lovers, and on December 14th, they married in Dijon.

  He warned her that it could be dangerous for her to marry a Jew, but, as she wrote in her diary, “That just made me even more keen.”

  Intrepid, determined, and resourceful, Lucie and Raymond were very similar characters.

  Joining the Resistance

  In June 1940, when France fell to the German Army, Raymond was taken prisoner. Ever resourceful, Lucie went to visit his brother, a physician, who gave her some pills that would induce a fever. She managed to slip them to Raymond in the barracks in which he was being held; he swallowed them, fell ill, and was soon transferred to a nearby hospital run by the Red Cross, from which he managed to escape by scaling a wall.

  THE RESISTANCE

  There were dozens of different factions resisting the Nazi Occupation, each one with a slightly different focus and methods. Up to 1,000 underground newspapers were printed and distributed; Allied airmen who had been shot down were smuggled back to safety via so-called “ratlines”; and France’s rail network was sabotaged to hamper German troop movements. On June 5, 1944, Resistance groups heard a coded radio message—“The die is cast, the die is cast”—alerting them that D-Day was imminent, following which an estimated 150,000 Frenchmen did their part to sabotage the German Army and slow their passage to Normandy: telegraph lines were cut, railway lines ruptured, trains blown up, and the troops harassed. It took the 2nd Panzer Division two weeks to get to Normandy from their base in the Dordogne, by which time the Allies were well established on French soil.

  Front page of the newspaper Libération, May 1, 1943. Friendly print-shop owners allowed Resistance operatives to use their printing machines at night.

  Lucie and Raymond could then have emigrated to America—he was offered a teaching post in Boston and she could have taken up her fellowship—but they felt it would mean betraying their country. Instead they made the fateful and incredibly brave decision to stay and fight the Occupation in whatever way they could.

  The couple moved to Lyons, in the zone that was still unoccupied by German troops, and it was there in a cafe, in the autumn of 1940, that Lucie met Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie. He was organizing a group to resist the Occupation, which Lucie and Raymond quickly agreed to join. At first their resistance took the form of civil disobedience, chalking defiant messages on walls, and dropping a newspaper called Libération into mailslots. After the birth of their son Jean-Pierre in May 1941, Lucie worked as a schoolteacher at a girls’ school while Raymond was an engineer tasked with repairing the runway at Bron airport. They had a small house on the avenue Esquirol and a maid called Maria. On the surface it seemed a normal, middle-class life. However, this life would become increasingly complicated as the war progressed and their work for the group known as Libération-sud became ever more dangerous.

  Raymond used four different names—Vallet, Ermelin, Balmont, and Aubrac—and was carrying the identification papers for François Vallet when he was arrested during a routine raid in March 1943. By this time the South of France had been occupied and the Nazi chief Klaus Barbie had established his headquarters in Lyons. Fortunately, the Germans had no idea that the man they held in custody was a member of Libération-sud, recently amalgamated with the seven other main resistance groups in France to form the Conseil Natio
nal de la Résistance. They also didn’t know that meetings were often held in the avenue Esquirol house, that fugitives sheltered there, and that Raymond and Lucie distributed packages of weapons and false papers, wrote articles for Libération, and were integral to Resistance activity in the region.

  German officers on motorcycles arrive in Lyons, June 21, 1940, after their division had crossed the Loire.

  “This guy is a collaborator and, therefore, a coward. If I speak louder than him, I’m sure to win.”

  Raymond was held for two months, during which time he was regularly interrogated, but he managed to convince his captors that he was merely a black marketeer. Lucie hired a lawyer, but it was only when she paid a personal visit to the French prosecutor that Raymond was granted bail. She convinced the cowering official that she was a representative of General de Gaulle himself and that he would not live to see another sunset if her husband wasn’t released. She thought, “This guy is a collaborator and, therefore, a coward. If I speak louder than him, I’m sure to win.” She insisted she wanted Raymond home by May 14th. That was their special day, the one on which they had consummated their relationship four years earlier. She got her wish and on May 14, 1943, during a joyful reunion, she became pregnant with their second child.