Clubmobiling in Germany
The ARC crew finally gets its own truck
My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 59
March 1945. The clubmobile was a two-and-a-half-ton GMC truck outfitted with coffee and donut-making equipment, and side windows that opened into a makeshift canteen — something like the taco trucks we see in cities today.
Scores of these trucks rolled onto Omaha Beach in July 1944, just weeks after the D-Day landings in France, each assigned to a crew of four American Red Cross (ARC) women. Their mission was to follow the troops, serving donuts, coffee, and good cheer to the men coming off the front lines.
The ARC women who landed in Italy, including my mother, Flo Wick, traveled with the armies north through southern France and all the way to the Rhine. But until they crossed into Germany, Flo’s crew had no clubmobile of their own. They improvised, scrounging whatever vehicles they could find to deliver donuts to soldiers.
On this page of her album, Flo posted the first pictures of clubmobiling in Germany. Here, at last, they were issued their own truck — nearly a year into their service overseas.
The photos hint at a trade-off: the women may have had to endure some “good-natured” groping in exchange for their vehicle. Flo names “Lamour Harrigan” of the 7th Infantry Service Company as the man with his arms locked tightly around her. She is laughing in the photo, but the other women’s faces tell another story. Liz looks distinctly unhappy, while Fritzie, in trousers and an army jacket, seems to be sidestepping unwanted attention.
Flo herself is captured dancing in the mud. On the back of the photo she wrote: “Markelsheim, Germany. Jitterbugging in the mud — March 1945. Note the big galoshes. Sad days.”
So she did learn to jitterbug after all. But the note carries a weight. There were plenty of reasons to feel sad — her fiancé, Gene, had been killed, and so many others were dying still. Yet she put on a brave face. Must smile.
Interestingly, on the same album page, Flo pasted a picture of her boyfriend, Lt. Col. Chris Chaney. Perhaps it was her way of making clear she wasn’t romantically tied to any of the men in those muddy, grinning snapshots.
The ARC crew’s adopted dog, TC, had been with them since they landed in France (TC is short for something, but I can’t remember what). They all doted on him, but from these pictures it appears he took to Janet more than the others. His presence offered moral and emotional support to both the women and soldiers.
Ch. 60: https://tradeswomn.medium.com/the-evolution-of-ptsd-0c9ccd4cce69
