Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation by Charles Glass

Author:Charles Glass
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780143118664
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

In October 1942, Dr Edmund Gros died at home in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He was 73. His obituary in the New York Times lauded his work for the Lafayette Escadrille in April 1916, when he had recruited pilots for the French Army’s American flying squadron from his house in the rue du Bois de Boulogne. When the American Expeditionary Force arrived in France, the Escadrille was transferred to the US army as its 103rd Pursuit Squadron. Gros’s long career encompassed directorships of the American Hospital and Library between the wars. His tireless service for both institutions during May and June 1940 undoubtedly hastened his death. He had left France in the autumn of 1940 a broken man. The realization that the Germans, whom he had opposed in two wars, had at last conquered France may have added to his depression. Nelson Dean Jay and Edward B. Close sent a telegram to Gros’s widow on behalf of the hospital: ‘There is no one who did more for the American Hospital than he and he will be greatly missed by all his many friends and colleagues.’ Eugene Bullard, who took a job as a longshoreman at the US Navy Yard in Staten Island after his arrival from France in 1940, remembered Dr Gros differently. To Bullard, he was the white man who tried to prevent qualified black Americans like himself from flying for either the French or American armies.

In September 1941, Bullard had written to the US army asking whether he needed American government permission to join the ‘English, Canadian or Free French Army of General Charles de Gaulle’. Bullard, aged 46, was deemed too old to enlist in the American army. So, he appointed himself recruiting agent for de Gaulle among African-Americans. He urged young black pilots to join de Gaulle’s air force. Unlike America’s first black air unit being formed at Tuskegee, the Free French squadrons were fully integrated.

Bullard stayed close to the French-speaking community in New York and probably had more in common with them than with his American neighbours in Harlem. His daughters, with the help of former Ambassador William Bullitt, were brought to New York in 1941. After their arrival, Bullard checked into New York’s French hospital for the injury his back suffered in the artillery blast at Le Mans. He was exhausted from the war, his flight from France, his loss of status and the shock of living once again in a segregated society. But there was good news: one of his visitors at the hospital was the old Foreign Legion comrade he had given up for dead at Chartres in June 1940, Bob Scanlon. Scanlon told Gene he had been wounded and could not find Bullard in the mêlée after the shell hit. He too had made it safely home and missed their good life in France.

Before an American Legion reunion in New York, Bullard received an anonymous letter: ‘Your extended sojourn abroad has perhaps made you forget that in the States white and colored people do not mix at social functions.

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