Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [40]
With his wife and son no longer in their avenue Foch apartment, Jackson moved into one on the third floor of the hospital. On the last warm June night before Paris fell, he ascended to the roof to smoke a cigar. He could see the fields where French kings hunted before the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie planted suburban villas in Neuilly. Artillery flashes on the horizon made it clear that the Germans were advancing on Paris from the east and north. It would not be long before they reached Neuilly. Jackson’s main concern now was to save the hospital from falling into German hands. Wounded French and British soldiers needed the institution, one of the finest in France, as much as the American civilians still in Paris. There were already rumours that the Germans had listed the hospital for requisitioning. Soon, Jackson would face another dilemma. Donald Coster, a young American who had come from Montreal to drive ambulances for the American Ambulance Field Service, asked for a safe haven. There was something curious about Coster. As an American neutral, he had nothing to fear from the Germans. Yet, for some reason, he was hiding in the hospital’s basement. If he were caught there, the Germans might seize the hospital and arrest Jackson for helping him. Jackson, 54 years old with a wife and young son to protect, had decided which side he was on. Helping Coster was only the first step along the anti-German road.
By the time the Germans consolidated their hold on Paris, most of the Americans who had vanished in the war’s chaos had been accounted for. Some of the American volunteer ambulance drivers, however, were still missing. They had either been killed or captured. Two American charities, the American Ambulance Field Service (AAFS) and Anne Morgan’s American Volunteer Ambulance Corps (AVAC), had dispatched drivers, crews and ambulances to France from the early spring of 1940. Americans from all forty-eight states donated a fleet of Chevrolet three-quarter ton trucks with the latest mobile medical facilities. At the end of May, seventy-five American drivers and sixty-six Chevrolets from AVAC and another thirty-eight men and six ambulances from AAFS were at the front. Drivers paid their own expenses and the cost of their equipment. Most were young Ivy Leaguers. One, Robert Montgomery, was a prominent Hollywood actor. When the Germans occupied Denmark on 9 April, the AAFS was attached to the French Tenth Army. Throughout May and June, the Americans went into action to retrieve wounded and evacuate civilians without cars or unable to depart on railway lines bombed by the Luftwaffe. Anne Morgan, although aged 67, led her drivers into the fighting in the Meuse Valley.
One American ambulance driver, 26-year-old Lawrence Jump, was reported dead in May after a German shell struck his ambulance. Life magazine declared the Oakland, California, native and Dartmouth graduate the ‘first American casualty’ of the war. Then, on 24 June, two days after the signing of the Franco-German Armistice at Compiègne, Life published a letter from his sister, Cynthia Jump Willett: ‘I received a telegram yesterday from the State Department informing me he was in a prison in Weinberg near Stuttgart.’ The American Embassy in Berlin arranged his release.
At least two American drivers were wounded, and nine went missing in action. Four of the missing, presumed dead, belonged to the AAFS unit with the French Tenth Army at Beauvais. Their chef de section was Peter Muir, the First World War ambulance veteran who would be captured by the Germans and escape to enjoy Charles Bedaux’s hospitality at the Château de Candé. The four missing drivers were Muir’s immediate subordinate, Donald Quested Coster, a Lawrenceville and Princeton alumnus who had worked in advertising in Montreal, Canada; John Clement of Brookline, Massachusetts; Gregory Wait of Shelburne, Vermont; and George