The first time I heard about the Corsicans was during the last days of 1943. I was one of a party of thirty members of the British Friends Ambulance Unit, newly arrived in Morocco to join the French 2nd Armoured Division which was being established there.
The divisions Medical Battalion, of which we were to be part, was in skeleton form only because the French were desperately short of manpower - hence our presence. In skeleton form it certainly was but the Sergeant-Major, who ran everything, went a long way towards making it seem efficient and fully staffed. Luckily he was a fervent Anglophile, almost embarrassingly so at times. The French equivalent of Sergeant-Major is Sergeant-Chef and so he was known to us as Chef Larreur. He and I became good friends and I corresponded with him after the war until he died, some years later.
The creation of the Division was a result of a series of events starting in 1943. De Gaulle sent Colonel (later General) Leclerc to the Chad region of French Equatorial Africa to see if there were, in the area, French and other nationals who wished to continue fighting the Germans. The news of Leclerc's mission spread and men began to arrive, sometimes singly, sometimes in small groups and occasionally in whole companies, together with officers and NCOs. Eventually, towards the end of 1943 Leclerc's small motley force set off across the Sahara. I use the word "motley" deliberately. Their transport was deplorable, they had no uniforms and their weapons were of more danger to their owners then to the enemy.
This extraordinary force had two overriding advantages. A fanatical morale and total surprise. These advantages enabled them to overwhelm the Italian and German outposts encountered in the desert. By the time they joined up with the British Eighth Army on the Mediterranean coast they were a very different group of men. Their morale had been further enhanced by continual success and they had very much more efficient transport and modern weapons. They still lacked uniforms but even so the Eighth Army was impressed, and the Americans even more so, by the performance of this unknown French General and his men. The Americans offered to provide complete equipment for a heavy armoured division if the French would provide the manpower.
This operation was going on when we arrived in the region of Casablanca, the port to which the Americans were delivering the equipment. It was, to us and the French, an astonishing eye-opener to see all that brand-new material. After several war years of make do and mend, to see about two hundred pristine Sherman tanks, as many self-propelled guns and thousands of huge lorries loaded with stores of all sorts, was unbelievable. Every man was provided with two uniforms, underclothes and even toothbrushes. The overcoats and shoes were of a quality that few of those who were to wear them had seen before.
Our ambulances were a joy, being four-wheel-drive Dodge petrol engine vehicles. They had comfortable crew space and seats and very advanced equipment for handling casualties. As soon as they were handed over we started training, working with the tank crews in the western edge of the Sahara.
In the meantime Chef Larreur made sure we were taught the etiquette required for existence within the French Army. One of the dangers from which he was determined to preserve us was the all-pervading light fingeredness. The Corsicans, he told us, were the worst. Even if they were not doing the stealing themselves they organised all the other thieves. If they were anywhere near us we were advised either to nail things down or carry them on our persons. (Luckily the Corsicans were encamped about a mile away.) We were told that they had arrived as a small unit with a leader, known as The Capo. It was difficult to communicate with them, except for The Capo, because what they thought to be spoken French was quite unintelligible even to Frenchmen.
With Chef Larreur's help we soon became an efficient part of the arrangements for coping with casualties, but the casualties were not real and it was not until the Division's first major engagement that we were really tested. We had first to sail to England and cross to France as part of the great invasion armada, although some time after the initial assault on the beaches. We had become part of the American 14th Army Group and were the leading division forming the southern claw of the Falaise trap.
The British and Canadians formed the northern claw and the Americans were pushing the trapped Germans from the west. We were on high ground and everybody could see clearly what was happening. To make it possible for their army group to escape, the Germans had only one option. The had to remove us. They attacked with a Panzer division early in the morning.
The ambulances of our section were collected in a group waiting to be called out. I was the first to go, the order given in the form of a map reference. It would be foolish to say I was not frightened, everybody was. There was a great deal of noise from tank guns and small arms fire but I was most concerned as to whether I would know what to do. Would all those months of training in the Moroccan desert be relevant to the problems with which I would soon have to cope?
I found the damaged tank quite quickly; only about a mile away. It had received a high explosive shell on the join between the turret and the body of the tank. The turret was jammed and the Commander, quite unconscious, was stuck in the hatch preventing any other crew members getting out. The driver's hatches were not useable and I could see the Gunner, obviously wounded, below the Commander. I, and my Orderlies, fetched both wounded men out. I patched them up and got them off to the Field Hospital, a few miles away. It turned out that the Commander was not badly hurt but the war was over for the Gunner. I well remember driving back to Headquarters with a feeling of elation. It had all gone very well and clearly everything we had practised was right.
The rest of the day has become a blur in my memory except that, about halfway through the day, we had obviously driven the Germans back. Every time I went out I passed destroyed German tanks and, apart from that first Sherman, all my work was with German wounded. That evening, after supper, Chef Larreur strolled over for a chat. "You did pretty well with the Corsicans" he said "You will have no more trouble with them."
It seemed that the Sherman was one of those crewed by the Corsicans and the Commander was The Capo himself, the Gunner being the second-in-command. Larreur was quite right. From that day until I left the Division, stretchered off in my own ambulance, nothing was stolen from me.
All the British driven ambulances had done well and, overnight, our status changed from being curious oddities to becoming an important part of the team. Our views were to be listened to and respected. One immediate change was made at our suggestion. Instead of having the ambulances in a central pool we were to be closely attached to the small units of tanks. This put us right in the centre of any action so that we could be alongside a stricken tank in minutes. Those minutes were the ones that saved lives. One of the weaknesses of Sherman tanks was a propensity to catch fire. To lift a wounded crewman out before the main body of the tank became too hot was one of the skills we soon learnt.
The small unit to which I was attached was commanded by another Sergeant-Chef who, in civilian life was a lecturer in philosophy at the Sorbonne. Three of the tanks were crewed by the Corsicans and the other three by the Chef himself and the students he had recruited when we liberated Paris. When we gathered for an evening meal the Corsicans tended to remain together because of language difficulties. The philosophers provided very good company although my French was not really good enough to understand the intricacies of their conversation, especially late at night. It was at the time of Sartre and Camus, and the Chef was bitterly opposed to their new ideas, a view not entirely shared by the students.
Being a small unit, often far ahead of the main action, our Shermans often captured enemy supply lorries. Sometimes these were laden with goodies destined for their Army Gestapo Headquarters. When this happened we all had a share. Astonishingly, the task of distributing this loot was given to the Corsicans. I suppose the thinking was that they would get it all anyway. In fact, they treated the task as a great honour and were scrupulously fair. I never heard a word of complaint and I was always well looked after. They learnt, as we all ate together sometimes, that I was fond of a glass of brandy. My cab was never without an interesting bottle - for medicinal purposes, of course!
One day, during what was euphemistically called a rest period, I was scrubbing out the floor of my vehicle when there was a knock on the door. Outside was quite the most disreputable-looking soldier I have ever seen. His hair was too long, he wore no hat and his uniform was a disgrace, but he did have a magnificent Mexican-style moustache. He had a packet in each hand. "For you", he said in fractured French. One packet contained a tin of beluga caviar, the other an airtight tin of English Bath Oliver biscuits. "How splendid", I said, "If I had some butter I could have a party". It seemed very unlikely that he understood a word but, about half-an-hour later there was another knock. Outside was the farmer's wife from further up the road. "The man said you were to have this" she said, and handed me a pat of freshly churned butter, wrapped in a large dock-leaf. I would have liked to ask her if `the man' had a large Mexican-style moustache, but I know the answer.
By living together with the tank crews we built up a very close relationship. Although they all seemed to believe that "it will never happen to me" they were driven by a fanatical need to drive the Germans out of their country. They made it clear they were constantly reassured to see the man carrying the morphine within a few minutes of them. The fact that they placed such faith in us was frightening at times, especially when a close friend was in trouble. Making the decision that the time had come to get out oneself was always bad. At the time it usually seemed clear but, later, it was never so straight-forward. Often the quiet comment, "You made the right decision about `x' meant that I slept better that night.
Later I shall tell the story of the time when I made the wrong decision but this account so far does, I hope, given some idea of what it was like to work with the Shermans of the 2nd French Armoured Division, and particularly their Corsican contingent.