Paris, France, 1946; Left to right-my brother, Raymond Barry Klee, Eleanor D'Arcy. Klee ,our Mother, and me, Gerald D'Arcy Klee By this time the war had ended and our mother was able to visit us in Paris

I promised to write about the adventures of Barry, D’Arcy and their mother in Paris in 1946. First I need to put it into context. Of all places on earth, how did a Japanese attack on Hawaii cause us to end up in Paris? I have written about this before, but some of it is worth repeating. The story leads to Paris eventually. The story is long and complicated, but filled with adventures. Most family members will find it interesting.

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 had many consequences that could never have been predicted. That is certainly true for the Klee family of Brooklyn, New York.

Within months after the attack, Barry, the oldest, was drafted into the US Army, Fred, second oldest, had one bad eye that caused him to be classified not fit for duty "4F", so he left his boring job at Chemical Bank and took a civilian construction job building an Air Force Base in Trinidad. Later, he was inducted into the Army and served in the Pacific in the Medical Corps as a physiotherapist. The Army sent Barry to New York University to be trained as a French interpreter. Subsequently, he served in military intelligence in France during 1944-45. He arrived on the coast of Normandy on July 6, 1944, one month after D day. Our sister Eleanor, "Lolly",  seized the occasion of world wide upheaval to accept the invitation of our cousin Frances to visit her and her husband Bob Rice in Lima, Peru. While there, Lolly learned Spanish while teaching English in a girl’s school. While in Lima, she met an Ecuadorian named Carlos Bermeo, and the two were later married. D’Arcy (me), the youngest, couldn’t wait to become involved in the military, so I enlisted. Immediately after graduating from High School I was assigned to a US Army Specialized Training Reserve Program (ASTRP) program at Princeton University in July 1944.

After 9 months, in which my group completed three 12 week semesters of math, science and engineering, we were transferred to basic infantry training at Fort McClellan Alabama, with the expectation of soon being in combat. As I was saying goodbye to my parents, I noticed that they seemed to be fighting back tears. This was hard for me to understand, since I was off to great adventures. It was hard to put myself in their position of having two sons overseas in war zones, a daughter half a world away in South America, and their youngest leaving to prepare for combat. I never fully understood their reaction until I became a parent myself.

    Gerald D'Arcy Klee when a buck private in the US Army during WWII

In April 1945 Germany surrendered, so our training focused on preparation to fight the Japanese on Okinawa (Jungle warfare). The training was extremely tough and dangerous. It was as close to the real thing as they could make it. Sometimes it was too close to the real thing, as I will soon describe. My cousin Gerald Cox from South Dakota (Aunt Madge’s son) was with the Marines on Iwo Jima where he was killed a few months earlier. I won’t deny having had some apprehensions for myself, especially since my very poor vision was a big handicap for an infantry rifleman in jungle warfare. I had some idea of what combat would be like because our training involved the use of live ammunition. We used many kinds of weapons, including our M-1 rifles, machine guns, mortars, hand grenades and many more. The weapon that impressed me the most was the flame thrower. It was quite an experience for me to fire a stream of flaming petroleum at a target 40 feet away, while hoping no one was in the way. We also sat in fox holes with tanks rolling over our heads and dodged and ducked bullets as we crawled under machine gun fire and attacked emplacements under cover of artillery. We did all this in the deadly Alabama heat. We were almost ready for jungle combat against the Japanese on Okinawa.

Near the end of training a lucky thing happened to me. You may not think it was lucky to get hit by shrapnel, but when it happens and you know it could have been worse, you feel lucky. This is how it happened. I was leading my squad in a charge on a hill under live artillery cover  (105-Millimeter Howitzers) when I got hit. When an infantryman runs, he holds his rifle in front of him with both hands. The shrapnel from an exploding shell passed through the middle finger of my left hand, which was holding the rifle in the normal running position, just in front of my heart. After shattering the finger, it split open the stock of the rifle and ricocheted away. If the rifle hadn’t been there, the shrapnel would have gone through my heart. 

That put me in the hospital and out of action for quite a while as my finger healed. (A small wound takes as long to heal as a large one, especially when bone is shattered.) Before I left the hospital my company completed training and went to the Pacific. If they saw any combat it couldn’t have been for long because the atom bomb soon brought the Japanese to their knees. The bombs were dropped in August 1945 and the Japanese surrendered in September. Because my training was interrupted I had to go through basic training all over again. By that time, I was a well trained killer, with a strong aversion to   committing violence. Soon afterward, in late 1945, I was shipped to Europe.

After a stormy eleven day voyage in the hold of a rusty Liberty ship we landed in Le Havre, France and traveled across France and Germany in railroad box cars. These box cars were the famous Forty and Eights of WWI fame, still in use. Forty and eight means it can carry forty men or eight horses. It was a long, very slow train carrying only about ten soldiers per box car.  It was winter, approaching Christmas time 1945. We had blankets and a wood stove, but no fuel. Each box car had its own supply of K Rations and some water. We slept on the floor and had no toilet facilities. The train moved at a speed of about five miles per hour, with frequent, unpredictable stops that could last from a few minutes to several hours. When you felt the call of nature, it was necessary to wait for the train to stop and then jump off into the fields and do your business before the train started up again. Sometimes we had our pants down when the train started up. It was comical to watch someone running for the train while pulling up his pants, unless you were the one.

Whenever the train stopped, starving, ragged peasants appeared and begged for food. We shared what we could with them. Although our conditions weren’t luxurious, we couldn’t feel sorry for ourselves. At first it was disconcerting to drop our pants in front of men women and children, but they paid no attention and we quickly overcame our self-consciousness.

The need to adjust our toilet functions to the vagaries of the train schedule sometimes led to awkward but amusing outcomes. Once, the train continued for nearly a day without stopping. Andy, a big, strapping Midwestern farm boy had been waiting for hours and was ready to burst. Like the good soldiers we were, our inventiveness rose to meet the emergency. Andy dropped his pants and leaned out backwards from the door of the boxcar while one man on each side held on to his hands. Things were looking good until we unexpectedly entered a tunnel. We pulled Andy’s butt inside just in time to avoid a casualty. Andy gritted his teeth while we waited to see daylight again. Eventually we saw the light at the end of the tunnel and as soon as we could we helped Andy get his backside out the door again. It sounded like an explosion as he was finally able to let go. While Andy was finally gaining relief, we noticed with horror that we had emerged from the tunnel onto a bridge overlooking the German city of Saarbrücken. Citizens in the street below had interrupted their daily errands to look up in amazement as this spectacle rolled by. It might have briefly provided something new for them to talk about in their colorless lives.

At that time of this adventure I had no stripes, in fact, no rank at all, like the rest of the guys with me. We resented the fact that we slept on the floor and had no wood for the stove, while the commissioned officers and Non-Coms up ahead were living in comparative luxury. One day the train stopped in a rail-yard alongside another freight train that had no passengers. We noticed that an empty car sitting a few feet away contained wooden bunk beds. In a flash, without any need for discussion, we swarmed into the other car and quickly tore apart the bunk beds and took them into our car for firewood. In doing so, we were only following an ancient military custom, known as commandeering supplies. We were proud of ourselves for learning so fast, without any prior instruction. We were lucky we didn’t get caught.

This is a copy of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) Emblem that I wore on my shoulder. 

My first assignment in Germany was in an ancient city called Bamberg, which was in the eastern part of the American occupied zone. It was in better condition than some other German cities, but there was still much devastation. There were many DP’s, as Displaced Persons were called. They were some of the human flotsam and jetsam of war. Many were Eastern Europeans who had been forced into slave labor in Germany. Between them and homeless Germans, there were millions of people in Germany sleeping in such places as railroad stations, streets and trash dumps. They were cold, starving and often ill. We were comparatively well housed in a former German army barracks, called a Kaserne. By now I was proud to have become a member of SHAEF, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, under the command of General Dwight Eisenhower. It was a bit anticlimactic however, since the shooting war was over and I hadn’t had a chance to become a hero. The good side to that was that I was still alive.

I quickly learned a smattering of German and of the multilingual pidgin language that was current among the people I met. One learned to communicate effectively about what was important with a mixture of sign language and Pidgin. The commonest German expressions were Alles ist Kaput. = (Everything is destroyed) Kartoffeln =(Potatoes, the chief source of food) Wie viel kostet das?= (How much does that cost?) Das ist zu viel. = (It costs too much) Zeegareten= (Cigarettes) (Cigarettes were in greater demand than food and brought a nice price in worthless German Marks on the black market). For Germans, soap (seife) was one of life’s necessities, but not so for the French as I was later to learn. It is no accident that the French are famous for perfume.

It appeared to me that most people I met in the streets were victims, regardless of whether they were German or not. Not all Germans had wanted to go to war. Few of them actually knew what it had been all about and most of them never benefited from it even in the best of times. I can say with confidence that most of the GI’s I knew had almost no real understanding of what it was all about either. I met plenty of German prisoners of war, many of whom were dull, semiliterate farm boys and the like, who would have been incapable of understanding the issues. Under normal circumstances, neither they, nor I would have had any impulse to shoot or stab one another. It still gives me chills to think about it.

The most sickening experience I had, occurred one cold, cloudy day when I was on duty disposing of waste from our barracks. Another GI and I were in the back of a truck with barrels containing a mixture of trash and garbage, that we were to dispose of at the dump. Another man was at the wheel of the truck. As the truck entered the dump, we were surrounded by swarms of ghostly, ragged figures that materialized from their shelters within the piles of trash.

I saw no able bodied men among the victims. Pathetic figures completely blocked the truck, preventing us from moving any further. As they pushed and shoved each other to be in the best positions to catch our waste, we had no choice but to empty the barrels’ contents on top of them as they wanted us to do. It was sheer horror for me to do it, but they were pleased to be able to catch the stuff before it hit the ground. A scrap of potato peel might quiet hunger pangs for a while and a scrap of wood could add warmth to a shelter burrowed within a mound of trash.

Within that nightmarish episode, there was one segment that haunts me to this day. A little boy and an ancient woman (At least she looked ancient) each held one end of a small piece of wood. Both were ragged, filthy and emaciated. Both tugged on the stick with all their might, as if their lives depended on the outcome, as may have been the case. I don’t remember who won the contest, or even if I could stand to look long enough to find out.

Although I saw many other desperate people who were homeless and hungry, as well as bombed out cities that still stank of rotting bodies buried in the rubble, it is the image of the old woman and the little boy that continues to haunt me to this day. I don’t know whether or not they were German, but it doesn’t matter to me. It may seem strange for me to say this, but it is something that I don’t want to forget. For me, it is the embodiment of the ultimate horror of war and the ultimate degradation of human life and of civilization. I understand that we don’t have a choice about whether to fight a war or not when we are attacked, but I made a decision for myself that I would never participate in the killing. That decision was the single greatest impetus that propelled me into training to be a doctor. I knew that our country would be at war against the communists within a few years and I vowed that by then I would be a healer instead of a killer.

• Paris, France, 1946, D’Arcy (Also known as Gerald or Gerry) and his mother, Eleanor D’Arcy Klee, with the Arch of Triumph in the background. Statues on top of the Arc are cut off by the photo. The US Army "Jeep" we are sitting in belonged to my brother, Raymond Barry Klee who purchased it from the OFLC. By this time the war had ended and our mother was able to visit us in Paris

The Army made a lot of bad decisions, but they occasionally made a good one, even if by accident. When it sent a bunch of near sighted students like me to Princeton University to study  engineering and then made them all Infantry Riflemen, it didn’t  make much sense. But when the Army decided I was no longer needed as a Rifleman and made me a clerk typist, it made better sense. When they discovered that I could read and write, they sent me to school in Frankfurt, Germany for six weeks to learn the trade. I was a miserable typist and still am, but I was in my element as a clerk. I passed with flying colors in everything but typing and early in 1946, I was sent to Paris, France to work in the Office of The Foreign Liquidation Commissioner (OFLC).

My assignment to this organization must be one of the greatest coincidences of all time. With US forces spread out all over the world, it was only by chance that I was sent to the very place where my brother Barry was working. Barry had been discharged from the Army a few months after the war ended and decided to remain in Paris to study voice. He had an almost life-long ambition to be an opera singer, but never made it. (However, even at his current {2005} age of  88 he continues to sing non-professionally  for his own pleasure and that of his listeners.) There were other civilian jobs he could have taken, but by sheer chance he went to work at the OFLC. It turned out very well for both of us and for our mother as well.

The Paris assignment brought with it a life style that one associates with the rich and famous. Instead of the crowded, dingy barracks I had known, I shared a room with another GI in the Hotel D’Iena, a luxury hotel located in the Étoile District, which was, and still is, one of the most fashionable parts of Paris. It is the area that surrounds the Arc of Triumph. With the Arc in the center, magnificent avenues radiate outward like the rays from a star. That’s why it’s called the Étoile, which means star

The "mess hall" in which we dined was a converted luxury restaurant on the Rue de Berri, just off the famous Champs Élysée. Before lunch I often sat in a sidewalk café on the Champs Élysée, sipping an aperitif while watching the pretty girls go by. During lunch in the elegant restaurant, we enjoyed classical music played by a live orchestra.

Living and working in the Étoile made life easy as well as pleasant. The Champs Élysée, which is a center of the good life in Paris, is one of the grand avenues radiating outward from the Arc. The OFLC occupied a luxurious building at 11 Rue de Presbourg (Presbourg Street.) It is one block from the Arc. The area now houses foreign embassies and Consulates.

The name Office of the Foreign Liquidation Commissioner is misleading. We were not in the business of liquidating foreigners. Now that the war was over, there were vast quantities of equipment to dispose of. Instead of shipping used equipment back to the States, the US government "liquidated" it by selling it to the French at cut rate prices. Some OFLC employees were also able to take advantage of those bargains. For example, Barry bought a used Jeep for $200. That’s the one in the photo in front of the Arc of Triumph.

The OFLC was a small, hybrid organization of the State Department and the US Army and was top heavy with Army brass. I was one of a. handful of enlisted men and the rest of the military were mostly Majors or Colonels, with a Brigadier General in charge. Barry was one of the civilians who took jobs there after being discharged from the Army. In case you are wondering, I reached the rank of sergeant before finishing my tour of duty there.

My work assignment was in the mail room, which was the nerve center for the establishment in many ways. I read all the incoming mail and recorded it in the log book. Most of it was in French, which I translated for the log. Afterwards, I delivered it to offices throughout the building. This turned out to be more of an educational experience than I could have imagined. In the course of my duties I read a lot of classified documents that were accessible to only a few people. I also saw and heard about some interesting things that were going on in the organization. I’ll say more about that later.

Although much of Europe was turned to rubble in the war, Paris was untouched. It is such a glorious city that conquering armies have always left it intact for their own benefit. Living in the Étoile District, I could easily walk to marvelous places like the Louvre Museum, which contains many of the greatest works of art in the world. It wasn’t crowded then like it is now and I could gaze to my heart’s content at masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa and the Venus De Milo.

In June, I made a trip to Denmark, where I was the first American relative to visit after the war. I received a warm reception and enjoyed meeting many of our Danish relatives for the first time. I also took a tour of Switzerland and Italy (including Rome), organized by the Army. While in Rome I saw the sights and was billeted in Mussolini’s palace. It was really elegant. I particularly enjoyed swimming in his huge indoor-outdoor pool with gorgeous mosaic walls. Mussolini wasn’t there at the time, because he had been lynched by a mob in Milan a short time before. 

Barry and I enjoyed the best of Paris and other parts of France and Europe. Because the economy was very depressed, Americans were wealthy in comparison with the French. Cigarettes were in great demand and Americans had control of the main supply. Like other GIs I had a weekly ration of a carton of cigarettes from the PX. A carton cost me fifty cents and I sold it for 1000 to 1200 French francs on the street. With that amount of money one could buy full course meals, including the best wines, for two people in the finest restaurants on the Champs Élysée or anywhere else in France, with change left over. Although the good restaurants had plenty of the finest foods, there wasn’t much for the average French citizen. It was obvious to me that cigarettes were addicting when I saw so many people who would rather smoke than eat.

I mentioned that while working in the OFLC I learned of some interesting things that were going on. The most interesting was a racket enjoyed by some of the top brass in the OFLC. Some of them had cigarettes shipped in from the USA in large volume. I couldn’t miss it because they came in through the mail room. These were then sold by consignment to local dealers, who paid for them in French francs. Because of the shattered French economy, francs were nearly worthless on the international market; but the top brass at OFLC had a trick to get around that. 

Unofficially, a franc was worth only about one cent US. However, the "official" exchange rate was pegged much higher. Through "Proper" channels, francs could be traded for pounds sterling at the "official" rate, which was many times higher than the actual value. I was one of only a few enlisted men in the organization and between us we knew nearly everything that was going on. Another sergeant was a courier, who flew from Paris to London once a week to exchange official documents. One of his "assignments" was to take a briefcase full of French francs to London on each trip and exchange them for English Pounds Sterling. Once the money was in Pounds, it could be exchanged for American dollars and deposited in the bank accounts of the officers involved. What a racket! I don’t think the sergeant got anything out of the deal except for expense paid trips to London. 

Although I had no definite proof of it I think that the brass made even more money by collecting "commissions" on sales of surplus equipment to purchasers. If you thought that corruption is something new you may want to reconsider that view.

Barry’s Jeep gave us mobility and we used it to travel to other parts of France and beyond its borders. I recall our having a hearty meal at a fine restaurant in the exclusive resort of Deauville on the English Channel. After our meal, we visited a beach head where Allied forces had landed on D Day. Less than two years had passed since that famous landing. It was still strung with barbed wire and there were pieces of human bones lying in the sand. In this peaceful and scenic spot, it was a grim reminder of Europe’s bloody history. 

Barry and I were corresponding with our mother, who was still toiling at her job in the New York subway with never a break. She had never had a real vacation nor traveled since she left Ireland as a young woman. Her entire life had been dedicated to taking care of the family. We got  some money together for her fare and invited her over. She stayed for a few months and had the time of her life. Her housing was easily arranged by having her live with the French family that Barry stayed with. Our father was unable to accompany her because he needed to attend to his real estate business. Chiefly, he had a few small, rental properties that  yielded little income, but still required his attention. As I described in "Hard Times Get Harder", as one of its side effects, World War II wrecked my father's business. http://www.letreb.com/Hard%20Times%20Get%20Harder.htm

Barry and I took our mother to visit famous palaces and cathedrals and other beautiful sites. Another of our favorite activities was attending the Paris Opera, which was a joy to us all. I won’t attempt to describe the magnificent places we visited, but if you haven’t seen them you have at least seen pictures of them. Mother and Barry traveled in the Jeep to various scenic places like Switzerland. They usually went without me on the long trips, because I didn’t have enough leave to make it each time.

That trip to Europe was the only real vacation my mother had in her entire life. And how lucky it was that we got it in while there was still time. In less than two years after that marvelous sojourn, mother fell and fractured a hip. Between her osteoporosis and poor medical care, she never healed properly. It wasn’t long before the other hip fractured and before she recovered from that she had a serious relapse of her rheumatoid arthritis. Things went from bad to worse and she became confined to a wheel chair and then to bed. She was in constant pain, but she bore it bravely and cheerfully.

Her last seven years of life were spent bedridden in a Baltimore nursing home, where I was able to visit her almost daily and supervise her care. She remained cheerful and gracious until the end and gained the love and admiration of everyone with whom she came into contact. Her favorite topic when we were together was our time together in France. Every golden moment of that time was relived over and over until the night in 1967, when she passed away.

This is a photo of me in 1953, one year after my graduation from Harvard Medical School.  I was a Medical Officer (physician) in the US Public Health Service with a rank equal to that of Army Captain. By that time our country was again at war, this time in Korea. By then I had fulfilled my vow, made at the end of WWII, of becoming a healer rather than a killer by the time the next war started.  At that time I was providing general medical care for prisoners at the US Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield , Missouri. Read about it at: http://www.mdpsych.org/archive/06F_Klee.htm

Gerald D'Arcy Klee, MD