World War II Love Stories Read online

  They warned her that Canada wasn’t as luxurious as she might be expecting.

  With victory in Italy secured, in spring 1945 Charley found himself with the Carleton and York in Holland as part of a brief campaign against the retreating German Army and in the fall was repatriated to Canada and assured that Jean could soon follow him. The Canadian Wives Bureau was helping to reunite war brides with their husbands. Jean visited their offices in London’s Regent Street to ask when she could be sent over, and was surprised when they tried to talk her out of it. They warned her that Canada wasn’t as luxurious as she might be expecting; the Americans had all the modern conveniences, such as washing machines, and the reserve where Charley lived was in the back of beyond. However, they might as well have been talking to a brick wall. Jean was headstrong and madly in love with her husband so she couldn’t wait to get there and be with him again.

  On May 14, 1946, along with hundreds of other war brides, 20-year-old Jean and her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Christine, sailed on the SS Aquitania, landing at Pier 21 in Halifax on May 21st. They caught a train to the town of McAdam, New Brunswick, where she was joyfully reunited with Charley. The journey wasn’t over yet, though, and along with a Catholic priest they climbed into a canoe. Jean clutched her daughter and admired the glorious scenery as they paddled to the Tobique reserve. On arrival they were met by Charley’s family and a crowd of locals clustered on the riverbank, all curious to see this white woman who’d come from so far away to live in their community.

  They walked the short distance from the river to the shack that they would share with Charley’s grandparents, parents, brothers, and sisters, and it was at that point that Jean began to get some idea of what she had let herself in for. Their “bedroom” was a corner of the shack with a curtain pulled across for privacy, the toilet was an outhouse, there was no electric light, and water came from a well. It was a far cry from the three-bedroom terraced house in which Jean had grown up. But she loved Charley and knew that she wanted to be wherever he was, so one way or another she was going to make this work.

  The SS Aquitania served as a troop transport ship during both world wars before being used to transport war brides.

  The Maliseet reserve where Charley grew up was at the meeting of the Tobique and St. John Rivers.

  Life on the Reserve

  One of the first problems Jean encountered was that everyone spoke to each other in the Maliseet language. Undaunted, she asked Charley to teach her and by learning a few words a day she was soon able to communicate. Before long, she spoke Maliseet fluently. She had become a legal “status Indian” by being Charley’s wife, but she encountered some hostility from the other women on the reserve who were jealous that she had taken one of their men and referred to her as “that white woman.” From the start, Jean was determined to fit into Maliseet culture rather than try to introduce her own British ways, and gradually that helped her to win respect.

  The Tobique Reserve, first established in 1801. Jean and Charley’s home was down by the riverside.

  Life was tough, though. They lived off the land and whatever Charley could earn as a river guide during the fishing season or as a guide during the hunting season. An agent from the federal government occasionally left a barrel of flour and some leftover army rations, but they frequently went hungry. In the fall, they crossed the nearby border into the United States to earn a little money picking potatoes, but it was backbreaking work that was rough on the hands. When winter arrived, Jean was stunned by the fierce cold in that part of the country, where snow lay thick on the ground for four months and there was only firewood to heat the shack. But through it all, her love for Charley kept her strong. When he took out his guitar and sang to her in the evening, or brought back a bunch of wildflowers from a fishing trip, there was nowhere in the world she would rather have been.

  More children were born: Stewart, Nick, Cindy, Lindsay, and then Pamela. Jean gave birth in the convent attended by nuns—there was no doctor for miles around—and it must have been terrifying the first time. Her mother and her sister Mary came over to help when Lindsay was born and were shocked by the conditions. Jean had never complained in her letters home, so they’d had no idea of her lifestyle.

  Jean and Charley were better off once his army pension came through, but life remained a struggle. In 1956, Jean’s younger sister Kathy married an American and moved to Maine, which was just a five-hour drive away, and Jean was delighted to have a family member within reach again. Gradually their living conditions were improving and by 1962 they had raised enough money to build a two-story timber house, the first home of their own. Jean’s grandfather died and left her a little money, which she insisted on using to install a bathtub with running water—the modern amenity she had missed the most. The children attended the convent school and the family took part in all the annual Maliseet festivities: the Salmon Festival, the Fiddlehead Fern Festival, Aboriginal Day, and powwows in the summer when everyone came from far and wide to eat, sing, dance, drum, and chant.

  Jean and Charley in 1948.

  Jean’s sister Kathy with Christine.

  Jean and Charley with friends in the 1960s; by which time Jean had her two-story timber house.

  In 1963, Jean traveled back to England to visit her family for the first time in 17 years. Her sister Mary didn’t recognize her at the airport and it was an emotional reunion. In the late 1960s, Charley was awarded the huge honor of becoming chief of the Tobique First Nation, an important role which meant representing the interests of the Maliseet people in negotiations with the federal government. He was instrumental in creating a union of all the New Brunswick Mi’kmaq and Maliseet Indians to give them greater bargaining power and he brought all the chiefs over for a visit to London. But meetings of the tribal council were held in the town of Fredericton, so in 1971 Jean and Charley moved there. It was something of a culture shock to be back in a town with paved roads, garbage collection, and telephones, but Charley’s arthritis, first diagnosed during the war, had worsened and living off the land was increasingly difficult.

  A reunion of the extended Paul family in 1977, with Jean standing rear center in a pink patterned dress and Charley in dark glasses beside her.

  Charley wears his wartime service medals and Jean has lace gloves and a black hat for dinner with the Queen in 1986.

  LOVE ACROSS CONTINENTS

  Many European and Asian women were eager to marry Americans because the United States was a wealthy country that they expected would afford them a better standard of living than at home. Canada was perceived in the same light. Most marriages took place with women from countries where soldiers were stationed for long periods. Approximately 100,000 British women married Americans and almost half as many (44,886) married Canadian soldiers, who had been a presence in Britain from the end of 1939. A total of 1,886 Canadian men married Dutch women, while another 649 married Belgian girls and another 100 found French brides; but only 26 got hitched to Italians, perhaps a reflection of the heavy fighting in Italy that precluded romance and the fiercely Catholic morality that made Italian girls more cautious than others about dalliances with these dashing foreigners. More than 20,000 Americans married German women they met during their postwar occupation of the country, another 15,000 married Australians while stationed Down Under, more than 51,000 married Filipino women, and 758 took Japanese brides. Many German war brides felt marked by an assumption of collective guilt for Nazi atrocities and tried to change their accents so as to assimilate into American society as quickly as possible.

  In 1986, when Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip visited Canada, Jean and Charley had such celebrity status that they sat next to the royals at dinner. Charley completed a PhD at Fredericton University and was entitled to use the prefix “Dr.” before his name. In 1991, at the age of 64, Jean was diagnosed with cancer. Her three sisters came to visit her over Christmas, but the cancer had progressed quickly and she died early in the new year. All the First Nation
chiefs of the area attended her funeral, demonstrating the respect she had won over the years.

  She had made many friends among the Maliseet people—but the best friend of all, and the great love of her life, was the man she had met at a dance in Surrey when she was just 16 years old. There was never anyone else, and she never expressed any regrets about her decision to swap middle-class suburbia for life on a reserve. She would have lived anywhere, just so long as it was with Charley.

  She would have lived anywhere, just so long as it was with Charley.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower & Kay Summersby

  Eisenhower on February 1, 1945 wearing the five-star cluster he was awarded on becoming general of the army.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower was based in London for three years as a major general, while his wife Mamie was on the other side of the Atlantic. But he wasn’t lonely with the attractive young Kay as his chauffeur, housemate, confidante, and, according to some accounts, lover.

  Kay was an aristocratic Irishwoman, born in Cork, who came to London in her late teens to attend business school. She soon got bored and when offered work as an extra in a film, she jumped at the chance, which led to her becoming a model for Worth of Paris. She had already been married and divorced when war was declared in 1939, but she kept her husband’s surname, Summersby, when she volunteered for the British Mechanized Transport Corps. She drove an ambulance during the Blitz and was reputedly adept at finding her way through the unlit streets, navigating around burning and collapsed buildings, in order to transport the living to the hospital and the dead to morgues. In May 1941, she met a US Army captain named Dick Arnold, who was in the process of divorcing his wife in the United States, and within a few months they were engaged.

  One day in May 1942, Kay was asked to drive for an American general, Dwight D. Eisenhower. She was disappointed not to get someone of a higher rank, but she soon warmed to Ike, as he was known, and in his time off duty she took him sightseeing around London and the surrounding countryside. They couldn’t have been more different: he was 18 years older, came from a poor Kansas background, and was a self-made man who’d worked his way up through the military and had a wife and son back home. Kay was 34 years old and very glamorous, even in her shapeless uniform and driver’s cap. But they had several things in common: they both loved horseback riding, golf, and bridge; shared a keen intelligence; and were absolutely and utterly discreet.

  Kay Summersby adjusts the American flag on the bonnet of Eisenhower’s car.

  Telegraph Cottage

  Eisenhower disliked socializing and wanted somewhere he could relax when not working, so he moved into Telegraph Cottage, a five-bedroom house in Kingston, southwest of London, which was on a private drive off the main road. In spare moments he could walk through a gate at the end of the garden onto the 13th hole of a golf course to play a few holes. This would be his base for the next three years, with a New York Irish housekeeper, Micky McKeogh, and his African-American valet, John Moaney. Kay talked him into getting a black terrier pup, which he named Telek—a contraction of Telegraph and Kay. On arrival in London, Eisenhower had written to his wife Mamie of his “rather lonely life” abroad and said that he yearned for “feminine companionship.” He had been charged with planning Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa, and was fully occupied handling the logistics of that campaign as well as the inevitable disagreements among his generals. Soon he began confiding in Kay while they were driving between engagements, finding that he could talk freely to her in a way he couldn’t with anyone else. “They all ask to be promoted, or if I talk to the wrong person, what I say is reported all over the world. I know that I can let my thoughts flow with you,” he told her, according to the memoir she published at the end of her life.

  A quiet lunchbreak: Eisenhower eats a soldier’s C-ration by the roadside in Tunisia, 1943.

  On November 8, 1942, American forces landed at Casablanca to try to push back German forces in North Africa, and Kay’s fiancé, Dick, was with them. Ike asked Kay if she would accompany him when he went to oversee the campaign, and she readily agreed. However, as she sailed out in December 1942, her ship, the SS Strathallan, was torpedoed and sunk. Kay was lucky to find her way into a lifeboat, having lost all her possessions. She was rescued the following morning, shocked and in salt-water-stained clothing, and taken to the coastal town of Oran in Algeria, where she was reunited with her fiancé, Dick. They fell into each other’s arms and agreed that they would get married in North Africa just as soon as they possibly could. But on that occasion they didn’t have long together, as she was soon obliged to travel to Ike’s headquarters in Algiers.

  She resumed her driving duty, conscious that the enemy was not far away, as cars were sometimes strafed by gunfire from passing planes. Then in spring 1943, Ike called her into his office to tell her the worst possible news: Dick had been killed by a landmine. She sobbed in the general’s arms and he comforted her, advising that the best way of dealing with grief was to stay active. In fact, once she got over the initial shock, she realized that she had hardly known Dick. It had been an intense wartime romance, and each time they met had been “as exciting as a first date.” Now she would never know what might have been had he lived.

  Ike was in overall command of the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943, followed by the Italian mainland in September, and had to mediate between Generals Patton and Montgomery, who were often at each other’s throats. It was a stressful period for him and Kay later claimed in her memoir that one day he grabbed her hand and declared passionately how special she had become to him. She replied that she felt the same way, and they kissed for the first time. But Ike was wary and apologetic afterward. He said he didn’t want to hurt her, but confessed he had realized he had strong feelings for her the night the Strathallan sank while he was waiting anxiously for news of her safety. Dignitaries came and went from Algiers—Churchill popped in for dinner, Roosevelt came for a picnic—but Kay claimed that in private moments she and Ike kissed, cuddled, and held hands. He rarely spoke of his wife, Mamie, but confessed that during a recent visit home to the United States he kept accidentally calling her “Kay,” which didn’t go over very well.

  “I know that I can let my thoughts flow with you…”

  Kay and Ike were back in London in February 1944 when he began planning for D-Day.

  PATTON & MONTY

  American General George S. Patton was a tough guy, who lived up to his nickname, “Old Blood and Guts,” when he slapped a shell-shocked soldier in a hospital and called him a coward. There were calls for him to be discharged, but Eisenhower valued him and merely insisted he apologize. British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery (known as “Monty”) was an experienced commander with the recent decisive victory at the Battle of El Alamein to his credit when he was asked to collaborate with Patton and American General Bradley for the invasion of Sicily. He found them disorganized and cavalier with the troops’ safety, while they found him high-handed and too cautious. Disunity between the American and British forces was further evident after the Normandy landings, when the Americans wanted to push forward faster than Monty did; in the winter of 1944–45, when Patton wanted to pursue the Germans directly while Montgomery favored a more measured strategy; and at the war’s end, when Monty wanted to get to Berlin before the Russians while Eisenhower did not. Monty frequently complained that Eisenhower gave American troops better treatment and more supplies than the British. Overall, the British–American rivalry caused Ike a lot of headaches.

  “Old Blood and Guts”: General George S. Patton in March 1943.

  “The Spartan General.” Field Marshal Montgomery in North Africa, November 1942. His personality and methods were in complete contrast to those of his American counterpart.

  In December 1943, Ike was promoted to supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force and they moved back to London, where he was tasked with preparing for the invasion of Normandy. Kay was with him in Portsmouth when he made the decisi
on to take advantage of a brief respite in the bad weather on June 5-6, 1944, and send the Allied Forces across the Channel for D-Day. She helped him to prepare the famous speech he would deliver to the troops: “The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and fears of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.” And she was by his side as they waited for first reports back from the Normandy beaches—surely one of the most nerve-racking nights of the entire war.

  “The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and fears of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.”

  Eisenhower delivers a speech to paratroopers about to set off for the first D-Day assault: “I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!”