World War II Love Stories

by Gill Paul

  Plans for the Future

  Kay knew that once the fighting was over, Ike would be transferred back to the Pentagon in Washington. The only way she could accompany him would be if she were accepted as a member of the American Women’s Army Corps (WAC), then applied for American citizenship. Ike helped her with her WAC application and sent her on a trip to Washington that summer where, bizarrely, she was shown around by his son, John, and briefly met his wife, Mamie. This was the first time she became aware that people were gossiping about her relationship with the general and speculating that they might be lovers. In fact, according to Kay’s memoir, the relationship remained unconsummated, although they came close to it on a couple of occasions, only thwarted when Ike was unable to perform. Certainly, Mamie seemed to think there could be some truth to the rumors and was very cold with the visitor from London, although her son was hospitable.

  Back again in London, Kay claimed that Ike was more ardent than ever. They couldn’t be openly affectionate in public, but he passed her little notes—“How about lunch, tea & dinner today?”—and grabbed any opportunity to be alone with her. He asked Kay if she would like to have a baby and when she said yes, he told her that he would like to give her a son if he possibly could. He worried that he was too old to be a father again, but promised he would do his damnedest. She didn’t dare to ask if he would leave Mamie, but that was the hope she cherished.

  During the winter of 1944–45, Ike became a five-star general and Kay became a first lieutenant in the WAC. They traveled to Europe behind the advancing Allied troops, and Kay was in the next room when on May 7, 1945, Ike accepted the surrender of General Alfred Jodl, German chief of staff, and Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg of the German Navy. After VE Day, Kay and Ike took a vacation in the South of France and were able to relax properly. “Whenever we’re together like this, it seems so right, the way things should always have been,” Kay claimed Ike told her, and she agreed. He was helping to expedite her American citizenship and she looked forward to continuing their affair in Washington, and then perhaps to having that child they had discussed. Surely she must have fantasized that one day he would leave Mamie, a hope that nonetheless she never dared put into words.

  April 12, 1945: Eisenhower inspects art treasures stolen by the Nazis and hidden in a salt mine.

  V for Victory: Eisenhower poses with his commanders after the German surrender is signed, while Kay smiles in the background.

  The Brush-off

  Ike flew home on November 10th, and Kay was booked to follow ten days later, but the day before her flight a telex came from Washington saying that she had been dropped from the list of those on board. On November 22nd, a formal, typed letter arrived for her that read, “I am terribly distressed, first because it has become impossible to keep you as a member of my personal official family…” A month later there was a handwritten note saying, “The break-up of my wartime personal staff has saddened me immeasurably.” But there was no further explanation.

  Kay was distraught and traveled to Washington, where she contrived to bump into him, but she couldn’t manage to see him alone and in public he was polite but distant. It was only 28 years later, when President Harry Truman’s biography was published, that Kay got an inkling of what might have made Ike change his plans. President Truman told his biographer Merle Miller, “Right after the war was over, he [Eisenhower] wrote a letter to General Marshall saying that he wanted to come back to the United States and divorce Mrs. Eisenhower so that he could marry this English woman.” The request was refused in the strongest possible terms. His commanding officer had ordered him not to do it.

  A trip to the theater, May 16, 1945. Eisenhower’s son, John, is far left, and Ike and Kay are next to each other.

  Looking back, Kay knew that with Ike duty always came first, so if his commanding officer told him not to divorce, he would not have divorced. She also understood that if there were two options, Ike would always choose the path “along which he would do the most good, inflict the least hurt.” He was also an ambitious man, and it’s unlikely he would have become the 34th president of the United States, as he did in 1953, if he were a divorcee married to the young woman who used to drive him around during the war.

  Kay stayed in America, had a romance with a man in California, and in 1952 married a Wall Street stockbroker, Reginald Morgan. She wrote to tell Ike of her wedding and he sent back a note wishing them happiness. She sent him a note of congratulations when he was later elected president. She never spoke of their affair to anyone until she was dying of cancer in 1974 and Ike had already passed away. During her final months of life, she wrote a memoir entitled Past Forgetting, about the intense, passionate love she said she had shared with the man who led the Allies to victory over Hitler’s troops. Some historians doubted her account: would the general truly have jeopardized his position for an affair? Ike’s grandson, David, later wrote that the truth “was only known by them, and both are gone.” But it seems undeniable that a strong, loving intimacy existed between Kay and Ike during those war years—one that he chose to end for the sake of duty to his country and to his wife.

  Eisenhower sits in the center of this photograph of victorious generals in 1945. Serving his country was always his paramount ambition.

  MAMIE EISENHOWER

  Mamie met Ike during a family holiday in Texas and married him when she was just 19 years old. The marriage faced early challenges when their first child died at the age of three. Ike was in Panama at the time, and they grieved in different ways, causing a rift in their relationship. As the wife of an officer, she had to move whenever he was assigned a new posting; altogether they would have 33 different homes over the next 37 years. Mamie took to making extended trips back to her family, which displeased Ike, and when she was with him overseas she became involved in humanitarian projects. During the war she lived in a hotel in Washington and didn’t see her husband for almost three years. She was reported to be anxious about her husband’s safety and upset by the rumors of his affair with Kay. They reunited at the end of 1945, however, and she went on to be a strenuous campaigner when he ran for the presidency and often helped him to rehearse and edit his speeches. As First Lady, she concentrated on entertaining guests to the White House and said she didn’t think women should work outside the home, but Ike credited her as being a “shrewd observer” and “a pretty darn good judge of things.” When Ike’s health deteriorated after a heart attack, Mamie was his loyal nurse and companion in his final years.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower with his new wife Mamie on their wedding day on July 1, 1916.

  Roger & Rosemarie Williams

  Rosemarie and Gisi Brandt with their father, Wilhelm. Theirs was a happy, rural childhood on the Isenschnibbe estate.

  Rosemarie was working as a translator in Wolfenbüttel, northern Germany, when one night she saw a drunk British soldier being carried out of the officers’ mess by his friends. Little did she guess that her future would soon become entwined with his.

  Rosemarie and her elder sister, Gisi, grew up on the estate of Isenschnibbe in northern Germany, two miles from the medieval town of Gardelegen and 85 miles west of Berlin. Their father was the estate manager and they lived in a little house in the main courtyard, surrounded by glorious countryside all around. The estate was huge, with its own brewery and a railway line that brought supplies and transported the farm’s produce and beer to market. When the war began, the Brandts were luckier than most because they could live off the land. Rosemarie’s father, Wilhelm, was no supporter of Hitler, but he held a prominent position in the local community and wisely kept his views to himself.

  Gisi joined the land army and was sent to Bohemia, but she soon became homesick for the north. Rosemarie visited her on a couple of occasions, and a local family hoped she would marry their middle son, but she didn’t take to the area or to him. Back home, Rosemarie enjoyed chatting with the parachutists at the aerodrome in Gardelegen, but also missed the local boys she used to d
ance with before they had all gone off to fight. She finished her schooling, studied for a year at a local college, and then worked on the estate farm as they all waited for the war to end.

  Rosemarie before the war, standing outside one of the estate buildings.

  Rosemarie, second from left, with a group of friends in a field at Isenschnibbe, June 8, 1940.

  The Brandts listened with some apprehension to the news on the radio of the Allied advance across Europe in 1945. There were already stories of the Red Army plundering their way through eastern Germany and instigating mass arrests of citizens, so they were pleased that the Americans got to Gardelegen first. German soldiers hid in the woods hoping to be able to surrender to the Americans, convinced they would fare better than if they were captured by the Russians. There was a lot of looting from the estate and some of the pigs were stolen, so Wilhelm Brandt kept the main gates locked and placed guards around the house and courtyard.

  THE GARDELEGEN MASSACRE

  Between April 3 and 5, 1945, approximately 4,000 inmates from Dora-Mittelbau and surrounding concentration camps were loaded onto trains to be sent to camps in the north. However, air raids had damaged the railway lines and they were forced to stop at Gardelegen, where they greatly outnumbered the SS officers, members of the Hitler Youth movement, and the local home guard who kept watch over them. On April 13th, more than 1,000 prisoners, too weak to work, were taken to the barn at Isenschnibbe. Straw was doused in gasoline and the doors barricaded before the barn was set on fire. Some of the prisoners who managed to escape were shot down. When the US 102nd Infantry Division arrived, they found the charred remains of 1,016 prisoners. Gerhard Thiele, who gave the order to kill, was never caught, but Erhard Brauny, who was in charge of the prisoners’ transport, was sentenced to life imprisonment by an American military court.

  Bodies found by American troops inside the barn at Isenschnibbe, April 14, 1945.

  Then on April 13, 1945, an horrific event took place on the Isenschnibbe estate when the SS and various accomplices herded more than 1,000 slave laborers from concentration camps into a barn and burned them to death. The Brandt family were a mile away and knew nothing about it at the time, but a few captives escaped and some local Gardelegers helped to hide them in ditches. Two days later, before the SS had time to cover the traces of the massacre, the Americans arrived and were able to interview some escapees. Even in those days of horrifying discoveries reported by Allied forces on almost a daily basis, the story made international headlines. The Brandts were deeply shocked that such an atrocity should have happened so close to their home, and they couldn’t help feeling more apprehensive over what the postwar period might bring.

  Rosemarie spoke fluent English, which she had learned at school, and often translated for US Army officials. Wilhelm befriended several of the officers and the family was delighted to be invited to watch Louis Armstrong playing for the troops (see p115). Rosemarie met him afterward and reported that he was “tip-top, very nice.” However, the Americans warned Wilhelm Brandt that the area would soon be under Russian control, and in May 1945 he managed to send his daughters farther west to Hildesheim in what would become the British Zone of Occupation, which he hoped would be safer, while he and his wife waited to see what Russian Occupation would mean for them.

  …horrifying discoveries [were] reported by Allied forces on almost a daily basis.

  Rosemarie (left) and Gisi with their father around the time of the war’s end.

  A Tough War

  Roger Williams from Streatham, South London, was right in the thick of some of the war’s heaviest fighting. He signed up straight from school for the London Scottish Regiment, believing (mistakenly, as it turned out) that he had Scottish ancestors. After basic training, in August 1942, the regiment shipped out to North Africa, where Roger transferred to the York & Lancasters. In July 1943, they were involved in the invasion of Sicily followed by the slow, fierce fighting all the way up the Italian peninsula that lasted right through to spring 1945. His unit was “pretty smashed up” at Monte Cassino, with high casualties, so Roger was sent back to Palestine for a period of rest and recuperation at a time when a Zionist extremist group called the Stern Gang were committing terrorist atrocities. One day Roger was talking to a Palestinian police officer when the police car exploded; the policeman would have died had he been in it at the time. So much for having a rest!

  Back in Italy, Roger fought in one battle after another and witnessed some appalling sights. At the end of one battle, he and another officer drew lots as to who would care for the wounded and who would care for the horses, and Roger was very glad that he got the horses. He and a friend nearly found themselves court-martialed in 1945 when they refused to repatriate some terrified Yugoslav refugees, arguing that sometimes following orders is simply wrong. Somehow, they got away with it.

  From mid-January to mid-May 1944, the Allies struggled to retake the historic town of Monte Cassino from the Germans, and the Benedictine abbey was reduced to rubble.

  Roger was with the York & Lancasters for the push through Europe toward Berlin and wherever else their orders might take them, but after VE Day they were able to relax a little more. There are stories of parties in the officers’ mess at which champagne corks were fired at chandeliers, and much local brew consumed. No one blamed them, though; they’d had a harder war than many.

  A snowy outing in January 1946. Gisi is on the front of the truck and Roger is at the back, while Rosemarie is between them with her head lowered.

  Meanwhile, Rosemarie and Gisi were finding life difficult in Hildesheim, because threequarters of the town’s buildings had been destroyed in bombing raids and half the townspeople were homeless and living in whatever shelter they could find. They heard that Wolfenbüttel was more comfortable, so Rosemarie applied for a job as a translator in the officers’ mess there. She was accepted, and she and Gisi found a place to stay with a woman whose husband had been taken as a prisoner of war. They were pleased to find that the York & Lancasters were stationed there, given their reputation for being fair and reliable.

  Rosemarie was surprised by the drinking and dissolute behavior as the men let off steam after their years-long ordeal; she later described them as being “very naughty.” She first saw Roger drunk and being carried by his colleagues, but he must have made a better impression at their next meeting because by the winter of 1945–46 they were an item. They went skiing together in the Harz Mountains, went dancing with groups of friends, and soon fell in love. Both were gregarious and fun-loving, with a quirky sense of humor, and before long Roger had asked her to marry him.

  Rosemarie had a big decision to make before she accepted Roger’s proposal. Would she be happy living in England? Her Uncle Fritz, who used to work in London as a waiter, assured her that she would love it because they had lots of trees. It must have crossed her mind to wonder if there would be any anti-German prejudice after the war, but surely no one could blame her. She wished she could ask her father’s advice, but news came through that he had been arrested by the Russians and was being held at Buchenwald concentration camp. As an estate manager, he was an important figure in the town; thus, his imprisonment along with the mayor, the chief of police, and two dignitaries was inevitable.

  The first German war brides arriving in Hull. Rosemarie is on the second step down and above her is a friend, Ilsa Guest, who traveled on the same crossing.

  Roger was demobilized and sent back to London in the summer of 1946 and, having made her decision, Rosemarie followed in October. Her mother came to see her off for the crossing on the Hamburg to Hull ferry that was bringing the first German war brides to Britain. They were met by British press photographers, but Roger whispered to Rosemarie not to make any comment. He had brought a phonograph with him and they danced all the way back on the train to London, utterly delighted to see each other again. They traveled to Wallington in Surrey to stay with his parents, and on December 7th, they were married in the local church. Sad
ly, none of her family could attend because of the postwar restrictions on travel.

  Making a New Life in England

  Rosemarie soon found that her fears about living in England were misplaced. She loved the food and the English countryside; her parents-in-law, with whom they lived, were also very welcoming and she didn’t encounter any hostility. Her only sadness was not being able to see her own family, because travel from East Germany was so difficult.

  A face from her old life soon turned up in Britain. The bookshop in Gardelegen had been run by the Manger family, whose son Werner had gone to school with Rosemarie. He had been injured during the war and was taken to a Canadian hospital in France and then to a prisoner-of-war camp in Norfolk. When Rosemarie heard about this, she and Roger tracked him down. They pretended Werner was Rosemarie’s cousin and managed to take him out for dinner on several occasions. When he was released in 1948, before he left Britain, he insisted on repaying their hospitality by taking them for dinner at the Savoy Hotel in London.

  Roger and Rosemarie got married in Wallington, Surrey, but none of her family was able to be there.

  Finally, after two and a half years, Rosemarie’s father Wilhelm was released from Buchenwald, for which his family was extremely thankful. He was sure he wouldn’t have survived another winter there and, in fact, only he and one other of the five dignitaries arrested in Gardelegen made it back home. Over the next decade he managed to visit Rosemarie and Roger, once using a false passport, and on another occasion the Williams family traveled to West Germany on vacation and met up with them there. It turned out that Roger’s father and Wilhelm had both fought at the Somme in World War I, and the two of them had a convivial chat about their recollections, comparing notes on their positions in the battle. But this type of contact was rare, and when Wilhelm died in 1958, Rosemarie was unable to attend his funeral.