May All Your Christmases be White

It may have been a white Christmas in 1944, but it certainly wasn't merry and bright.

This was especially true in western Europe, where the Germans had launched a last-ditch counter-offensive, now known as the Battle of the Bulge. Bitterly cold temperatures and heavy snow storms added to the miserable conditions endured by Allied forces.

(Library of Congress)

Our troops weren't the only Americans trapped by the wintry battle. Four Red Cross clubmobile crews were out serving units when the Germans attacked and were themselves trapped behind enemy lines. One Red Cross Girl, Peggy Henry, had been working at a Red Cross club in the resort town of Clervaux, Luxembourg and escaped under fire with a tank battle raging in the streets around her. In my novel Courage to be Counted, my heroine Vivian's experience is a dramatized composite of the harrowing ordeals of these Clubmobile crews and Peggy Henry's daring escape from Clervaux. Henry was later awarded the Bronze Star by President Truman for her bravery.

By Christmas Day 1944, most of these women were out of immediate danger. The women of Clubmobile Group B joined soldiers of the 1st Division to sing Christmas carols in the streets of Herve, Belgium on Christmas Eve, and though mixed with flashes of tracers and artillery fire in the sky, the brilliant stars brought a sense of peace and joy. The women of Clubmobile Group E later reported that they spent Christmas morning near Spa, Belgium diving into foxholes and serving doughnuts and coffee to the soldiers between alerts.

(National Archives)

It was Clubmobile Group F, however, who experienced the most dramatic Christmas of all, for they had been based at Bastogne in December and it was their Clubmobile crews who were most in peril at the time the Germans attacked. The crew of the Clubmobile named the Cheyenne were trapped at Vielsalm. One of Cheyenne's crew members, Jill Pitts, learned that her twin brother Jack had been killed in an early skirmish of the Battle of the Bulge, mere days after she had last seen him. Though she grieved for her brother, she had little choice but to carry on, especially given her own predicament. The town mayor of Vielsalm presented the women with an incendiary bomb: "To blow up your Clubmobile if the Boche should come." By the 21st, the US Army's 82nd Airborne had moved in, and the battle drew nearer. Early the next morning, the women were awakened and told they had a narrow window in which to escape. They loaded their Clubmobile with their Christmas gifts of nylons, perfume and food treats, bags of mail for the troops, and as much doughnut flour as they could carry. Following close behind a Jeep assigned to guide them out of Vielsalm, the women waved to the American soldiers lining their withdrawal route from this embattled village. In a bid to prevent German units from following, GIs threw up roadblocks as the Clubmobile roared past.


Still struggling to escape later that night, the Jeep guiding them ran into another vehicle. The women moved the injured men into the back of the Clubmobile, pushed the Jeep off the road, hitched the Jeep's trailer with its crucial supplies to the Clubmobile and drove on. An MP directed them around a tank battle, and they spent the night in an aid station. It took them until Christmas Eve to connect up with their main group at Charleville, France. They arrived in time to share some spiked Christmas punch and fruitcake with the other crews. While singing Christmas carols with the GIs that night, a German bomber dropped a bomb that shook the building. "When the ceiling didn't come down, they resumed singing."

After a day of serving crews and dodging bombs on Christmas Day, the crews of Clubmobile Group F received a hand-delivered message from their pals in the 101st Airborne, then mired in the Battle of Bastogne (immortalized in HBO's "Band of Brothers"): "Still here and pitching. Don't worry about us - we're doing okay. Thanks for the doughnut flour. We captured it from Jerry, and we're making pancakes from it every day. . . . See you soon - and have the doughnuts ready!"

Central Illinois WWII Stories, a video project of Illinois Public Media, created a stirring documentary tribute to Jill (Pitts) Knappenberger and her crewmates Phyllis and Helen and their dramatic escape from the siege at Vielsalm with the help of the 82nd Airborne.

Wishing all of you a happy holiday season, however and wherever you may celebrate!

You can learn more about me and my writing on my website, and you can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.

You can purchase my debut novel through the links below.

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I’ll be Home for Christmas By Eleri Grace

Many classic Christmas songs, stories, and films date to the 1940s, to WWII in particular, and with good reason. Almost half the popular Christmas tunes performed and played today were written and originally recorded in the 1930s-40s, with the majority of the remainder dating to the 1950s-1960s.

Why such an outpouring of creativity in celebration of Christmas? Homesick American soldiers, together with their lonely sweethearts, wives and mothers on the home front, spurred a nostalgic idealization of the holiday. These Christmas tributes sound universal themes of love, fellowship, hope and resurgence, presenting a stark contrast with the harsh realities of war. Through the vehicle of popular culture, artists united Americans in common purpose and camaraderie. 

Christmas Eve will find me

Where the love-light gleams

I’ll be home for Christmas

If only in my dreams.

                         

Kim Gannon, Walter Kent, and Buck Ram (1943)

This beautiful Library of Congress compilation of photographs, essays, magazine articles, journal entries and other reminiscences is the perfect way to step back in time to the bygone era of WWII this holiday season. It captures the spirit of the men and women serving overseas, as well as the hopes and fears of those who kept the home fires burning, who longed for the safe return of their loved ones.

The heroines of my Clubmobile Girls novels helped alleviate the acute homesickness experienced by so many young soldiers as Christmas neared. Suppressing their own longing for the comforts of home, the Red Cross Girls threw themselves into creating innovative holiday decorations, procuring gifts, and hosting holiday parties. Wherever possible, American soldiers were anxious to spread Christmas cheer to locals, particularly to area children. Red Cross Girls worked with the military to plan and pull off these festive celebrations that brought so much joy to the young men fighting the war so far from home.

 

In my debut novel Courage to be Counted, my heroine Vivian experiences an intense longing for her sweetheart and for home while singing “Silent Night” at a party the Red Cross and men of the 305^th Bomb Group hosted for village children in England. The party she and her friend Mabs plan would have looked something like this photograph from the 379th Bomb Group in Kimbolton, England.

379th Bomb Group (National Archives)

Photo ID: 342-FH-3A-14449-65542AC.

Meanwhile, her hero Jack wishes desperately that he could introduce her to his family as he shares what he knows will be his last Christmas dinner at home for a long while. Two years later in 1944, huddled under blankets in a freezing billet in Belgium with the Battle of the Bulge raging all around her, Vivian recalls with a pang of nostalgia the previous Christmas, when she and Jack spent holiday leave in London.

Making Christmas cards from Chinese currency in December 1944 (National Archives)

Inventive Christmas tree near Buna, Papua New Guinea, 1942

As you can see from the photos I’ve included here, the Red Cross Girls called on no small amount of ingenuity to replicate Christmas traditions for American soldiers serving all over the world. They made paper chains, used aluminum cans, cigarette cartons, and the metal strips known as chaff that the air forces released from their planes to jam radar defenses, strung popcorn, and made use of recycled Christmas cards.

The subtitle of I'll be Home for Christmas is The Library of Congress Revisits the Spirit of Christmas During World War II. The spirit of Christmas was especially strong in these tumultuous years, leaving us all with a lasting legacy of treasured Christmas music, stories and films. 

Learn more about me and my writing on my website, and you can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. 

You can purchase my debut novel through the links below.

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Extraordinary in the Ordinary By Eleri Grace

A “superhero” is a fictional character with extraordinary or superhuman powers or an exceptionally skilled or successful person.

Rather than paying tribute to the numerous actual people who populate my life and have exceptional or superhuman perseverance, strength, and empathy for others, I decided to write today about a group of women who straddle both worlds in a sense.  The heroines of my Clubmobile Girls novels are fictional, yet they are rooted firmly in our documented history. Based on the thousands of women who answered the call to wartime service with the American Red Cross, my heroines have a strong sense of duty and patriotism, resilience, an adventurous and independent streak, and exceptional courage.

Courage is the first word in the title of my first Clubmobile Girls novel, and it is the attribute my heroines call forth more than any other. As all good fictional characters do, my heroines must summon their mental strength to withstand and extricate themselves and others from dangerous situations. But my heroines evidence mettle from the beginning, way before they are in any sort of perilous situation. Indeed, they have built up and drawn on an enormous reservoir of tenacity before my readers meet them. Of course, most American women served in some capacity during WWII, whether working in a factory or defense plant, enlisting in one of the auxiliary military service units, volunteering with the USO, the Red Cross, or a local hospital, or tending a victory garden and economizing in her household. But the women who secured overseas assignments with the American Red Cross evinced particularly exceptional spirit and drive.

Well before the first women shipped out, before their overseas work was operational, the Red Cross intuited that the women who would organize and staff their clubs and mobile units all over the world must be self-starters with stamina, confidence, and adaptability.

Most of the women who applied (only one in six would be successful) were poised, charming, and accomplished professionals who could draw on a varied life experience. They were good conversationalists who could hold their own in a male-dominated environment, who could laugh at a dirty joke but retain “girl next door” respectability, who could offer comfort and stability to both the homesick and shell-shocked soldiers. But it was her inner fortitude that likely won her the job, and it will be that same strength that will see her through it all.

Stand in her shoes and close your eyes. It’s 1942, and you’ve just signed on for the duration.

You don’t know where you will be posted (a bomber base in southeast England or in the large cities of southeast Australia, a club in Algiers, Calcutta or Chungking, a train serving men working in the deserts of Persia, a naval base in Iceland or Cuba) or what your day-to-day work will entail. You don’t know when you might next see your parents or family and friends. Tied to that, of course, is the dawning realization that you don’t know what the “duration” actually means. You have no crystal ball that shows a return to normalcy by 1946. You don’t know yet how the war years will shape and change you profoundly, how those years more than any others will stand out as having been the most meaningful of your entire life. But you know one thing for certain: you wouldn’t trade this opportunity to serve your country with courage for anything.

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Learn more about me and my writing on my website, and you can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. 

The Devil's in the Details

Hi, I’m Eleri Grace, a new blogger at Romancing the Genres, and I’m excited to share more about me and my novels with all of you. I write WWII historical romance featuring trailblazing Red Cross Girl heroines and flyboy heroes. My novels reflect my passion for the 1940s era, and my hope is that readers will come away with an appreciation for the many couples swept up in war-time courtships forged in a time of larger-than-life uncertainties. 

 

We’ve commemorated many “75^th” anniversaries for key milestones in World War II in the last year, and recently marked the 80^th anniversary of the start to the conflict in Europe. The war years lived by the Greatest Generation seem paradoxically a bygone era and not so long ago. Many elements of our current lives were in existence and use in the 1940s. But as a historical author writing in that time period, I take special care to confirm the specifics. I know I’m not the only historical author to find that being a stickler for historical accuracy can be a slippery slope. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost hours to a research rabbit hole that ultimately didn’t perhaps merit that level of sleuthing. The trick is knowing when to stop, when you’ve hit a brick wall and need to “write around” the issue, when you’ve learned all you can via Google, or when you’ve lost sight of the bigger picture.

Some details are fun and relatively straightforward. I have always enjoyed perusing baby name books, so naming my characters is particularly rewarding.  I regularly consult the online Social Security Administration database of “Popular Names by Decade.”  My heroes and heroines were born in the 1917-1922 time period, so I browsed both the 1910s and 1920s lists and created a master list of possible character names. Now, some of the popular names in those decades don’t appeal much to modern readers. So I made a list of era-appropriate given names with modern currency. In my first Clubmobile Girls novel, Courage to be Counted, my heroine is Vivian Elaine Lambert, and the hero is John “Jack” Peter Nielsen. Both Vivian and Jack have seen a resurgence of popularity in the last few decades.

One only needs to read a few memoirs to pick up on the era’s propensity to bestow quirky nicknames. So while I’m reading memoirs and historical non-fiction for research purposes, I add to my ongoing list of unusual nicknames. While I probably won’t use those names for my hero or heroine, I do populate my cast of secondary characters with names like Ace, Tink, Duck, and Bizzy.

Some details are easy to verify. If you are writing a Christmas scene, your characters might sing songs that remind them of home, and a large number of familiar Christmas songs still enjoyed today date to the 1940s and 1950s. Most of us immediately associate Bing Crosby’s classic “White Christmas” with the WWII years, but it only takes a few seconds to confirm that it was originally performed and released in 1942. Whew, your 1943 Christmas scene can easily incorporate this well-known Christmas song. But you can’t include “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” which was first recorded in 1949.

Many common items were rationed during the war years. Internet sleuthing usually yields a quick answer to what sorts of food items were rationed in different countries, but you have to be careful here too. Even if a food wasn’t rationed, its typical packaging might have been.

WWII authors should always keep the blackout regulations in mind. Consider this scene from Courage to be Counted:

A trace of musty odor hung about the stuffy room. Vivian crossed the room and pulled on the sash to raise the window. A waft of cool, damp air left a light mist on her face. She closed her eyes in contentment.

She should move back and let the blackout drapes fall closed, but the delicate spray of mizzle continued to beckon, refreshing and relaxing.

Other regulations, such as the restriction on bath water limits, provide another opportunity to immerse one’s readers more directly in the realities of life during that time: “Did she have time to run a bath? It would only be a few inches of tepid water, but a big improvement over her toiletry for the last several days.”

Reading deeply in memoirs and narrative non-fiction can illuminate customs, patterns of behavior that weren’t dictated by regulations but were prevalent at the time. I wanted my hero’s scenes to reflect the challenges he faced in the air but also the realities of his life on a bomber base in southeastern England.

Bowie opened the door, and Jack followed him out into the night. A crisp bite of wind stung his chapped face and whooshed through his heavy clothing, chilling him deep in his bones. Darkness, dense and inky, enveloped them like a shroud. Occasional pinpricks of light marked a hut door opening and closing. They stumbled across the mucky footpaths by instinct, the huff of their breaths and the crunch of their boots on the frost-coated ground the only sounds.

No one talked. Not on their way to the mess. Not in the chow line. Not even as they ate powdered eggs and fried Spam washed down with black coffee. Apparently, they had been up too many times this week to merit the fresh eggs and bacon that would normally be served on the morning of a maximum effort mission.

These are but a few examples of the ways a historical author can weave tiny details into the story, giving it depth and color. At the same time, it’s important to use those sorts of details with a deft touch. Translating every line of dialogue into the slang of the era would be overkill. Avoiding the information dump is equally important. For all the research I do – and I do way more than I probably ought to – I only include a fraction of what I know. You have to know when to stop researching and when you’re laying it on too thick in your writing. The devil is in the details. 

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Learn more about me and my writing on my website, and you can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.