World War II Remembered

Bouncing Along with Zhukov

333 My Father's WW I history in France, Russia, Algeria, and later during WW II with the United States Army, led to a complicated national identity for me. So my father’s story—and my mother’s—is interwoven with my own WW II experience and is thus worth recounting. Dad—Col. René Jean Daudon—was born in the Champagne area of France. He was in Russia, where he had lived and was educated for 12 years, on vacation from an engineering university in Frankfurt, Germany . When WW I broke out, he rushed back to France by way of Murmansk and the Low Countries so that he could enlist in the French army before the War was over. At the enlistment center, the officer in charge asked, “What kind of a damn fool are you to come all this way to be killed?” He served in the French army and survived the battle of Verdun. Following the Russian Revolution, the Allies were worried that a token Russian brigade would contaminate their soldiers with revolutionary ideas. Because Dad spoke Russian, he was ordered to accompany these Russians to Algeria to work in a vineyard far from Europe. Bouncing Along with Zhukov • Janine Daudon Hawkes Janie with her husband Herbert Hawkes 334 334 World War II Remembered They, and he, remained there until the War ended, whereupon my father accompanied them on the trip back to Russia, by then the Soviet Union. He watched as “the poor devils” (as he put it) were conscripted into the White Russian army. For this service to the Tsarist government he received two medals, the Order of St. Stanislaus and the Order of Ste. Anne. But my father’s story was only half of my complicated national identity. My mother, an American citizen, went to school in Switzerland and met my father on a ship; they had a whirlwind romance and were married in France. I was born in Nice, my brother Dan in Paris. But because life was difficult in France after WW I, my parents came to the United States, where my father continued his education. He said he had almost received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania— “almost” because he had chosen to write a bibliography of the works of Rabelais, and the effort became more than daunting. I think he was glad to give it up to join the U.S. Army, where he gained an officer’s commission. Early in WW II, American war matériel was sent to Russia by way of Persia (now Iran) because of the devastating impact Germany’s “wolf-pack” submarine attacks were having on convoys traversing the North Atlantic and the Baltic Sea. The convoy that my Dad had been assigned to was routed into the Pacific Ocean, a longer but safer route that ended up in Persia. While in Tehran, he was invited to many Russian army parties and said that he often had to cry for mercy while trying to keep up with the alcohol consumption of his hosts. The Russians encouraged him to wear his WW I Russian medals because “they are part of our history!” Because of his multilinguistic skills, he became extremely valuable to the Army as a translator and was one of the translators at the Tehran conference involving Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin. After WW II ended, he was stationed in Berlin, which by then had been divided into four parts by the Allies. Again he served as a translator and, as he later admitted, also functioned as a spy. Initially after the division of the city, one could easily travel between the American , French, British, and Russian sectors. But the Russians later sealed off their sector, which was the poorest part of Berlin: the Soviets did not want their soldiers to see how well the people in the West lived. Bouncing Along with Zhukov: Janine Daudon Hawkes 335 My college years at Bryn Mawr were interrupted when my family moved to Berlin in June 1946, the first American dependents to arrive there. On the ship were two other American girls my age, and we became close friends, forming a nucleus of young ladies of many nationalities who could play bridge, ride horses, and play golf together. Life was very gay for the occupation forces. We lived in a house in Dahlem, which, supposedly, was spared by our Air Corps...