James T. Lingg - WWII
Page 16 - Safe in Hospital Ste. Simone

On the 18^th of August, all hell broke loose. They had let us out of the cars, one car at a time. It was our turn to be out when a locomotive blew up. The FFI (French Forces Interior) had staged some kind of attack. At that point, being outside the boxcar, with all the noise going on, I started to crawl down underneath the railroad car.

I had crawled about half the length of the train, when all of a sudden a pair of Jack Boots were staring me in the face. I gave up and crawled out. It was a Frenchman. He hauled me right out of that train station, through the Germans in a truck to the Hospital Ste. Simone. There I was put back in the hospital. The French found the bullet in my shoulder and removed it.

Incidentally, all these bullets had been given to me as keepsakes up to this point. I had them all through the war. I took them home after the war and put them on my first wife's key chain with her car keys. When I decided she and I were not getting along, I told her I was leaving the bullets with her and if she ever needed me to send them and I'd come running. Later when I asked her for them, she said she had thrown them away, so I guess I lost out there.

It was really something to lie in that hospital and listen to the French and Germans fighting outside on roof tops and very short distances away - night after night - from about the 17^th to the 23^rd, when the German Officer commanding all German troops in Paris ordered a cease fire and an armistice was signed with the FFI. Paris would be an open city. It would not be defended, so the Americans wouldn't bomb and shell it to death, the Germans would withdraw most of their troops, which they did.

It put us kind of in a bad spot because the Germans and the French Red Cross came into the hospital to see what was there and, seeing Americans, Canadian and British in their hospital, the Germans wanted to take us to Germany with them. They checked us and the French Red Cross intervened, keeping almost all of the wounded personnel in the hospital. It was really touch and go. I stayed there in the French Hospital until the French arrived on the 25^th. I stayed through that and the Americans finally came on the 29^th, 30^th or somewhere about there to ship us out to our own hospital.

On August 26^th, we had the heaviest bombing that Paris received during the war. This was ordered by Hitler in his anger because the troops had left the city without burning it to the ground. To give you a general idea, one of the books that was written about it said that 213 people were killed, 914 injured and they damaged or destroyed 5997 buildings, most of them tenements between Gare de Lyon and Bois de Vincennes.

I remember the bombing as being fairly close to our hospital. They blew our windows open. They didn't break but they were big, tall - must have been about 8' - windows in the rooms. I had a Canadian in the room with me. He had been injured in the spine so they had no way to move him. I was so scared when the bombing started; I jumped out of my bed and ran to the door. When I got to the door, I turned around and realized that that guy wasn't going to go so I told him I'd stay with him until they could get him out. We laid in bed and listened to the bombing going on and talking, keeping our spirits up. I was probably as scared as I ever was during the war because the bombs coming down sounded like they were going to come right in our windows.

The medical people never did come to get this guy. We laid there through the whole thing and talked about what had been going on with our lives. When it was all over, the people came straggling back up the stairs. The nurses came into our room and wanted to know why we hadn't evacuated. Then they realized that that young man couldn't, so we were treated pretty good after that. I shouldn't say that, we were treated pretty good all the time.