My mom, Virginia Weisbrod Steuber, grew up in the Depression. Small-town girl, one of six children, the butcher's daughter. She graduated in 1933 and went on to get her teaching certificate. She taught in Pequot Lakes, Austin and finally Des Moines, Iowa.
One Saturday night she and her teacher girlfriends went to the movies. They watched the newsreel about the war and were inspired to do more for their country. Mom resigned from her teaching position Monday morning, applied for the Red Cross and was assigned to a clubmobile unit affectionately know as the "Donut Dollies."
By March, Mom was sailing to England on the Queen Mary. She wrote about the ship being "stacked with soldiers"; how it took five days to cross, zigzagging across the ocean for submarine drills; and about the gas masks. They landed in Glasgow, Scotland, and took a train to London during the blackout, as everything was bombed out.
They trained for D-Day and Mom spent her birthday crossing the English Channel to France. They drove their clubmobiles off the LST (a tank-landing ship) at 4 a.m., onto Omaha Beach. Hastily sand-mounded graves of our dead were everywhere.
She wrote, "Apprehensive — you said it. My first introduction to the heartbreak that lay ahead."
As the convoy of Red Cross clubmobiles pushed farther on, death and destruction littered the French countryside from every hedgerow to every village. Mom shared her stories with family at home about tattered and limping soldiers ecstatic to see a real live American girl, about taking refuge in a Belgian convent when the Nazis broke through the line, and about serving coffee and donuts in the foxholes during the terrible Battle of the Bulge.
After 18 months in the European theater, she was in Weimar, Germany, when the Nazis surrendered on May 8, 1945, Victory in Europe Day. She returned home, got her BA from the University of Minnesota and raised her family.
She was posthumously awarded the Red Cross Service to the Armed Forces Legacy award for her service after she passed away at 97 years old.
