Hampton, Ellen

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Hampton, Ellen

PERSONAL:

Married; children: two.

ADDRESSES:

Home—France.

CAREER:

Historian. City University of New York, resident director of the Paris exchange program. Worked previously for Cox Newspapers as a journalist covering Central American politics, economics, and wars.

WRITINGS:

Women of Valor: The Rochambelles on the WWII Front, Palgrave Macmillan (New York, NY), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Ellen Hampton is a historian and educator based in Paris, France. Her first book, Women of Valor: The Rochambelles on the WWII Front, tells the story of a little-known group of women who served as ambulance drivers on the frontlines of World War II. Known as the Rochambeau Group, or "Rochambelles," the women were brought on as part of a temporary arrangement with the assumption that they would not be able to handle combat conditions and would inevitably be replaced by male drivers. Not only did the group remain intact through the end of the war, but they became the first women attached to an armored division of the military. Cercles contributor Charles L. Robertson remarked that Women of Valor is "the first book to pull together the entire story of this particular group of outstanding women, to bring each of them vividly to life, to detail how they came to join the group, their hardships and their personal triumphs." Robertson concluded: "[Hampton's] book is hard to put down. She can hardly have left any available sources untouched. We are all indebted to her." Patti C. McCall commented in a Library Journal review that Hampton "breathes new life into the little-known story of the Rochambeau Group." Writing for H-France Review, Shannon L. Fogg described Women of Valor as "a very readable book that weaves together oral histories, memoirs, and secondary sources in a way that should appeal to a broad audience." Fogg remarked that "academic audiences may criticize the book's lack of archival research and traditional historical methodology," but overall felt that "Hampton succeeds in bringing a little-known aspect of the war to light from the women's own perspectives."