Memories of Wartime Wanderings: What I Did in WWII-Part One
Book Details
PublisherBig Barn Press
ISBN / ASINB00DQF9NBS
ISBN-13978B00DQF9NB5
MarketplaceFrance 🇫🇷
Description
This book recounts a five-and-a-half year odyssey in the life of a young woman. In January 1943, in the midst of WWII, Ann Van Wynen completed her doctor of jurisprudence degree at the University of Texas and accepted an appointment as a vice consul in the U.S. Foreign Service. The long journeys and tough experiences she faced over the next five years changed her life forever. This vivid and detailed memoir is drawn from hundreds of letters written to her parents during her Foreign Service career.
Having grown up with her mother speaking Flemish and her father high Dutch, she was assigned to South Africa. But getting there in wartime meant traveling by boat with a layover in Lisbon, Portugal, where she agreed to lengthen her stay in order to frequent nightclubs to ferret out Nazi spies.
Upon reaching Johannesburg, she was ordered to research and write ground-breaking reports on South African labor relations. Her ability to speak Afrikaans led to cordial relations with Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts.
After contracting a rare (and usually fatal) tropical disease, bilharzias, Ann was reassigned to the American Embassy to the Government of the Netherlands-in-Exile in London. With the coming of Victory in Europe in 1945, she played a key role in mobilizing the return of the embassy staff to The Hague.
By the summer of 1948, attacks of bilharzias were getting worse and Ann wanted to make a career change. Her fiancée and fellow lawyer, A.J. Thomas, had completed his own Foreign Service tour and accepted a teaching post in the Law School of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
Ann left the Foreign Service in Sept. 1948, and later that fall she and A.J. were married in New York City. Late in 1948 she was appointed legal research associate and lecturer at SMU School of Law, a position she held until 1963. At that point, with a post-graduate degree in international law, she joined the SMU Political Science department as Professor of Constitutional and International Law.
Before his untimely death in 1982, A.J. Thomas and Ann Van Wynen Thomas collaborated on a dozen volumes of legal scholarship. After retiring as Emeritus Professor of Constitutional Law, Ann moved to Spaniel Hall in Preston Peninsula on Lake Texoma, north of Pottsboro, Texas. Until her death on March 27, 2013, she maintained a lively correspondence (by email) with former students and other contacts around the world, as well as continuing her research on the Supreme Court and giving monthly talks about controversial court decisions to local citizens.
Having grown up with her mother speaking Flemish and her father high Dutch, she was assigned to South Africa. But getting there in wartime meant traveling by boat with a layover in Lisbon, Portugal, where she agreed to lengthen her stay in order to frequent nightclubs to ferret out Nazi spies.
Upon reaching Johannesburg, she was ordered to research and write ground-breaking reports on South African labor relations. Her ability to speak Afrikaans led to cordial relations with Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts.
After contracting a rare (and usually fatal) tropical disease, bilharzias, Ann was reassigned to the American Embassy to the Government of the Netherlands-in-Exile in London. With the coming of Victory in Europe in 1945, she played a key role in mobilizing the return of the embassy staff to The Hague.
By the summer of 1948, attacks of bilharzias were getting worse and Ann wanted to make a career change. Her fiancée and fellow lawyer, A.J. Thomas, had completed his own Foreign Service tour and accepted a teaching post in the Law School of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
Ann left the Foreign Service in Sept. 1948, and later that fall she and A.J. were married in New York City. Late in 1948 she was appointed legal research associate and lecturer at SMU School of Law, a position she held until 1963. At that point, with a post-graduate degree in international law, she joined the SMU Political Science department as Professor of Constitutional and International Law.
Before his untimely death in 1982, A.J. Thomas and Ann Van Wynen Thomas collaborated on a dozen volumes of legal scholarship. After retiring as Emeritus Professor of Constitutional Law, Ann moved to Spaniel Hall in Preston Peninsula on Lake Texoma, north of Pottsboro, Texas. Until her death on March 27, 2013, she maintained a lively correspondence (by email) with former students and other contacts around the world, as well as continuing her research on the Supreme Court and giving monthly talks about controversial court decisions to local citizens.
