Recently I've been exchanging emails with an acquaintance about our time in German in the late '60s. I won't share his tales -- those are for him to tell -- but I thought my observations might be interesting to some of you.
My correspondent said that he and his fellow GIs where they were -- an industrial area in Hesse in Central Germany -- were given rather a cold shoulder by the locals and he felt that perhaps it was that we had bombed the area pretty much flat. Heidelberg is right next door to Mannheim, which was bombed flat during WW II and was almost a totally new city. I didn't feel the coldness some GIs felt, even there. We went up there fairly regularly, since a friend had a sports-bar on the outskirts of the city.
Some GIs only got to see their installation and the town right next to it and maybe a bus tour around the area. For them, their time in Germany could seem endless and rather boring, a poor substitute for life at home in the land of the Big PX. I was lucky that I had access to wheels. My buddy, Gary, an Airedale meteorologist, had an old Opel and a couple of the other guys had Dodge or Plymouth slant-six compacts. (They had been shipped over as POVs and when their owners bought new German cars, they got sold to other GIs. There was an informal car lot near Heidelberg with quite a few of them for sale under the watchful eye of an ex-GI who had taken his discharge there and stayed. Some of those Valiants and Darts had been passed through dozens of hands.)
One of our number, another Airedale, also with the meteorological unit at the Army air base like Gary, bought one of those rather ridiculous Renault Caravelle convertibles. He nearly put it on the (non-existent) roof one day. Toward the end, I bought a fifties Ford Anglia, which looked like a scaled-down version of my old '35 Ford 2-door sedan. I drove the Anglia for a short time and intended to ship it home. I don't remember what happened, but that didn't.
Along the way, I got to drive my office-mate's Porsche 911 Targa while he was in North Africa on leave. I took it up the Königstuhl -- a mountain road near Heidelberg -- and actually ran it in a timed-trial-style hill-climb. I also got to drive a Mini-Cooper when the owner had his license stripped for racing around the Kaserne grounds in it. It fit me like a tight overcoat but was a blast to drive.
1953 Ford Anglia 2-Door Saloon (not mine; this one has British plates)
Along the way, I got to drive my office-mate's Porsche 911 Targa while he was in North Africa on leave. I took it up the Königstuhl -- a mountain road near Heidelberg -- and actually ran it in a timed-trial-style hill-climb. I also got to drive a Mini-Cooper when the owner had his license stripped for racing around the Kaserne grounds in it. It fit me like a tight overcoat but was a blast to drive.
Heidelberg, seen from the Königstuhl
One of my roommates in the NCO barracks was a British Army Royal Corps of Transport Lance Corporal we called Twink. Kevin was from the West of England, a working-class kid with few chances to advance at home. So, at 17, with his Mum's permission, he took the Queen's Schilling. He did well, and when I met him he was the driver and dogsbody (shades of Baldrick; it was also Douglas Bader's call-sign, which will make sense in a bit.) for the British Army of the Rhine's Second-in-Command, a rather stuffy but generally pleasant Colonel. One of Twink's jobs was to drive up to Cologne, where the BAOR had its headquarters and buy the necessaries from the NAAFI Store (Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes; NAAFI administers facilities that are equivalent to our PX, commissary and officer's, NCO and EM clubs.) There were particular little bits of Britain without which the Colonel couldn't survive, including Peek Freans biscuits (cookies to you and me) and a particular type of Single Malt Scotch our Class Six didn't carry.
Twink drove the Colonel's Rover P6 3500 Sedan (powered by a license-built Buick V-8 engine) for the trip up to Cologne (Köln) and on the autobahn we clipped right along at 90 or better. That's British miles per hour, not KPH. We got passed by the occasional Wankel-engined NSU RO-80 sedan, one Corvette, with Luxemburg plates and the rather common white and green Landespolezei Porsche 911 Targa pursuit vehicles. Oh, and a German courier on a military BMW twin, riding flat out in the left lane.
I had privileges at the NAAFI -- and the Brits and Canadians had reciprocity at our facilities as well; the best source for electronics was the RCAF PX near Frankfurt, as I recall -- but bought little. (A matter of finances, not finickiness) The first or second time we drove up, we did a bit of sightseeing, including the Cathedral. It was magnificent, huge -- I'd seen both the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Unfinished (Er, ah, Divine actually) and St. Patrick's, both in NYC, but this place was immense. And, as irreligious as I am, I could feel the spirituality. Although hit by 70 aerial bombs in the war, the spires kept standing and the cathedral was rebuilt beginning in 1956.
I had privileges at the NAAFI -- and the Brits and Canadians had reciprocity at our facilities as well; the best source for electronics was the RCAF PX near Frankfurt, as I recall -- but bought little. (A matter of finances, not finickiness) The first or second time we drove up, we did a bit of sightseeing, including the Cathedral. It was magnificent, huge -- I'd seen both the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Unfinished (Er, ah, Divine actually) and St. Patrick's, both in NYC, but this place was immense. And, as irreligious as I am, I could feel the spirituality. Although hit by 70 aerial bombs in the war, the spires kept standing and the cathedral was rebuilt beginning in 1956.
Hohe Domkirche St. Peter und Maria, Köln
So, as I said, while I was, just like many of my contemporaries, a prisoner of the Army for another year, I tried to enjoy myself in the Federal Republic of Germany as much as possible. I do remember some guys stationed in the bleak industrial areas saying that it often seemed as if some of the Germans were waiting to rotate out, too, but maybe they just wanted to re-conquer Poland. Not that that would have been all that much of an improvement, from what I heard. {;-)
As for my treatment by the German people, aside from them not wanting us to date their daughters -- and that was true in the states, as well -- they treated me pretty well.
A side note, if I may: When I was in language school in the DC metro area, my classmates and I went out to the college bars in Georgetown. One of our bunch had a local college ID, which got us in. We'd been asked by the wonks at the State Department -- who administered our Lao language program. Lao wasn't taught at the Defense Language Institute, West Coast in Monterrey, California -- not to wear the uniform. They wanted us in civvies and not looking military, lest we frighten some of the NGO students they were also training in one of their programs. Officially, we were enrolled in the Defense Language Institute, East Coast, based at Ft. McNair and at Arlington Barracks, but our program was under the auspices of the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department. Got all of that? Good, because it is not really germane to the story. ☺
So, anyway, we went bar-hopping, four or five young GIs with non-regulation haircuts and non-PX clothes. In DC at the time, soldiers, sailors and airmen were at the absolute bottom of the pecking order, dating-wise. After all, these young women didn't come from Corn Patch, Iowa to meet some GI from two counties over. (No disrespect to Iowa or the corn-fed beauties therefrom intended, of course.) They wanted to meet someone interesting. So, when people asked what we did, we said, "We work for the government." "Oh, so do we," the young ladies would reply. "I work at Agriculture," one might say. "What do you do?" "Well, ma'am, I can't talk about what I do. It's classified at the highest level." Ah, an unassailable air of mystery and our military employer disguised. Since we would be working for the uniformed branch, so to speak, of the National Security Agency -- or No Such Agency as it was known back then -- we were technically correct. As it turned out, our subterfuge was for naught, and I ended up importing my own girl from Connecticut after we met when I went home for a two-week leave. (And that's a whole other story for another day. Remind me.)
So, then, back to German-American relations. When I started hanging out at and later tending bar in Treffpunkt, a local Gasthaus near Patton Barracks, older German men often spoke of their time in the war, and always made sure I knew that they had fought mostly on the Eastern Front. I know that Hitler threw a huge number of men into that campaign, but a lot were lost. Why was it that none of them had served on the other front or in North Africa? I surmised that many of the old vets didn't want me to think that they had faced my relatives in the forests of France or elsewhere on the Western Front. They bought me drinks, they shook my hand. We were now kameraden after all.
Rudi, who owned Treffpunkt -- which means "Meeting Place" -- was pretty much an unreconstructed Junker, (It was Graf und Ritter Rudolph Something, Something von Somewhere as I recall) who had been a Nazi because it was required of officers. He had a great deal of admiration for the British pilots who shot him down -- twice -- during the days of the Battle of Britain. Like Douglas Bader, the RAF Ace, Rudi had lost a leg (Bader lost both of his in a pre-war crash) and had a prosthetic. For some reason Rudi and his two daughters took a liking to me, and I found that I was no longer hanging out at Treffpunkt as a customer but was pouring drinks.
I was also sort of laundering money. German businesses weren't supposed to take US Dollars. They all did, pretty much. So, once a wekk, Rudi gave me his dollar take and I went to the US Army Finance Unit and exchanged it -- at the artificial military rate, for D-Marks at a ratio of 1 to 4, making a D-Mark equal to a quarter. Most of us in my office also took our paychecks -- which, through a hustle, we got early -- down to the Bundesbank at the railroad station and got them cashed, even pre-dated as they were. We'd get the funds in D-Marks and then exchange them for dollars, a reverse of what I did for Rudi. The nice thing is that we had money for a couple of days when most of the poor unfortunates didn't, which allowed some of us to act as bankers. I didn't, but a lot of guys did. When the people at the Finance Unit asked -- which some would -- I explained my handful of old, rumpled dollars -- fives, tens and some twenties -- as poker winnings, which no one questioned further.
I will add as a note that my ability to struggle along in first-year HS German did give me an edge and there were a lot of times when the young Germans we drank with would practice their English, of which they were a bit uncertain and shy to use and I would do the same in German. As the beer flowed, the tongues became more adept and every once in a while, someone would say something really outrageous and there would be mutual ROFLOAO ensuing.
Rudi, who owned Treffpunkt -- which means "Meeting Place" -- was pretty much an unreconstructed Junker, (It was Graf und Ritter Rudolph Something, Something von Somewhere as I recall) who had been a Nazi because it was required of officers. He had a great deal of admiration for the British pilots who shot him down -- twice -- during the days of the Battle of Britain. Like Douglas Bader, the RAF Ace, Rudi had lost a leg (Bader lost both of his in a pre-war crash) and had a prosthetic. For some reason Rudi and his two daughters took a liking to me, and I found that I was no longer hanging out at Treffpunkt as a customer but was pouring drinks.
I was also sort of laundering money. German businesses weren't supposed to take US Dollars. They all did, pretty much. So, once a wekk, Rudi gave me his dollar take and I went to the US Army Finance Unit and exchanged it -- at the artificial military rate, for D-Marks at a ratio of 1 to 4, making a D-Mark equal to a quarter. Most of us in my office also took our paychecks -- which, through a hustle, we got early -- down to the Bundesbank at the railroad station and got them cashed, even pre-dated as they were. We'd get the funds in D-Marks and then exchange them for dollars, a reverse of what I did for Rudi. The nice thing is that we had money for a couple of days when most of the poor unfortunates didn't, which allowed some of us to act as bankers. I didn't, but a lot of guys did. When the people at the Finance Unit asked -- which some would -- I explained my handful of old, rumpled dollars -- fives, tens and some twenties -- as poker winnings, which no one questioned further.
I will add as a note that my ability to struggle along in first-year HS German did give me an edge and there were a lot of times when the young Germans we drank with would practice their English, of which they were a bit uncertain and shy to use and I would do the same in German. As the beer flowed, the tongues became more adept and every once in a while, someone would say something really outrageous and there would be mutual ROFLOAO ensuing.
My acquaintance relates very different experiences. So, again, two guys of about the same age but with vastly different experiences in more or less the same place and time. Odd.
When the reminiscence bug grabs me again, there are more tales to tell of those days of yesteryear, maybe not thrilling, but -- well, they were interesting to me as I lived them. Let me know if you liked this and remind me if you want more.
When the reminiscence bug grabs me again, there are more tales to tell of those days of yesteryear, maybe not thrilling, but -- well, they were interesting to me as I lived them. Let me know if you liked this and remind me if you want more.
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