It came about thusly...

Our platoon, on detached duty, had been dispatched to the German port city of Bremerhaven at the mouth of the Weser River. This was in the British Sector, but an "enclave" had been worked out with the Brits whereby the Americans had "control" over a tongue-of-land stretching from the old Hanseatic League city of Bremerhaven down to Bremen and maybe twenty or so miles wide. This provided a port-of-entry for the Americans for replacement troops and supplies to be dispatched southward into landlocked Austria and the large American Sector.

Our platoon, with about six or so armored cars (M-8's) and a dozen or so Jeeps, was charged with Civilian Pacification and maintenance of general decorum among the still unruly former combatants. As I said, we were "in" the 78th Infantry Division, but about a hundred or so of us had been given "tests" (we never knew for what), and "selected out" to go into a bastard outfit of some kind called "Cannon Company" and ostensibly "in" the 29th Infantry Regiment - itself a bastard Regiment, as we had been further mysteriously told. To make it more confusing still, we were told we had been put into a sort of elite group known as the "Constabulary" (in our case, however, further refined as "District Constabulary" or just "DC" for short - the same in big, yellow letters on the turrets of our armored cars - as you can see I have faithfully duplicated on my scale model of same, shown elsewhere). The "DC" or "Cannon Company" (really a detached platoon) was "said" for a bit to have been "...part of the Seventh Cavalry" - George Armstrong Custer's old outfit no less! - but we never were issued any Cavalry insignia or patches. But since I have been a horseman much of my life, and western history buff to boot - I thus never "rode forth" on patrol without the hope that we would spot some Sioux some day instead of all these dispirited German farmers...

One afternoon, I had walked and climbed alone a long way through the ruins (the entire landscape was one vast bombed out nightmare). I came at last down to a canal's edge - and there in the water dockside to me, lay a half dozen or so unharmed, small, day-sailers and two or three cabin sloops. And at one end of the dock, bobbing at her moorings, lay the prettiest topsail schooner you ever saw - the "Naturne" I remember her name yet - I would guess maybe about 65 feet overall...

I had found the untouched, unbombed home of the onetime Bremerhaven Yacht Club! Since I was only just come (courtesy the Universal Draft...Grin!), from sailing my own sloop about on my own home ground waters of Long Island Sound off the southern Connecticut shore mere months before, the sight of sailboats stirred my blood anew, and I scrambled down to the dock and made my way toward a low, relatively intact building at the far end...

I don't remember him too well - I think his name was Alex - but he was (and had been) the official caretaker of the Club in its salad days. (But I remember his wife, Wilhelmina alright: she appeared soon at his side with two cold German Pilsners for us - in her trademark leopardskin bathing suit! - more anon). Alex was a German, but Wilhelmina was Dutch. They had met and married before the "Grosse Kreig" and had been the caretakers-of-record for this Yacht Club for many years... The Allied bombers had missed their little domain here on an obscure canal backwater. They had seen few Americans since the fighting had ceased - in fact only one other before me. I asked who that might have been. They replied that it had been a "high ranking Naval Officer of some kind - an 'Amerikaner' - and he had driven in over the bombed out street one day with his private driver in a jeep. He had surveyed around and then told them they were more less to "lay low" - that "this site and these boats" now all belonged to the Allied Government, and he was its representative and he was "taking over" the Club for his eventual use and to the end of American troops he was "in touch with" and so on and so on.

He had never returned.

I sensed, rather than clearly heard, opportunity's faint knocking at the door, so in an unaccustomed manner (for a PFC) I informed them that, with MY arrival, their Yacht Club had now indeed been taken over by a "superior" Allied Force (the Germans understood nothing so much as who has the bigger muscles) and that they could forget (for all practical purposes anyhow) about the American Naval Officer and all his blandishments - they were henceforth officially "adopted" by the Third Platoon of Cannon Company, Bremerhaven District Constabulary, Army of the United States - and they should turn a cold shoulder upon any other imposters who might climb in over the ruins and intrude upon their holdings....

With that, I tossed off my Pilsner, thanked them profusely - and hightailed back to my barracks! I found Lt. George in the "Day Room." Taking his ease, as befitted a 23-year-old "officer" - far from superior command for challenge or check, with only two or three, old, alcoholic combat sergeants (Sergeant Schindler from Amarillo yet stalks my fitful slumbers: "You gonna do what I say cuz Ah'm older'n you. Y'all's was still shittin' yaller in yore Mammy's arms when I wuz first-est in this hyar Army...") under him to enforce his every whim upon the draftees and other rabble who made up the ranks of his command. I am sure Marcus Aurelius or his counterparts, summoned far beyond the Rhine in the days of the early Empire, could not have been more sorely tempted than he to go astray (taking all down with him, of course), but in all honesty I must say Lt. George was, to the best of his ability, a square shooter.

He hailed from St. Louis.

"Well, Powell," he said as I walked in. "I missed your name on the Duty Roster somehow, so since you are one of the handier ones around here at pulling disappearing acts, I figured you likely out "liberating": the community some. Where you been?" ('Liberating' was a sort of euphemism of the period you see... for a widespread practice of the American troops: ' liberating' of rings from fingers like, or 'liberating' clocks from walls... stuff like that. Heck, I guess today they might even call it "looting," I suppose, but back then some of the troops, anyhow, were not putting too fine a point on anything...).

I sidestepped his query - with one of my own.

"Lt. George," I said, have you ever been sailing?"

"Sailing?," he said. "What you mean - like in a boat?"

"Yessir, Lt. George, Sir. In a boat! In a boat on the ocean. With the wind blowing and the salt spray coming in over the bow."

"What's a bow?," he asked.

I knew I had my man! For the next half hour or so I regaled Lt. George with tales of life at sea, and of the adventure that awaits him who seizes it, etc. etc. Interwoven with this was my revelation of the Yacht Club find - and how it had all these boats for us to use, and further a relatively undamaged hall where we could have beer parties and entertain and generally disport ourselves in the manner of the Liberating Troops we were...!

He bit! I was "ordered" to take him down to the "Club" (soon to be known as "our" Club) and to take him out sailing - if I knew how to do it (Ha! ha!) - the very next day.

Piece of cake!

He became an addict! But like many who like to "ride around in boats" (Yuck!) Lt. George was your consummate landlocked landlubber and never quite got on to how to handle one at all. He instinctively shoved the tiller the wrong way, he jibed, he got hung in stays, he invariably rammed the dock when we returned, etc. etc. - but he was Gung Ho! for sailing. It couldn't have been better (for me)! He named me "Sailing Master" of our Platoon (the only such Infantry Platoon I'm willing to bet you 10-to-1, in that whole man's army of WWII to boast such office! Grin! Hell - maybe even clear back to Washington's Continental Regulars for all I know...). And I was thereafter removed from active Patrol Duty to "...take the Lt. sailing" day after day.

Now, since what follows relates in several ways to the great German U-Boat fleets that operated out of these waters during the War, I propose some music to help set the theme - and what better than the theme from that greatest of all submarine movies: "Das Boot"! So-o-o-o, it's "Down periscope...and Dive! Dive! Dive!"....

Perhaps I shall tell elsewhere of how we learned to navigate the "suspected" mine fields of the open Weser; of the day we saw Heligoland blow up; of dinners and drinking bouts with Kraut lighthouse keepers on lonely sandflats in the Nord Zee; of similar drinking bouts with Dutch and German herring fishermen aboard bluff-bowed boats that looked for all the world like giant Dutch wooden shoes (what the Dutch call 'herring buss' and the English 'doggers' I think...); of how we learned to anchor nights among said fleets as insurance against mines; of how we hunted seals on the sandflats (and some made wallets and belts of their skins); of the "tidal bore" which raced daily up the Weser and the scary time I had once far from the boat when it came upon me; of the shoreside gun emplacements along the Weser (for all the world like photo props for that later movie classic, "Guns of the Navaronne"); of scuttled 'Unterzeebooten' one after another now beached along the lonely reaches out to the open sea... but for now - on to the torpedo boat!

"The first thing we did was to dock in a minefield,
Which isn't a place where repairs should be done;
And there we lay doggo in twelve-fathom water
With tri-nitro-toluol hogging our run"

It turned out after we got to be at home at the "Club" that there were some other properties that came with it as well. One was a long, sleek, diesel boat - I don't know - maybe a good 50 feet long, or more, and with an exceedingly narrow beam - I mean this thing was like a veritable log in the water - maybe about ten feet wide at most! It was a former German naval boat - a "Torpedo Recovery Boat" in fact, and they had been used as we understood, to go out and retrieve practice (and live?) torpedoes in the North Sea back when the U-Boats had been training and perfecting their murderous trade. Apparently, the torpedoes they were working with would eventually "run down", stop, and then float to the surface. At such times the "Torpedo Recovery Boats" were dispatched to retrieve them and bring them back to port. What was needed for this work was a high-speed (thus narrow beamed) vessel, and a long one - with low topside cranes or lifts - that could run up alongside the spent torpedoes and snatch them out of the water and then hightail it back to port.

"To blow things to bits is our business ( and Fritz's ),
Which means there are mine-fields wherever you stroll.
Unless you've particular wish to die quick, you'll avoid
steering close to the North Sea Patrol"

The only drawback to such a vessel (they were really rather elegantly furnished otherwise - having nice brightwork in the wheelhouse, and lots of brass appointments...) was in the steering - for they were like veritable logs: when once set on a course, they knifed ahead through the waves at high speed alright, but to manuver them or change course was a major operation: you put the helm hard over and they just kept going straight ahead - like logs through the water. Eventually though, they would begin to come round on a new course, but now the trick was to straighten them out - for if you did not jam the rudder hard over now, the opposite way, they would just continue coming around in a big circle.... It was pretty embarrassing in some ways - but eventually some of us got so we could manuver these craft pretty well...

Then there was "Dutch." Now Dutch came with the Club - like Alex and his wife. He, too, was a native Dutchman - Netherlander - but had thrown in his lot with the Germans long before... Dutch was a diesel engine mechanic without peer. Dutch could start, stop, regulate, overhaul, and cuss out in German, the best Deutschmarinefabrik diesel the Third Reich ever made! Take my word for it!

Now down below in these diesel boats, the engine compartment was a long narrow affair (naturally), with a slippery, metal gangway down the middle between the diesel engine banks to either side. Since I had the most boat savvy of anyone in our outfit, and was in addition Lt. George's private "Sailing Master", I was putting in a lot of time down at the "Club."

Dutch and I became cronies. He was a few years my senior but spoke passable English. He had a repetoire of war tales aboard ships of the Kriegs Marine, the German U-boats, and what not that would make the movie "Das Boot," tame stuff by comparison... He lived aboard one of the vessels, and I would often go down to see him with some cigarettes from the PX maybe and a candy bar or two. He would make us dinner in his tiny cabin there - a smoky fish oil (herring! everything smelled like herrings in Nordeutschland! LOL) lamp swinging overhead, and herrings and kartuflen (potatos) frying over his tiny fish oil stove.. But there was always good Deutsch 'bier zu trinken' , so we could yarn and swap lies into the evening.

Thus, Dutch began to "train" me as an engine oiler for his diesels. Engine oilers and their assistants in these kraut boats had a huge oil can with a long spout on it - maybe nearly two feet long! I'm not kidding! When you were underway, you had to run up and down this slippery metal gangway, sticking this spout in under the "poppet" (I never understood the whole procedure exactly) when these rods would come up out of the engine heads a bit. And give each a good squirt of oil - and then move rapidly on to the next one. This took some acrobatics and I got better and better at it - Dutch and I often had groups aboard and would run out to sea for short trips and so on. 'Course in a beam sea, it took some balancing act to keep from falling and sliding in under these greasy monsters, but it was fun and something to do anyhow...

Dutch still wore an old, oil-soaked jumper suit or overalls of some kind from his Kriegs Marine days, and before long my fatigues that I wore on these outings were about as oil-soaked and blackened as his, too. From a distance, we just appeared to be the "engineer and his assistant" and no one much bothered to slip back the scuttle and come below into our hazy, fume-filled domain anyhow...

So one day, this Red Cross or USO lady - forget which - "signed up" the Torpedo Recovery Boat for an afternoon cruise on the North Sea. (Oh Boy!) Lt. George, ever alert to ways to 'win friends and influence people', okay'd the whole arrangement - and passed on an aside to me that, "Powell, you better be there tomorrow afternoon and ship out with Dutch below and all - because I don't want any screwups on that boat, you hear?"

"Yes, Sir, Lt. George. Sir!"

So the following afternoon, Dutch and I were down in our smoky hold, oiling up the myriad parts and mechanisms (we used huge quantities of rags and oily waste scraps which hung out of our pockets and all giving us a real ragtag appearance you might say...), when this Red Cross gal and her group arrived topside. What the party consisted of was mostly guys from the Army Hospital at Bremerhaven - in wheelchairs and on crutches and so on - with any number of Orderlies to help setttle them aboard. They mostly all went aft to the fantail area where it had been possible to set up a few lounge chairs and round tables so they could have cookies and lemonade and so on.

Someone topside cast off, and the Engine Room telegraph went to 'All ahead Slow' (in Kraut of course) or some appropriate jangled instruction (this was Dutch's worry - not mine). I picked up my oil can and took up my duties... Soon the regular rise and fall told me that we had gone through the locks and were now out in the Weser and picking up the first incoming swells from the North Sea.

"Pop! Pop! Pop!" went these 'poppet' things (as I dubbed them) and I skipped merrily up and down the gangway squirting my dollop of oil in under each "Pop-Pop"...Now and then Dutch would holler something at me in pidgin English and/or Platt Deutsch - but it didn't much matter: I couldn't hear him anyway over all the engine noise, and the gurgle of the waves along the hull.

We had been under way for a bit and things were going along smoothly so I lay aft to peer up through the after hatchway. There was blue sky far overhead, and fresh air up there on deck, and sounds of laughter and voices and merriment... I stuck my head further out. There were several gals from the Red Cross aboard - very pert and feminine in their crisp uniforms. Probably a few army Nurses too - I don't remember. The Orderlies were passing out cookies and lemonade. I thought to myself, "Well this is a fun looking group and all. I think I will just hop up topside and see if they can't spare me a lemonade or two and maybe even a cookie..."

So I swung up the gangway and stepped out on the deck. "Hi!" I said to the first Nurse I saw. She looked quite startled back at me, and retreated to one of the Orderlies and spoke something to him. I went over to the table and said, "Well, guess you guys found a home away from home here ', right?" (An old familiar GI greeting of the times..). A few faces frowned, and a couple of wheelchairs wheeled about to face me. I began to get the feeling I was unwanted.

Just then a young Lieutenant, probably no more than ten days out of Stateside, appeared, and strode up to me. "Was wollen sie?" he said rather pre-emptorially. (What do you want?) I pulled myself to attention, and said, "Yessir, Lieutenant Sir! And I was just wondering if I might have a glass of lemonade and a cookie here with the troops?"

His eyes kinda bugged. "Why you speak English," he said. "So you must know there is to be no fraternization at all by you German nationals here!"

"Oh, Yessir!," I said. "English is the only language I really, know, Sir... save for a little bit of this Strasse Deutsch I've picked up the past few months." Then I added, "I am not a 'German national', Sir!"

He said, "Are you an American soldier, ....Soldier?"

"Yessir! I surely am," I said.

"Well what is this here - they said you were scaring the Nurses here, and had jumped up at them out of the hold there or something. And what are you doing in those oily, filthy fatigues? And our troops are not supposed to be below here in the Off Limits areas..."

"Well, Sir", I said, "I never meant to frighten anyone. I am just Old Dutch's assistant here you see and when I saw you all up here and all.. having fun and all..." I kinda trailed off.

"Who in hell is Old Dutch?," he asked. "And what is your outfit? Are you AWOL, Soldier?"

"Well, Dutch is the Diesel Engineer here, Sir, and I am Diesel Engine Oiler, you might say. Dutch taught me everything I know. Maybe going on First Class," I added rather mischieveously. (I could see he was having a hard time with all this - and truth to tell so was I...). "You see, Sir, I am really Sailing Master of our Platoon..."

"Sailing Master? he said "Sailing Master... what is that?"

And so it went, and so by degrees, I managed to convince him at last of the purity of my intentions and of the rather odd fate that had led us both (soldiers in the Army of the United States) aboard a German Torpedo Recovery Boat in the North Sea that day - he as an Officer in charge of a hospital outing group topside - and me a lowly engine oiler down below...

Well, that's about it. Fun while it lasted. But it didn't. Last I mean. Nothing does as you will come to know, too. I still think about Old Dutch with his thick glasses and the diesel oil sprayed all down his front, frying herrings in a tiny boat galley 60 years ago off the North German coast... I wish him well wherever he is. I truly do.

Note: for more adventures in Nordeutschland, check out this website:
http://www.usarmygermany.com/USAREUR_City_Bremerhaven.htm
It is hosted by a Walter Welkins, who has made a heroic study of the
"Enclave" in those days - and invited me to contribute to his site.

Scrape Here for more 'Barrel...'