"We Must Be Vigilant, We Must Vigilant..."

GLENN MILLER (and earlier)

The way our armored patrols worked was this. We'd send out maybe two patrols a day from our base in the old Flug und Schiff School where we were quartered up in Bremerhaven. Each (idealized) patrol would consist of a lead jeep, an M-8 armored car, and a following jeep. At .least we would start out that way. We would have maybe 30, 40, or 50 miles to patrol in a largely circuitous route that brought us back to our base in maybe 3 or 4 hours. Ostensibly we were to travel as a group - and often did - but we frequently "broke up" also. Then the jeeps might go off together at a crossroads - or each separately. (Draftee armies and armies of democracies generally, "have many generals" and many opinions about what to do next...) And the M-8 in another direction. We remained in touch by radio, however, should assistance be needed.

What we were chiefly responsible for was the "state" of the numerous villages or "dorps" that clustered around Bremerhaven and on down south in the "Enclave". These would consist of as few as five or six houses up to maybe a couple dozen, where the farmers all lived. They were very large homesteads, and for all I know some of them had been there since the Middle Ages. At least they looked that way. They looked like illustrations out of Grimm's Brothers Fairy Tales...

Now we need some good "Deutscheliede" here, nicht wahr?, to set our Germanic mood - and how can we do better than "Deutschland Uber Alles" - their erstwhile National Anthem...

They all had heavy, straw-thatched roofs. The walls were half-timbered and rubble-and-daub in between. The windows were mostly diamond-paned. Where the chimney's poked through the roofs, storks made their nests: huge affairs of sticks and daub - and they stood there often on one leg in the nests and maybe half asleep. They were big birds - maybe four feet high or so. The barns were an integral part of the homesteads and not usually separate. And so were the animals. Cows looked over the bottom half of the horizontally split doors right into the kitchens and parlors. Chewing their cuds and "mooing" their yays and nays in family discussions. Geese were everywhere - cackling and running about. The hausfraus would shoo them out of the kitchens, with long brooms. The same brooms they were not above using on the pesky "Amerikanisch soldaten" who trooped through these same kitchens with distressing regularity.

Paradoxically, considering all the livestock about, and the "cows in the kitchen", the houses were spotless! The old German hausfraus were the most compulsive housekeepers I ever saw! When we raided their houses, these old fraus would follow us around with dust mops and pans cleaning right up behind us! If you even touched their featherbeds, or poked into them with your rifle (as we had been instructed to do), they would raise more row than their geese out in the yard! The kitchens were the central part of their domicile and they all had huge clay ovens, topped with big flat areas covered with picturesque tiles. At night, in winter, the women and children - maybe the whole family - would climb up on top of these stoves and sleep right on the warm tiles! Another thing I recall: everyone wore wooden shoes outdoors - just like you see more popularly portrayed for the (Netherland) Dutch. (Nordeutschland - North Germany - is very much like the Netherlands...). They would leave these wooden shoes on the stoop and walk around indoors in heavy, woven socks.

Now those geese all had "shoes", too - "ganzeshuen" it sounded like. And here is how they got them. Out in the barn they had flat, black metal pans they would fill with hot asphalt or tar. Then they would drive the geese though them - so they had to walk in the hot tar! When it cooled, their feet were protected for the summer's work (the little goose girls drove them to and fro you see, from field to field and across the road in front of us...).

And the geese is where they got the feathers for those featherbeds. These were huge old bedsteads and the goosefeather comforters and all had to be fluffed up each morning...

They had chickens, too. Out in their barns of course. The most of these roosted in old steel combat helmets - German mostly - picked up in the muddy fields roundabout, filled with hay, and then set in rows for the hens. One day I decided to take one for a trophy. I flipped the old hen out and you never heard such a racket in your life! I felt like the fox in the henhouse for sure. It has a nice German insignia on the side, and I brought it back with me and gave it to my son long ago. I guess he still has it, I don't know...

There wasn't too much ground fighting around here far as I could tell. There had been some - mostly British troops through here I suppose, pursuing the fleeing Germans as they withdrew to the East. Most evidence of conflict was in the cities of Bremerhaven and Bremen where I would guess destruction - total - must have reached or exceeded perhaps 90% of all buildings. I really don't know. But there had been some skirmishing in the countryside - and now and then in the oddest places you would find abandoned gear and firearms and sometimes.... graves. These might be right in someone's dooryard - or out in some lonely field or along a road somewhere. They were marked mostly by rifles stuck muzzle down into the earth, and with combat helmets placed over the upended butts. The German graves were largely ignored - I guess the supposition being that the Germans themselves would ultimately bestir themselves to do something about them. But if they were British or American graves (you knew the nationality of the deceased by the type of helmet), you were supposed to report them to the Graves Registration people. We did this religiously; I have some pictures somewhere of these lonely graves - grim reminders of that terrible carnage...

"Once, at the end of WWII, I had a furlough to Paris. On the wall of a gallery hung a sort of surreal painting by a Frenchman: school children circling a Maypole in a schoolyard – laughing and holding hands. Their bombed school lay in ruins behind them. In a cutaway view just beneath their feet, the artist had shown the decomposing body of a dead German soldier, buried in an unmarked grave just as he had fallen.… I have never forgotten that picture. Nor a grave very like that I found in a German barnyard once. The artist had titled his picture ”The Dust is Whirling in The Dust.”

Preamble from my own "Dust is Whirling in the Dust", another story...

Each dorp had a "burgomeister"- kinda like a "mayor" you might say. He was the headman around there ("Hauptman"), and we had to always look them up. Our job was to get a slip of paper from them each day. This paper would have the official stamp (in ink) of whatever little dorp they were, and the Burgomeister would write on it: "Alles ist in ordnung." (All is in order). Or not, if there was a problem. (Problems were mostly created by the "Schwartzmann" (blacks) from the American Army who would slip out here at night and raid their barns and molest their young girls, etc. It was our job to investigate and capture malefactors here (hiding under the featherbeds or in the hay in the barns, wherever) and otherwise "keep order" for these people. The blacks were the main troublemakers, and that is just a statement of fact - not racism. They were actually the responsibility of the MP's, who were charged with infractions by American Service personnel. We were more strictly responsible for the surrendered civilian populace. But the Schwartzman were continuing problems, believe me - and since the MP's did not go out into the countryside, being mainly in-town troops, we had to shag them wherever they popped up. Mainly though, we would find "DP's" (displaced persons) and take them into custody. DP's were from all over Europe you see: they included Poles, Frenchmen, and all kinds of Eastern Europeans - including runaway Russians and Russian soldiers. They had mostly escaped from the prisoner camps - or just walked away from them at surrender. Sorting out all this mob was some job! In the early days, when we had first arrived - way down at Marburg - not yet up in the Enclave - they were dusting these people down wholesale with the "new" DDT powder!! They had big tents set up to do this down along the Mainz River...

Very occasionally, we would find a "Nazi" - and once or twice, we captured a genuine SS man. They had tattoos under their arms just like the Death Camp prisoners they had so mistreated. To hear them tell it, of course, there was never a Nazi in all of Germany ("Me nicht Nazi!", being the standard reply when asked for their "kenne-carte" (sounded like: it was an I.D. card...) when we stopped them on the streets or on patrol (or flushed them out from under their goosefeather beds!) We seized every scrap of Nazi paraphernalia as it was strictly Verboten! for them to have same after hostilities ceased. They were even forbidden to hum or sing their Nazi rallying song - the infamous "Horst Wessel" - whom some of you older sojourners here might recognize from those times... (Horst being an early Party appartchik, killed in a political street fight and vaulted into Party Sainthood thereafter...).

They were not allowed to have any Nazi memorabilia or insignia or anything like war medals or icons, etc. This got extended into items even of other wars. I remember once (and it hangs heavy on me sometimes) raiding this old Burgomeister's place and on the wall was this framed collection of Iron Cross medals. "Das ist verboten," I said to him. "Nein, das is mein Grosfader's" he said (It is or was my grandfathers). Lousy kraut - I yanked it off the wall - and took it. Years later I examined it closely and found the Iron Crosses were indeed dated back to the 19th Century - the Franco-Prussian War in fact - having nothing whatsoever to do with the Third Reich. They had been his grandfather's medals and I would give anything if I knew how to get them back into his hands or his descendants hands today... Some of these people, I am sure, were diehard Nazis. But I believe the most of them were not. These people lived in a sort of time warp from my perspective: it was like a walking, talking Middle Ages scene there, and these were genuine "peasants" out of the past - entirely unlike American farms and farmers at all. I can see the old whiskered Burgomeisters now, adjusting their glasses on their noses, and taking their pens up and slowly and deliberately writing their "Alles is in ordnung" across the slip. The Germans loved nothing so much as "officialdom" and "procedures."

In the middle of most of the dorps there was a sort of rough, cobblestoned area... a sort of "platz" or Square. These always ran with rivulets of dark cow-manure water: I never saw one that was totally dry.. these dark rivulets everywhere. Often there was a low brick wall around a sort of "holding yard" there, too - and everyone put their cow manure (and took out some, too) into these retaining areas. The whole place was redolent of cow manure. And herrings. The herring fisheries were very large activity here on the North Sea. The people far as I could see, lived mainly on herrings and kartuflen (potatoes). It was just post-War, so no real crops had been sown or reaped, and pickings were pretty sparse. But the oily, fishy smell of herrings was universal. Back in Bremerhaven we would seek out old fraus to do our laundry. And we would get bars of regular American laundry soap from our PX's and put them in with our laundry bundles. But what these old fraus would do if you did not watch them, is fish out your bars and keep them for themselves as their family "bath soap" (!), and run in their own herring soap for your laundry. Then you would wind up standing Retreat smelling like a herring!

So we would go from dorp to dorp. the countryside was quite flat with open, green fields - mostly with potatoes and sometimes rape (a sort of yellow flower they grew for oil or seeds or something), interspersed with dark "walds" (forests, or woods) of dense pine copses. Back in these woods and remoter fields beyond, there were deer... a sort of miniature race in fact - about the size of medium-sized dogs. Very small by our standards. The German name for them was "rei" - or it sounded like that - I never saw it written out anywhere. What we would do is hunt them, you see. (The kraut farmers loved this, because the rei were ruinous in their fields, and they had no guns anymore to stop them). So our patrols often turned into extended hunting trips or regular sporting events. We would then go out and retrieve the carcases and pile them up on the back of the M-8's.

Then the patrol turned serious. That is, we would then make a beeline for "Our Club." First, I guess... a word about the "clubs." It grew up among the early occupation forces here that various "groups"- battalions even, then companies and down even to individual platoons would "accidentally" come across former German "bierstubes" (bars or drinking clubs) - sometimes "Gasthof" - or else they would create places to drink and gather off hours on their own. For troops quartered in town, and without transportation, these were largely just giant drinking and orgy places where every weekend were drunken fights and raids by the MP's and all. But for outfits like ours - small, and with mobility or transport and thus able to roam out into the countryside - affairs were different. We would "adopt" some oldtime German Gasthof in one of the dorps and make it "ours." An "understanding" would be worked out with the krauts thereabouts that only "we" (the Amerikanischer of our very outfit - no others!) could patronize this "club" and they were to look to us for protection and advice. And so on. (Actually, Cannon Company had two clubs: the one I told you about elsewhere down on the Weser, and this one out in Blumenthal maybe it was, or maybe it was Vegesack - I honestly cannot remember). We patrolled through so many little dorps and crossroads that it is all just a blur at this distance...

Our "Club" then was not in the bombed-out ruins of Bremerhaven - but out in the clean countryside in the old German village. The burgers there had been drinking beer in the same building for maybe 300 or 400 years! They had old deer heads and boars' heads on the walls, and shields and flags and all kinds of stuff . Usually an extended family ran them and lived upstairs. The men were the bartenders and "Kellners", and the women and young frauleins rushed the beers and "fraternized" with the troops...

What we would do, then, is drop off these deer carcases from our patrols at the "Club." The Germans would then dress them - all week long - as we dropped them off (There was not much meat on any of them). The Germans on their behalf, whose breweries were either up and running or still extant, (there was a big old brewery in town we often marched past, just a shell now from the bombing, but it had niches in the outside walls just like a Church, and instead of saints standing in them - there were figures of the old Teutonic Knights...) would make sure there were sufficient kegs on hand for Saturday night - and all the dressed-out venison and the fraus would cook it all up and we would go out and have a big "party" there. Cooked venison and German bier! Great stuff! And as the hours wore on, we would get all convivial you see, and soon we would be in locked arms singing the "Schnitzelbank" and other German "liede." Husbands and brothers who had been in "Dem Grosse Krieg" would then start to emerge from the shadows - and we would stand treat - and swap yarns and all about the Russian Front and other adventures.

This was our main recreation. There were lots of fights and lots of drunkenness but we "took care of our own." and the sober ones would get the drunks home before Reville and so the time passed by pleasantly enough. For many of us, it was our first introduction to "drink" - but the old combat sergeants would see that we did not get into too much trouble and so it all worked out for the best.

Once, long after the preceding was written, I happened to remember and pass along this little gem about "fraternizing and trading" with the Fallen Enemy, in an E-mail to a friend. It seemed worthy of inclusion here somewhere - so this is the spot I have dropped it in.... In a message dated 7/13/2006 10:03:54 PM Eastern Daylight Time, ralan@juno.com writes:

As any student of American culture knows, you're right, of course.

LOL! I'm not a student of anything, Alan - including " 'Murican culture!" (Grin!) As to being "right" - well in the matter of shoes (which in a way this concerns, of course) there is always a "left", too....! I'm just a cantankerous old fart who actually remembers having to polish my shoes with the stuff eons ago. Dang!

***********

(Then there was dubbing. Is there anyone left alive today who remembers dubbing? In WWII, in the Infantry, we had to "dub" our combat boots - which were made of cowhide turned inside outside (like Hiawatha's celebrated rabbit-skin mittens...) and this rough, grainy surface had to be rubbed with dubbing. (Or dubbed with dubbing, I guess would be the preferred way to put this). Dubbing came in O.D. colored cans (natcherly) - about size of Shinola cans.

But dubbing was no polish, believe me. It was a thick, colorless grease - sort of like a dirty lard (it probably was something actually like that, or maybe a petroleum product for all I know!) - and you rubbed this stuff into your "uppers" under the ever-watchful eye of your Sargeant. Later, dirt and dust caked into the dubbing gave your boots a grimy, blackened surface that would have turned sulfuric acid, had you walked in it!

(When we went overseas, my first mistake was to fall in with bad company, including a Sargeant who sold ("traded") dubbing to the starving Krauts as "canned butter." (Yuk!) He was quite an entrepeneur, this guy. He bought cartons of cigarettes in the PX and they came in waxpaper sleeves sealed shut (for overseas delivery you see). He had "liberated" an iron from some poor old hausfrau somewhere, and would set up his iron evenings in our barracks, melt open the sleeves, slip out the carton, empty out the ciggies, replace them with toilet-paper wrapped rocks, reinsert them in the waxed sleeves and ":iron" them shut again! He had made a crude "balance" like the old chemist's balance, and "weighted" his cartons to match the originals. When he had a sufficient supply of these "ersatz rauchen" he would gather them up, throw in some "canned butter," and then look around for me to drive his "getaway jeep." Modus Operandi was to cruise the rubble and ruined streets you see, until he got a hail from some Kraut hiding in the ruins or in an alleyway. Sarge would take his trading stock and his .45 Colt, and disappear into the alley to consummate a deal. Then back he would come on the trot and tell me to "Get us the hell out of here!", and like the good wheelman I wasn't, I would careen away down the old Strasse! LOL!

I bet Sarge is living in a Greek villa these days... maybe even made "middle management" with Enron or somebody like that... He was a "natural."

Sigh.

(End of E-Mail)

Once we got an SS man, hiding on a farm. The next day six of us were sent under arms to pick him up and take him down to Bremen to turn over to the authorities. We picked him up at this farm or maybe it was his house - I am unsure. He was standing out front and we pulled up in the 3/4 ton. His wife and kid were there and hanging on to him all tearful and upset. His papers were checked and the sergeant verified he had this tattoo under his arm. We then searched him, and he had this little tiny penknife on him. Someone took it from him - it had been his family heirloom or something and lots of jabber. Then we loaded him into the 3/4 ton and were off. His wife and kid left crying behind us. Maybe like it had been when the SS was doing all the "leaving behind." War is Hell.

He never said a word or showed an expression. We sat next to and across from him, locked and loaded the whole time, and we all rode down thirty or more miles to Bremen. We took him to the "Haus de Reiches" as best I can remember or say it, though when I write it out it looks more "French" than German, but that was what it was called: The House of the Reich. It had been the Gestapo and SS headquarters when they were in the saddle here, and now it was turned around into headquarters for the Allied Intelligence and Security forces (mostly British here you see, since this was the British Sector we were operating in). When we got there, there was this big long "tube" of barbed wire from the street up to the door - maybe 10 or 12 feet in diameter and formed by unrolling coils of barbed wire so that you had to walk through them like a sort of tunnel or tube...

When we came out inside the building, it was something grand I tell you! Wow! A great big silver Nazi Eagle still up on the lobby wall, and marble floors and giant chandelier and all. It had not been bombed or damaged at all (deliberately). It was all done in pale cerulean blue, and there was a gigantic spiral staircase that led to the upper levels. Down the center through the staircase on a great chain, hung the chandelier. Like a Hollywood set for a Grade B war movie...

We were directed to march him down the hall to one of the "rooms" (offices or interrogation rooms or whatever they were from the Nazi times). These had massive doors with peepholes in them, and when we came to the right one, it opened and we all went inside and turned our man over to the Brits. I remember the walls in here too, were cerulean blue, but they were heavily padded up to maybe six feet around the whole room (!) and across the interior of the door as well - with plush, blue-velvet, textured padding... At least this was what I could see in my brief inspection, and then we were dismissed...

So that's how our days mainly went. A continuing round of the area's dorps and villages, and occasional forays around town if crowds were gathering or riots were anticipated.

I mentioned that North Germany is very much like Holland. It is very flat, being also recovered in part from the sea by "polderizing" I guess, or whatever it is that the Dutch call this system of dikes-and-pumping they have used in their country to retake land from the sea. The country was dotted with windmills when I was there - the real, old-fashioned kind like in the picture books, but I don't know if these have all been replaced now by electric or what. But their big "sails" turned night and day, face to the wind in those days... pumping out the continuous leakage from the dikes and canals. For a while after I got there I did not fully appreciate how much of the land lay below sea level. There was a stretch of road where we drove along old cobblestones for many miles through mostly open land, and way off to one side ran this endless embankment or berm - maybe thirty feet high or so. Grass grew right up to the top. One day we decided to see what was on the other side of that long berm, so the driver turned off the road (we had to be super careful with the M-8's in all that muddy, low ground, since they weighed about 8 tons and would sink into the axles in no time...). But it was firm, so we zoomed along and then right on up the side of the berm and came to a stop on top. My eyes bugged: there in front of us lay the sea - the North Sea to the horizon, and it was up amost level to the top of the berm on its side!

"Look you, our foreshore stretches far through sea-gate, dyke and groin –
Made land all, that our fathers made, where the flats and the fairway join.
They forced the sea a sea-league back. They died, and their work stood fast.
We were born to peace in the lee of the dykes, but the time of our peace is past."

Wow! We had been driving around out here below sea level all this time! I never forgot that!

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