Hitler's Home Front: Memoirs of a Hitler Youth - Don A. Gregory, Wilhelm R. Gehlen (2016)

Chapter 5. Nine-Year-Old Flak Helper

In the debacle at Stalingrad in early 1943, Germany lost so many divisions that there was an acute manpower shortage on the Eastern Front. Hitler, with a stroke of the pen, decreed that the losses were to be made up somehow. Thousands of flak gunners were immediately transferred to frontline units. This incensed Herr Meier. He was commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe after all, and the homeland flak was part of the Luftwaffe. The Hitler Youth was immediately mobilised to fill vacant spots on the light flak batteries. This was unheard of in Western armies, but young boys were required to do their bit for victory in Germany and that’s exactly what they did. While most able-bodied men were fighting on the Eastern Front or in North Africa, or just idling away in Norway, France, the Low Countries or the Balkans, the boys of the Hitler Youth and the girls of the BDM kept the home fires burning and the home front defended.

I had been a member of the Jungvolk for a while before the end of the war, and as such I had to attend parades and meetings where speeches were made by the youth leaders who stressed our role in the Thousand Year Reich. All this was not much to my liking but there was no way out, and besides, on the weekends we had field instruction. That was a lot more fun and gave me the chance to take the weekend off from garden labour and school lessons. In the spring of 1942, forty-seven of us Jungvolk kids claimed an unused sandpit at the foot of a small hill as our command centre. We didn’t have tents so we made our own shelter out of bushes we cut. Above the sandpit was an anti-aircraft position consisting of two quad 20mm guns. They were menacing weapons that looked like they meant business. After our weekend was over, I strolled up to the position to have a look for myself. In unmistakable terms a sergeant told me to leave immediately, but the commander of the guns, a staff sergeant, who happened to be my father’s friend and drinking pal, invited me to stay. I persuaded him to assign me as a messenger for the position. They had telephone communications with the nearby 88mm flak position, but they were often disrupted. This would also get me out of a lot of the other details that Jungvolk kids had to do. Roland was the staff sergeant’s name, and to me, he was a true giant, like Roland the Giant in the song ‘Roland der Reis im Rathhaus zu Bremen’ which we all knew. He must have been about six feet six inches tall and he told me that he would ask his captain if I could be assigned to the flak battery. The other Jungvolk kids were more than a little jealous when I told them that I had been approved to be the new flak helper.

When the quad crew first arrived, they had only a wooden hut and their meals were prepared in town by the NSV and brought up by a truck. When two new bunkers were constructed by Organisation Todt (OT - a civil and military support contractor) engineers, a several-kilowatt generator was installed in another small concrete shed, but the main purpose of this generator was to supply power to the searchlight and the Horchgerät or ‘großen Ohr’ (big ear), as we called it, sound detector. Cooking was done on a stove heated with wood or coal. Perishable foods were stored in another smaller underground bunker and once a week, a truck brought up six large blocks of ice from the city ice plant. Since I was a sort of flak helper, I was included in the rations but as I only lived a mile down the road, and their cook wasn’t very good, I preferred Mum’s cooking most of the time.

Germany is a country of many dialects and even languages. Western Rhinelanders speak a Platt Deutsch related to Dutch. A Bavarian can’t, or more likely won’t, understand what a North German from Holstein says and that goes the other way ‘round as well; an Oberlausitzer (someone from Upper Lusatia) has a hard time understanding a Saar Pfälzer (someone from the Saar), so it made a lot of sense having men in a regiment who understood what was being said; some knew each other in private life and that made the men of the regiment even more responsible to each other. The ever-inventive Landsers soon developed a litany of words that everyone in the regiment could understand, whether they were from the Lithuanian border, Aachen, Slesvig or the Brenner Pass. Here a few examples:

Wanzenhammer (bedbug hammer) … a tobacco pipe, or to kill bugs or lice.

Stalin Torte (Stalin pie or tart) … dry bread.

Taschenflak (pocket flak) … a pistol.

Rollbahn Krähe (runaway crow) … light aircraft.

Küchenbulle (kitchen bull) … military cook.

Krüppelgarde (crippled guard) … Volkssturm, older men drafted into military service.

Hühner Alarm (chicken alert) …late alert, as in bombs fell and then the alert was sounded; first the egg, then the chicken.

Flieger Bier (pilot’s beer) … lemonade.

Eiserne Kuh (iron cow) … canned milk.

Donner Balken (thunder plank) … simple toilet.

Blech Cravat (tin cravat) … the Knight’s Cross medal.

These are only a few, but there were hundreds of them, understood by any German soldier and late in the war, we had men from all over at the quad and 88 emplacements.

We were part of the Ruhr defence and came under the 64th Abteilung [Battalion] Düsseldorf. There were sub-commands of the 64th in Münster, Cologne, and Remscheid near us, all known as ‘Luftgaukommando [regional air command] VI Münster’, plus an assortment of fighter bases. One was only about four miles away from us and from our elevated quad position we had a good view of the base and could watch the planes take off and land. At one time, early in the war, Adolf Galland, the well-known fighter ace, was in command there. There was also the 88mm battery not far from us; in fact one gun was only a few fields away. One man in our flak crew, Willi Strauss was his name, had been in the outfit since 1941 and he was a real artist. He made several drawings of our position, including the 88s and these were later published in a picture book in late 1942 under the title Flak an Rhein und Ruhr (‘Flak on the Rhine and Ruhr’). I still have the book; my uncle, Major General Reinhard Gehlen, gave it to me on my birthday in 1943 and he had got General von Axthelm to sign it. Von Axthelm was the top flak general in the Reich.

By the end of 1943, about 4,000 enemy planes had been shot down over the Reich or been so severely damaged that they were unfit to fly. Almost thirty-five million AA (anti-aircraft) shells of all calibres had been fired to accomplish this. That was a lot of metal going up and there were many flak guns that never shot down even one plane. Flak men, especially those on the 88s, were well trained in the beginning, but later in the war, it was a different story; some were good, but some were downright useless. Allied bombers came over at a high altitude, from 20,000-22,000 feet and it took twenty seconds for an 88mm round to reach that altitude and explode. By that time the target had moved on about a mile, depending on air speed. At the quads, we fired over open sights. We could see the target because we only dealt with intruders that came in below 6,000 feet. We had a rangefinder, but for the quad crew it was mainly ears and eyes that counted.

My messenger duties allowed me to eat with the men if I happened to be there at mealtimes. The flak battery eventually also had running hot water and a shower cubicle installed in their bunker and I was allowed to make use of it as well. In late 1942 and early 1943, things weren’t too bad and the cook, who was also a magazine loader, had some choices in what to make for the men to eat. Later, however, the cook had to make something of whatever was available and kraut was always available. The sauerkraut soup was called Gorilla Rotze (‘gorilla snot’). It not only smelled terrible, it didn’t look like anything edible either. It had the taste of something between rotten spinach and bad onions. The worst part came a few hours after eating it when your guts would explode. The cook did the best he could with what he had and often that’s all he had. In civilian life before the war, the man had been an assistant to an undertaker and he should probably have kept that information to himself. The men never let him forget it. I suppose there were bad undertakers who were good cooks and good cooks who would have been bad undertakers; this guy was probably a good undertaker because he sure wasn’t much of a cook. The war made soldiers out of all men and you could never guess what some of them had been in the real world. There is an old saying that’s true in any army: ‘Never piss off the cook; you will regret it’, so we didn’t make too much fun of our cook’s former job, at least not when he was around.

* * *

In February 1942, when Mum went to the military hospital in Bottrop for a few days to visit my father, we had to fend for ourselves and we almost starved; Aunt Carol was not a very good cook. We avoided her meals whenever we could and I stayed with the quads as much as possible. As some sort of payment, I volunteered to help the cook prepare dinners for the thirty-one men. He was glad to get the help and I was glad to avoid Aunt Carol’s cooking. I brought a big bag of carrots and a freshly-killed rabbit up to the position as my contribution to one of the meals. The cook, two men from the flak crew, and I washed and scraped about twenty pounds of carrots while the rest of the crew was sleeping, playing cards, or writing home. It was a misty foggy day, so we knew we wouldn’t be disturbed by Jabos. When I told the cook that I wanted to make a carrot soup, he told me it had better be good.

‘Trying is not good enough boy,’ he said, ‘If these guys don’t like it, I’m in trouble and will have to start all over again.’

‘You ought to be thankful for the free twenty pounds of carrots and the rabbit - and for a rainy day with no alerts,’ I told him.

‘Those guys are spoiled; they’ll come down on me hard if the food isn’t good.’

‘They might yell at me too, but if they do, it’ll be the last time I bring any food up to them.’

Giant came in from an inspection tour. Because of the wet day, he had to make sure all the guns were covered with tarpaulins to keep out as much of the moisture as possible.

‘What’s going on here?’ he demanded.

‘I’m making lunch for all of you, Sir,’ I said, ‘cabbit soup.’

‘What is cabbit soup? I’ve never heard of it.’

‘Well, it’s like rabbit and carrot stew Sir.’

‘It has to be better than sauerkraut soup, so go ahead boy. The cook is your servant for today, so get going.’

At 1:00 p.m. the lunch gong, which was an empty 88mm shell, was hit with a hammer to call the men to eat. Each man received a good ladle full of the cabbit stew and a piece of black bread. There were no complaints and in fact, Gunny, our senior non-commissioned officer under Giant, remarked that they should make their cook the messenger and have me prepare their meals every day. Gunny, who originated from Finland and had an unpronounceable surname, had been a butcher, a bricklayer and a cobblestone layer in civilian life.

The most common meal for everyone, and that included soldiers at the front, was pea or bean soup. Every company had their own ‘Gulasch Cannon’, a mobile field kitchen with a huge cooking pot. When not in use, it was towed behind a Kübelwagen (the German equivalent of the Jeep). With the stove pipe laid flat, it looked like a cannon from afar and even became a target of the fighter-bombers late in the war. Today, modern versions of this stove are in use at fairs and large outdoor gatherings. A stray cow or even a pig, if available, was duly slaughtered, skinned and cut up into small portions, depending on the size of the company, which was usually 120 men. Water (or snow in the winter) was added to the pot along with dried peas, leeks or other vegetables. Salt, pepper and any available spices were also thrown into the pot. This whole concoction was then boiled for hours. Dried peas need time to cook. Later in the war, the dried peas were ground to a fine flour-like substance and that shortened the cooking time considerably. Ground pea powder is still sold to this day in Germany and I have it sent from Germany once every two months. It is sold as Erbswurst and if you know any German at all you know Bratwurst - and wurst means sausage; erb is pea, so the literal translation is ‘pea sausage’. It’s called this because it comes in a cylindrical roll like sausage. It cooks in just a few minutes which was a good thing for soldiers at the front. At our flak position we didn’t have a Gulasch Cannon because our guns were not mobile. The cook used a cast-iron stove fired by wood or coal and, unlike most of the cooks at the front, ours never learned how to cook for thirty-odd men. There was always too much or not enough. If there was too much, we had to eat it the next day but most of the time there wasn’t enough.

Things were exciting at times, but serving in an anti-aircraft battery, even in your own back yard, wasn’t always fun. You were as much in danger as a soldier hundreds of miles away at the front, whether in Russia, Italy, North Africa, or France. The duty of an AA gun crew was to try and stop attacking enemy aircraft shooting at you, and to not jump into the nearest trench or ditch. If a P-47 made a beeline toward your position, you had to brace yourself for the worst while keeping your gun sights on the plane. The only consolation the home flak had was that they were at least on home ground. That could still mean you were 400 miles from where you lived. If a crew member was from East Prussia and served along the western border, he was a good 400 miles from home. My Uncle Peter served in the flak in Königsberg, and that was 400 miles from his home in Aachen. Even a few Russian auxiliaries were later added to the batteries. They were ex-POWs who thought serving Hitler was a better choice than living under Stalin. The eastern POWs had a hard life, but a daily crust of bread and a mess tin of hot stew promised by recruiters from the Vlasov Army was enough to lure them into the Wehrmacht. Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov was a Russian general who decided he’d rather fight on the German side after being captured by General George Lindemann in July 1942.

Since I was exempt from Jungvolk and Hitler Youth parades most of the time because of my duties at the quads as a messenger, I had more time to help with work at home. I was sort of the mascot at the quads as well as the runner for messages when the phones went out, which was often. Whatever duties needed doing, I did them if I could. Mum at first said that I had to come home in the event of an air raid but she was soon convinced that her boy was safer under a foot of concrete at the quad position than at home under a wooden table. Besides, the fighter-bombers did not announce when they would arrive and I sure didn’t want to be out in the open after the shooting began. There were two concrete bunkers at the quad battery, one for the crew and the other for the loaded ammunition magazines, and both would withstand anything short of a direct hit. The crew’s bunker had a sleeping room with eighteen field beds. Later, when a searchlight crew was stationed nearby, things got rather crowded. The searchlight crew of course slept during the day and was at their positions by sunset. We had a generator in an old shed about twenty-five yards away, and later the generator was put in its own bunker and trenches were dug for the cables that ran to the searchlight. The quads really didn’t need electricity but it was sure dark in the bunkers without light. I still have a drawing our artist did that shows the shed before it was turned into firewood.

* * *

When Len became a group leader in the Hitler Youth, he got a dark green braid to wear on his uniform with all the efficiency badges he had won. I was still in the Jungvolk, but I had a more important job at the flak battery than anything he ever did. I was in good stead with the light flak crew and I wanted to keep it that way, so whenever I had free time I was at the battery helping out with loading magazines and emptying the collection bins that held empty shell cases. Since this was a sort of official duty assigned by the captain and Giant, I was exempt from town parades to the envy of Brother Len. He thought my job was just for show.

‘Look Len,’ I told him, ‘you dig holes and ditches and you march twice a week, strutting around town like a peacock, don’t you think that’s useless?’

‘It’s for the defence of the Reich and it’s very important.’

‘So in other words Len, what you’re saying is that the flak is not that important and that a ditch is a better air defence than a brace of quads, not to mention the 88s. Well, I can tell you that you’d better keep that opinion to yourself around the men from the flak position.’

‘We’re all important in this war.’

‘Yes,’ I shot back, ‘I know we are, and you think you are the most important of them all.’ And with that I left him standing.

My Jungvolk duty required me to be on the flak battery, but on quiet days, I loved the garden and farm work. Quiet days were also rainy and foggy, if not snowy, and the planes we were often bothered by couldn’t fly. Only the big boys high up, 20,000 feet or more, kept going in that weather, but even they had days off when their home bases in England were shrouded in fog. On these gloomy days, half the flak crew had time off. I usually went to help on a neighbour’s farm or worked in our garden. After Granddad Willem died, I was responsible for most of the garden work. Len always had excuses but he never shirked from digging slit trenches or anti-tank ditches for the Führer. He was so indoctrinated by the system that, even at the end of April 1945 when our area was under Allied occupation, he still believed in the Führer and final victory. In 1943 an offer was made to Brother Len by the Party-organised Kinderlandverschickung (KLV - Children’s Evacuation Office) for his evacuation to the Tyrol Hitler Youth camp for his safety, but he flatly refused to go. I myself could have gone to deepest Mecklenburg but Mum wouldn’t hear of it, and besides, I felt quite happy and safe under a foot of concrete at the flak battery.

Our quad battery was in a fixed position near M-G and Krefeld, but when bombing of the Buna plant at Marl threatened to decrease production, our crew got a two-week transfer to the area. We were to bring the guns that had been hastily brought up to us on halftracks driven by Luftwaffe soldiers. Our guns back home stood idle with only a skeleton crew, but fortunately, during our absence there were no major attacks. That Buna plant never ceased production during the war. There were too many flak batteries in the Ruhr area. I still have a picture that shows the skyline with all the barrels of the AA guns in the vicinity pointed upward. That must have been a frightening sight to the pilot of a fighter-bomber.

We set off in a truck on a warm July morning in 1944, reaching Marl in the afternoon where we were directed by a captain to a position just north-east of Buer (Gelsenkirchen) and about four miles west of the Buna plant. The position was on an old coal mining spoil heap and, although the spoil was mostly overgrown with grass and bushes, the hot summer wind blew clouds of black dust everywhere and soon we looked like a bunch of Zulus. The emplaced guns already there included a 20mm quad and a 37mm RB (Rheinmetall-Borsig) 18 that fired explosive shells from six-round magazines. The RB was something we didn’t have at our position back home. We stayed an unsuccessful nine days. The Allies had decided to give Marl and the Buna works a miss for the time being. A truck came to pick us up for the three hour journey home. We had just arrived in Karnap near Essen when out of the blue sky three fighter-bombers roared down at us with guns blazing. They were circling the huge smoke-belching chimneys of the town.

‘Damn it, we’ve got nothing to shoot back with,’ Gunny cried. A quad hitched to the back of a truck could be made ready to fire in less than two minutes by a well-trained crew, but we didn’t have one, and besides, we knew the bombers would be gone by then. We all dived into a roadside ditch hoping the enemy pilots would not spot us. Somewhere over Bottrop they turned around and came back for a second helping. By then, several light AA guns in the vicinity had opened up and tracers were crisscrossing the sky. We made ourselves inconspicuous, but the truck was too tempting a target and took a couple of cannon rounds through the canvas into the wooden flooring of the bed. Then, just as quickly as they had appeared, they were gone, followed by a few angry streams of AA fire, but we didn’t see any damage to the planes. There were none of our planes to be seen, but we didn’t expect any that late in the war.

‘Those flak guys were sure lousy shots. They need their butts kicked for wasting ammunition,’ commented Gunny.

‘It was probably Hitler Youth kids on those guns,’ someone added.

‘Now hold on there, they have to learn too and learn fast,’ Gunny replied, and looking me over, he asked, ‘You okay? No peeing in your pants?’

‘No Sir. I’m fine, but I agree, those guys were lousy shots.’

We inspected the few holes in the tarpaulin and in the bed of the truck and decided it was minor damage. We were saddling up to continue our journey toward Meiderich when a Wehrmacht staff car stopped by. A major and an NCO driver stepped out of the car.

‘You both okay,’ he asked, ‘no damage? I see you’re Luftwaffe flak; are you going far?’

‘Sir, we have come from the Buna works in Marl and we’re supposed to get back to our unit near Krefeld. We got a few scratches but no real damage was done,’ Gunny said. ‘We have our Marschbefehl [transport permit] here.’

‘No, that’s okay, but if you need anything, stop at the OT canteen in Duisburg-Wanheim. You can get something to eat and a rest there.’

‘We’ll be almost home then, Sir; that’s not far from the Krefeld-Uerdingen Rhine Bridge, but thank you all the same.’

‘Okay. Well have a safe journey then. Heil Hitler.’

‘Heil Hitler,’ we all shouted back.

‘We could do with a bite to eat,’ Gunny said. ‘It’s almost noon and for breakfast we had bread, beet molasses, and barley coffee. Who’s up for a stop in Wanheim so we can see how the OT engineers live?’

We were all for it, so we turned on a road west of Mühlheim and picked up the Duisburg-Düsseldorf Highway. Soon we passed the huge Mannesmann Armament Works, probably where our quads and 37mm guns were manufactured. The OT yard was just outside Duisburg-Wanheim. We pulled in, told the guard our predicament and showed him our travel permit.

‘Yes, okay, no problem,’ he said. ‘The mess hall is on your far left’

‘What’s for dinner here?’ Gunny asked the guard.

‘It’s all good. Go and see for yourself Sergeant. I had two helpings just minutes ago,’ he said as we drove away.

We got into the chow line with our mess gear that we always carried with us.

‘Ahh, the Luftwaffe is here,’ a guy from the OT remarked.

I saw the grin on Gunny’s face. He knew I would not let that go past without saying something. ‘We are flak gunners,’ I corrected the OT guy, ‘light flak, as you can see from the red piping and collar tabs on our uniforms.’

‘Flak, flak; that’s all I hear around here,’ another OT man chimed in. ‘Are you shooting much out of the sky? I don’t think so. We had two near misses this morning and the flak crew put enough explosives into the sky to kill every sparrow in Wanheim, but I didn’t see any planes go down.’

‘We’re not one of your outfits around here,’ I replied, and Gunny just let me go on. ‘We’re from near Krefeld and we look after our area.’

‘What unit?’ the OT man asked.

‘Pssst, Feind hört mit,’ [the enemy listens too], our gunner’s mate Kremer whispered to me.

A bit sheepishly, the OT guy looked around, but he asked no further questions.

The chow was excellent. Their cooks were mostly professionals, drafted from long-since closed restaurants. A good cook needs good ingredients to make a good meal and they surely had what they needed. We had potatoes, green peas, a slice of pork covered in juicy gravy and apple sauce, and second helpings were available. We ate more than our share and thanked them before going on our way.

‘We ought to send our cook here for some lessons’ I said to the sergeant.

‘That won’t help much if our supply truck only delivers sauerkraut, but they sure must have an excellent supply depot here. Too bad it’s too far for us to come for lunch every day.’

Around 3:00 p.m., we crossed the Rhine River, and on the west bank we met a group of RAD men and POWs who were busy filling in a few shallow bomb craters. An hour later we rolled up the hill to our home base.

‘Welcome home Kameraden. Did you have a good time?’ Giant shouted.

‘Naaa, nothing doing,’ Gunny answered, ‘we got black as Zulus from coal dust and there were no attackers within our range, but we did have some good food prepared by real cooks.’

‘Be happy to be home Sergeant. Our cook made something special for today’s evening meal.’

‘Did he now? I’m open to surprises.’

‘Yes; he has made a first-class chicken ragout.’

‘Where in Hell did he find a chicken?’

‘A woman brought it up this morning to thank us for being on guard here and protecting her home and life.’

‘What woman?’

‘It was that Mrs. Brögger, the Forstmeister’s wife.’

‘I didn’t know Brögger Flönz shot chickens. He normally shoots rabbits for the Party Bonzen. For that matter, I didn’t know he had a wife either.’

‘We got a rabbit too. It’s all in the ragout; the cook has been busy.’

‘A chicken and a rabbit isn’t much for sixteen hungry mouths.’

‘Well, the searchlight crew’s not in on this. They had pork in town and conveniently forgot to bring a share up for us.’

The evening meal was palatable, but not exactly excellent. A few ingredients that needed to be added were missing, and besides, rabbit and chicken is not a good mix cooked together. The left-out searchlight crew slept through it all. In the summer, with long daylight hours, they had the best job in any flak battery.

Our family occasionally invited some of the crew for dinner, but either Giant or Gunny had to be at the quad position, even at night. Most nights the 20mm guns were silent because the enemy raiders flew at an altitude that they couldn’t reach. To the crew, these dinners Mum made were a welcomed change from those made by the flak undertaker cook. Not that I had anything against undertakers: after all, my Uncle Hermann was a gravedigger at the local cemetery and supplied us with a Christmas tree every year after Granddad Willem died, but that flak cook just could not get his meals right no matter how hard he tried. To stretch our meagre rations we often made an Eintopf stew when the men came to dinner. After the Finnish-Russian war of 1939, Gunny had somehow made his way to Germany. His mother was German, and when he joined the Wehrmacht, they found out that, apart from knowing the ins and outs of cobblestones, he was also an expert in small-calibre gun mechanics. He quickly rose from private to corporal and then went for more schooling to the Rheinmetall-Borsig Plant, the makers of light flak cannons. After a successful examination, he found his way to the 64th as a gunnery sergeant.

The stew was made in our big three-gallon kettle if we were having visitors and it was usually started very early in the day to give the meat (usually rabbit) time to cook into small pieces, otherwise, someone - the first to be served - got the lion’s share of the good stuff. Halfway through the process of cooking, chopped leeks were added, along with potatoes, cabbage, carrots and ground peas or beans, if available. All this had to be cooked with an exact dose of herbs and spices. We even tried cauliflower stew, but that didn’t turn out to be very good because the cauliflower cooked to a creamy white soup with no texture. Of course we still ate it. If we had pork, we used that instead of rabbit. Beef was very seldom seen and you probably had to know someone high up in the Party to get some from the butcher. My mother’s recipe book also shows stew made with a whole chicken, and we had it occasionally before the war, but plenty of bones had to be picked out during the meal. Chicken meat was unobtainable during the war. Chickens were much more valuable as egg-layers than as ingredients in a stew but if ever a chicken refused to do its job, we had to put it in the pot. We couldn’t feed things that were of no use to us. I guess that’s why I always wanted to be useful.

Late in the war, when the meals at the battery were becoming unpalatable, some of the men asked if they could get a Blitzmädel (‘Lightning Girl’) to do the cooking. I was not very keen on that idea because these Blitzmädel were also used as messengers, meaning I could lose my cushy job at the guns and have to parade around town or dig trenches like Brother Len. They were called ‘lightning girls’ because their uniforms had a patch with a lightning bolt on the sleeve. It was a Signal Corps patch, but when young girl volunteers were authorised to wear the uniform, they were given the somewhat unflattering nickname of Blitzmädel. Giant ignored the men’s request and assured me that my job was secure. He was the chief and besides, the few girls in our area that might have been suitable were needed on the farms. I had the captain on my side too and he was the final decision-maker.

It was in the spring and summer of 1943 when the US Air Force began throwing its weight about over our area with bombing raids. When bombs were first dropped on M-G, I was asleep in the upstairs bedroom and almost fell out of bed. At that time there was only a single battery of 88mm anti-aircraft guns near us capable of firing on them at night and the racket was enough to wake the dead. The ground shook like an earthquake. That air raid was nothing compared to what would be in store for us two years later. In school, we had identification charts of all known enemy aircraft and classes were taught in how to identify them. We could eventually tell the difference between a B-26 Marauder, an A-20 Havoc, a B-17 Flying Fortress and a B-24 Liberator. Later there were other aircraft that were a worse problem for us, especially during the daylight when I was sent out as a messenger for the quads. Our quads were capable of firing about 2,000 rounds per minute. However, we didn’t have ammunition belts, only fifteen- or twenty-round magazines that emptied in a few seconds, and then they had to be replaced to resume firing. Another disadvantage was that quads in fixed positions had no shields like those at the front. Our quads were set up in open pits with no protection whatsoever against low-level attacks until we built a sort of earth and log embankment around them. Our 20mm flak was only used for lower-flying attackers and later, in 1944, we had plenty of them to deal with.