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

Chapter 6. Bombings and Fighter-Bombers

Germans seldom mourned the loss of property to bombs; that could always be replaced after the war. It was the starvation rations late in the war and the failure of their government to rectify the situation that brought on a feeling of helplessness we’d never experienced. Going hungry day in and day out was more depressing than a home destroyed by bombs or even a loved one killed. Any other country might have found a leader who would lead a revolt against such a system, but Germany had no other leaders. They had long since been thrown into concentration camps or murdered. There was no opposition political party the people could turn to and even expressing an opinion that was critical of the Party could be dangerous.

Why then did the German people not give up when all around them, cities were being laid wante? The German bombing of England had no effect on the morale of the British people, and it was the same for us. The Allied bombing was on a far more massive scale than the Luftwaffe’s puny attacks on Great Britain, even including the so-called ‘Baedeker Raids’ or the V-Weapon attacks. However, after the war, many Allied bombing analysts agreed that bombing German population centres was not a major contribution to ending the war. Destroying oil refineries, communication centres and industrial plants made much more of an impact. Allied commanders like Carl (Tooey) Spaatz, Ira Eaker, Arthur (Bomber) Harris, Charles Portal and a few more, however, were convinced that bombing civilians was just as important. By the beginning of 1944, America alone had built some 150,000 aircraft and those in charge were determined to do something with the ones still flying. Millions had been spent on their construction and they would be worthless as soon as the war was over, and by this time everyone knew it would be over very soon. Certainly if Germany had the planes, fuel and pilots at the time, there would have been a great deal more bombing of English cities late in the war as retaliation for the devastation we were enduring.

* * *

By the middle of the war most people had some sort of air-raid shelter. For centuries, houses in Germany were built with underground basements, and during the Third Reich, building regulations required any newly-built house to have a basement. The exterior of all houses was brick and mortar so everyone had at least some sort of protection in an air raid against anything but a direct hit. A direct hit by even a small 250lb bomb would wreck the house and basement and probably kill someone. Big cities were also big targets and there was a problem providing any sort of shelter for the inhabitants of apartment buildings. The shelters, if they existed, were rarely large enough to hold everyone and some preferred to take their chances in the lower floor apartments rather than be buried alive. Huge above-ground public shelters were constructed in the largest cities and they could hold thousands of people. They often had ceilings that were eight feet thick and made of reinforced concrete. Some even had 88mm anti-aircraft guns and quad 20mm positions on top of them. These Hochbunkers (high, above-ground bunkers), as they were called - like the one in Bottrop - had no windows and only a few small openings with inch-thick steel shutters over them. They were safe even from multiple direct hits and saved the lives of many city-dwellers during the last year of the war. A number of these shelters can still be seen in large German cities if you know what to look for. The Allies decided it was not worth all the explosives it would have taken to blow them up. They’re mostly used as storage facilities today. These remains of the Third Reich will probably be around for a dozen more generations.

Not until after 10 May 1940 did the real bombing begin, when civilians were killed en masse. That first raid, which was on Freiburg in May 1940, was a bombing by Germany’s own Luftwaffe. Some sixty tons of bombs were mistakenly dropped on the city’s train station because of a navigational error, killing dozens of civilians. Of course Goebbels blamed the British and Göring retaliated by attacking London, missing military targets altogether and hitting civilians. The British retaliated in kind and so it went on, both sides blaming the other. Luckily, the air-raid wardens, jokingly called ‘Meier’s Drovers’ were out in force. The air-raid sirens came to be called ‘Meier’s Hunting Horns’. Every city or town had an engineering detachment, usually a platoon or company of the OT or the Technische Nothilfe (TNH - Technical Emergency Corps), supplemented with labour from nearby POW camps. The constant bombing of bigger cities put an enormous strain on the resources of these organisations. They were always short of transport, fuel and equipment for removing rubble after the bombings. These people worked wonders to get jobs done that were essential to maintaining communications, water and power supplies.

Any fighter or bomber pilot from the Second World War can tell you that of all man-made structures they bombed, high bunkers and chimneys were the hardest to demolish. Just look at post-war photographs of the cities in the Ruhr and you will see miles and miles of destroyed factories but hundreds of chimneys defiantly standing.

Around December 1941, the first British plane was shot down over our area and crashed in the centre of town, burning a few houses and injuring several people. Brother Len was not entirely satisfied with the results and blamed the civilian casualties on our flak defence. I told him he should blame Herr Meier. After the first bombings, a verse circulated among the civilians that I think the Reich Marshal would not have appreciated. It went something like this in a loose English translation:

A Walk in the Blackout - Father and Son

‘Father, who’s that walking through our streets in the night;

all blacked out, no lights shining bright?’

‘My son, that’s a stupid question I hear,

that’s our blackout Kommandeur.

He’s the man who safeguards our beds,

when enemy bombs come down on our heads.’

‘My father, my father I can see very dim,

in the blackout, someone is following him.’

‘My dear son, yes, I can see him as well.

Is it Herr Meier? Yes, sure as Hell.’

‘Who is this Herr Meier? He looks like a thief.’

‘Well, yes son, he is one and our own Luftwaffen Chief.

So please don’t approach him, just walk by and be quiet,

like tits on a bull, he is useless tonight.’

‘We’re protected by our wardens from dusk until morning,

and your mum’s in the fire service to give us all warning.’

We then heard a shout from our warden, ‘Hear, hear.

The air raid is over; I’m sounding ‘all clear’.’

A five-ton bomb was dropped near our church, in the pastor’s garden, in early 1942, but luckily it didn’t explode and was made safe by the local bomb disposal unit. In our little community, we didn’t experience any real destruction until September 1942 when a few bombs fell on a farm not far away and the house and barn were burned down. Incendiary bombs set the home of the chaplain ablaze and the home of the holy sisters was hit too. Our pastor gave all of them temporary shelter until things could be sorted out. A phosphorus bomb hit the chaplain’s house in a later bombing and burned the roof. It was five months before the house was completely repaired. This bombing was reported in the official Wehrmacht War Diary I read years later. On 3 October 1942, an aerial mine was dropped near the church, killing a parishioner and breaking a few windows. One of the enemy bombers our 88s shot down crashed into a factory near us and the engine ended up next to the church but there was no damage that day. Several schoolchildren died in the early summer of 1944 when they gathered around a hole in the road that a time-delayed bomb had made. The children were curious and the bomb exploded as it was supposed to. There was some precision bombing by low-flying P-38s or P-47s, but the damage was minimal; a few dwellings were destroyed. During the heavy bombing raid in September 1944, the rest of the church windows were blown out.

There was a raid during one of our visits (February-March 1942) to see Dad in the military hospital in Bottrop. Sometime around midday, the sirens started up. We were ushered out into the street and an air-raid warden took us to a nearby Hochbunker. People were streaming in from all directions in the inner city for shelter. There were mothers with baby strollers, old men and women clutching a few belongings, and of course, the ever-present Party officials in their brown uniforms, demanding respect and the best seats in the place. Many of our soldiers came home on a short leave only to find their homes in ruins and the family missing. If they were lucky, they would find a crude sign stuck in the rubble telling them where their family was. The soldiers who had lost everything had no desire to stay in Germany. The front became their home and their only friends were their comrades in arms, so they boarded the next train back to their lice-ridden bunkers or their lonely bases out in the steppes. Millions never came back.

I sat next to an old man and his wife. He was holding a small wooden suitcase and his wife was clutching a few pillows. He told me that he lived in Oberhausen, which was only a few miles away, and that he had worked in the coal mines for fifty years. He had lost a son during the fighting in Yugoslavia. We talked for a while and I found out that he was also a gardener, so we had something in common. His garden was much smaller than ours but we grew some of the same things. After talking to him for a while, I realised just how much better off we were.

‘So, how are you set for manure for your garden then?’ he asked.

‘Animal droppings, kitchen waste, straw, weeds, the list is endless, Sir,’ I answered.

‘Well, he said, ‘I haven’t seen horse manure for years and have forgotten what it looks like.’

‘We have plenty,’ I told him, ‘but sorry, it’s too far from here to share it with you.’ I could just imagine this old man running through the streets with a shovel and bucket looking for horse droppings. ‘In the country we don’t live like rich folks but we manage to get by.’

‘We just get by too,’ he said with a chuckle, ‘but every day I have a slice of bread with four sausages on it.’

‘Four sausages!’ That’s a lot more than we have. How do you manage to get four sausages every day?’

‘Imagination son, just imagination,’ the old man replied.

‘Well, if imagination can fill my stomach, I would sure like to know how?’

‘Okay boy,’ the man whispered, ‘I’ll let you in on a secret. Just get a slice of black bread, put your four fingers on the top and your thumb below the slice, then hold it in front of your mouth and look at the four fingers. Then imagine those fingers being sausages and before you bite into your imaginary sausages, pull your fingers away. It works every time. You can even put mustard on your fingers for a little extra flavour. Mustard isn’t rationed; not yet anyway.’

Well, what could I say? I thanked him for the tip, and heard far away a few rumblings of exploding bombs. The 88s on the roof let loose with a few rounds and everything went quiet again. In the last year of the war, city people went through this exercise almost every day, sometimes more than once. I couldn’t imagine having to be cooped up like that very often.

‘Alert over, alert over,’ an air-raid warden shouted. I was glad to see the sun again. Bottrop was spared that day and we took the next train home.

In mid-June, it never gets really dark in north-western Germany. The sun sets well after 10:00 p.m. but the western horizon never gets dark and by 2:00 a.m., daylight starts creeping up again in the east. These were days when I did most of the garden work, at times well into the night. Brother Len didn’t do much garden work but he did like picking blackcurrants. I think it was because he could fill his belly with them while picking. In mid-June 1943, on a clear night, about midnight, a huge stream of aircraft approached from the west. We didn’t bother seeking shelter because bomber streams high up were not interested in a little village like ours, so we kept picking blackcurrants. Then a few minutes later, the sky to the east of us lit up as if by brilliant fireworks. These were the bombing markers that the Pathfinders dropped to show the following bomber stream where to drop their loads. The searchlights in our area had already been alerted and their silvery white fingers were swinging back and forth across the clear sky. The dozen or so 88 batteries in our area then commenced firing. Instantly we knew the city of Krefeld was on the receiving-end of this attack. The city had a huge steel works, the DEW (Deutsche Edelstahlwerke), a chemical plant, many cloth manufacturing and food-processing plants and an inland harbour on the Rhine.

Krefeld had been bombed several times since 1941 by the RAF but not much damage had been done. In mid-1943, the USAAF joined in with better and more advanced bombing sights, better incendiaries and much bigger bombs, but that night’s attack was courtesy of the RAF. Over 600 Avro Lancasters and Halifaxes dropped several thousand tons of bombs in multiple waves of attack. Our vantage-point on top of the only hill in the area gave us a panoramic view of the attack. We were about thirteen miles from the city and the huge fires started by phosphorus incendiary bombs lit up the sky; at times we could clearly see the attacking planes. A few German night fighters tried their very best to interfere, but they could never have stopped the attack. The AA flak had to stop firing when the night fighters released green and red flares to indicate their presence. A few of the bombers were shot down but not enough to make a difference. Brother Len reported to his Hitler Youth unit the next morning and was detailed to a rescue squad that went to Krefeld. The city, he told us, was flattened. I have no idea how many people died, but it must have been thousands. The city was attacked a few more times after that. In November 1944, Krefeld had another heavy raid but I wasn’t home at the time.

This particular raid on Krefeld seriously affected our food supply. Krefeld-Uerdingen was at that time the largest producer of Maizena or cornflour; another plant was in Bielefeld which also got its share of bombing in an earlier raid. Cornflour was used extensively in every kitchen, not for its nutrition value, but more for thickening watery soups and stews, gravies and pancakes. Some of the bombs hit the cornflour storage facility and the subsequent fire set off a huge corn-dust explosion. In a nearby high-rise concrete bunker with 1,500 people seeking protection, the air was sucked out of the ventilation shafts and many suffocated. Brother Len nevertheless brought some ten pounds of cornflour home two days later, mixed with ashes and dirt of course, but we put the stuff through a sifter and used it. This raid stopped production for a considerable time and we had to use plain flour until the factory was halfway back in operation. We didn’t grow corn because we had no facility for grinding and refining it. Our primitive coffee grinders just barely managed to grind rye, wheat or barley. There were plenty of oat fields too but processing oats requires a complicated bit of machinery to separate the oat grain from the chaff. We nevertheless cooked the whole thing anyway when we could get it, then strained the stuff and used the water in soups. The chickens and rabbits got the rest and they loved it.

Destroying a sugar refinery was an easy way to disrupt the local economy. By the winter of 1944/45, there was not a single one in operation. The refinery in Euskirchen had been bombed the day before Mum and I arrived during a trip through the Ardennes. Thousands of tons of sugar beets, waiting their turn to be made into sugar, were blown all over the town. The city of Jülich, only twelve miles north of the Hürtgen Forest, also had a large sugar factory. During the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest, still the longest battle the US Army has ever fought (19 September to 16 December 1944), that city and another, Düren, which was just east of the forest, were attacked by 650 American bombers on 16 November and totally destroyed.

Not only did the raids kill Germans; there were also thousands of foreign slave labourers in every major city working in the war industries, and they suffered the same fate. The bombs killed them as easily as they killed Germans. On 9 February 1945, we had our first heavy bombing raid. Up to that time, our city had only experienced the occasional scrap with fighter-bombers or the odd night bomb dropped by returning RAF bombers. On that early February day, things changed; the town was situated in the very centre of the path being taken by the advancing US XIII Army Corps commanded by Lieutenant General Alvan C. Gillem, Jr. during Operation Grenade. In mid-February, the IX US Bomber Division with a hundred B-26 Marauders and about forty B-26 Invaders attacked M-G just after 1:00 p.m.. There were 175 people killed in that raid, including many schoolchildren and several Russian POWs. The centre of the city was hit hard but the railway tracks, the main target, were quickly repaired and trains were moving again a few days later. The Amis decided that another attack was necessary, so on 24 February a second raid began. This time the IX US Bomber Division attacked with 110 A-26 Invaders, seventy-five B-26 Marauders, and for good measure, fifty fast twin-engined A-20 Havocs, protected by a swarm of P-51 Mustangs. They came in at 10,000-12,000 feet, just out of range of the quads, but we were busy nevertheless, targeting the escorts and flak suppressors. The 88s got two Marauders; one crashed about three miles from us with a full bomb load, the other hit a factory chimney as the pilot tried to get the damaged plane home on one engine.

There were fewer casualties during this attack. Most people who had survived the first bombing had already left the centre of town. The phosphorus bombs burned most of the inner city this time. The town’s old market area with the large Catholic cathedral was especially hard hit. After that raid, I went in search of Brother Len. I knew he had gone to a Hitler Youth meeting in M-G about mid-day, but I wasn’t very concerned about him getting hurt. He always managed to get out of any bad situation. I found him and several other Hitler Youths at a burning house on a side street by the cathedral. There was not a fire engine to be seen; the town only had four, and they were busy extinguishing fires in more important buildings. Brother Len and two more boys had just pulled an old couple out of the cellar. They were shaken but unhurt. The house, however, was in ruins. Len went back into the cellar and through the small basement window; he started handing canned peaches to his two mates. Under normal circumstances this would be looting, but these were not normal circumstances. They pulled the rubber rings and drank the peach juice like it was cold water and a few of them were taken home. By late afternoon, the whole block of houses had collapsed. Nobody felt guilty about taking the peaches, least of all Brother Len.

‘Spoils of war,’ he said.

I had heard that before somewhere. If I’m not mistaken, Dad said the same thing about the radio he brought home from Poland in 1939.

We walked the old couple to an NSV first-aid shelter and later, Brother Len got a commendation for helping rescue them. He didn’t get to show it off for long though. The war was over for us eight days later. We got home that afternoon by 6:00 p.m., avoiding a few delayed-action bombs that went off around us. No doubt the pilots had dropped them to delay the rescue operations. If that was their intention, it worked. Five more people were killed the next day when some of those hellish devices exploded. In that last week of February, the Jabos were constantly patrolling the sky from dawn to dusk and venturing outside in broad daylight with no cover was just dangerous. The 88s were absolutely useless in holding them off, so the job fell to the quads, the few 37mm guns in the area and an assortment of single and twin heavy machine guns. The days were long gone when we were able to defend the area with ease. The P-47 Thunderbolts we called Heckenspringer (‘Hedgehoppers’) now had armour plating underneath, self-sealing tanks and, for good measure, four rockets under each wing. Only a lucky hit in a vital part of the engine could bring them down, and with the front line only a few miles away, a damaged plane could easily glide to safety. The pilot would be back the next day to shoot at us again. On 26 February, we made a sieve out of the port wing of a P-47, but the guy got clean away and dropped two 250lb bombs on the old motorcycle track before veering off. If that had been one of our planes with damage like that, the pilot would have pulled up and bailed out.

The bombing of Viersen on 24 February 1945 by six American bomb groups did not affect the outlying areas much. They were going after a communications centre there and didn’t scatter their bombs. Three days later our house took a 105mm artillery hit that we didn’t get repaired until well after the war. One of the bombs, a 500-pounder dropped on Viersen, didn’t explode until 18 September 2012. It was a controlled detonation by a German bomb-disposal team, but there was still considerable damage. The disarming or detonation of such bombs is an almost weekly occurrence in areas that were especially targeted.

By late February 1945, things were getting bad for our church too. When the Allies advanced toward us, the Wehrmacht retreated and left many German cars, trucks and other vehicles parked near the church. On 28 February 1945, an attack by P-38s targeted this assembly of vehicles and a bomb fell on the home of the chief Church Warden, next door to our church. He and his daughter and some relatives who had taken shelter in the house were killed. The fighter-bomber pilots didn’t know what was below; all they could see was a Wehrmacht field kitchen and halftracks parked nearby. In addition to being an air-raid warden, our Church Warden was also the person responsible for church business and he played the organ during mass. The kindergarten next door to his house was also hit but thankfully no children were present at the time.

An artillery forward observer sat in the church steeple directing our return fire. All this attracted fighter-bombers and a squad of P-38s raked the area with cannon fire and bombs. The next morning I went up to the quads as usual and watched as an American halftrack opened up from more than a mile out with a .50 calibre machine gun, using our clock face for target practice. The whole mechanism came crashing down into the church. Our artillery observer in the steeple was chased out with a few well-aimed rounds from a 105mm gun. The next day, the Americans arrived. The vicinity of the church looked like a battlefield with burned-out cars, trucks, dead men and animals. That was the end of the war for us and our church. It took years to repair the damage after the war, but by 1950, it was back in good shape. The church was once again the centre of religious activity and it still stands today, 120 years after it was built, more than seventy years after the end of the war and the end of the Thousand Year Reich.

* * *

The bombings were bad, but the fighter-bombers were our biggest worry. They could fly in low, sometimes lower than the hedges that divided the fields. Coming in at 400 miles per hour, flying over and around the hedges, they were a tough target for our quads. We discovered the best way to get a shot at one was to put up a curtain of fire across the path we thought they would be taking. We called this a Harmonika. The P-47s soon figured out what we were doing and began flying in from crossing directions at a separation in elevation of a few hundred feet. They had two bombs, or wing-mounted rockets and up to eight machine guns or cannons. A single fighter-bomber could do an incredible amount of damage to a small town and there was rarely just one of them in an attack. In July-August 1944 they came in from captured airfields in France, about 20 miles away, and they were equipped with 75-gallon drop tanks to give them either a longer range or more time over a specific target. These drop tanks came in handy after the war as small boats or bathtubs. They made better bathtubs than boats. Even a small ripple on a lake or stream could turn them over.

Air defence positions were built around many towns by 1942, mostly in prominent places with a good view in all directions. The biggest concern was the north-western direction since that’s the direction the Tommy (British) and later the Ami fighter-bombers were coming from. To say our quads were in an excellent position would be a bad description of reality however. Firing from our position was like a doctor trying to remove an appendix with a kitchen knife and a corkscrew. Trees, chimney stacks, church steeples and other obstructions hindered the view in any direction. On top of that, a railway track ran only a hundred yards off, and to the east, about two hundred yards away, there was a large motorcycle race track, nicely oval shaped like a football stadium. Both made excellent references for a pilot looking for us. The motorcycle track had seen better days even when I was a kid. Nobody organised a race anymore, but as a reference point for bombers, there it was, and since we had no means to demolish it, we just ignored it. The demolition was finally taken out of our hands, first by P-47s with a few 250lb bombs and later, in February 1945, a misplaced salvo of 500lb bombs dropped from an A-20 Havoc finished the job. They were not aiming to destroy the racetrack of course; they were after the railway track. Gunny remarked that the bombing raid had been a terrible waste of explosives. In 2006, I visited the area for the first time since the war. The racetrack had turned into a wilderness but a few bare spots and parts of the concrete ticket booth were identifiable. A local resident who was walking his dog nearby said that he never knew there had been a racetrack there. He told me he was born in 1962 and had lived there all his life. A few shallow bomb craters can also be seen in the area and our old gun position is now part of a bird sanctuary. There were three huge factory buildings within a mile or so of the track, a food-processing plant, a cotton mill and a machine manufacturer, plus a few minor enterprises, and all of them had huge chimneys that were visible for miles. The cotton mill chimney was 240 feet tall and was the highest structure in town. Trees were not a big problem, they could be cut down, and they were in 1944. Church steeples and chimneys were a different matter. Brick chimneys were immune to machine-gun fire and even 20mm cannons hardly scratched them.

München-Gladbach, the city we were supposed to protect from air raids, was about three miles away from the quads, but there was also a fighter base a few miles to the south-east. From our elevated position, we had a grandstand view of both. Only to the north and west was our view largely restricted by chimney stacks, high buildings, and tall poplar trees. The Heckenspringers always used these trees as approach cover. Of course they knew where all the flak positions were, and even their best pilots hesitated to tangle with the eight barrels of our two quads. The chimney stacks were something we couldn’t do much about, but in all our time up there, I can’t recall ever hitting one. Gunny always knew the most direct solution to any problem so he suggested that we sneak up to the stacks at night and blow them up ourselves and blame the destruction on enemy raiders. He didn’t get much support for that idea.

Many factories, and especially the food-processing plants, had ceased operation by early 1945 because of the daily bombing raids. Those that were still in operation had Volkssturm men and air-raid wardens guarding them. They were known to occasionally help themselves to whatever was being produced, but they also knew that, by this late date, they would likely be shot if they were caught. The Hitler Youth had been required to guard these facilities, but Goebbels’ proclamation of early 1945, ‘Der Führer erwartet Dein Opfer’, which means, ‘The Führer expects your sacrifice,’ changed everything; even younger boys were being called up. Ten- to sixteen-year-olds died by the thousands defending Germany at the end of the war. ‘The Hitler Youth fights for our lives, our freedom and greater Germany - and we will win’ was another slogan we heard everywhere. I’m not really sure if we believed this propaganda anymore, or if we were just afraid of what would happen to us if Germany lost the war. By this time war had become very personal for all Germans.

At times, when enemy fighter-bombers had nothing better to target, they would attack livestock in the fields. I guess they figured a dead cow couldn’t give milk and less milk meant less food for the enemy. A dead German was a dead German, whether he died from a bullet or hunger. That surely sounds cruel today but war is cruel, especially for civilians. I remember a quote I once heard but I can’t remember who said it. I think it was a general. ‘The will to resist can only be broken by killing the willing.’ That is what total war is all about. Any cow that unfortunately got targeted by a P-47’s machine gun was not wasted by any means, but if you wanted your share of fresh beef, you had to have a sharp knife and nerves of steel. You had to get your cut while the fighter-bombers were still roaming about and the farmer was still in his shelter. If the pilots got a glimpse of you, they would turn around in an instant and you became the next target. You also had to have a good excuse if someone happened to see you walking around with a slab of beef under your arm after any attack. It was still stealing, whether the cow was alive or dead.

* * *

Except in the winter, our garden was the place to be during the day, but because of the constant threat of air raids and particularly fighter-bombers, it was also a dangerous place to be caught unaware. The Jabos came unannounced; alerts were sounded usually after the culprit was gone and had left behind a trail of destruction. Many gardens, including ours, had a sort of shelter dug in one corner, about six feet deep and eight feet square with a corrugated iron roof, topped with two feet of soil. This was not exactly a safe haven against a direct hit, but a near miss from a 250lb bomb could be survived if you were in the thing. We also built a Laube, a sort of crudely-camouflaged gazebo as a place to hide from spying observation planes. We had no front garden and so we were exempt from the law requiring us to have a ditch about ten feet long and four feet deep to be used by the public walking along the street in the event of an air raid.

One minute, you were on your hands and knees, peacefully thinning out rows of carrots, and the next minute all Hell would break loose. It was not the peaceful gardening one has today. We were not so much afraid of the bombs however. We had figured out that a bomb exploding in the soft ground was much less dangerous than the machine guns on a Jabo. If the bomb happened to hit a house, that was a different matter - bad luck we would say. Jabos were fast, but they couldn’t disguise the sounds they made. Even children could distinguish between turbocharged Allison, Pratt & Whitney, and Messerschmitt BMW engines. Our planes weren’t often seen but when they were, they were greeted with much fanfare by the schoolchildren. For people living in large cities, the fears were reversed. Jabos rarely ventured low over them because of the church spires, chimneys and high-rise buildings. City dwellers feared the bombs that rained down from the high-altitude bombers. They didn’t drop the small 250-pounders either. Their loads were 2,000lb to 10,000lb destroyers. The Allies didn’t waste that kind of munition on farms and gardens. Even in daylight, when only high-flying bombers were up, life was by no means peaceful. Our 88mm flak that harassed the Allied planes had to throw up a tremendous number of shells to hit their targets and what goes up must come down. Our 88mm shells took about twenty seconds to reach an altitude of 20,000 feet before exploding and raining down shrapnel. From that height, even a small piece could kill.

One day in September 1944, we had a soccer game that I will always remember. Our opponents were from a school in Neuss, which was about fifteen miles away. The team and a few of their supporters came by tram to our soccer field for the match. Kick-off was at 2:00 p.m. on a sunny afternoon. The crowd roared when a Nazi official presented each team member with a nice triangular banner. ‘Sieg Heils’ could be heard miles away. I think maybe the Amis heard the noise as well. The front line was in the Hürtgen Forest and that wasn’t very far away. A couple of P-47s came over to investigate and there was not a single German plane in the sky to defend us. The local quads began firing and the crowd scattered like the inhabitants of a disturbed ant hill when the planes came back around. Luckily, there was a brick wall surrounding the soccer field and it provided a bit of shelter. Two small 250lb bombs hit the field, but the twenty-two players had already run into the dressing room. The other bombs went wide of the mark into a nearby wheat field. A few spectators were killed and several more were wounded. The game was called off that day and the only winners were the P-47s, which went home without a scratch. All open air games were cancelled from that day forward and the Hitler Youth was ordered to dig a five-foot deep trench outside the stadium gate. I have no idea what for.

* * *

Night raids by the RAF were a spectacular fireworks display for us, but daytime raids by the Americans were shrouded in dust, and the easterly winds brought the dust clouds right up to our door. By 1944, these raids were commonplace and were hardly even discussed anymore unless our area was on the receiving end. Even the radio didn’t talk much about the ‘terror attacks by gangsters’ as they were called by our Propaganda Minister. Goebbels promised revenge for every bomb dropped on Germany, but by then we knew that would never happen. Soldiers home on leave were often glad to get back to the front where they could at least fire back at the enemy. At home, they were in the same predicament as the rest of us. Some still believed, even as late as the first months of 1945, that Germany’s V-weapons would somehow change the course of the war in our favour.

During quiet nights, we could hear the faint roar of the V-2s heading westward. They travelled faster than sound, and at 70,000 feet, we couldn’t see them. Several mobile launching sites were in our area but they were heavily guarded and we never got a close look at any of them. At times the gyro compasses in these rockets went haywire and they ended up far from where they were supposed to. One crashed into a hotel not far from us and killed several people. Another did a soft belly landing near Cleve in February 1945 without exploding. It landed in the front line of the 1st Canadian Division and was delivered intact into the hands of Montgomery’s 21st Army Group. It became a showpiece in London after the war. By the end of the war, many V-1s and V-2s had been captured and some of them can still be seen in museums in the United States and Great Britain. The team that developed these rockets was captured by the Americans and eventually taken to Huntsville, Alabama. SS-Sturmbannführer Dr Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun, the father of German rocket development was made an honorary citizen of Huntsville and under his guidance, the Saturn V moon rocket was developed at what is now called the Marshall Space Flight Center (named for General George C. Marshall of the ‘Marshall Plan’ by the way). Whether the Americans fed the captured German POW scientists in Huntsville on sauerkraut soup and black bread, I don’t know, but I very much doubt it.