The German invasion of Poland in the early hours of 1 September 1939 widened the gulf between the generations even more. Many people of my parents’ age had watched Hitler’s increasingly brazen expansionist foreign policies with mounting, if mostly unspoken, alarm. And when this latest venture–the first to be carried out by force of arms–resulted in England and France declaring war on Germany, they saw their worst fears realized. They remembered all too clearly the horrors of the First World War, which had ended in Germany’s defeat little more than two decades ago. This renewed outbreak of hostilities witnessed none of the spontaneous popular jubilation that had greeted the start of the earlier conflict. It must be said, however, that the voices of the ‘grumblers and grousers’–the party’s own words–grew progressively fainter as the campaign in Poland ran its victorious course.
We of the younger generation viewed matters entirely differently. The final weeks’ countdown to war had taken place during the summer holidays, which had given us ample time and opportunity to get together to follow and discuss the political developments with mounting patriotic fervour. Even after we had returned to school, the news from the front that September occupied our minds far more than did our studies. The unstoppable advance of our troops through Poland had totally captured our imaginations. Each new success was reported by a ‘special announcement’ on the radio. They were always preceded by a triumphant fanfare and were listened to with rapt attention.
It was our last year at school and we had been given automatic deferment from military service to allow us to take the Abitur, our final exams, which we were due to sit in the spring of 1940. But now something new had been introduced: the so called ‘War Abitur’. This did not involve any kind of examination, but was based entirely on a pupil’s performance and his grades in school to date. If these were deemed to be satisfactory, the ‘War Abitur’ was duly awarded–provided the recipient volunteered for the armed forces when he turned eighteen.
To several of my school friends and myself this was hugely tempting. Filled with the true recklessness of youth, motivated by a mixture of allegiance to the fatherland and boredom with school, and fired up by visions of heroic deeds and impressive medals, it seemed to us to offer all the prospects of a great adventure. But such a course required parental consent. In those days the age of majority was still twenty-one. Resigned to the fact that they were not going to be able to stop me, my parents gave the necessary consent, albeit with a marked lack of enthusiasm. On the morning of my eighteenth birthday, 30 October 1939, I duly volunteered my services to the Luftwaffe.
A few days later I received my call-up papers ordering me to report to Manching airfield near Ingolstadt, some sixty kilometres to the north of Munich, on 15 November 1939. Manching was currently home to Fliegerausbildungsregiment 33 (Luftwaffe Basic Training Regiment 33) and it was here that I was to do my ‘square-bashing’. Early on 15 November a small group of us–myself and four of my best friends from school–made our way to Rosenheim railway station fairly bursting with anticipation. Our mothers all turned up to see us off, of course, but tactfully kept their distance. They responded to our excited waves and laughing faces as the train pulled out of the station by fluttering their tear-stained handkerchiefs after us.
At Manching we were abruptly and unceremoniously plunged into the world of the military. But we had known what to expect and were not unduly alarmed. The barracks echoed to the sound of barking–not of the canine kind, but the shouted commands of the kapos, or NCOs, who were there to ‘help’ us draw our uniforms and equipment…“that helmet fits perfectly, it’s your head that’s the wrong shape!” As nothing else was available, I was issued with a tunic bearing a corporal’s insignia. For the rest of the day, and much to my embarrassment, I was constantly being treated with unwarranted deference and respect by people I didn’t know. I couldn’t wait to get back to our barracks room that evening and remove the offending braid.
After such a long passage of time it is difficult to remember much about my basic training, the main purpose of which seems to have been to teach us how to walk properly; something we had apparently failed to master as civilians. My weeks at Manching are now just a blur of marching and drilling, drilling and marching. But one thing does stick in my mind. A misdemeanour by one resulted in collective punishment for all. I put my roommates’ forbearance severely to the test on one occasion by arriving on morning parade without my rifle. Considering the importance attached to this item and the reverence in which it was held, the kapo’s reaction can be imagined.
I could only catch the gist of what he was screaming at me in his near apoplectic fury, but I was led to understand, among other things, that nothing like this had happened in the German army since the days of Frederick the Great. The upshot was that we were all ordered to do fifty ‘Prussians with applause’–fifty push-ups with a handclap between each. Another infringement of the rules (I wasn’t the guilty party this time) resulted in a punishment that seemed to us to be less of a deterrent and more of a chance for the NCOs to relieve their boredom. The wrongdoer had to climb to the top of one of the tall pines that fringed our training ground. Swaying in the wind, he was then commanded to start shouting “cuckoo” at the top of his voice while the rest of us joined hands and danced around the base of the tree singing a well known ditty of the time, ‘All the little birdies up there on high’.
In those early days of the war it was the norm for a Luftwaffe training base to house two units: one a basic training regiment such as ours, and the other an elementary flying training school. Both would share the same numerical designation and it was generally the case that a recruit, having successfully completed his basic military training in the first, would then progress to the second to commence flying training. But Manching’s ‘twinned’ flying school, Sch/FAR 33, had been transferred up to Königsberg only days before we arrived and our regiment was moved lock, stock and barrel to join it there in early December.
Lying in the firing butts at Königsberg in the depths of an East Prussian winter, I came down with a nasty bout of influenza and found myself spending Christmas 1939 in the station sick quarters. At the beginning of January 1940 we were on the move again, this time along the coast to Elbing, close to the western end of the Frisches Haff lagoon. Here it was, if anything, even colder. In temperatures as low as minus 33 degrees there were several cases of frostbitten ears and noses. We were quartered in wooden barracks furnished with three-tier bunk beds. The huge iron stoves that were used to heat the rooms had to be fed throughout the night by the sentries coming on and off watch. The only trouble was that those in the lower bunks were constantly demanding more warmth while those in the top tiers–including me–were practically suffocating from the heat. We were only at Elbing for a month, thank God, before our basic training came to an end.
Early in February 1940 we four holders of the War Abitur, rather than being transferred across to the elementary flying training wing as we had hoped, unexpectedly found ourselves posted instead to a long-range reconnaissance Staffel. Equipped with Dornier Do 17s and based at Brüsterort on the extreme tip of the Samland peninsula northwest of Königsberg, this Staffel formed part of the Fernaufklärungsgruppe/Ob.d.L. which, as its designation suffix indicates, was a special unit subordinated directly to the Oberbefehlshaber der Luftwaffe (Luftwaffe High Command). Its present task was to fly reconnaissance missions along the Baltic to keep a covert eye on what the Russians were up to, even though the Soviet Union was signatory to a non-aggression pact with Germany at this time.
Despite our joining the Staffel as ‘airmen/general-duties’, in other words, the lowest of the low, the disappointment at not being selected for flying training was somewhat mitigated by the atmosphere that greeted us. Brüsterort was very much an operational station. There was none of the screaming of orders that had accompanied our every waking moment during basic training, nor any of the petty and seemingly pointless rules and regulations that had made our lives such a misery. Most of the Staffel’s general-duties personnel were reservists and there was a very relaxed air about the place. We wouldn’t have been unduly surprised had they addressed us as ‘Herr’ rather than ‘Airman’.
Not that we behaved very much like Herren in our off-duty hours, which were spent larking about like the overgrown schoolboys we still were. In those early weeks of 1940 the winter landscape of the Baltic coastline was a magnificent natural spectacle. Before freezing over completely, the angry sea had hurled huge blocks of ice on to the beach. We scrambled and slid about on these like a pack of demented polar bears. Less enjoyable were the hours of backbreaking toil spent shovelling deep snow from the airfield’s roads and runways.
In the spring of 1940 the Staffel was transferred from Brüsterort to Döberitz, west of Berlin. I was to remain with the unit until the late summer and so got ample opportunity to explore my country’s capital city. As a Bavarian–and a provincial one at that–it made an enormous impression on me. To someone of my rather sheltered upbringing it all seemed so vibrant and modern. I was particularly struck by the Haus Vaterland, a so called entertainment and pleasure venue on the Potsdamer Platz. This establishment even had a telephone on every table, which permitted you to strike up a conversation with a lady sitting anywhere in the room–something, I must admit, I never had the courage to do.
Towards the end of August 1940 I received a fresh posting. I was being sent to newly occupied France to join a mobile meteorological centre (Wetterzentrale XII mot.) currently based at Étampes, southwest of Paris. This move meant saying a final goodbye to my Rosenheim schoolmates. But at Étampes I soon found a new friend in Rudi Breu from Augsburg. Like me, he had chosen to take the War Abitur and was now serving as a deciphering clerk; our job being to decode the weather reports sent in by aircraft and ships out in the Atlantic, and by German-manned weather stations operating in Greenland.