The unit was housed in a small country mansion on the southern outskirts of Étampes. Our living quarters, we were informed, were to be treated with the utmost respect and kept in good order with the help of local cleaning ladies. I was given a tiny room all to myself. It contained a small four-poster bed, complete with canopy, and had presumably been the bedroom of one of the daughters of the house. Unfortunately, it was also an absolute flea trap. The place was alive with the things. In fact, they were so numerous that during my first night, each time I switched on the light to gain a few moments’ respite from their incessant biting, I swear I could clearly see the last of my tormentors hurriedly jumping for cover! By the morning I was so covered in bites that the CO of the unit, Dr. Christians, immediately called in the pest controllers to disinfect the whole house. After that there were no further problems.

Although he was our commanding officer, Dr. Christians was not, strictly speaking, a member of the Luftwaffe as such. A qualified meteorologist in his own right, his actual position was that of a Wehrmachtsbeamter, or official of the armed forces. I point this out because the met unit was a completely new experience for me. After the rigours of basic training, Brüsterort’s relaxed atmosphere had been a welcome surprise. But it had nothing on Étampes. Here, although everyone was in uniform, things really were run on civilian lines. It was like working in a friendly office. There was none of the usual military hustle and bustle. If their badges of rank were anything to go by, the unit’s wireless operators were all corporals. But they were like no corporals I had ever met; they were extremely pleasant and approachable. The cartographers who prepared the weather maps were themselves meteorologists and, like Dr. Christians, employed as officials of the armed forces.

The unit operated around the clock, working in three eight hour shifts. Rudi and I asked to be put on the same shift and this request was readily granted. This meant that we could spend our off-duty hours together. Before our first venture out into occupied France we were told how we were expected to behave. We were not to strut around like conquering heroes, but to be polite and reserved. No attempts at personal contact with the French populace were to be made. We were only allowed out in groups of two or more, never alone, and only during the hours of daylight. After all, the war with France had only ended little more than two months earlier. For their part the French, while not openly hostile, were very cautious and guarded. Older people, in particular, remained extremely cold and brusque in their manner.

But Germany’s behaviour towards occupied France began to pay dividends in a surprisingly short time. The official policy in these early days of not provoking confrontation, of trying to wean the French away from their mental alliance with the British and fostering better German-French understanding, certainly appeared to have an effect. It was not very long before we were able to move around in France pretty much as we would do at home. Rudi and I also found that our schoolboy French came in very handy. People’s attitude became much more friendly at our stumbling attempts to address them in their own language.

Rudi was a huge fan of American swing music and I used to go along with him whenever he trawled through the record shops of Étampes looking to add to his collection of discs. These became increasingly hard to find, as many were now on the banned list for being ‘un-German’. I can still vividly recall the dreamy expression of bliss on his face as he sat listening to his favourite melodies. Nobody in the unit, by the way, took the slightest offence at the illicit strains of ‘Tiger Rag’, ‘Jeepers Creepers’, ‘Dinah’ and the like, which regularly issued from Rudi’s room.

Late in September 1940 the Wetterzentrale was transferred up to Deauville-Trouville at the mouth of the River Seine. These twin seaside resorts, famous as playgrounds of the rich in the years between the wars, lay along a kilometre of beach fronted by luxury villas and casinos. At the time of our arrival, however–still not all that long after the end of the war in France, and with the onset of autumn–the place had a somewhat deserted and melancholy air. We set up camp in one of the half-timbered, Norman-style villas overlooking the beach. The interior of the building was palatial, and the reason we had been allocated such grand quarters soon became apparent.

An even more imposing villa diagonally across from ours was the official residence of Generalfeldmarschall Hugo Sperrle, the AOC of Luftflotte 3, one of the two main air fleets currently engaged in the air war against England. The weather played an important part in the planning of operations and it was to be my and Rudi’s duty, on alternate days, to deliver the latest met report to the great man’s office. At first, I could hardly grasp the fact that I–an ‘erk’ of the lowest order–was to come into such close contact with one of the most important and powerful men in the Luftwaffe.

But my initial nervousness was soon dispelled by the frequency of my visits and by the Generalfeldmarschall’s obvious interest in the information I brought to him. Besides, despite his intimidating appearance, he was known for the consideration he displayed towards the lower ranks, as I myself can testify. It was said that he reserved his worst tongue-lashings for the more senior members of his staff, something else I can vouch for–we could occasionally hear his roars of displeasure from the other side of the road.

Our present surroundings were even more attractive than those we had enjoyed at Étampes. The villa in which we were quartered was actually located in Deauville, where there was a quaint little fishing harbour. It was also a small but thriving regional market town offering a variety of diversions and amusements. In keeping with its recent cosmopolitan past, Deauville boasted a number of well-stocked music shops, which allowed Rudi to indulge his hobby to the full. Another sign of its previous international flavour were those villas still occupied by Americans living in France, most of which could be identified by the stars-and-stripes flying from the flagpoles in their front gardens.

One day Rudi and I happened to be passing one of these villas just as a couple of attractive American girls came out the front door. Rudi immediately started loudly to hum ‘Jeepers Creepers’, while I misguidedly tried to accompany him by whistling through my teeth. Total disaster! The looks that the two girls gave us were icy, bordering on the withering. We slunk away with our tails between our legs, trying to come to terms with the fact that we were not the two personable young gallants out for a pleasant afternoon’s stroll that we had fondly imagined ourselves to be–just another pair of those ‘nasty Nazis’.

It was an odd period of the war altogether. In the nine months between the defeat of France and the start of the Balkans campaign, most of continental Europe was in the grip of the same state of suspended animation that we were experiencing at Deauville. The only signs of military activity in our vicinity were the landing exercises being carried out along the Normandy coast not far from us. These were part of the preparations for the planned invasion of southern England. There may have been no fighting on the ground, but in the air–and at sea–it was a very different story.

The daylight phase of the Battle of Britain had peaked some weeks before. But the bizarre patterns of condensation trails, evidence of furious dogfights between the Luftwaffe and the RAF, were still sometimes to be seen in the skies above the Channel and over the Bay of the Seine. Occasionally, a formation of Me 109 fighters would swoop low along the beach in front of our villa. They made a thrilling sight, rekindling my burning ambition to be up there with them. But the wheels of Luftwaffe bureaucracy, it seemed, continued to grind exceeding slow.

Then, early in December 1940, the unit packed its bags and departed Deauville by truck for Villacoublay airfield on the southwestern outskirts of Paris. Our relaxed methods of working didn’t alter one iota, but our surroundings took a definite nosedive in social terms. The Wetterzentrale occupied just one small corner of the large Villacoublay complex, which meant that we were suddenly thrust back into a totally military environment. For my part, the move wasn’t entirely unwelcome. It had at least returned me to the world of flying machines–even if those machines were Heinkel He 111 bombers. At the start of the Battle of Britain, Villacoublay had housed all three Gruppen of Kampfgeschwader 55, the famous ‘Greif’, or ‘Griffon’ bomber wing.

Now, with the night blitz at its height, only the wing HQ and III. Gruppe remained. Although I had no direct contact with the crews of KG 55, if I was off-duty I would often watch the black-camouflaged Heinkels taking off into the night to attack a target somewhere in England. It was only a matter of days after our arrival at Villacoublay that I experienced for the first time the true reality of war. One of the heavily laden bombers suffered some sort of trouble and crashed on take-off. People rushed to the scene to help, but there was nothing that could be done. The four-man crew were burned beyond recognition. The horrific sight of their charred bodies, shrunken to the size of children, and the stench of burning fuel and roasted flesh made a lasting impression on me. It was a far cry from the heroic vision of air warfare that I had cherished for so long, but it did not weaken my resolve to fly.

Meanwhile, Rudi and I had all of Paris to explore. Clutching our street plans and historical guidebooks, we wandered through the city from one end to the other. The shock of the French defeat had long since worn off; life had returned and the streets were pulsating with activity, although petrol rationing meant that relatively few cars were to be seen on the roads. The armed forces’ welfare organization even published a small booklet entitled A German Guide to Paris. Appearing monthly, this contained everything the visitor needed to know about the French capital–what was on in the theatre, the latest cinema releases, which cabarets to visit, where to shop, and much more.

There were also a number of ‘Soldatenheime’, or leave centres, where troops could spend the whole day if they so wished. Reichsmarschall Göring, who always made sure that nothing but the best was good enough for ‘his’ flyers, requisitioned one of the most sumptuous private residences in the city for this purpose. The Palais Rothschild was located in the exclusive Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, close to the Place de la Concorde end of the Champs Elysées. Among its many attractions was the finest wine cellar in Paris, if not the whole of France, which the owner had been forced to abandon when he fled to England. The result was that even a nineteen-year-old wine philistine like myself was now able to pour a fine 1854 HautSauterne down his throat for the princely sum of three-and-a-half Reichsmarks a bottle–an absolute steal. (In retrospect, the phrase ‘throwing pearls before swine’ springs rightly to mind.)

There was to be no home leave for Rudi and me over Christmas 1940, as the married members were understandably given priority. But we wanted to mark the occasion somehow, and so decided that on Christmas Eve we would climb to the top of the Eiffel Tower. The lifts were not working at this time, of course, but we tackled the stairs up to the second platform without too much difficulty. From there on, however, the going got tougher. The only way to ascend the final 150 metres to the top of the tower was via a steep and narrow circular metal staircase that wound itself tightly around the approximately one-and-a-half-metre diameter load-bearing central steel mast.

The higher we climbed, the giddier we felt. We made the mistake of looking down at the ant-like figures of the people on the ground far below, which only made things worse. Eventually we got to the top. At this height, very nearly 300 metres up, the swaying of the tower in the wind was very noticeable. This added to our general feeling of queasiness and unease, and we lost little time in setting off back down again. The climb up had taken us forty minutes. We made the descent in better time; at first keeping our eyes firmly fixed on the step immediately in front of us in order not to have to look straight down into the vertigo-inducing abyss yawning beneath our feet. But it was a marvellous experience all the same.

Almost from the start, the German authorities had been assiduous in their attempts to win over the people of Paris. Suitable German films, such as ‘Hallo, Janine’, were dubbed into French and drew long queues outside the city’s cinemas. Another popular attraction was the concerts given by the Wehrmacht’s military brass bands, which played selections from French and German operas and operettas in the parks and open spaces along the Champs Elysées and elsewhere. I was present at one of these concerts, held outside the Palais de Chaillot on the right bank of the Seine opposite the Eiffel Tower, where the German musicians ended their performance by striking up the ‘Marseillaise’. The predominantly French audience broke into a spontaneous storm of delighted applause–a great number even raised their right arms to Hitler!

It mustn’t be inferred from this, of course, that the French had suddenly developed a warm friendship for the Germans. As far as the majority of the population was concerned, it would be truer to say that the previous undercurrents of hostility were no longer present–or, at least, no longer apparent. In the shops we were served with civility. And requests for directions from strangers in the street were invariably answered politely.

But there was a darker side to life in Paris. Individual acts of terrorism were already being carried out against the German occupiers. They were admittedly few and far between at first, but this made their impact all the greater. I was witness to only one such atrocity. It was in the summer of 1941 and I was waiting for a train in a crowded metro station. Among the crush of people on the platform opposite were four girls in gaily coloured summer frocks. Despite the general hubbub, I realized from the scraps of excited chatter I could hear that they were German, probably secretaries or typists working for one of the German firms that had set up offices in Paris. I waved across to them, indicating that they should move back from the edge of the platform. But they misunderstood my gestures and simply waved back laughing.

When the train drew in shortly afterwards, I could only watch in horror as the three or four men in civilian clothes who had been jostling and crowding round the girls suddenly pushed them on to the tracks in front of it. It was an absolute bloodbath. One of the young girls was screaming for her mother. But her cries gradually grew weaker until they finally ceased altogether. A few days later large red posters appeared on hoardings throughout the city announcing, in French, that–‘in accordance with the Hague Convention’–nine captive members of the resistance movement had been executed in retaliation for these cold-blooded murders. With the image of the slaughtered girls burned into my brain, I cannot deny feeling that justice had been done.

On 1 February 1941 I had been transferred from the Wetterzentrale to the Villacoublay permanent staff. Although I was still on the same base, my duties were entirely different–in fact, they were practically non-existent. My decoding work with the met unit had at least been of some value. But now that I was officially a member of the station company, I found myself with very little to do. The security of the operational side of the airfield was the responsibility of the resident KG 55, while the admin blocks and remaining areas were guarded by one of my new company’s other platoons. As our off-duty hours now rarely coincided, I saw less and less of Rudi. We lost contact altogether after the invasion of Russia when he volunteered to serve in one of the Luftwaffe field battalions fighting on the eastern front, and sadly I never heard anything from him again.

As for me, my posting to the Villacoublay station company was clearly an attempt to make a ‘proper’ soldier out of me again before my nomination to officer cadet. I had never been endowed with a natural military bearing, and after eight months service in the relaxed atmosphere of the Wetterzentrale, any resemblance I may have had to an archetypal ‘Defender of the Fatherland’ was purely superficial. Determined, however, to fulfil my ambition of becoming a pilot, I pulled out all the stops to create the right impression.

This obviously had the desired effect, for it was not long before I was given the narrow strip of silver braid to wear on my right epaulette that identified me to all and sundry as an officer cadet. As my actual rank was still that of ordinary aircraftman, this made me something of an oddity. Another consequence of my newfound status was that I was required to dine in the officers’ mess. I found this very daunting at first, but the station commander, an elderly Major and a fatherly type, took great pains to put me at my ease (incidentally, he also turned a benevolent blind eye to my increasingly ardent relationship with a pretty French girl working in station HQ.)

The station company’s days were mostly taken up with exercises, target practice, route marches and sport. This was no doubt designed to hone us to the hardness of steel so that we would be ready and able to repulse any attack on the airfield by the wicked enemy–an event that, given the overall war situation at the time, seemed most unlikely to come to pass. One by-product of all this activity was my rise up the promotion ladder to the dizzying heights of aircraftman first class. But those in the corridors of power remained firmly of the opinion that I was still not yet enough of a soldier and that, furthermore, I needed to acquire at least some of the qualities of leadership.

The latter I could not argue with. And so, on 1 July 1941, I was despatched to attend a two-month NCOs’ instructional course. This was held at Neukuhren on the Samland peninsula, less than twenty kilometres from Brüsterort, where I had first served with the long-range reconnaissance Staffel of the FAGr/Ob.d.L. early the previous year. But this beautiful stretch of East Prussian coastline presented a very different picture in the height of summer. The huge blocks of ice that I remembered had given way to long stretches of glorious sandy beaches. Not that we found much time for bathing. We were kept much too busy.

The main purpose of this course was to instil into ordinary young soldiers like ourselves the self-confidence that is fundamental to command. It took a lot of will power, not to say courage, to stand up in front of a sea of faces–some expectant, some obviously bored stiff, and a few clearly intent on causing trouble–and deliver a lecture to one’s fellow course members. It was no easier out on the parade ground, where it was a favourite trick of the squad being drilled to keep marching straight ahead, preferably towards some obstacle or other, if the unfortunate pupil in temporary charge of them had not developed the necessary strength and clarity of voice to make himself properly understood over the distance–often rapidly increasing–that separated the two parties.

Sometimes, without warning and just to break the monotony, we would be sent out on a full day’s route march. On one occasion we were rudely awoken from our slumbers at around three in the morning by the yells of the instructors sounding the alarm and ordering us to fall in outside in fifteen minutes in ‘field marching order’. This meant being washed–shaving wasn’t required–in full uniform, with a knapsack containing a day’s rations, and clutching the ‘soldier’s best friend’: our Karabiner 98k rifles. Such an order could only be carried out if our equipment was always kept to hand, in the right place and laid out in the regulation manner. This practice had been drummed into us during our basic training. In those dim and distant days we had dismissed it as yet another example of pointless military bullshit. But it was to prove its worth now, and we all somehow managed to scramble outside in time.

We set off along the dusty paths through the pinewoods skirting the coast, at first in columns, and then in open order. At intervals we had to take cover from imaginary enemy aircraft, or crawl through the trees on our stomachs, after which we would be ordered to proceed at the double ‘just to loosen up the limbs’. At about 7am we were given an hour’s break. But before eating breakfast we had to demonstrate that we still remembered how to construct two-man tents out of our groundsheets–another throwback to the days of basic training. A medic who had been trailing us by car also took this opportunity to treat the first of the morning’s blisters.

And so it went on, and on–and on. The sun beat down. Despite being so close to the sea it was boiling hot. Hour succeeded weary hour and still we marched, crawled and doubled. I never knew East Prussia was so big. It was not until nearly 7pm that we finally arrived back in Neukuhren. We were led to a sort of mock-Bavarian beer garden, where the camp’s brass band was waiting to serenade us. They did their best to revive our flagging spirits with a selection of popular tunes–but it was the free beer that really brought us back to life.

The two months spent at Neukuhren were the making of me, even if you might not guess so today. This was down almost entirely to our course leader, Oberleutnant von Stein. He came from an aristocratic old East Prussian family, but displayed none of the high-handed militarism so often associated with his kind. He was strong on discipline–he needed to be to control a bunch of nineteen and twenty year olds like us–but his authority did not depend on his uniform and badges of rank. It was his personality that commanded obedience and respect. And this he passed down through the instructors to us budding NCOs.

We were given training that was undeniably hard, but it was also fair and focussed. At its end we were self-confident and able to think for ourselves. Had we remained in Oberleutnant von Stein’s hands for much longer he would probably have forged us into some sort of élite unit. It is him I have to thank for setting me firmly on the last lap of the road towards my goal of becoming an officer and an operational pilot.