Sorry Jerry - I wasn’t having a go; superb figure - not least showing a Bren with a sling - all too often overlooked. 'Looking forward to the rest!
Yeah, no worries! I was just letting you know the set up. He will have plenty of Jocks around him later.
J
As I say - looking forward to it - “plenty of Jocks?” Hmmm.
I won’t bore you too much I hope but a long time ago I was in downtown Djibouti killing time; there were several French Foreign Legionnaires at the bar so I thought, sort of brothers in arms - I’ll go and chat, assembling in my head what remained from my schoolboy French. They all turned out to be Jocks (mind you, the language barrier almost remained!)
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Dje’ no’ know whit wir sayin’ ? LOL.
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Yup - that’s more or less how it went down!
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I have a pal on FB that does my Jock translating for me. Next word comin’ up “scunner”.
J
Jerry, you wouldn’t believe how it all went down (although you might):
Me: Bon après-midi, je suis un soldat britannique servant à Oman
puis-je vous rejoindre?
1st Legionnaire: Something something something Pal.
2nd Legionnaire: Something something something Jimmy.
3rd Legionnaire: Something something eh.
4 hours later and half a million beers, we were communicating freely; they then took me down town further to a bar which seemed to be populated by Somali women with gold teeth. Even more alcohol (if that were possible) an exchange of shirts, me trying on a kepi, Polaroid to commemorate the event, then, not far from oblivion, the blessed arrival of their Provost staff who gave me a lift back to the Holiday Inn.
I must just acknowledge a cracking bunch of Legionnaires.
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That jogged a thought - wasn’t that a NATO code name for a missile?
God knows I’ve hijacked the thread far too much as it is.
Yes,the kind of story that makes me miss the old days. Good one! My first Christmas/New Years in the army and away from home for that occasion for the first time I found myself in a small pub in Germany with some buddies from my unit. We were viewing the last few hours till the new year with chagrin and this older Gent musta noticed our hang dog looks and buys us a bottle of what turns out to be uber expensive private reserve wine and from his personal vineyard. So we talked and then toasted the new year. Turns out we reminded him of himself 35 years earlier when he was wounded and surrounded in Stalingrad, far far from home. This was the moment It dawned on me the concept of the universal soldier. Even when fighting for an odious regime, we are all very very similar. At this moment I stopped using my parents’ generation sobriquet of “krauts”.
Ain’t that the truth! You know, it transcends the generations let alone the years. When stationed at a huge, extremely comfortable HQ in Germany, an edict went out that all offices (around 9 miles worth of corridor let alone office space I should think) were to be carpeted - as opposed to the hard tiling they currently had. In due course it came around to my Staff branch to be thus fitted. This involved numerous German civilian workmen. They started early which involved me as a Duty Clerk being assigned to an early detail.
Now, German workmen may start early but then they have a break around 8 o’clock. In this case, a particular individual would crack open a bottle of beer. One of my rather particular and more sensitive officers noticed this and took offence; he told me to remonstrate with the workman, which I tried to do so in my limited German.
He replied that he’d been in Russia and he would decide when and where to drink what the hell he liked. My interest piqued, I asked him what unit he’d been in. He replied “3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf”.
I duly reported this to my boss, who perhaps, unsurprisingly, backed down. Me and the German workman got on just fine after that.
Lots more of those guys were around in my first 2 tours in Germany. One of the guys that worked in the always present taxi line outside the main gate at Lee Barracks in Mainz was a member of the LAH Division band! There was a reservist Major across the river in Wiesbaden that wore the individual tank destruction badge won in Russia.
Looking back, I now realise I was quite privileged in that I encountered so many for whom the Second World War was an all too vivid memory. In that one posting (HQ NORTHAG) I found that the NAAFI (Serviceman’s’ club) barman was ex Fallschirmjaeger (captured by the British in 44 when they threw a grenade into the cellar where he was hiding), my own head of branch had been one of Rommel’s ADCs (in addition to an oil painting of the Field Marshal on his wall he also had a signed photograph on his desk from Geyr von Schweppenburg); his replacement wrote a paper on how to augment NATO’s anti-tank capability by utilising soldiers on mountain bikes armed with as many 66mm LAWs as they could carry (as he’d done the same back in 1945 as a 16 year-old using Panzerfausts on his bike - accounting for 3 x Soviet tanks), and lastly our HQ COS had won the Knight’s Cross on the Eastern front. He went on to command 1st German Corps; I mean what the hell? I only wish I’d drilled down a little deeper but I was only a young Corporal and one could hardly belay a German Major General in the corridors of power for instance and enquire “So General, how was WW2 for you?” or similar, yet in a way, I wish I had.
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I hear you. I found though,that the guys I tried to press for stories were like my Dad and his generation. They didn’t open up much. We finally got my Pop to tell about Pearl Harbor attack and Midway,Savo Island,etc etc only after decades had passed. The Germn guys I met were the same. My first field excercise in Gemany it turned so unseasonably cold our tracks couldn’t move because of ice. So some of us boneheaded privates stole away after dark and went to the nearby village Gasthaus. We met some German vets at the Stammtisch and I tried to get them to talk about Russia because of the outside conditions. But all they wanted to do was buy us kids rounds of stiff drinks. I only have dim memories of stumbling back across a freezing windswept farmers field after midnight to my sleeping bag. heheheh
They were a particularly stoical generation that’s for sure; dear old Uncle Heinz (ex (9th SS) told me in detail what he’d done and where he’d been but had never opened up to his own family. They knew he’d been a German POW obviously, but he reinvented his life - as he sort of had to - and got on with it. After his death I told them all I knew and they were flabbergasted.
German winters; now we’re talking. Funnily enough, most of our locations on exercises were in the vicinity of a Gasthaus or two. I recall a military upgrading course I was on in December at Bracht (large Brit base near the Dutch border); we were hiding up to do a night ambush and we looked so forward to springing it as that way we we could warm our hands on the rifle barrels. My waterbottle froze - that’s how cold it was. There we were, all huddled up, whimpering with the cold, with frozen water bottles - I mean, what the hell was I doing?
The first day of that same exercise I was the only guy in my track to wander over to the 5/4 ton truck for Tops’ breakfast he had hauled out there in mermites. The rest of the cowards were shivering in the iceboxes we called APCs. None of them had working heaters. I recall getting my dollup of grits and eggs and by the time I had walked back the short distance to my vehicle the grits had freekin FROZEN OVER ! Even the coffee doled out in my canteen cup was now at room temperature and getting chilly. But I do admit that was an unusual winter. It never really got that cold in middle Germany and also did not snow that much. Always exceptions though.
Uncle Heinz mustv’e had some goosebump stories I’ll bet? Straight from forming up into the cauldron of Russia, then right over by Blitztrain to Normandy. The track Bn got slammed by the surprise medium bomber attack right before their counterattack into the Scots western flank during Epsom. Hill112,etc etc quite a resume.
J
J
Maybe this guy was able to “organize” items that had not been issued according the Army rules…
As happens during all missions, soldiers are present in.
Dear Mr. Rutman, please, continue as you did!
Every now and than you might encounter a high command staff member, who tells fighting guys that their shoes could have been polished a bit better!
Jerry, I’ll send you a brief synopsis of my sort of “debrief” when I saw him around 2012 or so to your personal email address (which I’ve still got from way back when). That is, if you don’t mind.
Huh? Sorry, but I have no idea what you’re referencing.
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Yes thanks that would be well appreciated for sure.
J
ditto! I haven’t a clue either brother.
J
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