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Chapter 18
Pursuit Across Germany
After the Rhine crossing, we went into another phase like the one I earlier called
"The Glamour War." Much of the time we were moving rapidly, either following or
actually attached to an armored division. There was one difference, however: the German
civilians definitely were not standing beside the road cheering us on. Mostly they tried to
keep out of sight, and the few who were visible looked stunned and glum. Nobody
enjoyed losing the war, not even the ones - the vast majority - who proclaimed loudly that
they were "nichs Nazi." And if not hostile) they were not friendly or cooperative, either.
Don Thomson ran into one surprising exception. He and John Klas were in a
command car, coming up to a new CP, when they found themselves lost in the streets of a
town. It was twilight, and all they could tell from the map was that they were supposed to
pass through town and proceed toward Budweis, a little farther on. They stopped at an
intersection where there was what looked like a sign, and Don got out to see if he could
read it.
A voice came out of the dusk. "Can I be of assistance?"
Thomson turned, and seeing a man in civilian clothes, mustered most of his
German vocabulary to ask, "Wo ist Budweis'l"
"Oh," said the civilian, "straightaway here, then take the next turning to the right."
"Danke," said Captain Thomson.
"Oh, don't mention it," the German replied.
Don got back into the car, and went two miles before he realized he had made a
fool of himself.
Perhaps more typical was the response Doc Davis got to a question. He was more
proficient in German than Don Thomson, and he enjoyed fishing. When we stopped near
a little lake, he wondered if there were fish in it.
He knocked on the door of a house along the bank. "Can one fish here?" he asked
in German.
The housewife shrugged and replied bitterly. "Why not? You won the war, didn't
you?"
Of course even had the German citizenry been disposed to be friendly, our own
anti-fraternization regulations required us to keep them at arm's length. So most of our
communication was strictly business-like, as when we directed a family to vacate their
house within twenty minutes because we needed to use it. Even this amount of
conversation was complicated, of course, by the language barrier, but we did have a few
soldiers who spoke usable German. Our Chief Computor, S/Sgt Hallick, was one, and he
was a handy person to have around when we started to move in.
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