Armageddon - Max Hastings [364]
When Corporal Harry Trinder was freed from his PoW camp by the Americans, he found himself pushed into a truck heading for the rear, carrying fifty German prisoners. This felt very strange, all the more so when the GI driver gave him brief instruction on the workings of the .30 calibre machine-gun mounted on the roof. He explained that Trinder must act as guard. “After about an hour, we had to stop because of an obstruction on the road. A large number of the Germans on the truck jumped down and started racing across the fields. I don’t know what I was thinking of, but I swung the cannon round and let off a continuous burst of fire until I was pulled off the gun by the Germans still on the truck. Then an American officer arrived . . . and said that I had killed or injured 15 Germans, and I was put in an escorting jeep under arrest. I explained my own history, and was released.” By contrast, Private Bill Bampton and some other liberated British prisoners were offered weapons “to take a bit of revenge if we felt like it, but we were too dazed and happy to think of that.”
Many Poles harboured implacable grudges against the Germans. Those who found themselves in Germany when peace came, as prisoners or forced labourers, possessed exceptional opportunities to avenge themselves. At Piotr Tareczynski’s PoW camp, “we were unofficially told that anyone who had any personal grievance to settle with any German could do so within a fortnight of the announcement, and would be immune from prosecution, regardless of what form his revenge took. Personally, I had no personal accounts to settle with anyone, and just wanted to be left alone.” The wife of a large estate-owner implored a British sergeant to stop the looting of cherished family possessions. The NCO replied that he could do nothing, because he was not allowed to interfere with the Poles.
Soon after Texan GI Bud Lindsey was liberated from PoW camp, he received a touching letter from an Indian soldier who had been his friend behind the wire. “The only thing which I will miss when I am away from here will be ‘my sweet American,’ ” wrote Armin Ghafur Dist, who hailed from Campbellpore in the Punjab. “When I reach my own home I will tell The Old Girl (my mother) that the American tanks brought the happiest day of my life on 29 April. Freedom! Freedom! After hard long starving nights . . . good on you America. The Gerry is kaputt now!” Six-year-old Klaus Fischer’s chief impression of American occupation was that everything seemed scented—the fresh coffee, even the chewing gum: “We had not smelt sensation for years.”
GOING HOME
SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD Corporal Helmut Fromm’s odyssey westwards from Ninth Army’s Berlin encirclement continued on foot and by bicycle through the early days of May. Sometimes he travelled alone, sometimes with one of the innumerable small groups of desperate men thronging the countryside. He was among a cluster of fugitives who eventually reached the Elbe at Magdeburg to find the bridge blown and the Americans on the far side. He rode a bicycle upstream to a dam, searching for a crossing. A German military police party stopped him and demanded his medical discharge certificate. He was fortunate enough to be able to talk his way through. There was a great crowd of men at the Elbe bank. Fromm threw his bike and machine-pistol into the water. A gunner officer rowed alone in a small boat to the far bank and smartly saluted the American officer on the far side. After a few moments’ conversation, the officer shouted across: “Men! They’ll let us come over if we don’t give the Hitler salute!” Somebody said: “If the Amis want us to stick our fingers up our arses, we’ll do it.” On the far bank, Fromm met his first gum-chewing American. “What will happen to us?” he asked. “You’ll be going home,” said this amiable enemy. “Now quick march, friends!” They were placed in a cage guarded by black Americans, who jovially referred to the Germans as “white negroes.” The only indignity they suffered was to be pelted with stones by newly liberated Allied prisoners. Fromm made the