Good thing Walsh could talk French, and he could, you know, ask directions, I couldn’t, I couldn’t even ask Tom where I wanted to go, so, well, it was an interesting night.
They didn’t tear it up. They didn’t bomb it, and they didn’t artillery it. It might be on the outskirts a little bit, but not, it wasn’t damaged.
Yeah, they just said, here, you can have it. We’re not going to fight here in the city. There’s a lot of cities were converted to rubble.
I mean, you’re in Germany. There’s Cologne and all those places. Oh, Cologne, yeah.
Well, I dropped bombs right outside that cathedral. I watched that cathedral go right by me on a dive bomb. You know, I was bombing within blocks of it, so.
Amazing. That beautiful cathedral, the bomb.
I didn’t realize, that’s not really what I was looking for, this place is taken. Yeah, this place is taken. So I got up there in the warehouse, and I had a couple of enlisted men with me, and bottles, stacks of empty bottles and cases up there, I mean it was a huge thing, and they were all lined up nice and pretty, and I got to a place, the alignment didn’t work right, and I said that’s strange that everything here is so lined up, and I told the guys, let’s pull a couple of those cases away from there, and got in there, and there was a lawn back there, and there was a room back in there, it was full of finest cognacs and champagnes, liquors of all kinds, and we loaded up a vehicle with that stuff, and we headed back to the base, and I told them, hey guys, we got better orders out that you don’t drink this stuff without having it tested first, because the Germans were putting poison in some of that stuff, and I said, well, we’re going, and I saw Doc Schlechter, he was our flight surgeon, and I said, hey Doc, I found all this booze over here, and we’re supposed to have it checked before we drink it, and he said, yeah, you sure do, and he said, well, can you do that for us, and I said, yeah, I can, and he said, hand me one of those bottles, and when he pulled the cord and took the drink out of it, he said, it’s okay, I’ll drink it.
That was an official inspection of the booze. So we divvied up with an enlisted man, and I took the rest of the office club. And everybody had a good time.
Yeah, I guess so. Oh, we drank a lot of liberated booze over there. It was all liberated booze.
Yeah, liberated. Well, they had a stuff called Kalbados. Man, white lightening, that was stuff was bad.
They made it out of apples or something. Made a lot of this stuff out of apples. There were lots of apples.
Normandy, where we had our fighter strip, landing strip, that was a great big apple orchard. So it takes a bulldozer down the apple trees, and we had the runways in the apple orchard. Apple trees everywhere.
Man, we had apple, green apple fights galore over there. Throwing apples at each other. Did I tell you what the, I had a thing happen to me, really comical.
We all smoked like little men. Cigarette in the mouth all the time. And we lived in tents, about six of us in a tent.
And I went, I visited my friends over there. And they had a table, they had an old C ration can there on the table. And I thought it was an ashtray.
And I was smoking a cigarette. And what it was, the Germans had stockpiled ammunition in the hedgerows back in there. So if you just moved back, the ammunition would be there.
There were just piles of it, all the time. Well, he’d get him these shells, and he’d take the, on the back end there, the tracer, that left the tracer when they fired. What he was using that can for, he was putting that powder from the back end of those tracers in that thing.
And I was smoking, I thought it was an ashtray, I dropped that cigarette in there. Boy, we had fire techniques in that room for a while. I thought I was going to burn the damn tent down.
All things kind of happened, though. We had foxholes dug, because the Germans, sometimes they’d come with their bombers at night and drop bombs around. They never did get close to it.
But I heard a fly in there coming around. And we had an air raid one day. We all had this dug hole, foxhole, to jump into in case of the air raids.
And it rained, and one guy jumped in this foxhole that was full of water on a cold night. They didn’t hit us, I didn’t get in no foxhole, I stayed in the tent. Funny things happened through things like that.
Yep. At least they seemed funny to us. Well, it’s kind of like Thorndale, you had to get your Uber where you could.
And we’d have, out there in Normandy, we’d have parties. We’d have nurses from different units, they’d come over there for dance around and have parties together. And, of course, booze was no problem.
It was everywhere. So we all got tooted up pretty good. I got pictures of some of our buddies getting drunker.
And let me see, who was that? It was McKay, or anyway. He was telling me he was going to take me home. But hell, he’s the one that couldn’t walk.
I was all right. Oh, man. Lots of things happened.