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Should be a good trip. Krakow is the closest to the Ukraine that you’ve mentioned. I went to Krakow via Prague after our 2018 Berlin reunion and it was enjoyable. Of course, visiting Auschwitz was serious.
In Prague, during the summer tourist season, the famous Rte. 22 streetcar is pretty crowded. It’ll be interesting to learn how things go in the winter with the pandemic.
-- rwr
Msg rcvd! And appreciated. Hope all are staying healthy and happy.
Remember the Christmas shopping in Germany? Here’s December 1970 in Essen on a three-day pass.
-- rwr
Summing up, my dad called my 27 months in Berlin “the master’s degree you didn’t get because of the draft.” I had used my leave and three-day passes in Europe.
In 1971 was sent home via Pan Am, then Amtrak on my way to Portland, Oregon from Fort Dix to NYC, to Albany, to Cleveland, to Chicago, to Portage, to Seattle and then home. It was interesting to see the changes in the country since I had left in May 1969.
-- rwr
Ref. the 1982 photo, nice time of year for a patrol in the Gruney-bushes!
In retirement Reinhard continued his love of the Grunewald. In March or early April 2005 we hiked out to the ausflugziel Onkel Tom’s place, long a burned out ruin.
-- rwr
I don’t remember having the band send off at the RTO. Perhaps that’s because in 1969 we were sending people back to the States on Pan Am 707’s from Tegel. (I’ve got a short tale from that operation, too.) In 1971 we were sending people back to the States on Pan Am 727’s from Tempelhof to Frankfurt and then Pan Am 747’s to JFK.
Allen Lawless might know more about this. If they did play something specific it was probably Auf wiedersehen.
As with many of us on those flights I had mixed feelings as we took off.
-- rwr
Another brief tale from the RTO from my brief duty as “PFCIC”:
The RTO staff, military and civilian, had several different work schedules. After I’d been oriented I was assigned to cover the “information clerk” duties for the morning arrival of the Duty Trains. Passengers from the earlier Bremerhaven train were on their own in 1969 but the Frankfurt train delivered all sorts of people with questions. I was to be the only GI on duty until 8 a.m., along with a German ticket clerk and German baggage room staff. I was briefed on some common issues and told how to tell an Airborne soldier to take their pants out of their boots.
I was quite pleased with this assignment. What the Army didn’t know was that in college I had been an Assistant Tour Director (go-fer) and before that had spent lots of time in the Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon train stations waiting for newspaper shipments and listening to customers and clerks. I felt flattered that I was being asked to represent the Brigade even though I was a newbie.
When I couldn’t answer a question or had an inadequate answer I made note of it and tried to be ready for the next time — most questions are repeated over and over. I noticed what the favorite pensions were for budget travelers and even visited a couple of them on my own time to see them first hand, like a travel agent would. I studied the transit system.
Most of the time things ran smoothly. On one morning my ticket clerk was late because her S-Bahn train caught fire. On another I was chewed out by a SMOD for the litter on the platform. I explained that we would have police call after the other GI staff arrived. He told me that he would talk to the TC people in HQ, who I’m sure told him the same thing.
Then the bottom dropped out. My sergeant told me that the Transportation Corps had received a commendation from some visiting higher up from the “Zone” for my work. Why was that a problem? He confessed that TC wanted to dispense with that duty due to the work load of Vietnam-induced household goods shipments. I had been assigned the information duty because I was new and the hope was that I would screw up and then they would discontinue the service on the grounds that no one else was available.
“Now,” he complained, “we’ll be stuck having to do this for a while!”
As it happened another assignment came up so I left Transportation. Ironically, the things I had learned about getting around the Divided City paid off in getting a better job than being PFCIC at times in the RTO.
-- rwr
The Railway MP’s, counterparts to the civilian railroad police, had some unique duties. They were portrayed in the movie Stop Train 349….
-- rwr
The RTO was out of the picture around the corner to the left. The building with the clocktower was the old Royal Prussian Railways station. It has been restored and last time I was there it was being rented to a restaurant. The RTO was dismantled a few years ago, replaced by a grocery.
-- rwr
You remind me that there were (and are) a bunch of interesting stores in the little business district of Lichterfelde-West. I bought maps – new and old – at the antiquariat there. On a reunion trip I found a reprint of a history of Lichterfelde that answered a lot of questions. For example: it turns out that the Imperial cadet school that became Andrews Barracks was part of a real estate scheme. That info made me feel right at home.
-- rwr
Ed,
if you are thinking of writing up your experiences perhaps you could start with an anecdote or summary of some incident to post in the “My Berlin Stories” forum in this website. As with any big project it’ll be easier if you just do it in small pieces.
I have a Berlin history website (search for “Berlin 1969” in Google or Bing) and it has about the same size as a book. I’ve added to it for over two decades. If I had just sat down to write it all at once I would have quit.
-- rwr
The train conductors were part of the Movement command at Mannheim (I may be wrong). West of Helmstedt they were in charge. Several of them were professional railroaders who had been drafted and thereby retained their civilian seniority.
-- rwr
Larry: now I know why 69-70 was such a terrible winter. You left us to get two years worth of the white stuff!
-- rwr
More great “unknown” stories. When I tell people that elements of Berlin Brigade served in the Balkan peace-keeping force they always say “I never heard of that.” And I reply “Exactly. You never heard of it because they did a great job and kept the peace.”
I was interested in it because of the Berlin connection, but also because I have a cousin-in-law who was a career Canadian Army signals EM and later officer. He served on a number of peacekeeping operations and getting between people who wanted to kill each other with military weapons was not easy.
In a way Task Force Able Sentry was full circle from the early days of the Cold War in Germany. The British Military Liaison Mission, counterparts to our USMLM Potsdam, helped train the first Norwegian peacekeepers for the UN.
-- rwr
