What was great fun for us must have been a tough job for the soldiers. While we always ran about in our light
summer clothes, the troops had to lug about with them not only their battle uniform and their big backpacks that
were heavy enough, but also their weapons and ammunition. No wonder they were jolly glad to be rid of the latter
after a combat encounter. Unlike us, they looked anything but happy when, not long afterwards, they were adorned
anew with full bandoleers and never-ending machine gun belts. We could hear them swearing loudly, for us
completely incomprehensibly. At the end of their tether, they often buried the new ballast on the spot, threw it
away, or inconspicuously put it into our bags.
The reason of the training was to be sufficiently prepared for the big maneuvers. Certain single actions would
be practiced again and again. The units seemed to focus particularly on small groups of about twenty men
attacking individual "enemy" positions at short intervals. It was quite a few weeks before this cycle had been
carried out by all of the companies - there were more than a dozen, each with about eighty soldiers.
Under the umpires' critical observation, the units were given either good or bad marks. If something didn't go
right the first time, straightaway you heard "once more"! From their ambush positions, the "enemy" machine guns
were fired until their muzzles were visibly glowing. A real glut of brass for all collectors, for the attackers
were never sparing with their blank ammunition. As soon as this kind of combat was over, extensive landing
exercises began on the Havel beach. There they often scared many swimming or relaxing people, who suddenly found
themselves with their blankets right in the middle of firing American troops, detonated simulators and all kind
of smoke grenades. In addition to this, numerous tracked vehicles practiced their driving exercises and churned
up the entire Grunewald.
For these maneuvers, the heavy M48 combat tanks of that time preferred to take a round trip extending from the
Fischerhuettenweg to the Teufelsberg. On the edge of the wood trail, either behind the bushes or out in the open,
I discovered cardboard targets positioned at irregular intervals. If the first tank drove past one of these spots,
then individual soldiers who had hidden themselves threw simulators into the tank's trail. The tank then responded
by firing endless bursts from their on-board M37 .30 cal coaxial machine gun. The tracked vehicle following from
behind then took over the leading position. Unfortunately, the tank crews only rarely handed out the shells that
were caught beneath the gun in big canvas bags.
And so the years passed. I turned sixteen and got my first bike. It was the "Bauer" model, and it was equipped
with three gears. And so my mobility and my 'radius of action' increased enormously.
Sometimes, it seemed to me that some Americans had a "loose screw". Sometimes they would let us pick up all that
they had left behind, only to then take everything back again without uttering a word. Boy, did that make me
upset! One time I watched as an adult slipped the Americans a few cans of beer, and by doing this received, at
our expense, his reward in the form of our brass. Luckily this happened only rarely. Mostly the soldiers were the
ones who eagerly filled up their steel pots with shells and then tipped them into our bags. Or, whenever they
were firing blanks, they held their weapons with the ejection opening directly above our bags or placed their
helmets at the side of the machine gun in order to save us the trouble of picking everything up. I thought this
was extraordinarily considerate.
And then one day it was time for a big maneuver.
Big maneuvers