The CO wandered into my office one morning and said he and I were going on a road trip. We were headed to Grafenwohr and Hohenfels. Nothing was happening at the time but he said we need to know these training areas better than the people we were sending there.
We headed out and the lessons began – where to park when you were checking a railhead was number one. If you were checking railheads and an armored unit was unloading off a train you didn’t want to be blocked in while they unloaded tanks. We covered where to stay when on the road. While some installations had in-transit barracks many did not or they were full. Best to stay on the economy in a gasthaus. Also how to use the phone. Sounds funny but there were at least three phone systems available to me. The normal German telephone system, the U.S. military phone system and then the BASA phone system.
The BASA phone system was the one I usually used. The German system wanted money just like AT&T. The U.S. military phone system was sometimes hard to access from small villages in Bavaria or anywhere else. The BASA phone system was the German Federal Bundesbahn (railroad) phone system. There were BASA phones everywhere including my office in Stuttgart. The nice thing about the BASA phones is that they were at railheads, train stations and even some large sidings.
The picture above is what Hohenfels usually looked like when I was there for maneuvers.When we were approaching Hohenfels training area I noticed a U.S. Army jeep with top off, windshield laying flat to the hood and metal pipe that had been welded to the front bumper. The pipe stuck up 4 to 5 feet above the hood level. I thought it was some pompous officer’s flag holder.
After the 3rd or 4th pipe I asked the colonel what the pipes were for. He said right after the war there were still some Nazi sympathizers in Germany and they would string wire across back roads to decapitate soldiers driving to and from maneuvers! A number of the generals required that the tops be off jeeps and the windshields laid flat even during winter training. Not all jeeps had the pipes welded to the front but the lead vehicles all had some sort of wire breaker on the front of their vehicle. Hard to believe but it had only been 16 years since we won the war and there were still a lot of missing Nazi’s. Never heard of anyone actually losing their head.
We stopped in Weiden, Germany to meet our counterparts in the German Army. I have no idea who colonel Alexander met with but I met Feldwebel Heinrich Goetz. I was an E-4 at the time and he was, I think, an E-6. He was also 15 years older than me. We hit it off and over time became good friends. He offered to take me wild boar hunting at Grafenwohr and then gave me an off handed challenge to a soccer match with his unit. We eventually did both and will talk about them later.
By the time we got back home 3-4 days later we had accomplished a lot. The colonel said, “Daugherty, when I tell you to shag your ass to Hohenfels or Graf to meet a unit you will know where to go – no excuses.” We had marked out routes, places to stay, places to park so as not to get blocked in. This was importatnt since I quite often ended up checking 3-4 rails heads each day. The permanent cadre at Grafenwohr was probably 300-400 personnel and on any given weekend or manuever you could have 15,000 to 20,000 American, German and sometimes British troops. It got damned crowded around there and the fact that the tankers thought they owned the road you best know where you are going.
Today Grafenwohr and Hohenfels are huge by comparison. If I had my guess the town of Grafenwohr was probably about 1,000 population and Hohenfels was a wide spot in the road. By comparison Weiden, where the Germany army was based, was about 10,000. Today Weiden is probably 35,000 to 40,000, Graf is 4-5,000 and Hohenfels in 2-3,000.
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