About how many men?
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'Phew! There'd be thousands. They sorted us all out.'
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What about Benny Lewis?
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'I'd be with him. Aye, must have been because we went out on the night. I'd have lost touch with him when we got back to England. You could go out off the airfield, but you couldn't get into the town. You see Halle is like Durham: there's a river and it runs around it. There was a main bridge over, but they'd blew it--the Jerries. The Yanks put a big pontoon over and that's how they were getting their stuff in. But once you got into the town and you wanted to be back to the airfield, they had to let to let you in over it.
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'But the buggers wouldn't let you come from the airfield to go into the town. So, we used to go down the river. We got to know this Jerry, he had a row boat. So we used to give him a packet of fags, or a couple of bars of chocolate or whatever we got off the Yankees: chewing gum, any bloody thing. He used to take us over and we'd scuttle away to hell out of it! Because once you were in, the Yankees had to let you out and that was it. We used to do the bugger practically every night!'
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Could you get a drink of beer in the town?
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'Such as the bugger was. There was no alcoholic beer in Germany. They used to get bottles of beer in the canteen at the brickyard where we used to work but it was non-alcoholic. They didn't brew it.'
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What about food?
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'We used to get the same as the Yankees. You used to get your ration on a morning: used to get your chewing gum, your cigarettes and your chocolate. Why aye!
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'I forget now what Army it was. There was a bloody big board outside, it had on: "Nothing this side of Hell can stop the American First Army!"'
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When did you meet the black American soldier?
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'That was when we'd been to the town. We got a lift. We were coming back from the town and he was coming along the road. We'd been in the town and we'd gotten out and we'd been over the bridge and we were going along the road and he pulled up. And we got in and he had this schnapps bottle and he was swigging away while he was driving, you know. "Here," he says, "Have a drink!"
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'But you weren't to know whether the bugger was home made or not. There was a lot of the buggers they got blinded with that bloody stuff! They were making the bugger out of wood alcohol, mixing the bugger up and drinking it, so you had to be careful.'
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And then they took you to Bitterfeld to fly you to Brussels.
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'I can't remember much about that. I think it was just a jumping of aerodrome. It wasn't very far away. I'm certain it was Bitterfeld.
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Why not Halle?
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'Oh, the airfield was there, but they weren't using it, it was so full of
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POWs. They took in trucks and then we got on the Dakotas and we got to Brussels.'
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These would be Douglas C-47 Dakotas of the US Army Air Force.
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