Missing The Boat: War Stories of Thomas Alan Dirkin

70 The Russian troops treated us very well, and looked after us and gave us anything that we wanted, and I stayed with them for some days. Then one day I went to the Russian colonel and asked him what he wanted us to do 12 . He said we could do as we wished. We stayed with the Russian troops for a little longer, and saw some fighting in the direction of Prague, and then the German S.S. Division there surrendered. We then found an English lorry which the Germans had evidently captured in Africa, and was in perfect order. For the next fortnight I drove the lorry through Czechoslovakia to Regensburg, in Bavaria. The weather was beautiful, and there was no rain. I drove all day stripped to the waist, and by the time I reached Bavaria I was as brown as an oak tree. We had some exciting times, particularly in and near the town of Brux, where Czech partisans and German troops were still fighting. The town of Brux was absolutely flat, and one had to drive along the main street, on each side of which rubble was piled many feet high. This episode was more like a gangster story from America. We drove at full speed through the town, and fired machine pistols, with other people firing back at us. None of us were hurt, and we quickly left the town behind. We had difficulty in getting past the forward Russian positions, but managed to creep through late one night on a side road, and two days afterwards we met the first American forward patrols who gave us to eat many things that we had not seen for the last five years. It took us two us two days from there to reach the airfield at Regensburg, but once we had arrived things moved very quickly. We reached there at about 9:30 in the morning, and at 10:30 I was in an American plane and on the way to Brussels. At Brussels we changed planes to a British plane, and at 4:30 in the afternoon I landed once again in England for the first time for 5 ½ years. 13 Footnotes for my father’s letter: 1. Gogolin was a town about 25 miles east on the Lamsdorf camp. 2. On short notice, the POWs made sleds from wood in the prison huts from their bunk beds 3. Temperature were known to have dropped to -15F/-26C during this period of time 4. A 1000 kilometers is 620 miles. 5. Guards executed men who could not continue with the march 6. Many German guards and troops started to befriend their prisoners and foes, realizing potential repercussions. 7. It is hard to imagine that my father had anything left to trade after five years. Other prisoners who were captured later were able to keep some personal effects. 8. Trommelfeur is literally translated as “drum fire”. Trommelfeur is a massive, concentrated, artillery bombardment directed at a defined area.