“Mind if I sit down, Horst?”
“Help yourself, Brummie,” said Horst, moving further along the bench to make room.
“I’ve come to apologise about yesterday,” said Brummie bluntly.
“Sarge send you?”
“Not exactly, he said it was up to me. He told me a few things that I didn’t know and said to think it over, sleep on it, then decide. I’ve thought it over, and I realise I was well out of order. The thing is this, Horst, although the lads call me Brummie, I’m not from Birmingham, I’m from Coventry.”
“Ahh!” said Horst knowingly. “I told Sarge there would be a reason. Were you bombed out?”
“Twice! The first time from the lovely little house that my parents had scrimped and saved to buy. Then about a month later from the temporary accommodation we had been allocated.”
“I’m so sorry, Brummie, that must have been devastating. You would have just been a kid?”
“I was nine, but I remember coming out of the Anderson shelter after the raid and finding our house just a pile of bricks and burning wood. My mother broke her heart.”
Horst nodded but said nothing. Words wouldn’t ease this pain.
“Last night Sarge told me a few things about how it was in Germany during the war. He said that as far as bombing went, Germany had it far worse than we did. Is that right, Horst?”
“I only have hearsay from people I served with who were receiving letters from home, what I’ve read since the end of the war and of course my own experience, but apparently Germany did have a lot more casualties. The latest estimate puts the figure—most of whom were women and children, by the way—at well over half a million, and before you say, ‘Serves you right! You started it!’, you’re right Brummie, we did start it.”
“I wasn’t going to say that. I’m just really staggered by that number. That would have been Hamburg and places like that?”
“Hamburg, Dresden, Stuttgart, Munich, Wilhelmshaven and so on.”
“Aren’t you angry?”
“Yes of course, and deeply saddened, but I’m realistic. The RAF did what they had to do in the main. Mostly they were strategic targets, and it was the same for both sides: centres of industry or important economic cities like London and Berlin. Shipbuilding in Hamburg and Liverpool. Naval bases like Portsmouth and Wilhelmshaven, and industrial centres: Manchester, Coventry, Munich and Stuttgart. But some things angered me very much.”
“Sarge mentioned a place called Foreshine?”
“Pforzheim, 23 February 1945. Note the date, Brummie, and how close that was to the end of the war. The Allies knew the war was over when Harris ordered the bombing of Pforzheim. It was a day of shame for him. And do you know why Harris ordered the destruction of this small medieval town? Why it was burned to the ground and pulverised? Why twenty thousand people—old men, women and children—had to be incinerated? Let me show you.” Horst stretched out his arm and pulled back his sleeve, revealing a watch. “They made watches for the Luftwaffe!”
“That can’t be true, surely!”
“That was in the first statement made about the raid. It caused such an uproar among British senior military figures and MPs that the statement was retracted and another one issued almost immediately, saying that watchmaking was just one of the many activities undertaken in Pforzheim. It then listed other components which were supposedly made there, including guidance systems for V2 rockets.”
Horst sighed and leaned back on the bench, slowly shaking his head. “Sorry, Brummie, you shouldn’t have let me go on like that. It’s probably made you angrier, listening to me whinge.”
“It’s made me think, Horst, did Berlin have it bad?”
“Yes, pretty bad, but it was weird, some districts were nearly wiped out whilst other places were hardly damaged. For instance, this place where we are sitting now—Spandau Machine Gun Factory—hardly a scratch. You would think that this would have been a prime target, wouldn’t you? The Air Ministry in Wilhelmstrasse should have been hard to miss! It was two hundred and fifty metres long, never hit once. My mates used to say it was because the RAF were aiming at it! Some places, on the other hand, were simply demolished.”
Suddenly Horst’s eyes widened, and his face assumed a look of horror. He gripped Brummie’s arm. “Brummie, do you know what those RAF monsters did?”
“What, Horst, what?” exclaimed Brummie, alarmed.
“They bombed Hertha BSC football stadium!” Horst fell back against the bench backrest with his hand on his heart, whilst Brummie burst into peals of spontaneous laughter.
“God, Horst, you had me going there!”
“I’m serious! A hundred and forty craters in the pitch! You wouldn’t be happy if the Luftwaffe had bombed Coventry’s ground.”
“Highfield? It was. Same night we were bombed out for the first time. My dad was a supporter, but he had other things on his mind that night.”
“Aah,” sighed Horst, “it’s a good job we can laugh about it now, but it wasn’t funny at the time. Heart-breaking, eh Brummie?”
“It was! If it’s not too painful a question to answer, did you lose anybody in the war, Horst?”
“I did sadly, I lost my elder brother. He was an air gunner in a Heinkel 111 that went down over London in 1940. Then I lost my parents in the big raid of November 1943. They lived in a flat, not far from where I live now, in Charlottenburg. I went to see the area when I was posted back to Berlin in late 1944, but there was just a pile of rubble and ashes. I couldn’t even be sure which pile of rubble had been our block. I don’t mind telling you that this brave sergeant major stood on that pile of rubble and broke his heart. They never
