November 18, 2023 would’ve been my Dad’s 100th Birthday. In the photo below, taken on August 1, 1945, he’s age 22, in the woods just south of the former Luftwaffe airfield (the Luftwaffe was the German air force) at Unter Biberg, just south of Munich, on August 1, 1945. When his unit was ordered to stop their advance on May 1, Biberg (Neubiberg today) just happened to be the place their lead vehicles were rolling up to. They established a camp there (Camp Rattle) in due course, but in the six days before Germany’s formal surrender on May 8, they did a lot of preliminary celebrating of the end of the war. Some men even gassed up several German aircraft and drove them around the field. On May 7 and 8, more German aircraft, their pilots eager to surrender to Americans rather than to the Russians, landed there after fleeing from airdromes further east. In the days after V-E Day (May 8, Victory in Europe), several more landed, including a few Me262 “Swallows,” the world’s first operational jet fighter, as well as an experimental Dornier Do335 “Arrow.” The Arrow had two propellers: one in its nose to pull the plane and one in its tail to push it. That configuration made it the fastest piston-engine fighter of WW II, allowing it to reach a top speed of 475 miles per hour. One of the Swallows and the Arrow were taken from Unter Biberg and shipped back to the States for study at Wright-Patterson Field in Ohio.
While hunting deer with their M-1 Garands in the forests around the field, they found several Me262s concealed under camouflage netting in the woods. The Germans had also covered dirt tracks leading from the planes’ hiding places to the nearby autobahn (a four-lane highway modeled after the Palisades Interstate Parkway in southeastern New York State). As part of Hitler’s plan to continue waging war from Bavaria – from the area south of Munich that he called “The National Redoubt” – the Luftwaffe planned to use the autobahn for jet takeoffs and landings since most of their regular airfields had been heavily cratered by Allied bombing, including one of the runways at Unter Biberg. That plan was abandoned after Hitler’s suicide on April 30.
It was in the woods shown in the photo that he and another GI found a hunting lodge that the Germans had used for “R n’ R” (rest and relaxation) that had been well-stocked with beer and wine. Needless to say, those were “spoils of war,” and were taken back to fill out a makeshift bar the men had set up in one of the barracks (which are still on the site today, occupied by what is the University of the Bundeswehr, i.e., the “German West Point”). The other GI also found a German “panzerfaust,” a disposable German anti-tank weapon that fired a shaped charge. While my Dad was foraging for other goodies, his pal was on the front porch of the lodge, fiddling with the panzerfaust despite my Dad’s warnings to not mess around with it. The next thing my Dad knew, he heard the weapon go off and came outside to find his friend on the ground with one of his feet barely attached by shredded tissue to his ankle since it had misfired (thankfully) and nearly blew his foot off. Knowing that there was a U.S. aid station on the other side of the woods, my Dad picked up the wounded man, put him across his shoulders (I guess a “fireman’s carry”), and ran as fast as he could the half-mile or so to the aid station. Not only did he never see the guy again, but his name isn’t listed in the unit’s roster published with their official history that every member of the battalion received before the unit broke up in September. My Dad always wondered about him, but I could never locate any information about him until 2021, when I discovered an obituary for a WW II veteran with a matching name. I confirmed that he was the same man my Dad knew by communicating with a family member. I asked about a war injury and they advised he had a prosthetic foot, but never knew how he’d been injured. I chose not to tell them. He had received a Purple Heart for his injury, and I simply wasn’t sure they knew the circumstances. I just said my Dad served in the same unit and regularly mentioned him. He passed away several months before my Dad, but when I told my Dad about him, he sadly couldn’t remember the story of the panzerfaust or the person.
