Captured in Germany

...till we were getting water to drink. And it was in west of Hamburg, so it was farming country and I knew enough about farming to be able to walk at night and sleep in the daytime. And this went on for a few days, and as I say, I couldn’t get water. Every time I went near a farm to get a drink out of a farm trough, there was dogs there and they weren’t Pekinese either. So I found out later that they had parties of school children out looking for me. Course they had caught the rest of my crew, but they hadn’t got me. After about four or five days, I got picked up too. I went up to a farm to see if I could get a drink, and he was there having a coffee, I suppose, and he had the usual greeting, “For you the war is over.” I think they all said that when they caught you. They treated you reasonably well. These were Luftwaffe people by that time, and they were military people themselves. And they expected to treat everybody that they came across as a military man, so you couldn’t complain about it. And I got a piece of bread to eat and a glass of water, which was pretty welcome at the time. And I was put in a bed on an upper story and first thing I saw in the morning, when I looked out the window, some German kiddies playing. And one of the boys was beating up a little girl. And I thought, “Well, this why we’re here.”