Vic Socotra

10 November 2009

All Fall Down

(The Ludendorf Rail Bridge, 1945)

The anniversary of the Fall was yesterday, or so they tell me.

I wrap my life around that long ribbon of concrete. It went up in 1961, when I was ten and the notion that our little suburban town was in imminent danger of being incinerated by Soviet missiles.

The Wall didn’t last a full thirty years after that, and I was forty when it ended, and a full-fledged Cold Warrior myself with a nuclear target deck and a lot to worry about.

There was some talk about collecting memories of the time when the Communist Empire began to unravel, and I thought I would go back through the Daily Stories for the period and see what I thought at the time.

As it turns out, I was too busy to think.

The best Wall Story I could come up with was from 1986, two years before the mis-statement of GDR Polituro spokesman Günter Schabowski, who was told to tell the media about new Border crossing procedures.

I was sitting with a pal at his rented stairwell apartment in a little village outside Vaihingen, the Headquarters of the US European Command at Patch Barracks. I was on a trip to talk to junior naval officers at the Command, and with their seniors, to ascertain appropriate follow-on assignments.

It was the full flower of the struggle then, with tanks roaring around a the rural Bund in the annual Autumn Reforger exercises on our side of the Fulda Gap, and the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (GSFG) planning their Operational Maneuver Group strategies to push us into the Channel.

I had the weekend, and my pal John suggested something memorable. We thought about blasting down to Berchtesgarden to see the Eagle’s Nest. That seemed too far to go for the weekend, and besides, would probably get me in trouble when I got home and gave the trip report over the dinner table.

Our choices came down to putting on our uniforms and driving one of the protected routes through the GDR to Berlin, and exercise our Treaty Rights to stroll around East Berlin and see Checkpoint Charlie.

That made me a little queasy, since treaty rights or not, being detained by the STASI was not on my itinerary for that trip.

“Yeah,” said my pal “We can always do that. It’s not like the Wall is going away any time soon.”

In the end, we roared off to follow Patton’s line of advance to the Rhine in March of 1945, even as the Red Army was storming into what was about to stop being East Prussia. Our drive culminated at the two crenellated towers that marked the east end of the Ludendorf rail bridge.

I knew the history of the thing. Capture of the bridge opened the way for Patton to drive into the heart of Germany. Over 8,000 men crossed the bridge in the first twenty-four hours after its capture, which was a near thing. German engineers had attempted to drop the span to slow down the Americans, but had failed.

Well, they failed for twenty-four hours. The thing fell down ten days later, unexpectedly, killing 28 and wounding 93 American engineers. At that point the tradgedy was offset by the major bridgehead across the Rhine, and the drive on to Berlin.

I will confess that I I still was startled to round the corner and see the great river, and the gaping hole of the tunnel on the east side with nothing there.

I guess that is the way it is going to be when I finally get to Berlin.

Checking my old papers, I know where I was when the famous Press Conference in East Berlin marked the beginning of the end.

It is not surprising that I did not comment on it directly. In those days, being on a man of war mean you were cut off from everything, hermetically sealed. We had left Mayport on the 3rd, and that was the last of November that we understood.

Not that we didn't know something big was going on. The demonstrations had been going on since September; Hungary had opened the borders to traditional partner Austria, and all sorts of things were going on. I was on the 02 level of the Good Ship Forrestal, headed for the Straits of Gibraltar at best speed.

About the time the Ossies were realizing that they were free, I was crushing out a cigarette in a foul humor and hearing the 1MC crackled into the call for "Man Overboard."

I first heard it reverberate through the steel overhead from the Air Boss's flight deck 5MC as he shouted to launch the alert helicopter. They thought they had a real one: The Captain morning explained on the 1MC that the fantail watch saw a light go over the stern and vanish in to the blackness of the twenty-five knot wake astern.

The Watch did the usual outstanding job; which is to say, if I was blown over in the black-ass night, I would be deeply and eternally grateful that the kid wasn't asleep in the paint locker and was instead doing his job and peering resolutely in to the gloom

The helo skimmed in a concentric search pattern over the carrier’s wake as the USS Thorne and Forrestal conducted their man overboard musters.

We did a pretty good job and all but a couple sleepyheads had been tallied within twenty-five minutes, and their shipmates found the last stragglers in not much over a half hour.

The numbers tallied, the ships rang up twenty-five knots again and re-commenced the race over the horizon, hading for a world that had changed just as radically as the Ludendorf Rail Bridge: gone like the freaking wind.

A couple days later, the wall breached, I was I pondering the rumor that started at dinner down in the Flag Mess. The Admiral liked a freewheeling discussion and one item that reportedly came up was what the outcome of the Bush-Gorbachev Saltwater Summit was likely to be.

I looked at my words this morning with wonder:

“My line throughout the wild collapse of the Communist system in East Europe is that we are finally seeing the end of the war that our fathers fought.

World War II is finally coming to an end; the end of our century's Hundred Year's War; an exclamation mark at the end of the greatest butchery our species has yet accomplished.

Someone said: "Suppose Bush is talking to Gorby, and Gorb says, “Hey, George, I can give you real Peace in our time. I can secure your place in the historical record and make both our people really safe for the first time since the Bomb was born. But I need your help to fend off the old-guard. If you lose me, you lose your chance at Peace. What I need from you Georgie, is a demonstration of your commitment. You must give me something concrete to take home from this meeting. Remove your aircraft carrier from the MED..."

Just a thought, mind you, but it seemed at the time that maybe there would be chance to hang up the contingency target list and go home.

Didn’t work out hat way, but goodness, what a time it was. You could think of just about anything.

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