In War Times (24 page)

W
HEN WE TOOK
over the Weller Submarine Fabrique, my CO discovered that it was equipped with what turned out to be a twenty-four-line in-house telephone switchboard, with no feed from the MG system
(alles kaput)
, and asked me if I could fix it. It provided in-factory phone service without going out to the city with each extension.

We were operating with an amalgam of field telephones, a twisted pair of wires in weatherproofing. When the Army moves, one of the techs gets a wheel of this wire and reels it off. You drag these wires over fences and rooftops and set up something like an old-fashioned switchboard, crank the magneto to generate power, plug in a manual connector, and get the operator, a soldier at a manual switchboard. The farther you get from the battery, the fainter the signal becomes. Our wire came all the way to Muchengladbach from Liège in Belgium so it took a lot of hollering to get anyone to understand you.

I took on W. as a partner. The system we were rehabbing in Muchengladbach had a central battery that provided power to each of the phones connected into it. So when we started putting it together the first thing we had to do was recharge glass telephone batteries. I assume they were kept charged off the city grid but we didn’t have a city grid; there was no power at that time. This was very sensitive equipment, built to last forty years. Our battery shop was used to charging truck batteries; that was their main business. We lugged these batteries to the shop and explained that these were sensitive
telephone
batteries and that we had no backup. We instructed that they be put on a light charge and we’d pick them up in a couple of days.

He said he understood, so we went back to work on other phases of the phone business and an hour or so later had a message to pick up our batteries. What? We went to the shop and the guy says the batteries are ready, nothin’ to it, just put them on a hot shot, they’re ready to go. And they were, though we didn’t have much hope for them. He didn’t know what he was doing; we just lucked out.

We reinstalled the telephone batteries and threw the main switch. The switchboard sprang into action, giving me a small thrill, both because the batteries were not irreparably ruined and because the phone switchboard had life in it and responded to electric current. But was it damaged?

Step relays jumped into action. There, I already learned what a step relay was, by watching the initial action of the switchboard and applying a word that I had heard before in classes but had never seen demonstrated. I had a great advantage, which was that I knew nothing—had no preconceived ideas—about American telephones, much less German phones.

Other relays clicked, quite a bit of action for a few seconds, which slowed, and finally came to a complete stop. It just sat there, waiting. What next? It was all up to me. So—poke it and see what happens!

I picked up a telephone from the pile and plugged it into what looked like a matching outlet. Aha, it fit! The switchboard made a few encouraging clicks. I put the receiver to my ear (nothing mysterious here, it looked just like an American handset). After getting a dial tone (whatever a German dial tone might sound like, never in my life having heard one), I thought I might like to know how many numbers it would take to ring a number.

I dialed a number at random and got what I took to be a ring signal—only one dial to get a number? That couldn’t be right! I kept trying more numbers, and with every try I got a ring signal. Then, at twenty-three—

“Hello.”

“Who the hell is this?” I ask.

“Colonel Erbahr,” he says. “Who the hell is this?”

Well, wasn’t that an interesting answer. I spent the next minute extracting foot from mouth.

Early in the process we discovered an eighteen-phone setup next door in the submarine AC factory. Having no knowledge of how the Germans did it, I devised a system to connect the two systems together by using a cannibalized phone from the Weller system to hack into the AC factory panel, and a phone from the AC factory system to hack into the Weller panel.

Thus, we started the D & W Telephone Company.

After Perler came on board and examined my handiwork he said that the phone system had special relays called
querverbindungsatz
which would do the job and at the same time recapture four customer numbers for our limited system. So we began our search through bombed-out Germany for
querverbindungsatz
. They were difficult to find.

We began visiting Düsseldorf, cadging telephone parts not available on our side of the Rhine. Düsseldorf is nearby, about eight or ten miles, had a lot of equipment we could use, and a working telephone system. Like Muchengladbach and all of Germany, the Düsseldorf office was part of the post office department, a government entity. From Muchengladbach it was about six miles to Krefeld, on the way, where we crossed the Rhine on a pontoon bridge (the highway bridge and the railroad bridge were destroyed by the German troops in an unsuccessful attempt to keep the Allied forces out of central Germany) and about two miles along the river to Düsseldorf.

Perler was very interesting to observe. He seemed to incorporate within his person the contradictions observed in many Germans in varied social contexts. In line with his status, he appeared to be about fifty-five years old. I was twenty-four, a member of the conquering army. He was deferential to me, not fawning, but maybe he was, and I just didn’t notice it, having had my own expectations of his role.

However, I had ample opportunity to observe him in other contexts and settings.

W. and I provided cigarettes to Perler, although on a strange basis to outsiders. Cigarettes were a much more acceptable medium of exchange than any form of money; Germans just did not smoke if left on their own. When we took a break and offered a cigarette to Perler, it went into the pocket; if we wanted him to smoke with us, it took a second cigarette. In Düsseldorf, meanwhile, Perler was hauling out cigarette gifts and fawning over these guys who may have outranked him on the government (Nazi) chart, but worked in an entirely different district.

Our search for
querverbindungsatz
eventually led us to an obscure warehouse in the tiny village of Dahlhaus under the control of the U.S. Army Signal Corps.

When we got to the phone warehouse at Dahlhaus, the status situation was totally reversed. The warehouse manager, who was totally in charge (and his employees really snapped to) was reduced to jelly when Perler tore him apart as he explained that the U.S. Signal Corps had taken charge of the warehouse, and although they
did
have the
querverbindungsatz
we needed, a signed requisition form from the Signal Corps office in Köln was required for him to release it.

Well
! Perler, in cold Prussian that would have done General Rommel proud, explained to this hayseed Hitler that the U.S. Army
needed
this
querverbindungsatz
! it needed this
querverbindungsatz
now! And the very idea that the U.S. Army should retreat to Köln like a whipped dog to get a piece of paper that could be produced at this very counter in the next minute, and that you, mister manager or whoever you think you are, lack the authority to accept such a piece of paper, you can borrow my authority to accept it.

The manager, by this time actually shaking, ordered his awestruck staff to produce the
querverbindungsatz
and Perler whispered to me to write an order. The order was produced, dated, and signed by me, and we were on our way. Thus we had two faces—actually three, counting his toward W. and I—of Perler—fawning underdog, bullying commander, and deferential, defeated German. He was a perfect example of how deeply rank-conscious the Germans were.

The
querverbindungsatz
looked as though it had been designed by Western Electric for Bell Telephone Company in 1930; that is, it would attract no attention in a telephone switchboard; totally anonymous. It was a black prewired circuit board ready to pop into a standard small-format interoffice automatic switchboard to increase its capacity by attaching another unit to it The basic difference in appearance between the
querverbindungsatz
and, for instance, a circuit board in the M-9 Director was the collection of electrical elements between the input and output contacts.

On our way back, we stopped at a radio station and traded cigarettes for some speakers. This German radio announcer had been studying English secretly for three or four years, and this was the first day he had dared to try it on anyone who spoke English. He was oh-so-happy that we could understand him (his English was quite good; he actually had a British accent!).

A few days later we emerged from Düsseldorf telephone headquarters to observe a leaden sky promising a violent thunderstorm. We had the pontoon bridge to negotiate, and preferring to be in Krefeld, on the home side of the Rhine, before the storm struck, we sped to the bridge and were nearly across when the storm hit us, and hit us it did.

Between the end of the bridge and the top of the riverbank was a
volkspark
with huge gnarled trees that gave the appearance of an ancient orchard, with great limbs horizontal and vertical, headed every direction. I have to admit that this demonized forest really got my attention in that storm, for all of the limbs were in action, more or less independently, with some treetops revolving and some thrashing, with all of them threatening to blow away and some of them doing it. This small forest was probably only six or seven hundred feet to traverse, and with some artful dodging (terrified action, more like it) we were able to gain the top of the riverbank to gain the relative safety of the town.

Relativity showed its ugly head in the next minute. I was sailing along a clear street in Krefeld, no traffic at all, partly sheltered by a four-story brick building on my left (windward) side when my two German assistants in the rear of our weapons carrier screamed in unison, which I could barely hear over the roar of the wind.

At that same moment I observed several bricks bouncing on the street just in front of the truck. Looking back through the canvas cutout and through the open rear of the canvas cover, W. and I saw the street just beyond our tailgate was eight feet deep in bricks. Just ahead was a vacant lot which became our refuge until the storm moved on.

Krefeld, like Muchengladbach, had been heavily bombed during the war, some of it very late in the war, during the past several weeks. A bomb, exploding in a masonry building, which described many of the buildings in that area, might blow off the roof and the back of the structure and break the bonds between the vertical building front and floors, leaving it standing, an accidental booby trap ready to be toppled by a moderate wind.