Walter was a boy, just 12 years old, when he stood in his doorway in Bad Hersfeld and watched bombers of the 445^th fall out of the sky.

    Six decades later Walter is a retired city official, in his seventies now, living just outside the very same town where he was born and spent all of his working life. And today Walter is sitting in a restaurant in Bad Hersfeld with Frank Bertram, one time navigator with the 445^th. It was sixty years ago almost to the day that these two first met: Frank Bertram, hiding alone in the woods on the edge of town, his ankle torn from when he hit the ground, and Walter, a curious German schoolboy in uniform.

    It was the fall of 1944. The pine forests that cloak these hills were damp and close and dark, and the sky was overcast, grey, like aluminum.

    The day before they had heard the engines of the American bombers overhead. Then they heard the guns firing, up in the sky, far out of sight. Walter had gone out on to the porch and standing there he saw something come through the clouds. Low down, a parachute. And another, and another. And then there was airplane, or part of an airplane, with a double tail, falling out of the cloud. It went down into the forest to the east, beyond the village of Friedlos. But the army was already there, and they kept the boys away although they wanted to see. There were dead Americans, lying in the front of the plane that had fallen at the top of the track in the forest.

    Walter was in the Hitler Youth, like every boy in Bad Hersfeld. The boys preferred fighting in the street, skipping school when they could, and running after soldiers whenever they saw them, but the day after the bombers came down they were sent to the fields on the edge of town, on the road to Friedlos. They were told to cross the railway line, and go into the meadow by the creek.

    American planes had dropped leaflets and ration cards. The Hitler Youth had to collect the leaflets. Of course it was forbidden to read them. Walter read the American leaflets anyway, but he didn’t believe anything they said.

    Then someone pointed to the creek, and the tree line beyond. There, in the trees, looking out at them, a terror bomber fallen from the sky. Terrorflieger.

    Walter went first. Another boy followed him, and then another. One of the older ones spoke English. He looked down at Frank, lying on the ground on the bank of the creek, his dress uniform still on under his flying suit, and said ‘Are you hurt, sir?’

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    “That’s right. He called me sir”

    Frank Bertram is wide awake despite the long flight from California and the long drive from Frankfurt. He points at Walter: “I was lying down there and I looked out of the corner of my eye and I saw this little head come up – that was him.”

    “He seemed very tall, “ said Walter. “He stood up but he could hardly walk. He had a wooden stick in his hand, using it for support.”

    The Hitler Youth took Frank to a nearby house, and then away into Bad Hersfeld. That was the last Walter saw of the tall terrorflieger from America. After that Frank disappeared into interrogation and then to some distant POW camp. But somehow along the way Walter he had picked up a detail or two – that this tall navigator was a First Lieutenant, and that he lived in San Francisco.

    In the years that followed Walter wanted to put the memory of those bombing raids out of his mind. At first it was hard. “I used to dream about air raids every night,” he says. “Nightmares. I would try to run away but I couldn’t move. And right until the end of the war I felt hatred for the Americans.”

    But after the end of the war that changed. “Then I got to know Americans, the occupation troops,” he says. “I had a lot of nice experiences with them. It was a hard time, but they fed us.” Yet the memory of those air raids still would not go away. So Walter began researching, trying to find out everything he could about the raids he remembered as a boy. He felt he needed to know every detail, who was shot down, who survived, and where they were from.  And of course, he wanted to know if any of the survivors were still alive – especially that tall navigator. He began writing letters: one letter went to San Francisco.   

    Walter had always been interested in military history. That was part of the obsession. But there was something else, something much more personal that was giving Walter his nightmares.

    “There was an air raid on the twenty first of November,” says Walter. My father had come home from work for lunch. So there was my father, my mother, and me, and there was a young woman with a six-month old baby who was living with us. Next door there was another woman and a thirteen-year-old girl. And I remember my aunt and another woman were walking across the street, towards the house. They were coming to pay us a visit. My father and I looked up and we saw the bombers, coming from the south. Then we were standing underneath a porch next to the house – me and my father and the two women who had come to visit. My mother was inside. The woman with the baby was in the street, she was going to the bomb shelter, but then she came running back, leaving the baby carriage in the street. She had forgotten something. She ran past us into the house and at the same moment I looked up and I saw bombs in the air, coming down, directly above. I just threw myself on the ground, I can’t explain why. My father threw himself down on top of me. And then the bombs hit. I heard the explosion and then it was dark.”

    Everyone else in Walter’s house was killed. His father, his mother, the next door neighbours, the women visitors, the woman who had run back into the house. Only the baby in his carriage was unhurt, lying alone in the street.

    Walter woke up in hospital. He had injuries to his head, his chest, and both his legs were broken. He asked for his parents, but he was told they were too sick to see him.  He kept asking, why don’t you take me to see them? No, said the doctors, nobody can be moved. Be patient. But Walter guessed what had happened – why else were his visitors always crying? And two months later, in Bad Hersfeld, the war was over.

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