James Bond For Real?

My father made a point of taking me to all of the opening nights for James Bond films.  Dr. No - stupid, Goldfinger - mostly stupid by I liked the girl with the rifle, Thunderball - pure gold.

I was not really impressed with the beginning of Thunderball and I felt real sorry for that snake if it was real and thrown from one vehicle to another.  The take over of the Vulcan bomber, priceless.  I always loved Delta wing aircraft and the Vulcan was probably the largest and longest living of all of these 1950's relics.

Suddenly, the movie was stopped, the lights came up and an officer standing at the front of the theater ordered all disaster preparedness personnel to report to the lobby immediately.  Father left, the movie restarted and about three hours later father returned to take me home.....  He was very angry over being called out of a movie and not being reimbursed the admissions price!  Plus the NATO theater was a 70 mile drive one way for us.

Seems someone in the audience was familiar enough with the breathing systems on the Vulcan and wondered if the same was in usage on the B-52 and Convair's Delta Dagger (F-102), both nuclear equipped.  If it was multi-passenger and could carry a nuke, its air systems were thoroughly investigated that evening.

I can't say whether or not any problem was actually found, but I am sure that after the release of Thunderball - there was no possibility any gassing of the crew, via the movie plot scenario, as being any longer a possibility.

OMG Off Spain

It was my birthday 1966.  The family all went to Basle for the winter carnival - my favorite!, to celebrate.  Okay it is really my and my mother's birthday, we were born on the same day and knowing my father this was really for her but I will claim it!  :^)

On January 17, we headed back for home, up in the little notch where Belgium, Luxembourg and France are all joined together.  But, something was wrong on the Swiss - French border, Father was requested to leave the car and go to the guard shack.  Very odd.

When he came back, he was really in a state of agitation.  Seems the US had lost a B-52 over Spain, equipped with four Hydrogen Bombs!  Three had been found, one was missing.  Nothing like one of your toys going missing on you.  (Not even getting into the whole discussion of how on Earth he and Edvard were able to justify what they had created!)

Father, faced turned from camera

So, we had a very quiet ride home, were dropped off and father headed for the nearest NATO base for an emergency flight to Spain - in winter - life is really tough.  The school was all a buzz over this.  News leaks out of Upper Hayford let us know that the bomb had been found almost immediately - but the idiots were going to leave it where it lay because the searchers had broken military search routine in finding it.  Wasn't finding it the whole point?  But it lay another 9 weeks until it was re-discovered, and then could be properly raised.  Father was so angry when he got home, you have no idea.....  I have no idea if any of his complaints against the wackos responsible had any effect.

I know from my secret readings in father's books, that things were not going to go well for those poor villagers whom had been contaminated by plutonium when the three bombs, which hit ground, had blown their conventional detonators.  I remember at the time reading in the newspaper of villagers kicking sand on the bombs to put the fires out; posing for pictures sitting on the bomb casings, and living life as usual - in a contaminated environment.  I never did see any reports come out on their life expectancies or deaths in public sources.  Just not news I guess when you have shots of President Johnson holding up his beagles by their ears or whatever.  And, I try not to even search on such subjects on the internet lest I draw undesired attention.

Prior to this I had always held the US military in high esteem.  But, if you were so anal as to "stick" to a scheduled search and then reprimand those whom broke protocol to find what you were looking for - doesn't this point to a significant problem within the power structure of the military?  Until January 1966, I had wanted a career in the US military, like my father, but now I started to watch, listen, remember and think on what I was hearing.....

All Those TDYs

Father was gone so much of the time from 1962 on, that one is forced to consider what it was the government had him up to!  You can look at world events, look backwards in history later on, as well as, note interesting occurrences. In this case, occurrences may have more of a clue than usual and we knew almost instantly what was up once the German State Police raided the village!

I was in training to be a long distance runner, so every morning I was out the door at 5 am for a cross-country training practice at mother's insistance.  Make no mistake, this was not my idea.  But, there was a little shoemaker about half way through my run and I would spend several minutes with him every morning to keep my time average high for mother's records.  He was a very nice man.  Lets call him Hans.

Hans was in this later sixties, sort of a broken man I would call him.  He knew almost nothing of the village history and carefully avoided all wartime discussions.  He made himself more interesting than he should have been.

One Saturday morning, even before the cows were up, I ran past Hans' and noticed the shop in disarray, with no Hans.  I ran for the Police.  Not the friendliest people in town but they were honest and reliable.   The Sargent was ash white when I told him Hans was missing.  Within minutes, before I could even get out the door - there were several calls concerning missing citizens.  The Sargent understood what I could not fathom.  I jogged back past the shop and now the State Police were there and I was instantly detained for being "of interest".

One of the patrolmen sat and told me about how they were hunting Nazi war criminals and Hans had been one of those being sought.  I then repeated how I had reported Hans' absence to the local police and had over heard of missing people all over the Pfaltz....  The officer swore, ran for the door and quickly sped away.

I quietly re-entered Hans' little shop and remembered the humor and fun we had enjoyed.  I have always had the utmost respect for my elders, because they were interesting and I saw value in their knowledge.  I saw Hans had dropped a vest pocket wallet, which I picked up.  I burned the photos and papers inside, to his memory and perhaps protection.  I kept his SS Identification, dated August 1944, issued in Odessa.

Father moved us from the village to military housing following this.  There are no coincidences in life, one did not have to search far to find a similar SS Id Card carefully hidden amongst my father's papers.  This I followed up with also collecting my uncle Fritz's as well.  The three of them I imagine make quite a unique collection.  I have yet to see even one, even in photographs on the internet.  Hmmmmmm.....

However, this post is not about outlawed SS organizations, it is about the SS funding rocket research with the Egyptians in order to hasten the removal of the Jewish State in 1962 through 1967.  Egypt finally went with the Russian Scud missile as its offensive deterrent to the Jewish "aggression".  Nasser was nothing if not a scum bag himself.

As for father?  That is a pretty easy one: he and his fellow team from the V-3 (A-9) were all in on the project.  They all had the backgrounds, were all German and the three also had the nuclear background - because a missile has to deliver something!  Was the US Military Intelligence involved?  Was father and his friends all on contract to the Mossad?  Military to CIA to Mossad?  Certainly, enough of their co-workers met with horrible deaths back in Germany.  Makes you wonder about their absences and whom exactly was fingering German Nationals and European suppliers.....  Someone was feeding the Mossad and father was a Jewish convert after all.  To further add to the discussion, he received his second Bronze Star just after the missiles failed to launch in 1967 War.

Tales of Pork

The US used to have a base outside of Tripoli, obviously, if my father was involved - nasty stuff was present.  The base had been there since the end of World War II.  And it seems that there was a certain young officer in the Libyan Army whom was attempting to breech the base perimeter either for the sake of gaining arms or cause an international incident.

What is one to do?  The US Government under Lynden B. Johnson was committed to not offending host countries, but here was a situation where a loose cannon officer was trying to cause an incident and rightfully, even by treaty should be shot for his attempts to scale the wire..

Of course, he did get the incident he sought, just only not quite the way he thought it would go.

Father ordered the water trucks filled with the deep fry fat (hot pork grease) from the NCO club and then driven out to the fence the radicals were gathering near for their morning - "go ahead and blow me off this wire with a fire hose" routine.

The group rushed the fence, a translator warned them of what would happen and they dared the pumpers to make them unclean.

Yeah, a certain young Lieutenant Gaddafi was completely hosed down and left standing covered in pork fat.

Father had a very great laugh over that one.  Of course, officially he was reprimanded by the US State Department, as the Department of Defense promoted him at the same time.

As an aside to this tale, father expressed complete satisfaction at having taken a situation and defused it without the taking of human life.  Since the wire was now even unclean, no one attempted to scale it again.....