USASA Worldwide Direction Finding Net

Straubing Germany DF Detachment

I was transferred to the Straubing Detachment our of Herzo.  Do you have any information on people there in 1959 to 1960?
Ed Johnson

From Ron Knief:
Here is a short "chronicle" on my trip to Straubing. I don't recall anything of the site itself. After awhile they all looked alike and the memories are of the whooping and hollering we did in the towns.

Ron
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We left Frankfurt in early 1960 to perform site maintenance on the DF sites at Straubing and Giebelstadt. This consisted of aligning the R-390 radios, the antennas and the DF equipment itself. This was my first trip into Bavaria and I sampled every Bavarian beer I came across. German beer is the only beer that I was ever able to drink with breakfast.

Straubing was a fair sized town about 25 miles ESE of Regensburg. I remember drinking one afternoon in a typical gasthaus that the GIs frequented and having a good conversation with a member of the German Bundeswehr. He was assigned to a unit equipped with the Panzer Faust which was the equivalent of a bazooka and was the model for the RPG (rocket propelled grenade that is being used in Iraq). He said that in the event of a war he would pop out of a hole after the tank had passed and destroy the tank. He said in reality however, the tank would drive over the hole he was in and lock one track up when the other was over his hole and then grind him into the earth. I spoke enough German to carry on a conversation and he suggested we go to a fair that was being held in a park. We took along a local bar hanger-on that looked better and better as the day and the beer wore on.

Just after we had left the bar I realized that I had left my camera (which had cost several weeks of pay) hanging on the back of my chair. I bemoaned the loss and fully expected it to be lost forever. The German soldier went back and managed to talk them into giving it back. It was already in the back room and being a GI hangout would have been lost forever to me had it not been for the soldier.

We stopped at a shooting gallery that used a small caliber gun with a minimal powder charge and shot at pieces of chalk that were set up in little wire holders. He was going to show me how he could shoot and wound himself up in the sling and took a very proper shooter's stance - and missed. I had had enough beer in me (which generated the requisite amount of bravado) that I snorted that we Americans didn't need to use any such aids in shooting and shot from a standing position without the sling and managed to shatter the damned thing!! No one was more surprised than me! The operator of the stand and the girl were quite impressed, the German soldier less so. The prize was a rose that I presented to the girl. I looked at the slide of her holding that rose last year and was once again amazed at what a lot of beer will do to a young American soldier! It was one of my proudest days! Those are the only remembrances I have of Straubing.

Ron Knief

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