ASAE > Straubing Germany DF Detachment

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. CLICK HERE FOR THE REST OF THE STORY