jarndice wrote:Hi Roy, Back in the days of the cold war we would get detachments to RAF Gatow in Berlin to fly Scout Helicopters around the wall and Border Fence,
They were fitted with cameras and I/R sensors,
At night we would drive to Templehof and fit out a US Army Huey with our gear and fly around the City perimeter, It got some quite interesting reactions from the East German soldiery in their towers
In the Hanger was a long timber Workbench with labels above sectioned areas of the bench, from memory they read Me-109/e/g then FW- 190 G, adjacent to these labels were the tags for Tempest, Meatbox, Sabre.
In the Airman's barracks were the original Rifle Racks.
I signed out a set of personal wheels in the shape of a Berlin Brigade 3 cylinder DKW Jeep ideal for driving in a big city.
Oh by the way I have every confidence the top will fit, Have you chosen the right sized hammer yet?
Shaun.
I went though Checkpoint Charlie back in 1988; the year before the Wall finally came down (really wish I'd seen
that in the flesh..er ..concrete, I mean). I almost expected to see Orson Welles lurking in the shadows, with Joseph Cotten. As we passed though the maze of barriers, that were part of some sort of filtration process, the hapless guy in a macintosh just ahead of us, was having a packet of kleenex x-rayed. How bizarre is that?.Was sneezing illegal in the East, I wondered? Hmm..mayve the tissues had secret ciphers in them in invisible ink. Ciphers that only became legible when sneezed upon....
I was then instructed to drive our camper van at no more than 5kmh to the next set of sentry posts, where our passports had arrived by some weird conveyer belt system.
We were then asked for the fourth time how many people were on board (me , the ex- and two kids..in fact). I think they were hoping to admit that we had a spy with us hidden somewhere in the van, The rest of the trip was just as bizarre. Everything was a nightmarish grey version of the West, complete with old bullet holes, sometimes.., and seen through an omnipresent fug of Trabant two-stoike smoke. There were guard towers everywhere sporting machine guns and expressionless guards.., and it was as if every war film I'd ever seen
had finally come to life, with me playing a starring role..
Instead of having traffic police cars at intervals by the Motorways, they had
tanks, camouflaged and stashed behind bridges and in culverts.
What really struck me, though, was that the guards wore exactly the same uniforms that the Wehrmacht had worn in WW2. Had it had not been for the soviet pattern helmets, I could have been walking though the Germany of 1943...
What
"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please"- Mark Twain.
and all the time the Russian drivers were trying to force the car off the road 
