Quotations from *Moby-Dick; or, The Whale*, 13 of 22
Herman Melville
1819-1891 American

The glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp -- all others but liars!
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true -- not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. “All is vanity”. ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing grave-yards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly; -- not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest uninterrupted labors, which know no night; continuing straight through for ninety-six hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled their wrists with all day rowing on the Line, -- they only step to the deck to carry vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea, and in their very sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of “There she blows!” and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage -- and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things; look here, -- three peaks as proud as Lucifer.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Born in throes, 't is fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be it, then! Here's stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain!”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Book! you lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path -- he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that's our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the Scales -- happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in rear.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“And to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep. There's a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty. Jollily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?”

So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colors, bearing down under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his hoisted quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat's bow. He was a darkly-tanned, burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, of sixty or thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round him in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket streamed behind him like the broidered arm of a huzzar's surcoat.

“Hast seen the White Whale?”

“See you this?” and withdrawing it from the fold that had hidden it, he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head like a mallet.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time. Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went milling and milling round so, that my boat's crew could only trim dish, by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale. Presently up breaches from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a milky-white head and hump, all crows' feet and wrinkles.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“I didn't then know what whale it was that had served me such a trick, till some time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard about Moby Dick -- as some call him -- and then I knew it was he.”

“Did'st thou cross his wake again?”

“Twice.”

“But could not fasten?”

“Didn't want to try to: ain't one limb enough? What should I do without this other arm? And I'm thinking Moby Dick doesn't bite so much as he swallows.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“No more White Whales for me; I've lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me. There would be great glory in killing him, I know that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye, he's best let alone; don't you think so, Captain?” -- glancing at the ivory leg.

“He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

They were all trumps—every soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly death.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

For, as a general thing, the English merchant-ship scrimps her crew; but not so the English whaler.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

During my researches in the leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew must be about whalers.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

For, say they, when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Wherefore all these ceaseless toilings?
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“The Leopard and the Deer”
Chapter 19 of *The Book of Lies, Which Is Also Falsely Called Breaks, The Wanderings or Falsifications of the One Thought of Frater Perdurabo, Which Thought Is Itself Untrue, A Reprint with an additional commentary to each chapter*
Aleister Crowley
1875-1947 English

The spots of the leopard are the sunlight in the glade; pursue thou the deer stealthily at thy pleasure.

The dappling of the deer is the sunlight in the glade; concealed from the leopard do thou feed at thy pleasure.

Resemble all that surroundeth thee; yet be Thyself—and take thy pleasure among the Living.

This is that which is written—Lurk!—in The Book of The Law.

Commentary

19 is the last Trump, “The Sun”, which is the representative of God in the Macrocosm, as the Phallus is in the Microcosm.

There is a certain universality and adaptability among its secret powers. The chapter is taken from Rudyard Kipling's “Just So Stories”.

The Master urges his disciples to a certain holy stealth, a concealment of the real purpose of their lives; in this way making the best of both worlds. This counsels a course of action hardly distinguishable from hypocrisy; but the distinction is obvious to any clear thinker, though not altogether so to Frater P.

“Hot, hot sex.”
Steff

The space between my legs smells of sex,
Hot and sticky telling stories of a long goodnight
With a man I already miss.
My thighs, no longer coltish have grown thicker,
The enticing gap of youth that once crowned my innocence
Has filled out with gained weight.
I was once slim, scrawny almost,
My breasts were small, nipples protruding beneath a bra
I did not yet need but wore to enhance what little I had in a
Whore’s game.
Now I am what some may call festively plump,
My sexuality more overt and obvious
Now that my breasts meet in beautiful round circles in corsets
And my hips flare beneath hooped skirts and netting.
I do not call myself plump,
Instead I revel in my pleasant pot belly,
I push it out as I walk and do not breathe in to hide it.
I am proud, the dimples in my buttocks
Remember grabbing hands and carpet burns
That love gave me, something I never got when
I was thin.
It should seem ironic, I looked how the world said I should
But now I am rounder and more curved I ooze hot, hot sex
And he roars delight in my ears as I push my pot belly into his
Flat tattooed stomach.
We do not match on the outside, he is dark, entrancing, mysterious,
I am sexual, strong and pale from hiding in shadows to add to my desire,
But the sweat on my brow whispers to me
That we do, we do.
He held me once, and did not need to speak it,
I am beautiful, I know.
I am beautiful.

Quotations from *Moby-Dick; or, The Whale*, 14 of 22
Herman Melville
1819-1891 American

The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

According to my careful calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety tons; so that reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one thousand one hundred inhabitants.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

No. Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a white billiard-ball. I was told that there were still smaller ones, but they had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest's children, who had stolen them to play marbles with. Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child's play.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals, and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

They keep a Whale's Rib of an incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the Ground with its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which cannot be reached by a Man upon a Camel's Back.
—John Leo, as quoted in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville

Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs at the mast-heads of the whale-ships, now penetrating even through Behring's straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.

Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals, where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

If ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

In the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft-cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

The above hinted casualty -- remaining, as it did, moodily unaccounted for by Ahab -- invested itself with terrors, not entirely underived from the land of spirits and of wails.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air, or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took plain practical procedures; -- he called the carpenter.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Was it that this old carpenter had been a life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him?
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Here he comes, or it's somebody else, that's certain.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“I do deem it now a most meaning thing, that that old Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they say, should have been a blacksmith, and animated them with fire; for what's made in fire must properly belong to fire; and so hell's probable.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Or would'st thou rather work in clay?”

“Sir? -- Clay? clay, Sir? That's mud; we leave clay to ditchers, Sir.”

“The fellow's impious!”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite?”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Oh, Life! Here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I'm down in the whole world's books. I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with the wealthiest Praetorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was the world's); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By heavens! I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. So.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Yet I don't stop to plug my leak; for who can find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it, even if found, in this life's howling gale?”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“The Bombed and the Bombardier”
Andi with an introduction by Art Kramer
1967- German

On April 20 1945 we (the 344th Bomb Group) attacked the Bavarian city of Straubing. I was one of the bombardiers on that mission. I recorded our bomb hits and after the war placed the photograph on my website where it can be seen today. Recently I began to receive letters from a Straubing resident who’s family went through our bombing. Here is their story.

(The letters have been slightly edited for brevity and relevance.)

--Art Kramer


Dear Mr. Kramer,

Today I found your picture of Straubing in the Internet. I am 37 years old and I grew up in Straubing. I think I have a story for you belonging to this picture. But because my last English lesson is 20 years ago it is hard for me to write in English. I can try to tell the story to you if you are interested in it.

Greetings from Bavaria

* * *

Hallo Arthur,

I hope it’s no problem for that I call you Arthur. Your name sounds German, doesn’t it?

Yes I want to tell you the story -- and it will be an emotional story for me. But it will take me a lot of time to write in English language. I am not used to write in English. So I hope you excuse my mistakes.

By finding your picture I get really scared. If you have released your bombs over Straubing seconds earlier or later I would not be alive. Somewhere on this picture is my Grandmother with her little baby (my mother) and I want to tell you here story. She told it to me in the early 90s and died in 1996 at 83 years old -- her body was as a matter of a lot of illness in a really bad constitution but her brain was still very alive -- but in 1996 she hasn't lost her power.
Please give me some days to write her story. At the moment I have a lot of work for my job and at the evenings when I have time to write emails I am tired.

Some years ago I bought a book about the bomb raid over Straubing. There are pictures in it. I will look for it. Maybe there are some pictures in it which you want to see.

Have you contact to people from Straubing?

Greetings from snowy Straubing

Andi

* * *

Well now Arthur,

I try my best in English.

I was born in 1967. Straubing has been grown at that time and I grew up at the place I signed with the red point on your picture. You will find this picture as a detached file to this mail. I still remember the damage your bombs have done around the train station. At the beginning of the 80s the last prints of the bombs has been cleaned up. But sometimes still streets are close by construction works when they find by digging in the ground blind bombs of the bomb raid.

In the early 90s I lived in Munich while I was studying at the Ludwigs Maximilians Universität. Every weekend I went home to Straubing to meet my family and my girlfriend.

It was summer when I visited my Grandmother. We were sitting outside in the garden -- while she was telling her old stories I read the newspaper. After a little while she told me about the “Amerikaner” and how she survived the bomb raid. I stopped reading the newspaper and started to listen to her story. It was not a fantastic story but when there would have been a bad end I would have not been alive.

Here is her little life story:

In 1913 she was born in a little village about 10 miles outside of Straubing. Her family was a poor farmer's family. Her mother has borne 17 babies. But at that time a lot of little children died because there were no antibiotics on pneumonia. So in her family: 5 children died.

She grew up in the poor time of World War 1 by having no luxuries and feeling hungry every day. It must haven been in the early 1920s when she lost most of her possibility to hear. (I still don’t know the reason I have never asked but I feel now that I have to ask my mother very soon about this.)

14 years old she learned how to be a tailor. At the time she finished to become a tailor it was very hard to find a job in Germany. So she did what every people in Bavaria did when they were poor: She went from farm to farm to work in the farmer’s family as a tailor as long as the work in the family was done. She got paid very poor but at every farm she had a roof over her had and something to eat. It must have been the late 1930s when she met the man she married.

I remember her telling me stories about the voting and the Nazis. She had tears in her eyes. She said she voted for Hitler because he promised a better life. But not really a lot for her situation changed with Hitler and she had not the possibility to inform herself because of her fight to survive and her handicap in hearing.

She believed in Hitler until he has stolen her husband.

I also remember that we had only one TV in our family. It was in my Grandmother’s room. I once went to her room to watch TV -- I made her a construction with a strong amplifier and a headset so she could manage to follow the words. She was sitting in her room watching a documentation film about Dachau while she was praying with tears in her eyes.

With her husband she rented a little room. But they could not meet each other very often because they had to go to work. She as a tailor every week at another farm. He as a carpenter at other farms.

When 1939 the war started her husband had to go to the army. He was in the 6th Army (Do you know the story of the 6th Army in WW2?)

At the end of spring 1941 her husband -- his name was Johann Singer -- got front vacation. He was stationed in Russia. And while the time he was at home my Grandma got pregnant.

She still has to work a lot. End of December her husband was lucky to get again vacation from the war. He was waiting to join the birth of my mother. But on 2nd of January 1942 he has to go back to the front again. One day later my mother was born. He has never seen his daughter. In January 1943 he got missed in Stalingrad. He never came back again.

(If you will find information about the Germans and the Russians fighting in Stalingrad you will stop to ask what missed in action means at that time. To be honest I believe that he was butchered by the Russians.)

My mother has never seen her Daddy and the Daddy had never seen his daughter. But there are letters from him out of Stalingrad. By reading that letters I started to cry myself: They had nothing to eat at Stalingrad but my Grandfather sent a little piece of chocolate to my baby mother. He wrote in the letter how he joins to imagine my mother by eating this piece of chocolate with all the brown color around her mouth.

My Grandma still believed that her husband will be found alive one day. But while having a baby she had to change her life. It was no longer possible for her to move from one farm to another. So she shared a little room with her sister Lea in Straubing. Now she tried to find work in Straubing by families to make their tailor work. It was not easy for her because it was very hard for her to hear.

So in April 1945 she was working at a family which has a house next to the train station. She was lucky to take her little daughter with her. While she was sewing the little daughter was playing at the floor.

On April the 20th she was doing her work. Because she was not able to hear she could not hear the siren, which tells that the bombers are coming. And nobody remembers her working at the house. So she was still working while the first bombs were falling. When the house got the first shakes of the bomb explosions she got very frightened. But she could manage to fetch her little daughter and find a way out of this house. She runs between the bomb explosions with her little daughter in front of her chest for her life. And she made it. By knowing my Grandma I am sure that she would have made all just to survive.

Soon the war was over after the bomb raid over Straubing -- and the Americans for the poorer people had been very welcome. The GIs occupied Straubing. And hunger and fear starts to be over. But at the next years after the war it was still a hard fight for life for my mother and Grandma.

First things my mother remembers about the GIs was fear. She has never seen colored people. But: They throw chocolate out of their tanks and Jeeps. And so the little kid after a little while went very lucky by seeing American soldiers. They also brought food to the schools.

At the time the Americans are still loved by the Germans because of the help they brought to them.

I have been to the USA for vacation after I graduated from school in 1987. I met a man in my age in Oklahoma. We got friends. One year later he came over the ocean to visit me in Germany. My Grandma was full of luck to meet a real American. She also was full of thanks to your nation. So my mother. You brought them peace and help in very hard times.

And the life of my Grandma? It was going on for her to be hard. She got a bad tumor spinal column in 1966. She made it also the doctors said: no chance. Later she got hard rheumatism and gout. She made it.

In the 1980s she got poisoned by medicine in a hospital. She made it.

1987 I had to be a soldier at the German Army for 15 months. I had been a “Gebirgsjäger” that’s a soldier in the mountains. My Grandmother always was in worry about me. She always was in fear that I once have to go to war. But for God's thank there was no war at that time. With all her worries about me she made it.

Some years later she went blind. No problem for her.

All the way she joined life very lucky. She never thought about dying. She was waiting for every new day what it will bring funny and lucky things. She was too lucky with life and too curious what in life was still waiting for her.

But every people have a reservoir of power. And it gets used up. She used that reservoir more than up by having no pity for herself and waiting positively on every new day. I still miss her with all the power she had.

That’s the little story I had to think about by finding that old picture in the Internet. Not a very exciting story -- but it’s my story which holds me from sleeping the last night.

Now it’s late in the evening here in Straubing. This mail took me nearly 2 hours. But to find sleep this night I had to do it today also I am very tired.

I hope you got not bored with this mail.

Greetings from Straubing

Andi

* * *

Dear Art,

I now found the book which describes the bomb run to Straubing.

It is written in German. I thought about buying the book and send it to you.

But it seems to be not easy to get t his book once more. It is sold out. There might be a way to contact the author of the book to get an exemple. But it’s all in German and I don’t know anything about your German knowledge.

But if you want me to get the book for you I can try it and send it to you. It will not cost you anything.

What I read in the book:

The raid started on 18th of April. Around 9.30 o’clock reached -- 5000 feet high -- the English Channel to cross it. When they arrived 3 hours later the German controlled air they were in 20000 feet high because of the German flak. No German fighters around. Some time before the bombers had to cross dangerous territory 259 P-51 fighters came to assist the bombers. Altogether now the task force over Bavaria includes 518 airplanes.

The main target was Tabor/Budweis.

Secondary target was Pilsen. Both targets were in Czech Republic.

But short before the bombers took off they brought another secondary target on the map for briefing. This was Straubing.

Half an hour after midday the scout planes came from Czech Republic back to the task force. They reported deep clouds over Tabor/Budweis and Pilsen. But over Straubing there were only a partly and less cloudy sky.

Now 174 B-17 Bombers and 99 P-51 Fighters started their run to Straubing. The 93rd Squadron keeps on flying to Tabor/Budweis. Which was really luck for Straubing because 352000 kg of bombs were not falling on the town.

The 93rd Squadron bombed Kolin. They got flak fire and German Me 262 fighters came up to fight against them. They had been too fast for the P-51 because of their jet engine.

Over the Bavarian Forest around the mountains Arber and Lusen the bomb targeting run started.

With the target picture the pathfinder planes showed the bombers the way. After a while: “Bombs away.”

2000 detonations let the town Straubing tremble.

The bombing started at 1.07 pm and ended at 1.49 pm. 480800 kg of blasting bombs and 33800 kg of firebombs came down on Strabing. 2 planes -- one of the 390 BG and one of the 388 BG -- through down notes for the people. For the helping people in the town it took nearly 2 days to fight the fires and save people in the bury cellars. More than 300 death people. A lot more people died as a follow of their injuries.

In 1952 they digged out the last broken down cellar. They found 30 more bodies.

Now in the book are following stories about what happened to people and how they died. I don’t want to translate this.

30% of Straubing was damaged.

The bombers flight back to England took more time then the pilots thought. The fuel got less. But all the planes made it home. From the 1650 crew members nobody had to die at this raid. No plane was shot down. Only one plane had damage at his propellers and it made an emergency landing in Brüssel.

In my last story I told you about my mother’s side of the family. Here is a little story about my father’s side.

My father was the youngest of four brothers. He was lucky because he was too young to fight as a soldier at WW 2. He is born in 1932. But his brothers had been old enough. One was at the Uboats, one was infantry in Russia and the oldest was Sergeant at the German Luftwaffe. He was a mechanic at the German Bomber HE 111. He had to share the Battle over Britain. Some years ago, maybe in the late 80s when my Grandfather died, I talked to him.

He said:

During the war we were flying our bomb raids. Nobody thought about the people living down under us. We wanted to hit our targets and that was the success we had to have. So we were glad if we hit our targets and didn’t even think about the evil we cause at the ground.

I think that makes war a lot easier to accept: Fighting the targets by not seeing how people die. It was the same at the Uboats.

The uncle of me who was at the infantry in Russia had to fight against other men. He had to do and see really bad things at war. He is the one who has problems to sleep at night because of these experiences. And to say that: He was a only conventional soldier, not SS or things like that. But he to recognize war as that what it is.

I did my military service because I had to do it. I am so glad that I never had to fight in a war. I am really thankful for the chance to grown up and live in peace.

And what I want to say also:

The Americans did a lot to make Germany free from the Nazis and help people to come on their feet after the war again. So when older people tell from their experiences with war and the Americans they do it with a respect and gratitude.

Greetings from Bavaria

Andi

PS:

By the way: Unbelievable, but all the brothers of my father survived the war more or less healthy.

As the brother at home my father had to pray with his mother every day for his brothers. He had to do it near a cross with Jesus on it in his kitchen. Seems that it helped. As a man later he moved from his hometown Landshut to Straubing. He does not believe very much in God but this cross is still hanging in his office.