On the Sour Taste of Fear and the Sweet Smell of Death

If you ask someone whether they’ve ever felt fear and they say they have never been afraid, you know right away that you’re either dealing with a liar or a psychopath. Fear is one of those primal emotions that grips you at your core. There is nothing shameful in being fearful. In fact, it is healthy to feel fear, because it clears your mind of everything nonessential and forces you to focus on solving the problem at hand. Fear is something you can taste and smell. It’s the dank smell of cold sweat and mold and shit. It loiters on your tongue and creeps into your nose. There’s nothing else like it. I have known fear. What stands out in my mind is the time in my life when fear was the gourmet flavor of the day. You never forget. Let me give you three examples of what I’m talking about.

When I was six years old, American fighter pilots occasionally used us kids for target practice with their planes, if they caught us out in the open on our way home from school. In the early spring of 1945, Field Marshal Kesselring, the commander of what was left of the German Army West, had his headquarters in a special train in the valley below our house. He used the adjacent railroad tunnel to hide from Allied planes. The planes came in low over the hills from the west, hoping to surprise that train out in the open. They never did catch him. To compensate for their lack of success in doing the field marshal, they’d open up on us with their 20mm on-board cannons. It probably was a game for them to terrorize children. Maybe they thought they were ridding the world of little Nazis. Maybe that’s how they calmed their conscience, if they had one.

For us it was sheer terror. We dove into the ditch and dug our faces into the muck and willed ourselves to be invisible. You don’t know what terror is until you had a P-51 Mustang strafe you from up close. The sudden explosive roar of the 12-cylinder Merlin engines as the planes swooped down on us, the rattle of the machine guns and board cannons, the whine and thumps of the bullets churning up the road next to us and ricocheting over our heads, the clatter of shell casings raining down around us, the stench of cordite, the stink of shit, all froze us in place in utter panic. Every time this happened, we knew we were dead. We just waited for the inevitable. Yet we lived. But the terror we experienced stayed with us to this day. I can still taste it. It scarred us.

After the planes disappeared over the hills, we picked ourselves up out of the dirt, beat the dust out of our clothes, picked the mud out of our hair, laughed and pretended that we had not been scared shitless and we collected spent 20mm shell casings to bring home as souvenirs.

In the previous year, in September of 1944, my mother and I were visiting my grandparents and my aunt in Schweinfurt, home of the famous ball-bearing plants, which were an essential cog in Hitler’s war machine. Their output insured that the Tiger tanks kept rolling and the Messerschmitts continued flying. They also ensured that Schweinfurt was the repeated main bombing target of the Allies. My mother and I got caught in a daylight bombing raid and had to seek shelter in a high-rise air-raid bunker near my grandmother’s house. The shelter was jammed with frightened people and when the bombs started dropping and exploding all around outside, the building, hit by the bombs’ pressure waves, started swaying back and forth and clouds of mortar and cement dust rained down on us, together with the odd chunk of concrete. Women and children were screaming and crying and moaning. The lights flickered off and on.

My mother and I found a seat on a bench along a wall and my mother made me crawl under the bench. She cowered over me and prayed. Someone kept babbling on about the fact that the shelter was perfectly safe, what with the concrete being six feet thick and steel-reinforced to withstand the pressure waves and the bombs could only penetrate if two hit exactly the same spot, one after the other, from the same angle. The asshole was trying to work out the odds of that happening when the inferno outside subsided.

We were lucky, because in some of those terror raids the firestorm got so intense that it sucked the oxygen right out of these sanctuaries and everyone in those shelters asphyxiated.

When we got outside after the all clear, the city was in flames. You could hear the roar of the fires. The odd dog was barking out of sight somewhere. There were no voices. The bells of the ambulances and fire engines – they didn’t have sirens then – sounded in the distance. The incendiary bombs had set off a firestorm that had gutted the insides of most of the buildings and melted the asphalt in the streets. The carbonated remains of people, some seemingly in full stride, who had not made it to shelter and had got stuck in the burning tar, stood here and there in the street like apocalyptic groupings, caught trying to flee from the heavenly onslaught.

They had shrunk to maybe four to four and a half feet in height with their arms raised to chest level and bent like a boxer advancing in the ring. They looked like charred pieces of wood, with their bloated innards spilled out, blood red and exposed. Their guts had boiled and popped out through what used to be their skin.

What I remember most, though, is the smell. It was almost like a taste on your tongue, a sweet, sickly perfume wafting along the burning streets. I had no idea what it was then. The answer came to me years later in the humid jungles of Vietnam – the sweet smell of the decomposing dead. It is always with me. That day, 329 American B-17 Flying Fortresses, escorted by 338 P-51 Mustang fighters had tried to wipe out the ball-bearing plants and the railroad yards again. They had missed their target. It was the heaviest raid on Schweinfurt of the war.

The city itself was another matter. The city center, with its medieval framework buildings was pretty much flattened and what remained standing after the high explosive bombs got through with it was burned to the ground in the firestorms caused by the phosphor bombs which always concluded an Allied air-raid. The idea behind this sequence was the high explosive bombs and air-mines would destroy the roofs of buildings giving the phosphor bombs access to the flammable insides of the buildings. This plan worked extremely well, except with the ball-bearing plants. Their production pretty much survived unscathed.

Another time, in the summer of 1944, my mother and I were in Hilders, a town of about 1,000 inhabitants about two hours walk from our house on the road to Fulda, to visit our dentist. I had a terrible toothache. I was in the dentist chair and trying to explain to him which tooth was hurting, when the air-raid sirens went off. Everyone was supposed to rush off to his or her assigned air-raid shelter, but I was in so much pain and the dentist was in a hurry and couldn’t tell which tooth needed attention. He decided to pull all four of my upper front teeth at once, sure that the culprit was among them. He pulled them with a pair of pliers and it hurt worse than my erstwhile toothache. There were no painkillers. I bled like stuck pig.

The dentist jammed a wad of gauze into my mouth and we were off to the air-raid shelter, which was a culvert under the railroad tracks open at both ends, the bottom covered in filth and slime and jammed with terrified women and children and old men. My mother and I and the goddamn ogre of a dentist cowered against the damp stonewalls of the underpass. I was scared to death, listening to the moans and sobs and whimpers of the crowd around me. We strained to hear the sound of the approaching bombers, willing the bombs to drop elsewhere, wipe out some other neighborhood, kill someone other than us. My fear was mixed with hate. I hated the Americans because they had deprived me of my moment of glory with their untimely attack, my place at the center of attention, of my starring role as the recipient of pity, of being a bloody hero, who had withstood the barbaric assault of the dentist. Instead I was just one scared child among many, my own pain just another detail, surrounded by the dank smell of fear emanating from the packed crowd around me.

But, as it transpired, we were lucky. It turned out to be a false alarm. The American bombers spared us. Instead a group of 18 B-24 Liberators had wiped out the synthetic rubber plant and the marshalling yards in Fulda. My mouth hurt like hell for hours and I ended up with a huge gap in my front teeth, a junior version of Bobby Clark without his choppers. Luckily they were baby teeth and the gap filled again, eventually.

One consequence of the terror that bracketed my childhood and the fact that I had escaped unscathed was that I began to believe that I was on borrowed time, that the bogeyman would catch up with me sooner or later. It also sharpened my sense of smell and taste. Above all, it made me extremely cautious. It probably saved my life later in another hell.