Crossings the border...

Yeah. I am a bad person.

I need to update more. And I will. And I will stop doing such HUGE long blogs and will now start to do some shorter pithier anecdotes about my time in the RAF.

It seems my posts on my times in the service are the ones people like, so I am going to do more of them...

Here's a short one.

Two years ago I went on a "staff ride" to Poland. It was to visit the site of the Great Escape - Stalag Luft III. The first night we were there we watched the film "The Great Escape" in the place where it actually happened (and I got slightly drunk drinking very rough Polish vodka), and we camped on the actual site of the original camp, which is not really over-grown by the woods that are encroaching back onto the prison camp.

As we were walking around we could stand were the original huts actually were and we stood at the flag-stone that marks the entrance to the famous tunnel that was where the escapers....er...escaped through. Anyway to get into the tunnel - if you remember the film - they had to dig through underneigh the heaters and through some floor tiles. And the floor tiles are still there. Or bit of them are...so well...I stole a bit of it. It sits on my desk now...as my little bit of history.

But that is not what I wanted to say in this blog. It's an example of a bit of forces humour.

On that trip we marched some 65 miles in three days from Poland into Germany to recrate a thing called the Long March which was a forced march carried out by British and American POW's in January 1945. We did it in the same time of year in very similar weather conditions...and it was flipping freezing!

Anyway at the end of the march we were to drive back in a coach into Poland to go to a Castle/Hotel that was once Herman Gorings hunting lodge. We were all told to make sure we had our passports in our daysacks to allow us to get across the border without any hassle. Which MOST of us did.

Apart from a lad named Noel. Noel Hellmann. Now the astute amongst you will have noticed that Hellmann is a bit of a Germanic name. It is. Very Germanic. So Germanic that Noel's Grandfather was actually German. So German that he was in the Waffen SS in the Second World War.

So there we are at the German/Polish border. And the boss down the front of the bus turns to the rest of the coach and says everyone get your passports out.

And Noel can't cos he doesn't have one. He turns to one of my pals and says "My passport is in my other bag in the 4-tonner [truck]. What am I going to do?"

The response? "Don't worry Noel mate. We'll sort you out. Anyway, you won't be the first Hellmann to cross the Polish border without a passport. Mind you the last one did it in a Mark II Panzer..."