TRAVEL and TRANSPORT
'Your Journey to Germany'
From 1946, significant numbers of wives and children began to travel to Germany to join their military and civilian husbands. Many had never travelled abroad before, and the authorities were anxious to reassure the wives that they would be well taken care of. Initially the route was from Tilbury to Cuxhaven, and officers’ wives travelled separately from those of other ranks. By December 1947 the route had been switched to Harwich-Hook of Holland and, perhaps as a cost-saving measure, families of all ranks travelled together.
A booklet, Your Journey to Germany, illustrated with amusing cartoons, sought to explain to Officers wives the arrangements for their voyage from Tilbury to Cuxhaven, and the long onward train journeys to the towns in Germany where their husbands were stationed.[1] Most wives would have waited a long time to make the journey, because approval to join their husbands was not granted until they had served for 12 months in Germany.
They would sail on the Empire Halladale – the former German troopship Antonio Delfino.[2] The vessel was operated by the Merchant Navy but was under military command; the Officer Commanding was “a busy man”, the implication being that he was not to be bothered! On the other hand, the BAOR Movements Liaison Officer was there “to HELP YOU”. The 400-mile sea voyage to Cuxhaven took approximately 1 ½ days, involving 2 nights on board. Passengers could purchase goods in the on-board canteen and were provided with a Union Jack badge to wear in Germany.
Wives were reminded that they were not aboard a luxury liner but a troopship, and it was expected that they would happily endure any irksome restrictions, although the arrangements seem to have provided them with a remarkable range of facilities and assistance. There were on board: a Ship’s Medical Officer, an Army Medical Officer, and a Dispenser (pharmacist); 12 WVS (Women’s Voluntary Service) Ladies to help with the children; 4 Nursing Sisters, 4 VADs (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurses; 4 Company (Anchor Line) Stewardesses; and 6 WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) Provost.[3]
For mothers with children there was a food preparation room where a WVS lady would be on hand 5 times a day to help prepare bottles, and who would also prepare them for wives who succumb to seasickness “or any other misfortune”. A crèche was open from 7am to 8pm with a WVS lady in attendance, where babies could be left “when you cannot conveniently look after it yourself”; and there was a nursery for children under five. There was a washing room and 2 drying rooms, and irons were available from a steward.
When the ship docked in Cuxhaven a detailed disembarkation schedule began. Timings were set with military precision from 0600 until 10 am when the final batch of passengers disembarked. Every passenger was assigned a designated colour, depending on their final destination. Train routes were coloured accordingly: green day train; green night train, blue train; white train. A map showed the various train routes and the destinations they served.
There were 2 restaurant cars on each train, each accommodating 44 people, serving lunch and tea in 2 or 3 sittings, for which there was no charge, although wine had to be paid for in BAFSVs. From these numbers it might be possible to estimated that each train carried a maximum of 265 passengers, including children; so that 3 train-loads could mean up to 800 passengers on each sailing.
Wives did not need to carry their own luggage: heavy baggage was stacked by porters in the relevant colour zones in the Reception Hall on the quayside, after which it was taken to the baggage van of the train. Hand baggage was carried by stewards to the ship’s Pursers Hall, where a German porter would be waiting to carry their baggage as soon as they identified it.
Once down the gangway passengers proceeded to the Reception Hall where they must show their Military Entry Permit (no passports were required). They then went to a booth bearing the initial letter of their surname (the last surname for double-barrelled names) where they were given a paper showing their name, destination and seat reservation number. They must then identify their heavy baggage and could then wash and brush up in the ladies’ cloak room, and proceed to the Officers’ Transit Mess, where there was a buffet and small NAAFI shop. But wives were told to pass all these “diversions” as quickly as possible and follow signs to their train.
The most distant destinations – Düsseldorf, Iserlohn, Cologne – were regarded as too far to travel the same day, so passengers for these places were to spend the day in the Services Families Hotel in Cuxhaven, where they would be escorted to their rooms “by a German girl”, and then travel that evening by the Green Night Train. The train dropped coaches off during the night at various places en route, so wives must be sure to occupy their allotted berth: if they did not then alarmingly, they might arrive “at some strange place to find no husband to meet [them]”. But equally, wives were told not to worry if their arrival station was not the place where their husband was stationed. If he was not there to meet her, a unit vehicle would be sent for her. They were also instructed that, even in the excitement of meeting their husbands they must go along to the guard van and check that their luggage had been unloaded.
Travel Within Germany
The War destroyed the transport system in the British Zone of Germany: of 13,000km of rail track, only 1,000km was operable in May 1945; only 40% of locomotives were functional, and a third of the remaining rolling stock was damaged. Not a single bridge was left over the Rhine, whose waterways were blocked by wreckage and unnavigable.[4] In the key port of Hamburg, 50 merchant ships, 19 floating docks and many small craft had been sunk in the harbour. The roads were in a poor state of repair, fuel was scarce, and public transport virtually non-existent. Work to restore basic transport systems began immediately: bridges were improvised with military material, and key roads were made passable. By August 1945 the Rhine was once more open to navigation, and some railways had been reopened, albeit with single-line tracks, among them Lübbecke’s train service to Minden and Herford. But getting about in the British Zone remained difficult. Although local German transport services – buses, trams, underground trains, ferries - were progressively restored, they remained prohibited to British military and civilian personnel and their families until March 1949.[5]
Travel by Road
CCG officials had to travel daily throughout the British Zone between the small Westfalian towns where their offices were located; to the major cities; and across the network of regional and Kreis offices. In addition, there were regular visits to Berlin. A network of British military trains was established to run across the Zone and to Berlin, on which British personnel could travel for duty and, on repayment, private visits. (See below for further detail.) But shorter journeys within the Zone were invariably made by car, and an extensive vehicle maintenance operation was needed to facilitate this. The CCG car service was a major operation, with numerous garages and maintenance workshops throughout the British Zone, employing hundreds of German drivers and mechanics. Even in May 1948, when the CCG organisation was reducing, CCG still employed over two thousand drivers and more than five hundred vehicle mechanics.[6]
Roads in the British Zone were in a poor state after six years of war, and there were frequent road traffic accidents, which partly account for the extensive network of vehicle maintenance workshops. In January 1948, 17% of vehicles were off the road, a figure described as ‘low’ in that month’s CCG Report. There was also a shortage of drivers: in October 1946 CCG had 10,000 vehicles but only 1,700 drivers.[7] In the absence of access to public transport, it was normal for even relatively junior officials to be assigned a car and a German driver to transport them to and from work, and to external meetings. Families were also permitted limited use of official transport for visits to hospital, and for weekly NAAFI shopping trips.
In the early days, private cars were few and far between, but sometimes CCG staff were able to purchase them locally from Germans, and then sell them to colleagues when they returned to the UK. Some venerable pre-war Opels and Fiats could be seen for many years on British Zone roads, having passed from owner to owner. New cars could be imported from the UK free of purchase tax, which constituted a significant saving, but in the days before car ferries this involved a lengthy and expensive operation which required vehicles to be individually hoisted by crane on to the deck of a cross-channel ferry.
Cars were licensed with BZ (British Zone) number plates, making them instantly recognisable, a practice which continued until the 1970s when, following IRA attacks on British Army bases in Germany, British-owned cars were re-registered with regular German number plates. Petrol was subsidised and rationed according to engine size – cars with larger engines received higher ration – these were the days before concern about fossil fuels was even a tiny cloud on the environmental horizon.
The authorities were keen to promote British-made cars, but car production in the UK was too slow to replace wastage in the British Zone, making it difficult to provide enough serviceable cars for the efficient working of CCG, so permission was granted in 1947 for British personnel to buy VW cars.[8] But fuel shortages were a constant headache: in February 1947 both the UK Austin and German VW factories, as well as the REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) workshop at Fallersleben were closed due to lack of fuel.[9]
Military Trains
A network of military and CCG trains, operated by the Royal Corps of Transport, ran throughout the British Zone, transporting officials on duty and their families on leave, who could be accompanied by their nurses and governesses, except those who were “of ex-enemy nationality”. Later, this restriction was lifted but, as late as 1953, German nurses and governesses were prohibited from travelling on the Berlin military train.[10] With the reduction of CCG, the number of dedicated trains also reduced: in July 1947 the daily military train to Brussels was discontinued, although from 5 August a new CCG train ran from Hannover to Hook of Holland and return via Herford and Krefeld.[11]
By the time West Germany achieved full sovereignty in 1955, the only remaining military train was a daily shuttle between the former British zone and Berlin, which ran from 1945 throughout the cold war until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1990, interrupted only during the Berlin Blockade in 1948-1949 when the Soviet Union blocked all road, rail, and canal travel into Berlin from the West. The train ran daily, irrespective of the number of passengers, in order to exercise the right of the western allies to access their zones of Berlin. The last military train ran on 7th February 1991. In the 1950s the terminating stop of The Berliner was moved east from Bad Oeynhausen to Hannover. By the 1960s the terminus was moved again to Brunswick. The timetable below relates to these later years of service. The extended waiting times at Potsdam and Marienborn were for passport checks and searching of the train. [12] When the author of this website travelled on the military train to Berlin in 1965, these checks were conducted by Soviet military, not East Germans, since at that time East Germany was not recognised by the western Allies. Somewhat unnervingly, however, when the train stopped at Marienborn, armed East German border guards lined the tracks facing into the train windows while the checks were made.
The passengers travelled in Deutsche Bahn coaches, usually 1st Class, and were served meals by white-jacketed waiters in a fully equipped dining car. The windows on each coach carried signs stating, ‘THE USE OF CAMERAS AND BINOCULARS IS PROHIBITED’, to dissuade passengers from photographing East German territories and, before departure, the train doors were secured on the inside by wooden bars to prevent East Germans attempting to board. There were armed British military personnel on each train, which also carried a radio transmitter to keep in contact with UK military bases en route.
Air Travel
A military train from Hanover and flights from Bückeburg provided access to Berlin across the Soviet Zone. The Deputy Military Governor commuted weekly by air between Berlin and Lübbecke where, as recounted in the Lübbecke section, a temporary landing strip was laid to enable him to land close to his residence, to the astonishment of the local populace. But journeys by air were frequently punctuated by disruptions, delays and breakdowns, as recorded by Bill Yeadell, who attended a meeting in Berlin in April 1948.
Footnotes
[1] Your Journey to Germany Second Edition, HQ BAOR October 1946IWM
[2] Originally served on Germany-Argentina route. In 1940 used as a naval accommodation ship at Kiel. 1943 transferred to Gdynia (Gdansk) and became flagship for officer commanding submarines at Gotenhafen. 1945 brought over 20,500 refugees from the German eastern territories to the west. May 1945 taken over by British forces at Copenhagen and refitted as a troopship. Nov.1945 allocated to the Ministry of War Transport and renamed EMPIRE HALLADALE. (Internet sources)
[3] The Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) was a voluntary unit of civilians providing nursing care for military personnel in the United Kingdom and various other countries in the British Empire.
[4] Wendy Carlin: Economic Reconstruction of Western Germany, 1945-55: The Displacement of Vegetative Control. Published in Reconstruction in Post-War Germany: British Occupation Policy and the Western Zones 1945-1955. Ed Ian D Turner
[5] CCG Routine Order 13/144 19.3.49 National Archives File FO1005/1878
[6] Breakdown of German Manpower, May 1948. National Archives File FO1069/51: German Employees Rations, Feeding, Accommodation
[7] CCG Monthly Report 1/5 October 1946
[8] CCG Monthly Report 2/1 January 1947
[9] CCG Monthly Report 2/2 February 1947. IWM
[10] Guide for Families in Germany issued by HQ Northern Army Group September 1953. IWM
[11] CCG Monthly Report 2/7 July 1947. IWM
[12] My thanks to Stuart Jordan for his article on the Gaugemaster.com website
