Major (ret.) Gerhard Singer

"The flood in Dunkerque wasn’t really pleasant either. When we arrived to Dunkerque we settled there. We made some ditches, then we had to lift the tanks a little up, so they could fire to longer distances. Nearby there were some abandoned farms where we stayed. And all of a sudden the ground water appeared all over. So we called the firemen from the surrounded villages to drain the water, but the water just came back in a little while again."

"They also gave us some money so we can write letter at home while we still could, because Turkey was non-aligned country. I wanted to send one letter also to Denmark to let them know where I was and how I was doing. And after the end of the war we found out that the people to whom we gave the letters and the money for the mailing service kept all the money and that our letters have never been sent. But that we found out only after the war.”

"I have served by the 200th anti-aerial regiment. I was operating the automatic cannon called Bofors. This gun was being loaded from the top. There were four bullets in one clip. One soldier was standing on the ground and was passing the bullets from the container to the loader who was standing on the Bofor´s platform and was loading the bullets down the cannon. It looked like... You know the top loaders? A machine gun or rifle has the bottom loader. But machine cannon had the top loader. The loader operator had to be very fast, because that cannon could fire as many as 80 times per minute."

"So I got on this Danish farm in 1939. They took great care of us there. Even today we’re still in touch with their children. And when they were younger they came for a visit. You have to understand, that we’re all over eighty now and those people, who took care of us in Denmark are unfortunately already dead. But we kept writing to each other for a long time."

"There was no place to stay there (in Torbruk - editor’s note). We simply stayed in shelters we made ourselves. We dug out a hole, found some logs or woods although there wasn’t much wood around too. Then we put some sheet over it and covered it all with dirt. That’s how we lived there. Some warm cozy place - that just didn’t exist. We had to be careful when it was raining though, because our trucks were standing on the muddy, sand like ground someone could easily drown there. The water was all over, it didn’t have time to seep, so it was running through the wadi straight into the sea."