“This is where you take over, Craig,” I said. I had suddenly developed an evil headache and had lost all interest in going any place. I walked over to my luggage, which I had dumped in front of the building, and plunked myself down on top of it, put on dark glasses and went to sleep. An hour later, Craig shook me.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ve found a B-17 that’s going to Frankfurt.” We piled our gear onto a truck and rumbled out over the bumpy field for a distance of half a mile. One of the B-17’s crew was sitting unconcernedly in the grass.
“We’d like to go to Frankfurt,” said Craig.
“Okay,” he said, “we’ll be going along pretty soon.” He was disconcertingly casual. But the trip wasn’t. We ran into heavy fog and got lost, so it took us nearly three hours to make the run which shouldn’t have taken more than two.
We finally landed in a green meadow near Hanau. Craig said he’d look for transportation if I’d stand guard over our luggage. It was an agreeable assignment. The day was warm, the meadow soft and inviting. I took out my German book and a chocolate bar, curled up in the grass and hoped he’d be gone a long time.
Craig came back an hour and a half later with a jeep. We were about twenty miles outside Frankfurt. On the way in the driver said that the city had been eighty percent destroyed. He hadn’t exaggerated. As we turned into the Mainzer Landstrasse, we saw nothing but gutted buildings on either side. We continued up the Taunus Anlage and I recognized the Opera House ahead. At first I thought it was undamaged. Then I saw that the roof was gone, and only the outer walls remained. Most of the buildings were like that. This was just the shell of a city.
Our first stop was SHAEF headquarters, newly established in the vast I. G. Farben building which, either by accident or design, was completely undamaged. There we got another car to take us to Bad Homburg.
The little resort town where the fashionable world of Edward VII’s day had gone to drink the waters and enjoy the mineral baths consisted mostly of hotels. Some of them were occupied by our troops. Others were being used as hospitals for wounded German soldiers. The big Kurhaus had received a direct hit, but the rest of the buildings appeared to be undamaged.
At ECAD headquarters we were assigned a billet in the Grand Hotel Parc. That sounded pretty snappy to us—another Royal Monceau, maybe. The billeting officer must have guessed our thoughts, because he shook his head glumly and said, “’Tain’t anything special. Don’t get your hopes up.”