Thursday, August 18, 2005, First day in the field - This is incomparable work. It is as I imagined it would be yet, as I arrived at the site, I was momentarily overwhelmed by the reality of the marker flags, the equipment, the busy team, and the purpose of their industry. Today’s work was educated and organized deductive guesswork - preparing for the excavation so the digging is accurate and purposeful. From what I can see of the archeological strategy it is a tedious and hopefully precise project. The intention is to locate and impact crater which lies perhaps three meters below the surface. Therein lies the richest store of artifacts and remains.
Ernst and I arrived at the field around 10 am. A row of cars, vans, and bicycles were lining Butterstrasse Road and a television crew was filming in an adjacent field. The site was splendid with little red, yellow, and lime green flags, indicating metal below the surface. Nine team members, including an archeologist/antropologist, a munitions expert, a medic, a photographer, several mortuary affairs guys, and a team leader, were busy measuring and setting flags. Everyone is military except the archeologist/anthropologist. The team leader, Captain David Emmons, has just returned from a difficult excavation in Viet Nam.
The media wanted stories and pictures but only a few are authorized to interview members of the JPAC team. The Torgau paper was represented by Nico Wendt, a reporter who has provided wonderful press coverage of our search and discovery of the site in early 2003. A reporter from Morgen Post in Leipzig came by on his motorcycle hoping to set up an interview next week. The documentary film company der Spiegel TV arrives on Monday for the week. It looked like a small circus had arrived waving their festive banners. Someone, not a fan of Americans, drove by and suggested we go home. That is the exception rather than the rule. The Germans are, as they have always been on my previous visits, gracious and welcoming.
It was also a day for P-38 model airplanes crafted by two local men and brought to the site for my inspection. One was at least an arm-span wide and is used in remote control plane competitions. The other was a tiny version of the standard silver model complete with Ninth AAC markings.
Ernst and I were invited to Herr & Frau Thiel’s home for afternoon coffee. Frau Theil’s family owned the field where my father died until she sold it a few years ago. Mrs. Thiel’s father, a German officer in WW II, was killed in Romania in 1944. Today she showed us his photograph and told us that when she visits the cross on my father’s field, she also does it for her father.
She has never been able to travel to Romania to see her father’s grave so we share this one. This is an amazing spirit of the German people I know in this area. They are incomparable.
As I left the field late this afternoon, I glanced back at the day’s work. Tiny flags were flying hopefully in a light breeze - a field of tulips. Surrounding the field now is ominous yellow and black tape posted with warning signs Betreten der Baustelle verboten! Eltern haften fur ihre Kinder! I think it is to dissuade unsupervised visitors. The team leader tells me they sometimes hire guards for the sites to avoid interference by relic hunters. Although that is not necessary in this case, it is a grave site and the preliminary work is tedious and important to the final success of the excavation.
So it begins. There is talk of sifting and sorting and evaluation. Some plane parts have already emerged along with a few bomb fragments and a tractor spring. Most of the stuff beign sifted indicates whether it is worth digging under that flag. Tomorrow work begins at 8 am. Permission has been granted to begin digging which was a separate permission from marking the field. The team expects this to take all of the alloted 20 days to complete the work. Whatever happens, I will be there. It is a time of attending to my father in the only way I can. He would have done it for me.
(When I figure out how to post photos the German way, they will appear.)