Time Capsule - Don't Try Any Tricks!

( A recurring series based on odd things that probably should be thrown away but are just odd enough to study).

My Father in Law heard that I was taking German class.  So when my wife visited he had to send home a present for me.  Lord knows why he had this, he was never in the military and his two trips to Germany were respectively when he was three years old and when my wife and I took her parents in the 1990s.

This is an official US military German phrase book.  From the serial number I have determined that it was first published in 1943 and was intended to be a help to US servicemen should they find themselves among, well, Germans.  It stayed in print a long time, this particular edition has a 1962 copyright.  This put it smack in the middle of the Cold War, in which East Germans were still the enemy.

A few selections:

In some instances the pronunciation seems a bit off.  











And some of this sounds more like Hollywood than real life.

I guess it covered a lot of things that a lost GI might need to know.  The section titled "How to Land a Plane" seemed a bit excessive.  If you are reading a pamphlet to try and figure that out then language barriers are not likely to be your biggest issue.

You have to wonder if this book was updated very often.  I mean, it must have been, as there is a passing reference to Austria, a country that did not exist until after the war.  But honestly, how likely is it in Germany that you will need to report that you have been bitten by a venomous reptile!