Hi Balt. Yes I know; and I repeat: "hats off for the women of old"Baltasar wrote:HaEn, we're talking about more than 1 round to carry arround. Imagine an air raid of several hours.

HN
The weight of an 88 round is 9,4 kg, or just over twenty pounds---not that great a weight. As for the size of the shells, I have one of them, and there is nothing too cumbersome about that, either. Even the three-shell basket carrier wouldn't be impossible for a woman of average stature to manage, and certainly not for a couple of Helferinnen.Baltasar wrote:knieptang, looking at the size and weight of 88mm rounds, I doubt women would've been ordered to operate them.
Michael (knieptang),knieptang wrote: Valkyrie, I will search for some more pictures, they are very rare and hard to find, please be patient...
Regards Michael
In 1943, when she was about twenty-two, Erna Tietz learned how to operate the searchlights that sought out Allied planes in the night skies. Following her training, she was sent to Berlin and assigned to a searchlight mission (Scheinwerfereinsatz). The searchlights could reach up to nine thousand meters, she said. But when die Englander und die Amerikaner flew at ten thousand meters to avoid them, “our searchlights were too small.”
So, in 1944, she was retrained, as a Flakwaffenhelferin. In a direct translation of the German euphemism, she was a female “flak weapons helper.” In more straightforward English, she was an antiaircraftgunner. Rather than aim a searchlight at Allied planes, she aimed a gun. She called it “a big gun,” an “eight-eight.” What was it? The first expert I asked knew right away. Ed Green of the Presidio Army Museum in San Francisco called the German eighty-eight-caliber [sic, 8,8 cm, (Fraulein Valkyrie's comment)] antiaircraft gun “a hundred times better than anything we had.” The famous, accurate, powerful, long-barreled gun was so big, he said, it required a team of at least three people to operate it: someone to focus, someone to load the shells, someone to fire……
....[Frau Tietz] did not like that the Nazis were hiding from the German public the fact that women were being used to shoot down planes. Frau Tietz’s identification “only says ZBV [zur besonderen Verwendung (for special use)]. That means they did not admit that I was with the eight-eight and schooled in how to use it.” ZBV could mean a lot of things, she said. “Maybe I could have been active in news gathering for the Wehrmacht, or in the secretarial pool, or distribution of clothing, or so. One wanted to avoid that the public learn that women were assigned to weapons. One wanted to veil....” (emphasis added)
~FV....She added that she now very much opposes women being soldiers. “I would say, in secretarial assignments, information desk, ja, but not the way we were. And this concealment under ZBV, not to have the courage....These were young girls in a very dangerous situation. And if the Americans, English, French, or the Russians come and then surprise these girls at their weapons, we definitely would have been (treated) just like the soldiers, and rightly so, for we also shot.”
BDM, You are absolutely right, please excuse my mistake!BDMhistorian wrote:"They were killed by a so called "Buffalo-Soldier", a man in a flying machine"
Actually, the black pilots were called Tuskeege Airmen, not Buffalo Soldiers...
Eindecker,Eindecker wrote:Here is one of my more interesting dog tags - not a photo as everyone wants but another log on the fire - I think you can read the descrition below.