The long patrol - Roy Bainton

When the Allies occupied Germany at the end of World War II, few people could have imagined just how long this occupation was going to lastright up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and well into its aftermath. Today, some 17,000 British troops remain in Germany. But over the past four and a half decades, tens of thousands of British men and women have lived and worked in the British Zone as members of the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR); some for relatively short periods, many for much longer. Long enough, though, for the experience to have a profound effect on their lives and on their attitudes. The Long Patrol reveals what life has really been like in the British Zone for those men and women and their families. As the post-war worlds of Britain and Germany had little in common, they had to find their own identity, often suspended between the two. Based largely on interviews and information culled from personal diaries and letters, The Long Patrol is primarily an oral history of the British in Germany; funny, tragic, bizarre, and poignant in equal parts.