Berlin: The Waltzing Bulldozer

"Stehen bleiben! [Halt!]" screamed the Communist border guards as the refugee bent on escape headed for the barbed-wire barrier. "Stehen bleiben!"

But the defector plunged on, unheeding —in fact, unhearing. For the escapee was a clanking, wheezing bulldozer. Slowly it staggered forward, weaving from side to side, as if in some drunken waltz.

Machine pistols cracked. Sobered, the dozer straightened up, clattered straight into a 5-ft.-deep antitank ditch and through three barbed-wire fences to come to rest against a tree in the Spandau section of West Berlin. From the bulldozer's cab emerged two husky young East Germans, their pregnant wives, and the towheaded three-year-old son of one.

It turned out that the ringleader had got the idea for the escape when his job required him to use the dozer to level the forbidden strip opposite Spandau. He and a neighbor in the nearby hamlet of Falkensee lined the cab with steel plate against the bullets of border guards, and it was a sound idea, since the bulldozer was hit by at least 30 bullets. As an additional defense, both men had carried bags of pepper "to throw in their eyes in case they stopped us." Far more fortifying were other advance preparations, which may have explained some of the waltzing at the border. Said one of the men with a grin: "We had to drink a lot of schnapps to give us courage."