War and Love

War and Love - Irish Exile

© JoeMo1619 - July 2025 ff.

Nearby Limerick, Irish Free State, spring and summer 1936

The small steam locomotive slowly pulled our train -- comprising only three carriages -- along the western Irish coastal route from Limerick to Athenry. The next stop was to be Sixmilebridge, where I was to disembark and be met by my relatives and their coachman. "A real coachman," my mother had told me. "Aunt Shauna doesn't own a car. That's still a true rarity in the west of Ireland."

For me, a child of the heavily industrialized Ruhr region, a coach ride seemed like something backward and rural, or something for poor people. For over ten years, our household had considered a stately vehicle with a chauffeur to be perfectly normal, ever since my father had been promoted shortly after the end of the hyperinflation period to coal mine director at the Mont-Cenis colliery in Sodingen near Herne.

I, Michael Bohnkamp, born on November 15th, 1916, the third child and first son of the staunch Westphalian mining engineer Dr. Friedrich Bohnkamp and his Irish-born second wife Mary, had graduated from the Gymnasium in Herne the month before and had voluntarily enlisted in the new German Luftwaffe as a prospective flying officer instead of serving the required term of military service. My physical examination and subsequent suitability tests, all of which I had completed between the written and oral final exams, had been passed successfully. I had received my draft notice for October 1st, 1936.

We hadn't discussed for long at home what would be a sensible way to spend the half-year between school and military service. "As you know, Uncle Patrick died in a fatal accident at the beginning of the year," my mother explained. "My sister Shauna, now running an all-female household, has her hands full and urgently needs some male help from the family. Do yourself and the family a favour and go spend six months with her."

My father had chimed in encouragingly. "Your English in school was decent. But it doesn't hurt to spend some time talking with native speakers who don't speak a word of German."

My mother had laughed at that. "I suspect that Shauna's family will deliberately speak Gaelic, not English. After all, we're all Republicans."

"Then the boy will just learn Gaelic, too. Can't hurt either."

And so, two weeks before Easter, I took the train to the Belgian Channel coast, then from Folkestone to Holyhead on the northwest tip of Wales, and, after another ferry crossing, from Dublin to Limerick. Now, as I sat on the last leg of my train journey, I was completely exhausted and worn out after three days of travel.

I had met my late uncle and my aunt along with my four cousins in person for the first time a year earlier, at the silver wedding anniversary celebration of my parents.

Aunt Shauna was six years younger than my mother, and my four cousins were now between nineteen and twelve years old. Until then, I had taken relatively little interest in the Irish branch of the family. I only really knew that the Richardson family -- my mother's maiden name -- had been politically and militarily active in the Irish independence movement for several generations. My grandfather Charles, a foundry engineer by profession, had been a prominent member of the Irish Parliamentary Party and had emigrated to the Ruhr area at the end of the previous century after being arrested twice by the very British police in Ireland. There, he had run a large iron foundry in Gelsenkirchen for many years. In 1910, he returned to Ireland with his wife and younger children -- primarily for political reasons -- and, with the support of his German foundry-owning partner, established his own foundry there. During his work with the new radical Sinn Féin party, he met Patrick Keane, who married my aunt shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. During the Easter Rising of 1916 and the civil war in the early 1920s, my uncle was initially on the losing radical Irish side as a member of the IRA, but then joined Éamon de Valera, who had fled into exile in the U.S. and who, in 1926, founded the Fianna Fáil party -- a new political movement aiming for full Irish independence through democratic means. Patrick Keane was elected to the Irish Parliament in the major Fianna Fáil victory of 1932 and remained a prominent politician until his accidental death. I didn't know much more, but from the aforementioned silver anniversary celebration, I knew that my two older cousins, who were one year older and one year younger than me respectively, were extremely sweet and attractive girls.

It was exactly those two cousins, Riona and Sinéad, who greeted me at the station along with the coachman. The roughly five-mile coach ride was accompanied by somewhat awkward conversation in English, and I wasn't sure who of us was less fluent in this language that was foreign to all three of us. Aunt Shauna really did look like my mother, with her reddish-blonde hair, which immediately gave me the feeling of having arrived in a kind of second home. She was still wearing mourning clothes four months after her husband's death but didn't seem particularly weighed down by grief.

The following weeks unfolded like a dream for a boy from an industrial metropolis. Of course, the everyday work on my aunt's large farm was certainly demanding, but the family didn't belong to the rural peasantry--they were part of the small landowner class. I quickly learned to ride a horse so I could move about the farm efficiently. I witnessed the birth of numerous lambs and some calves, which to the amusement of my cousins was completely unfamiliar to me. And from the very first Sunday, I realized that the Catholic Church, its priests, and congregations in Ireland were entirely different from those in the Westphalian Ruhr area.

Naturally, my two cousins had a nearly magical allure for me. Both had finished school a few years earlier and were helping their widowed mother run the farm. This wasn't just girls' work -- Irish farms weren't luxurious estates, and during peak times, every available hand was needed.

"Otherwise, we're just waiting for our husbands," said Riona with a bit of irreverence. "Some say the sooner, the better. But honestly, I want something better. After all, I'm the heiress to this estate because I have no brother. So, I think I'm entitled to make some demands. Sinéad and the little ones will surely have it harder."

Riona was by far the most outgoing of my cousins. Sinéad still had a virginal innocence about her, even in her thoughts. But Riona seemed to know quite a bit more. It was already midsummer when we took a ride and stopped to rest by one of the small lakes in the area. "It's so incredibly hot today," Riona sighed as we sat side by side on a log at the lake's edge -- sitting closer than might have been considered proper. Suddenly she stood up and started to strip herself down. "I have to refresh myself in this lake," was her explanation during her lavishly striptease. "Come on, you should follow my lead, Michael."

I looked at her, at first, quite astonished. We, the German youth, had by then developed -- through the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls -- a view of the human body and nudity that was very frivolous and immoral by Irish-Catholic standards. But the fact that my cousin, who was a year older than me, undressed completely without hesitation right next to me -- that really shocked me.

"What's the matter? Are you shy?" was Riona's rather provocative question. "Hurry up! I don't want to bathe alone."

That was the deciding factor. In the end, I was even a few seconds ahead of her in the refreshingly cool water. At first, we splashed around like two crazy people, swam a few meters, and then swam back far enough so that we could stand. Riona swam toward me like a predator fish and then stopped right in front of me. Then she hugged me, pressed her apple-shaped breasts -- with nipples made rock hard by the water -- against my chest, and kissed me. A real revelation, which, of course, immediately caused a reaction in my lower body.

Riona looked at me intensively with her deep-green eyes. She seemed excited about my malehood reaction, my meanwhile rock-hard cock pressed against her belly. "Irish girl are Catholics and marry as virgins," was her cynical sounding comment.

I grunted some inaudible answer. This Irish girl animated me much more than I would have expected after her strict Catholic upbringing and education.

Riona bit into my earlobe, which resulted into some goose bumps all over my body. "But Irish girls know exactly what they have to do to get some fun. And some satisfaction." She laughed really seductive. "Sin is sin, and I will be condemned to hell, guaranteed. But until then, I want to enjoy as much fun as possible."

She grabbed my cock, pulled my foreskin back with one sharp move and started to wank me strongly. I closed my eyes and enjoyed her rough treatment. I wasn't innocent anymore, but far away to be an experienced lover. Which was almost impossible for a high School graduate.

"Women have two entrances," whispered Riona suddenly into my ear. "And my backdoor entrance has the huge advantage that it doesn't ruin my virginity and can't result in pregnancy." She looked at me like a staff sergeant and gave me a very clear command: "Push your fingers into my arsehole. Start with one and then more and more. If you can penetrate me with your three middle fingers without any problems, take your cock and push it into me." Finishing her command, she walked few steps to the shallow waterside without losing her grip on my cock, knelt down and hold out her shining arse towards me. "Come on! I want to feel you inside me!"

The wildest thoughts buzzed through my mind. But I recognized rapidly that Riona demanded exactly this treatment. And the effect on my manhood was phenomenal. "I believe my cock was never so large and hard," I whispered from her back into her ear.

"Then we are well-prepared. Your fingers have done an excellent job. Now come!"

I placed my cock's tip at her pink rosette. To my amazement, Riona pressed her body directly against my slowly penetrating cock. I needed only three advancing attempts to pass her muscular entrance ring, then I was deep inside her.

It was obvious that Riona had some experience with anal sex, something I heard from very little before. Now, at the shallow waterside of an Irish lake, I fucked my cousin with full commitment into her arsehole. The pressure of her narrow backdoor entrance on my unexperienced cock was rapidly too strong for me. Very soon I felt the increasing pressure of my cum. Two advances later, I moaned very loudly, then I pumped my cream deep into her gut. Riona shivered with her entire body, cried loud and without any hesitation and shook her head powerful from left to right and back. In my young life, I had never experienced such an orgasm from my sex partner.

It took us a little while to calm down. "Let's dive in completely one more time and clean ourselves up. It's refreshing and avoids any awkward questions."

Half an hour later, we arrived back at the farm just in time for dinner, freshened up, changed clothes, and enjoyed a refreshing summer soup after the table prayer.

Riona and I regularly repeated our sex game. When we had more time, she would first jerk me off to get the first load out, taking royal delight in having me shoot across her breasts before properly massaging in my semen. "The big advantage is that you last much longer afterward," was her simple but absolutely accurate comment. "And I'm not confessing our game to the priest. It's none of his business. And if God sees us, he can form his own opinion." She was incredibly self-confident.

My Irish summer ended on September 20th. A week before that, we had attended a wedding of some distant cousins. There, I had danced and enjoyed myself with Riona, but also with Sinéad, my aunt, and a number of young women I hadn't known until then. After that, Riona and I only had time once more to ride out to our lake and enjoy each other's company. The water was already damn cold, so we limited the "cleansing afterward" to an absolute minimum.

In one thing, however, my father had indeed been right: my spoken English had improved significantly, though now I had a western Irish accent, which I actually found quite attractive. I had also learned a bit of Gaelic. During the return trip, I let all the experiences of those nearly six months play out in my mind's eye. I could never have guessed that this summer stay, between high school graduation and joining the air force academy, would later first save my life and then fundamentally change it.

Back in the Ruhr area, I had just enough time to wash and sort my laundry and pack my things. On Thursday, October 1st, 1936, I reported to my assigned post in Dresden and began my two-year training to become a Luftwaffe pilot and officer.

During those two years of training -- during which I only rarely returned home for short leave -- I heard only three things from Ireland:

Riona's wedding in the summer of 1937 to the eldest son of a respected and apparently wealthy merchant family from Limerick, who also had aviation interests for fast cargo transport by air freight and operated a terminal for the large transatlantic flying boats on the Shannon River;The final independence of the Republic of Ireland at the end of 1937, following a majority in a national referendum;The wedding of the now apparently more mature Sinéad in the spring of 1939; the groom came from a family of shipowners and shipbuilders from Galway.

I wrote personal congratulatory letters for both weddings, which were kindly answered shortly afterward. Then, for a few years, I heard nothing more from or about our Irish relatives.

The Luftwaffe preferred that its young officer pilots not be married. In that respect, I was free to enjoy a few romantic affairs, which also noticeably broadened my sexual experiences. However, I never again had the pleasure of satisfying a woman anally. The German girls wanted proper intercourse. After all, the motto"I give the Führer a child"had already taken hold in the BDM (League of German Girls).

Airfield of a German Luftwaffe bomber wing near the Dutch North Sea coast, Spring 1941

I had successfully embarked on my dream career in the new German Luftwaffe. After two years of service and practically continuous training, I was promoted to lieutenant on October 1, 1938 -- forty-eight hours after the conclusion of the Munich Agreement, which had halted the imminent outbreak of a European war. With this promotion began my third year of training, centred at a specialized Luftwaffe flying school, where we were to earn the so-called C-license for flying large, multi-engine aircraft. This training was supposed to be completed by September 1939, and -- if successful -- I would be assigned to a bomber wing as a pilot.

Despite the tough and undeniably dangerous training -- the Luftwaffe lost more than 200 pilot trainees per year due to accidents of various kinds, largely caused by poor training standards -- the atmosphere at our school was incredibly good. Practically all my comrades were of the same age and had grown up under the Nazi regime. Like me, most had been active in the Hitler Youth's aviation wing. We had witnessed Germany's economic upswing firsthand, watched as employment returned, and personally experienced the massive rearmament of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe through our voluntary service. We followed the political and military leadership practically without question. When I returned home to Sodingen in my brand-new Luftwaffe lieutenant's uniform in October 1938, half the neighbourhood came out to greet me. The red, revolutionary, and deeply Catholic Ruhr area that I had known until I was sixteen no longer existed in that form. Many people in my hometown had followed the seemingly utopian successes of Adolf Hitler and his followers with more or less euphoric support. His recent political coups -- the annexation of Austria in March and the return of the Sudetenland to the Reich -- had significantly contributed to this change in sentiment. Only in my own family home was the enthusiasm limited. While both my older sisters had become more or less ardent Nazi mothers after their respective marriages, and my younger brother had also volunteered for the Wehrmacht, my mother remained strictly Catholic, and my father -- now nearly sixty, silver-haired from the stress of his daily work as a director at his notoriously harsh coal mine -- had become reserved and sceptical.

"Son," he said to me one quiet evening, "the Führer wants to lead the Reich into a war with our old enemies, both in the East and the West. To me, it's only a matter of time. And then I, who never served at the front in the Great War but faced similar dangers here mining coal, will have two sons voluntarily serving in the Luftwaffe and the Army." He fell silent for a long time before adding, "If you and your brother ever need a way out, remember that you are fifty percent Irish. Republican Irish!" He took a deep swig from his beer mug and looked me straight in the eyes. "As sons of an Irish mother, you have a constitutional right to Irish citizenship."

I looked at my father, more than a little confused. I was sitting in his office in a Luftwaffe officer's uniform, and he was talking about escape options. But I knew that my father -- who could be loud and authoritarian at his coal mine -- was at heart a well-read and thoughtful man, someone who could think far ahead both technically and economically. So I replied simply, "Thanks, Father, for the advice." I grinned. "Ireland really is beautiful. So green and clean."

A smile crossed his face. "We could use a bit of Irish air here in Herne and Sodingen. Then we wouldn't have to dust the windowsills twice a day."

We toasted each other, and that ended the disrespectful topic.

Just under a year later, on September 1st, 1939, my father's prediction came true. Adolf Hitler and the German Wehrmacht, with all its branches, began the invasion of Poland and triggered yet another great European war. Our third year of training had already been shortened by six weeks in mid-August, and we had received our deployment orders to bomber wings. When the attack on Poland began, I was on a train to Upper Silesia, where I was to report to my new airbase west of Gleiwitz. I was now a trained and licensed bomber pilot for twin-engine bombers, primarily trained on the twin-engine Heinkel He 111, which had a distinctive glass nose.

There was little time to get settled in. Five days after reporting to the wing commander's office, I was in the cockpit of a Heinkel bomber for the first time, with my navigator seated beside me and the other three crew members manning the machine guns for air defence. But we flew to our target in an industrial area of Poland practically unchallenged. After just five days of war, the Polish Air Force with its outdated planes and weak infrastructure had been virtually wiped out. The Luftwaffe had near-total air superiority. Between September 6thand 26th, I flew sixteen missions with my crew -- an incredibly high number for a pilot. But with mostly clear weather and practically no enemy resistance, the missions felt almost like training flights. For the first time, I could apply the skills I had acquired over three years in actual military operations. Only one rough landing during a thunderstorm posed any real danger. One of our squadron mates botched a landing in the same storm, and two crew members died in the crash. They were the only casualties our squadron suffered in the entire Polish campaign.