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...

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