Luftwaffe Puking Machines

     Members of some earliest generations -like mine - may remember Jimmy Edwards, an English comedian which a huge handlebar moustache best remembered for his performances in Whack-O! as a drunken, devious, misfit of a headmaster who loved swinging the cane. The fantastic moustache was, in fact, grown to disguise the scars of his injuries in an R.A.F. plane crash during World War II. Nevertheless, he continued in the R.A.F. for its final drive into Germany, during which period the following discovery was made.

   At this stage, now that the Luftwaffe was no longer airborne, we were using quite a lot of their captured aerodromes, rather than the makeshift strips hurriedly put together by our troops. We found that the German Brylcream boys had certainly lived in style. Not only was the accommodation lavish, but their were certain installations which spoke volumes for their lifestyle. At Celle, for example, where I night-stopped more than once, the loo [lavatory] on the Officers' Mess revealed a very strange amenity. Along the wall was a line of what at first glance looked like washbasins. But above, at head-height there was a metal plunger: when you pressed this with your forehead, the basin was automatically flushed. In simple terms, they were puking machines, which our gallant adversaries apparently used when they had overloaded themselves with booze and wished to carry on with the debauch. A trick they pinched off the Romans?

Reference: Jimmy Edwards (1984), Six of the Best, Robson Books, p 208.  (The title refers to his six years in the war, as well as a popular reference to the number of strokes of the cane usually applied.)