Coming out of Kaiserslautern Army Depot loaded, most of the time you had to go east toward Mannheim to get to anywhere else. Because almost every place cargo would go out of KAD was east. So you got on the autobahn headed for Mannheim and wound up and down and curved around through forests and mountain country. At one point on the route you would come up on a piece of high ground with no trees in the immediate area and you could see more than a dozen little German villages scattered all around. Just as you started down into the Rhine valley you passed a little castle on the south side of the autobahn, there was a small rest area there, too. All the GIs called it "Castle Hill", I don't know if I ever knew its real name. It is one of those landmarks that every GI who was ever in the area would instantly recall. Once you reached the bottom of the hill, it was pretty flat until you got to the Rhine, near Mannheim.
Dewey was one of those adventurous truckers who would put his truck into neutral (we called it "Angel Gear") and coast down Castle Hill. Not the safest of practices but not all that uncommon, either. The tactical tractor-trailers we had were slow, you would be lucky to hold them at any speed over 50mph for any length of time. But if you coasted down the hill, you would sometimes get up to 65. And after coasting for a while, you would eventually slow down to the point you could rev up and get back into gear.
He was beginning to think he was slowing down too quickly. German drivers began to honk and wave at him. He wasn't sure why. He began to think there might be something wrong. He got back into gear and the truck started speeding back up. More honking and waving. One brave BMW driver pulled in front of him and started slowing down. As soon as he let off the fuel, the truck started slowing down a lot quicker than normal. Dewey figured there was something wrong with the truck and those Germans were trying to tell him about it. So he pulled to the side of the autobahn and stopped. A few German cars stopped, too, and some of the drivers were motioning to the rear of the truck. He went to the back and was surprised to find a Volkswagen beetle growing out of the rear of his trailer. He later told me it looked like the trailer was giving birth and the beetle was only half way out.
Germans drive fast. Even today, most of the autobahns don't have any speed limits, in 1968 the only ones that had speed limits were where there was construction going on. Their cars are fast. A VW beetle will go well over 90 mph. I don't know how fast that beetle had to be going to park that far up under Dewey's trailer, but it had to be a lot. Dewey swears he never felt any impact at all and from the cab, you couldn't see any part of the beetle in either mirror...the only thing he could notice was the slight drag the car put on his rig. If the Germans hadn't stopped him, he would have pulled that beetle right back into the motor pool with him.
Dewey was not cited by German Polizei or American MPs. The German driver would have been cited for following too close...but he was dead.