Three of us were loading at the small maintenance Kaserne behind the main barracks in Bamberg. Bamberg was a town with a tough reputation among the GIs. It had a large Kaserne with two different kinds of units,I think it was Artillery and Armor. And when they weren't practicing to go to war with the Russians, they were really going to war with each other...in the bars of Bamberg.
The local labor force guys were loading three one-axle, pintle-towed, cargo trailers on each of our flatbeds. They backed the trailers onto the flatbed, dropped the tongue onto the deck of the flatbed and tied it down. Then backed the next one over the tongue of that trailer and did the same. When all three trailers were on the flatbed, there was maybe a foot to spare at the end of the flatbed, the space was full. Then they put the headboard on and the first two sideboards, stacking the rest of the sideboards next to them. It made a tight fit.
We had dropped our trailers at the loading dock the evening before and found a nice Gasthaus that served a really decent schnitzel dinner for 5 Marks (in 1968 exchange, about a dollar and a quarter for dinner), sat around for a couple hours enjoying locally brewed bier, found our way to the transit barracks without incident. We were a little late getting to the loading dock the next morning; when you are
on the road, that sort of thing goes mostly unnoticed. When we showed up, all three trailers were loaded, tied, secured for travel and the sergeant in charge had the paperwork on his desk, ready to go. Not hard to make a verification of the load, you could see there were three trailers on each flatbed from the office. So we signed the TCMDs and head for the rigs. A quick pre-trip and we started rolling for W.O. Darby Kaserne in Nurnberg. I have no excuse. I hadn't drank so much the night before that I was hungover or fuzzy headed. Maybe it was the prospect of spending a day or two in Nurnberg that overshadowed good practice, but whatever it was, we left one very important step out of the procedure.
We went out of town on a backdoor route and hooked up to the southbound hiway. It wasn't an autobahn (freeway) but it was a four-lane, divided highway. There was a right turn lane onto the highway that was just like a freeway on-ramp. I saw a wide open highway and no need to slow down. As I started to enter the curving right turn lane, I remembered two things: a) The crash scene in Pirmasens several weeks before, and 
I hadn't inspected the load, or the way it was secured. I was suddenly very reluctant to race around that curve. I decided to stop and check things out as soon as I could get on the highway shoulder safely. While all this thinking was going on in the cab, I kinda lost track of what was going on outside the cab. I was in Germany. Car traffic moves FAST in Germany. I glanced over at the highway and realized that a string of sedans had moved up and would be blocking the right lane of the highway when I reached the end of the ramp. I had slowed down ALOT when I thought about the Pirm Hill accident, but I was still moving about 25-30 mph. I had to hit the brakes harder than I wanted to avoid merging INTO the line of cars. As soon as I jabbed the brakes, I felt a lurching sensation and heard screeching and wood breaking. I immediately eased up on the brakes and steered onto the shoulder. It wasn't where I had planned to stop but stopping seemed the right idea right then. The other two semis pulled in behind me, their drivers running up to me with ashen faces. I stood there looking at the mess the front of my trailer had become and wondered what it would have looked like if I hadn't slowed down going into the curve.
When the labor force folks loaded the trailers, it was pretty tight spaces. So they used wire twists to secure the trailers but the first trailer on the flatbed was right up against the headboard and the sideboards were on and it was so cramped in there...so they didn't tie the front of the trailer to the flatbed. They didn't put chockblocks on that side of the trailer's wheels, either...oh!...and, yeah...they forgot to set the parking brakes on that first trailer, too. Everything I just described are things a driver is supposed to check before he pulls the load away from the loading dock. I didn't.
So, when I stabbed the brakes, the front trailer on the flatbed surged forward, broke the wires that were tied to the back of the trailer, rammed into the headboard at the front of the flatbed, bent it down forming a ramp, and rolled right up that ramp to the front edge of it. If I hadn't let off the brakes and steered for the shoulder when I did, that little trailer would have rolled off the end of the little ramp it had created and joined me in the canvas-covered cab; instead, it rolled back down into its place. The driver behind me described it in vivid detail over and over marvelling at the fact that I wasn't squished.
We checked the other trailers and found they were in the same boat, and the one behind me had broken it wires, too. But whoever worked on his flatbed had put chockblocks in front of the wheels on his lead trailer. It had climbed the blocks and had wedged up against the headboard but hadn't broken all the way free. We limped back to the little Kaserne at about 5 mph and had them do it all over again, this time supervised by the drivers, as it should have been in the first place. The sergeant provided me with a new headboard in return for "just keeping this between us". Worked for me.