| The Berlin Journal | Number Fifteen | Fall 2007
Fall 2007 | Number Fifteen | The Berlin Journal | © bpk
I
One C-54
Every Ninety Seconds
How the Berlin Airlift broke the Soviet blocade
by Richard Reeves
spen t t he be t t er pa rt of the last
twenty years researching and writing
a trilogy on the American presidency,
doing books on John F. Kennedy, Richard
Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. I knew I had
said what I had to say on all that. I had to
find some new subjects. At the same time,
I continued writing a syndicated column
for newspapers around the country, an
exercise that kept me up on the politics and
people of the day and of the twenty-first
century. I was not happy many of those
days. My country was becoming, or being
seen as, arrogant, self-righteous, and brutal – a monster using its very substantial
power to try to enforce a new order, a kind
of neo-imperialism. Of course, we meant
well; Americans usually do. After all, didn’t
these people want to be like us?
It seemed they didn’t. I have traveled
enough and lived enough places to feel the
resentment, even hatred, of people who had
been told America was the height of disinterested good – as long as things went our
way. I was taken by a line in a not-very-good
2003 movie called Head of State, in which
the comedian Chris Rock played a black
Washington city councilman running for
president against a self-satisfied senator
who ended each speech by saying, “God
bless America. And no one else!”
Was that the America I grew up in? The
question bothered me, and so did the fact
that I had no idea for a new book. That was
my state of mind when I picked up Tony
Judt’s excellent book Postwar, subtitled
A History of Europe Since 1945, published in
2005. On page 146, I read this:
As the Soviet troops tightened their control over surface connections into the city,
the American and British governments
decided upon an airlift to provision their
own zones and on June 26, the first transport plane landed at Tempelhof airfield in
West Berlin. The Berlin Airlift lasted until
May 29, 1949. Over those eleven months,
the Western Allies shipped some 2.3 million tons of food on 277,500 flights at the
cost of the lives of 73 Allied airmen.
Stalin’s purpose in blockading Berlin
was to force the West to choose between
quitting the city or else abandoning its
plans for a separate West German state….
In the end he secured neither objective.
That was about it. I was surprised. I
thought there would be much more. I was
11 years old when the Airlift began, as
thrilled by the action as only a small boy
could be. I thought I was on those planes
far away, riding to the rescue of innocent
people. Of course Berliners were not that
innocent, but that just made the effort
more heroic to an American kid.
I next checked David McCullough’s
1,100-page biography, Truman. There was
not much more, though he did record
President Truman’s dramatic words after
he was briefed on what seemed to be the
impossible position of the Allies – under
virtual siege, surrounded by more than
300,000 Soviet combat troops: “We stay in
Berlin, period.”
And so we (and the British) did.
McCullough asserted that the Airlift was
never very far from Truman’s mind, but
there were only a few more passing references before he concluded that it was “one
of Truman’s proudest decisions, strongly
affecting the morale of Western, non-com-
on July 30. He kissed his wife Betty and
baby Glenn and left the next day. Five days
later, as Lt. Thompson again, he was flying
over Germany, past cities he had bombed
– Leipzig, Merseburg, Zeitz, Halle – thinking of friends who never made it home. The
pilot who had bunked next to him in 1945,
Lt. Don Dennis, was beaten to death by
civilians after he parachuted to the ground
below. That was the great fear of Allied airmen at the end of the war: to be set upon
by civilians, enraged by constant bombing,
with clubs, pitchforks, and dogs.
Many of those men hated Germans,
which was not hard for Americans. Even
at the age of eight or nine that’s what I had
been taught. Now, as civilians and reservists, they were getting telegrams to report
immediately to Air Force bases. After a cou-
“TDY,” they were told – “Temporary Duty” –
ninety days at the most. But they were gone a year. Jobs were
lost. marriages broke up. mortgages went unpaid.
munist Europe, and the whole course of
the Cold War.”
I asked a few friends what they remembered about the Airlift. People my age
generally responded by asking when it
happened. (“The 1960s, wasn’t it?”) People
forget. Many thought the Soviet blockade
of 1948 was the same as the building of the
Wall in 1961. I generally responded by babbling on about the young men (and some
women) pulled away from their lives, their
wives, their schools, their work for the second time in five or six years – this time to
feed the people they had been trying to kill,
and who had been trying to kill them, only
three years earlier.
Edwin Gere, a B-24 pilot who bombed
Japanese cities during the war, had just
enrolled for graduate studies in history
at the University of Connecticut. He was
woken by the telephone one of those summer mornings in 1948. “Lieutenant Gere?”
asked a pleasant female voice. “You have a
telegram from the Air Force. I’ll read it and
send it right on to you. ‘By direction of the
President, you are ordered to active duty
for the Berlin Airlift, reporting to Camp
Kilmer, New Jersey…’”
The calls were being answered all across
the country by veterans demobilized in
1946 or 1947, many of them pilots who
had bombed Berlin and other German
targets. Noah Thompson, a Vermont
farmer and a proud new father, was called
ple of months those with no four-engine
experience went to Great Falls, Montana,
to learn how to fly C-54 passenger planes
and practice instrument take-offs and landings at a quickly built plywood replica of
Tempelhof. The weather was usually lousy
in both Great Falls and Berlin, and the
approach was an air alley over a cemetery
between seven-story apartment buildings.
Two or three weeks of training and they
were off to the American base at RheinMain outside Frankfurt. “t dy,” they were
told – “Temporary Duty,” ninety days at the
most. Jobs were lost, marriages broke up,
mortgages went unpaid. One of the problems: the civilians called up were away for
a year or more. Some could not remember
where they had parked their cars when they
finally got back home.
It was not only pilots. Calls were made to
mechanics, truck drivers, cooks, and meteorologists. There were 570 weathermen
ordered to Germany. Roger Moser, a DC-3
pilot during the war – the first planes in
the Airlift were 1930s-design C-47s called
“Gooney Birds” – had become certified as
an air traffic controller at Washington’s
National Airport. “About 19 of us volunteered on August 31 in Washington, New
York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati,
Detroit, Chicago, Jacksonville, and Miami
and were immediately ordered to active
duty for ninety days…. My group arrived in
Germany on Saturday, September 4.” fi
| The Berlin Journal | Number Fifteen | Fall 2007
He landed his first planes that next Monday,
at the beginning of a 12-hour shift hunched
over radar scopes in a rolling control office
at the end of a runway.
I
not only that the Western candidates would
win the citywide election scheduled for
October, but that Allied plans to introduce
a new, separate currency in West Germany
would destroy what was left of the East
German economy. The Soviets printed
stacks of “Occupation Reichmarks,” which
had already lost most of their face value
and led to black markets where the usual
ister, Ernest Bevin, one of the many who
could be credited with coming up with the
idea of supplying Berlin by air. And then,
most importantly, there were the Berliners
themselves on both sides of the city, first
among them the ex-communist mayor,
a protégé of Lenin himself, Ernst Reuter.
Great characters. Men of history. They
are easy to find, in diaries and memoirs,
eight bases in West Germany to Tempelhof,
Tegel, and Gatow airports?
Building new airstrips to handle the
C-54s taking off or landing every ninety
seconds was one of the Airlift’s great challenges. Tempelhof and Tegel were lovely
grass strips before and after World War II.
They couldn’t last a week under the pounding of hundreds of transports carrying ten
© bpk / Friedrich Seidenstücker
decided I wan t ed to write a book
about all this and was lucky enough
to have an editor, Alice Mayhew of
Simon & Schuster, who thought that was
Fall 2007 | Number Fifteen | The Berlin Journal | Three weeks after the Airlift began on
June 24, a National Security Council memorandum to President Truman said: “The
airdrome situation is critical. Tempelhof is
breaking up under its present load.” LeMay
himself reported: “It’s so bad we have to
keep a gang of laborers on the runway with
asphalt, mats, shovels, wheelbarrows and
all.… Down one of the transport planes
What was it like to be one of the 17,000 German
women and men using the rubble of the bombed city
to build a new airfield at Tegel in just 92 days?
tons each of coal or food, medicines, or the
rolls of newsprint needed to publish newspapers in the city threatened with starving
and freezing. The Americans began with
perforated metal mats laid over the grass or
dirt, with crews of Germans and Displaced
Persons (mostly Eastern Europeans) filling
in holes between takeoffs and landings.
Noah Thompson wrote home that pilots
were terrified that the workers would leave
their wheelbarrows on the runway.
comes slamming loose material, scattering wildly…. Out the workmen came: they
pored, pounded the mats down into place…
then they went scrambling back to get out
of the way of the next C-54.”
A week later, on July 17, Assistant
Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett had
more bad news for Truman: “It’s obvious
that the Soviets know that flying weather
will be too bad for this operation to continue beyond October.… We should clearly
recognize that the airlift is a temporary
expedient.”
That was exactly what the Soviets
thought. “General Winter,” as they called
him, would defeat the Airlift as surely as
he had defeated Napoleon and Hitler when
they invaded Russia. The Soviets also
knew very well that there was almost no
construction equipment in Berlin when
the Americans and British came in June of
1945. The Soviets, who got there first, had
stripped the city of anything useful. Russia,
after all, was as badly damaged as Germany,
and the Red Army considered whatever
they could get their hands on to be reparations for the suffering of their own people
when Hitler invaded.
It is difficult, to say the least, to build
airstrips with bulldozers, front-end loaders, and the rest, but those machines are
too big and too heavy to be flown in by
C-54s. That was General William Tunner’s
problem. Tunner, who had run the aerial
­supply line from Burma into China during
the war – “over the Hump,” meaning the
Himalayas – was the commander of a joint
American-British Airlift Task Force. As fi
Deine Flügel
Crash of an American “Raisin Bomber” in Berlin, July 1948
a good idea. I hoped, rather romantically,
that the Airlift was what I thought it was
as a boy – and that the better angels of the
American nature and character hovered over
the men and women who made it happen.
I still hope so. The book is very much
a work in progress, but as I read more and
sought out veterans of what the Air Force
called “Operation Vittles,” I quickly realized that Americans were hardly alone in
this great effort. The British, who called it,
with double meaning, “Plane Fare,” carried
almost one-third of the lifesaving freight
and lost more airmen than the Americans.
Many of the mechanics who kept the planes
flying were Germans. The people who loaded and unloaded planes were from all over
Europe, and so were the men and women
who did the heavy lifting on endless runway maintenance and construction.
I write narrative history, so I needed
characters – and there were plenty, beginning with Truman and Stalin. At the time,
Allied officials could only guess the Soviet
leader’s role and tactics in the blockade.
Now we know that on March 19, 1948, East
German communist leaders had told him
currency was American cigarettes. Stalin’s
response was: “Let’s make a joint effort.
Perhaps we can kick them out.”
In fact, the distribution of new Western
“Deutschmarks” was announced on June 20,
1948, and four days later the Soviets blockaded all land and water routes into Berlin’s
western sectors, leaving West Berlin an
island in a Red sea – accessible from the
West only by air.
On the scene, then, were actors reporting to Truman, Stalin, and British Prime
Minister Clement Attlee. General Lucius
Clay, the courtly descendant of Henry
Clay, was the top American official in
Berlin, and General Vassily Skolovsky was
the Soviet commander. Then there were:
Colonel Frank Howley, the hot-head, communist-hating US troop commander of
Berlin; General Curtis LeMay, the architect
of the Allied bombing of Germany, now
the European commander of the brand
new United States Air Force. (Before 1947,
planes and the men who flew and maintained them were part of the US Army.)
The dominant British character, at least at
the creation, was the steadfast foreign min-
films, military records, transcripts, letters,
interviews. It is harder, but more rewarding,
to collect the stories of the uncelebrated
airmen, mechanics, weathermen, ground
controllers, and uncommon laborers who
were among the 60,000 men and women
who kept the Airlift going for 322 days until
the Soviets backed down in May of 1949.
Reading through records and hanging
around at meetings of the Berlin Airlift
Veterans Association in the US and the
British Berlin Airlift Association produced
some of those stories, but there are more
out there. What was it like to be one of the
17,000 German women and men, wearing whatever clothes they had, using the
rubble of the bombed city to build a new
airfield at Tegel in just 92 days? “It was an
unforgettable sight,” said Colonel Theodore
Milton, who had been a B-17 pilot bombing Berlin. “Women in high heels pushing
heavy wheelbarrows; men who looked like
doctors or professors and probably were,
wielding shovels.” What was it like to be
one of the Luftwaffe mechanics recruited
and retrained by the Allies to keep Douglas
C-54s flying loads of coal and fuel from
From Berlin to 26 destinations
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*Inclusive of taxes and fees. Limited availability.
Bookings: germanwings.com
10 | The Berlin Journal | Number Fifteen | Fall 2007
brought in 7,058 tons – and were taking
out sick children as well as light bulbs and
other products labeled “Made in Blockaded
Berlin.” On October 15 the Allies formed
a Combined Task Force, commanded
by Tunner with a British deputy, Air
Commodore W.F. Merer. They were ready
for “General Winter.” Fortunately Berlin’s
weather was milder than usual that winter:
In January 1949 the Task Force delivered a record 171,960 tons. It was obvious
by then that the Airlift was succeeding.
On the last day of that month, January 31,
1949, Stalin conceded. In an unusual interview in Moscow with Kingsbury Smith of
International News Service, the Soviet leader did not mention currency issues when
asked about the blockade. The US State
around-the-clock air traffic covered the noise of the
trucks, carts, and wheelbarrows of farmers and blackmarketeers coming from the Eastern zone.
Department noticed, and Philip Jessup,
more fog but higher temperatures and
a deputy American ambassador to the
less snow and ice. The Task Force Times
reported on December 5: “The Army and
United Nations, was delegated to approach
Air Force are pre-cooking meals for Berlin
the Russian ambassador to ask if the omission was intentional. On February 15, the
housewives to save coal in Berlin. There is
answer came back, “Yes.”
coal enough for heating one room for two
That led to rounds of secret negotiations
hours a day, and about twenty minutes of
– the Soviets wanted to delay any establishthat is ‘cooking time’ with heat sufficient
ment of a West German state separate from
to boil fluids. Beans, for instance, are prethe Eastern zone – that ended with a Soviet
cooked for two hours by mess personnel,
dehydrated and shipped in bags to families.” announcement on May 4 that the blockade
would be lifted on May 12, and that the
Foreign Ministers of the four occupying
powers would meet on May 23 to discuss
Germany’s future.
Airlift planes continued to fly until
the end of July 1949, but that was only to
build up stockpiles, as fresh food and coal
poured into the Allied sectors on trucks
and railroad cars. One of the last issues of
Task Force Times reported that West Berlin
was a healthier place in 1948 than in 1947:
“Death rates fell below those of 1939 in the
American sector. Weight increases were
recorded in all age groups. Polio cases were
recorded at 1.6 per 10,000 people compared with 6.6 in 1947.”
It was over, part of history. The
Americans went home again, looking for
their cars. µ
Writer and columnist Richard Reeves,
senior lecturer at the Annenberg School
for Communication at the University of
Southern California, was the Holtzbrinck
Distinguished Visitor in September 2007.
He is the author, most ­recently, of President
Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination.
www.berlin-airport.de
and the various British planes in the corridors, buzzing by within ten or twenty feet
of the big transports. The Soviets periodically fired anti-aircraft guns in the vicinity
of the planes and aimed strong spotlights
from the ground to try to blind pilots.
Significantly, there were never attempts to
jam the radio signals essential for instrument flying – their planes had no instrument capability so they could only go up in
good weather – because the Soviets were
The Soviets thought “General not prepared to go to war and believed the
Winter” would defeat the
Allies might retaliate militarily if jamming
Airlift as surely as he had
caused a series of crashes.
defeated Napoleon and Hitler.
There were bad days, particularly in the
foggy days of November when there was
literally no visibility at all as clouds settled
down to earth. But the lines on Tunner’s
the land and water routes for “necessary
charts kept going up. A mélange of aircraft
repairs.”)
– C-47s, C-54s, converted British Lancaster
Tunner’s men came out with a plan:
bombers and seaplanes – were delivering
American and British planes – almost all
just over 2,500 tons a day when he took
French military aircraft were otherwise
over at the end of July. On August 7, the
engaged in Indo-China – would fly into the
Americans and the British flew in a record
city in the outer corridors and fly back in
3,800 tons. On August 12, 4,742 tons
the center corridor; planes missing their
were delivered in 707 flights. That was the
Berlin landings would not circle the field
first time planes delivered more than the
in stacks as they had in the beginning but
4,500 tons considered the minimum in coal
would fly straight out, still loaded, in the
and dried foodstuffs to keep West Berlin
center corridor; all flights would be instrument flights, even in the clearest weather.
going on low-calorie diets and provide two
Tunner was not big on individualism in
hours a day of electricity and gas for cooking.
his pilots; he wanted them controlled and
li v ely and profi ta ble black
monitored from the ground at all times.
market provided just about the
Old Soviet ya k fighters and new jet
migs sporadically harassed the 250 C-54s
only fresh food in the Allied zones.
Berlin had traditionally been fed by farms
to the east, now controlled by the Soviets,
and the night was alive with sound, the
around-the-clock air traffic that helped
cover the noise of the trucks, carts, and
wheelbarrows of farmers and black-marketeers bringing, for a price, food and other
essentials from the Eastern zone.
Competition was Tunner’s method. He
goaded on his squadrons and each base
by bombarding them with statistics and
praise for other units – to the point that the
German loading crews took up the game.
Task Force Times, the Airlift’s daily fourpage news sheet, reported on September 18,
“Two 16-man German loading teams made
Vittles history today by tossing more than
19 tons of coal into two C-54s in slightly
more than 7 minutes…. The winners tossed
176 sacks, the losers were 29 seconds
behind…. There was also a record unloading: 5 min 45 seconds at Tempelhof.”
That was on Air Force Day, the first
anniversary of the founding of the US
Air Force. American and British planes
the three twenty-mile-wide air corridors
leading into the western sectors of divided
Berlin, flying lanes agreed upon by an air
safety treaty signed by the Allies and the
Soviets soon after the European fighting of
World War II ended in May of 1945. (There
were no agreements on rail, highway, and
canal access, which was the reason Soviet
troops could blockade the city, closing
A
© akg-images / Tony Vaccaro
his airstrips were pounded and drenched
by rain, he remembered hearing about a
guy in Brazil, an American civilian, who
was a genius at cutting up heavy equipment
with oxyacetylene torches so that parts
could fit into planes and then welding them
back together after they were off-loaded.
H.P. Lacomb was the name. Or so they
tell me. They also tell me the fbi was to
find him – and did, at a small airfield in the
Midwestern US. Soon enough, Lacomb was
in Germany doing his thing and teaching
others how to do the same. I have spent
more than a year trying to find his family
to get his story. (I am assuming he is dead.)
No luck so far; the military does not keep
records of civilian employees. If you know
anything about him, give me a call. Collect.
General Tunner took over “Vittles” on
July 29 when the Americans were landing less than 2,000 tons a day, less than
half the estimated 4,500 tons necessary
to keep the lights on in West Berlin and
to keep Berliners fed and warm – that is,
supplied with 1,834 to 2,609 calories per
day depending on their age and occupation. His nickname (behind his back) was
“Willie the Whip.” He drove himself and
anyone within his reach to exhaustion. He
was a man of numbers and details, determined to end the “cowboy lift,” the first
hectic weeks when exhausted pilots and
half-empty planes with smoking engines
circled Tempelhof waiting for a break in the
clouds to roar down between the apartment
houses around the airport. He wanted to
turn the Airlift into a flying conveyor belt,
and he did just that, saying:
The actual operation of an airlift is about
as glamorous as drops of water on a stone.
There’s no frenzy, no flap…. You don’t see
planes parked all over the place; they’re
either in the air, on loading or unloading ramps, or being worked on. You don’t
see personnel milling around…. The real
excitement from running a successful airlift comes from seeing a dozen lines climbing on a dozen charts – tonnage delivered,
utilization of aircraft, and so on…. There’s a
basic rule that applies to military air operations just as it does to commercial operation. An airplane has to be doing one thing
to be earning its salt. It has to be in the air
with a load.
About the first thing Tunner did was
to lock up his staff – most of whom had
served with him in Burma – in a room
with model airplanes attached to old coat
hangers hooked onto a maze of string
and small pulleys. The strings simulated
Fall 2007 | Number Fifteen | The Berlin Journal | 11
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