Daring Young Men: The Heroism and Triumph of the
Berlin Airlift, June 1948-May 1949
By Richard Reeves
(Simon & Schuster, 316 pages, $28)
General Lucius Dubignon Clay, West Point ‘18, descendent of
Senator Henry (the Great Pacificator) Clay, commander in chief of
U.S. forces in Europe and military governor of the American Zone in
Germany, had won his point. The terse message from the Joint Chiefs
of Staff on July 24, 1948, to his headquarters in Berlin decisively
backed his controversial plan to deal with the Soviet blockade. “We
have ordered our planes all over the world to fly to Europe,” it
said. “You have our full support. God bless Berlin.”
Exactly one month before, Soviet authorities had suddenly
decreed a halt “for technical reasons” to all road, rail, and water
traffic into occupied Berlin’s American, British, and French
sectors. Its 2.1 million population was cut off from the rest of
the world. Faced with Josef Stalin’s bald move to annex the city by
forcing the Allies out, President Harry Truman’s senior national
security advisers, including Secretary of State George Marshall and
Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, strongly counseled
withdrawing Allied troops and leaving the city to the tender
mercies of the Red Army.
Force the blockade on the ground? The Allies had only 290,000
troops in all of western Germany, compared with at least 20 Red
Army divisions in East Germany, plus another million or so Soviet
troops in the rest of Eastern Europe. Supply the city, an urban
island 100 miles inside the Soviet Zone, with the needed 15,000
tons a day of food, fuel, and other supplies by an immense,
unprecedented — and highly risky — airlift? All advisers except
Clay dismissed the idea as far-fetched. As America’s most
influential columnist, Walter Lippmann, pointed out, “To supply the
Allied sectors of Berlin is obviously only a spectacular and
temporary answer to the ground blockade…in the long run,
especially in the fog and rain of a Berlin winter, the cost in
lives of the pilots and crews…would be exorbitant.”
But at a White House crisis meeting June 28, Undersecretary of
State Robert Lovett was outlining options for exiting Berlin when
Truman cut him off with an abrupt, “We stay in Berlin. Period.”
Fine, but how to overcome the logistical nightmares?
That is the subject of Richard Reeves’s engrossing new book
about one of the Cold War’s hottest episodes. Reeves, author of
presidential biographies of Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan, among other
works, here draws on official archives and hundreds of interviews
to tell the story of those who flew, guided, repaired, and loaded
the planes that were, for 324 days, the lifeline of a great,
embattled city. These daring young men from places like Union City,
New Jersey; Corpus Christi, Texas; and Mount Sterling, Kentucky,
were another instance of the ordinary Americans of Tom Brokaw’s
“Greatest Generation” accomplishing extraordinary things.
It was up to Clay, a 50-year-old chain-smoking workaholic, to
create the airlift, officially known as Operation Vittles. He began
with virtually nothing. Needed immediately if not sooner were more
planes, crews, loaders, and mechanics, as well as more airports and
better runways. For help he first called General Curtis LeMay.
Ironically it was LeMay, the legendary commander of United States
Air Forces Europe (USAFE), who had developed the bombing tactics
and formation flying that enabled his mighty 8th Air Force to turn
much of Germany into rubble. When Clay asked if he had any planes
that could carry coal, LeMay chewed his trademark cigar a moment,
then yelled incredulously into the phone, “We must have a bad
connection. Sounds as if you’re asking whether we have planes for
carrying coal.” When Clay confirmed, he got his answer: “General,
the Air Force can deliver anything, anytime, anywhere.”
But LeMay’s typical bravado couldn’t magically supply the
necessary hundreds of planes and the pilots to fly them. The
airlift began shakily with whatever old, twin-engine C-47s (known
wryly as Gooney Birds) could be scrounged up. The larger,
four-engine C-54 could carry three times as much, but of the Air
Force’s 400 Skymasters, only two were in Germany; the rest were
mostly at Pacific bases like Guam, more than 11,000 miles from
Europe. The Joint Chiefs’ decision on June 24 sent them, their
pilots, and ground crews scrambling to Germany.
The Air Force sent telegrams all over America to call up
reservists “for 30 days’ temporary duty.” Reeves’s research found
examples of many who were just beginning normal postwar lives. One
was Noah Thompson, who had flown 21 bombing missions over Germany
and had recently passed his airline pilot’s exam for a new career.
When the TDY notice came he kissed his wife, Betty, and their new
son, Glenn, goodbye. Twenty-four hours after arriving at Rhein-Main
Air Base near Frankfurt, he was flying 10 tons of coal to Berlin.
There was also Arlie Nixon, chief DC-4 pilot at TWA, who was
suddenly 1st Lt. Nixon again, making $180 a month instead of $550.
As one amazed RAF officer commented, “You’d be talking to some
fellow and find out he had been a lawyer in Manhattan a couple of
weeks before.”
Others still on active duty got the call wherever they were. Lt.
Harry Yoder, a former B-24 pilot, was on leave visiting his parents
in Pennsylvania when the local police chief knocked on the door at
2:30 a.m.: “I have a cable here from the Air Force…” Lt. Richard
A. Campbell got to Wiesbaden from his base in Japan via stopovers
in Guam, Hawaii, California, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, Newfoundland,
and the Azores. He dropped off his bag at base ops and made five
round trips to Berlin’s Tempelhof airport before getting back to
pick it up and settle in.
Even with planes taking off and landing every three minutes,
flight crews and air -traffic controllers stretched to the breaking
point, less than half of the city’s needs were supplied during the
Airlift’s first few weeks. Then LeMay brought in Major General
William Tunner, deputy commander for operations of the Air Force’s
new Military Air Transport Service, to handle logistics. Arrogant,
cantankerous, and coldly efficient, Tunner had run The Hump airlift
of matériel over the Himalayas from India to China during the war.
“Willie the Whip” proceeded to increase daily loads by
rationalizing ground operations, reducing turnaround time by 30
minutes per plane. He unified American and British resources,
created competitions between squadrons and bases, and, most
controversially, hired German mechanics to maintain the planes.
Deliveries rose dramatically — at one feverish point, planes were
taking off or landing in Berlin every 30 seconds.
Veteran, battlehardened pilots were hard put to cope with
Airlift conditions. Flying into Tempelhof’s short runway meant
following a glide path that put the plane’s landing gear within
feet of a nearby six-story apartment building, diving steeply to
touchdown on full flaps, then standing on the brakes while skidding
over the strip’s perforated steel planking toward the mud at the
end. Weather was horrendous. In November thick fog blanketed
northern Europe and lasted weeks; flying was zero-zero visibility,
tractors pulled planes to parking areas because pilots couldn’t see
runway lights.
Crews often flew with windows and doors open to avoid explosive
buildup of coal or flour dust. The dust got into eyes anyway and
flight surgeons had to clean it out. With crews lucky to get a few
hours’ sleep, both pilot and co-pilot occasionally dozed off and
woke up when the plane suddenly changed altitude. Punchy air
traffic controllers headed for mess halls muttering flight
instructions to themselves.
Then there was the Soviet harassment. Yak and MiG-15 fighters
tried to force down Airlift planes by buzzing them within a few
feet — one pilot counted 22 Yaks on his tail. Other tactics: East
German radio stations flooded the airwaves with loud polka music to
make navigation difficult; the Red Army fired random anti-aircraft
shells and beamed powerful searchlights to blind pilots (flying on
instruments anyway, many just taped newspapers inside windshields).
USAFE officially counted 773 incidents, with 96 involving close
flying, 54 flak, 14 air-to-air fire, 59 flares, 103 searchlights,
11 barrage balloons. Many others went unreported to avoid
paperwork.
Fatigue, worn-out aircraft, and the weather inevitably caused
crashes on takeoff or landing, once into a Berlin apartment
building. Thirty-two American and 39 British personnel died during
the Airlift. (The French did not participate in the Airlift because
such military aircraft as they had were being used to combat
Communist rebellions in Indochina.) Reeves reports that a German
boy living near a runway wrote wonderingly of a C-54 crash, “The
two pilots were killed….Only three years ago they were fighting
against my country, and now they were dying for us. The Americans
were such strange people…what made them do the things they
did?”
Not only things like dying for their former enemies, but like
becoming the Candy Bomber. That peculiar exercise began when Lt.
Gail Halvorsen was stretching his legs around the perimeter fence
after landing at Tempelhof. He came across a group of German
schoolchildren and tossed them a couple of sticks of chewing gum.
Seeing their excitement over the exotic treat, he promised to drop
gum and candy next time he passed over them and to waggle his wings
so they would know which plane was his. Before long, the Tempelhof
ops office began receiving dozens of letters addressed to Uncle
Wackelflugel (Wiggly Wings) and Schokoladen Flieger (Chocolate
Flyer). Soon other pilots joined in, donating their candy rations.
In all, more than 23 tons were dropped on miniature parachutes the
pilots made in their spare time.
As the months wore on, the Airlift became ever more efficient,
the North Atlantic Treaty creating the NATO mutual defense alliance
was signed in April, and West Germany moved closer to political
reality. Stalin realized he had lost his gamble to get Berlin
without a war. The lights running around the New York
Times building on May 5, 1949, said it all: “BERLIN BLOCKADE
WILL END MAY 12.” The West had won the Cold War’s first
eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation.
Reeves’s highly readable account of the Airlift highlights a
largely neglected operation that once again showed American
ingenuity and resourcefulness, as well as the selfless, can-do
spirit of its citizen soldiers. It was undeniably a heroic
undertaking. But was it the best way to handle the crisis? It does
not detract from the merit of those courageous, dedicated airmen to
question whether the West should not have called Stalin’s bluff and
broken the blockade instead of circumventing it. After all, who had
The Bomb?
As Reeves records, at that same June meeting where Truman
decided to make a stand in Berlin, he also ordered no fewer than 60
B-29 Superfortresses to bases in Britain — carrying the same type
of Fat Man atomic bombs dropped on Japan — under a secret plan
code-named Charioteer. And as it happens, an eager Curtis LeMay,
never one to back off from a fight, had already prepared a
contingency plan in case of a Soviet blockade, insisting that
USAFE’s fighters and bombers could destroy every Soviet airfield
and plane on the ground in a few hours. That was vetoed by the
war-weary British and French.
Had we chosen to take off the gloves, we had the punch to put
Uncle Joe on the ropes. As LeMay put it, “They had no atomic
capability. Hell, they didn’t have much of any capability.” Of such
questions do armchair generals debate after the battle is over.
