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Daring Young Men
The heroism and Triumph of the Berlin Airlift June of 1948 to May of 1949
By Richard Reeves
Mention the Berlin Airlift today and chances are you will get a blank look. Those
who took part in that amazing achievement deserve better.
Reeves, writing with passion, reverence and humor, wants to make sure they will
be remembered. Drawing on interviews, diaries, newspapers, biographies and
government documents, he tells the story of the sixty thousand men and women
who kept a ravaged city alive for more than a year; and the extraordinary leaders
who made the Berlin Airlift possible: President Harry Truman, Generals Lucius
Clay and Curtis LeMay, Colonel Frank Howley, and Major General William
Tunner, who made it work, to mention a few. The book includes 6 pages of rarely
seen photographs and, at the beginning of each chapter, a wonderful Jake
Schuffert cartoon from the Task Force Times, a newspaper for airlift personnel.
A brief historical recap may be helpful. At the end of WW11, Berlin was divided
into four occupation sectors: Soviets in the eastern sector, Americans, British and
French in western neighborhoods.
Allied bombers, artillery fire and Hitler’s order to “fight to the last man” had
destroyed Berlin. The Soviets captured the city in 1945 and pillaged what was
left. They sent whole factories and hundreds of thousands of pieces of industrial
equipment to the Soviet Union, along with German technicians and managers.
There were an estimated one million rapes during the 62 hellish days prior to the
arrival of American troops.
Fast forward to three years later. The civilian population, mostly women, children,
and old people, were still living in basements or in caves dug into the rubble and,
according to a 1947 estimate by Clay’s staff, living on about 900 calories a day.
Hitler’s Reichsmark was nearly worthless making the black market the real
economy of Berlin and American cigarettes the preferred currency,
Clay, Commander of all American troops in Europe, saw currency reform as the
only way to return to some semblance of normality. Not everyone agreed. The
Soviets hoped economic chaos would drive the city, and perhaps all of Germany,
into their waiting arms. The French, having fought the Germans twice in 26
years, wanted Germany to be a poor agrarian nation.
On June 23, 1948, the western powers announced a new West German
currency. Within hours of the announcement the Soviets closed railway traffic on
the line between Berlin and Helmstedt and roads connecting the Western sector
to the rest of Germany. Except for air traffic, the Allied zones were cut off from all
deliveries of food and fuel.
Curtis LeMay, Commander of United States Air Force Europe, viewed the Berlin
crisis as “a logical outgrowth of the God-bless-our buddy-buddy-Russians-wesure-can-trust-forever-and-ever-philosophy that flowered way back in the
Roosevelt Administration.’ What he didn’t say was that the root of the Berlin
problem
was the political decision (apparently made at Yalta), to allow the Soviets to take
Berlin.
Reeves writes that the American position was perilous.
There were hundreds of thousands of Red Army Troops…in and near East
Germany. The Soviets also had more than 2.500 combat aircraft, fighters and
light bombers in East Germany and another 1,500 or so in Eastern European
countries. That compared with 16,000Allied troops, most of them military police
and engineers, fewer than 300 combat aircraft and perhaps 100 British fighters
and bombers. There were another million or so Soviet troops in the rest of
Eastern Europe, surrounding East Germany. Allied troop strength in all of
western Germany was 290,000 men but only one or two combat ready brigades.
As Clay commented years later,
Remember this when the war ended we were sitting over there with the greatest
army that had ever been seen, nobody was ever concerned about anybody
blocking us on roads and railroads… The Japs surrendered and then the
demand for bringing the troops home was great. With a relatively short period of
time our military forces had deteriorated until they were nothing but young high
school boys not wanting to be there.
It is no wonder that the Russians thought they could push us out of Europe. It did
not appear that we were serious about staying.
Let’s make a joint effort, perhaps we can kick them out.” Stalin said to William
Pieck, Communist Party Leader of East Germany, March 19, 1948.
The reaction of Colonel Frank Howley, Commander of Civil Government in the
American sector of Berlin, was to announce: “We are not getting out of Berlin.
We are going to stay. I don’t know the answer to the current problem –not yet—
but this much I do know: The American people will not allow the German people
to starve.”
That’s the back-story of the airlift. Reeves explains what happened next.
‘We stay in Berlin. Period.’ Truman said on June 29, 1948, after his military and
diplomatic advisors told him there was no way for a few thousand allied soldiers
to stand up to hundreds of thousands of Red Army Troops blockading the city.
The airlift began with 10-year old American C-47s left over from the war. The
planes a British pilot had described in 1945 as, “A collection of parts flying in
loose formation” were resurrected from abandoned British airfields and flown by
any pilots who could be found.
In America, the first to be called up were those still on active duty.
"This time [the soldiers] were supposed to free the people they had been trying to
kill, and who had been trying to kill them, only three years earlier."
Noah Thompson, a farm boy from Vermont, had been a bomber and transport
pilot in the Air Force. Within 24 hours of his arrival in Rhein-Main, he was piloting
ten tons of coal to Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. He knew the territory. He’d flown
21 bombing missions over Germany in B-17s.
Thompson was shocked when he saw the proximity of apartment buildings and
the short, 6,100 ft of perforated steel planking laid on top of grass that was the
single runway at Tempelhof. “Pilots coming into Tempelhof did not exactly ’land,’
they dived for the ground.” He saw Germans, mostly women, using
wheelbarrows and shovels to fill holes, all the heavy equipment having been
appropriated by the Soviets. Then women ran to get out of his way but when
Thompson looked back they were running behind him to continue working.
At Gatow in the British sector, 30 Royal Air Force planes of every description
landed the first day, June 26. They took off again as soon as they were
unloaded. It was airborne chaos with different planes flying at different speeds
and altitudes.
The US Air Force grabbed any planes capable of carrying cargo that happened
to be on the ground in Germany, civilian or military didn’t matter.
Newer DC-4s were stripped of seats and bathrooms to be turned into air
transports. “The airplane I had was the city of Denver, an American Airlines
flagship,” said Corporal James Spatafora, who was in charge of rebuilding
hydraulic systems at Rhein-Main.”
Reservists were called up and civilians working for airlines recruited. The airlift
needed pilots, mechanics, maintenance people, and air controllers.
The United States Armed Forces Medical Journal reported later:
Seldom, even in time of war, have persons been so rapidly removed from their
homes or from established society as they were in the early stages of the airlift.
Believing their departures would be for a matter of a few weeks, some left their
families in tourist courts, some left their cars parked under trees, hiding the
keys…
They solved the loading and unloading problem by hiring Germans.
Everyone worked around the clock and it wasn’t enough. By July 23, there were
only 2,500 tons of food and fuel flown into Berlin by British and American planes.
Flying two round trips per 24-hour days both planes and men were breaking
down. The conventional wisdom in America and Britain was the airlift was
"doomed to failure.” Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, advised Truman to
get out before the Soviets drove us out.
But Clay kept asking Truman for more planes and Truman kept sending them.
There was one man who believed it could be done. Major General William
Tunner had directed the Hump operation over the 20,000-foot high Himalayan
peaks during the war. Tunner was lobbying hard to get to Germany. He finally
made it on July 29.
When Tunner arrived the daily airlift delivery averaged 1.985 tons, less than half
the 4,500 minimum considered necessary to keep western Berlin going. Tunner
performed a miracle of logistics and stubborn grit. On August 12, the target
tonnage of 4,500 was reached for the first time.
Winter fog and frost made the airlift more difficult and more dangerous. Yet, on
January 31, Tunner announced that “General winter be damned” the Americans
and British had flown 171,960 tons of cargo into Berlin that month. The cost was
high, before the airlift ended, weather, pilot fatigue and inadequate maintenance
would kill 73 western airmen.
By the beginning of March the cargo flown into the three Berlin airports was
more than had been coming into the city by railroad and canal before the airlift
began - 6,328 tons per day.
Reeves restores to memory one of America’s finest accomplishments. The airlift
could not have succeeded without the British, but Britain was a war-ravaged
country with problems of its own. The success of the airlift depended upon
American money, materials, bravery, and humanitarianism.
Just as General Howley had predicted, the American people refused to let the
German people starve. Geopolitical considerations aside, money collected in
American schools, businesses and churches was used to charter planes to take
packages of food and clothing to western Germany. The packages were then
crammed into transports for delivery to Berlin.
The Soviets realized they had lost. A fact either ignored or not communicated to
Stalin was that East Berlin depended upon the western sectors for raw materials.
When the Allies retaliated with their own blockade, factories shut down and East
Germans lost their jobs. On May 12, 1949, all road and rail routes from the West
were reopened. It was a huge propaganda and political defeat for Stalin. Shortly
afterward the West German Federal Republic and the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization were formed.
This reviewer has always believed that Harry Truman was much under rated as a
president. Richard Reeves’ book confirmed that belief. President Truman
displayed great personal courage in supporting the airlift despite the advice of
almost everyone in his administration. There was no such thing as “leading from
behind” in the Truman White House. A looming presidential election he was
widely predicted to lose did not alter his decision.
On Nov. 2, against all odds, Truman won the election. Polling indicated that
public support for his stand on Berlin contributed to his victory.
There is much to learn from Reeves’ book. As history has demonstrated more
than once, cutting defense without considering future needs can be a fatal error.
Weakness encourages enemies and exacts terrible costs in blood and treasure.
Without the courage demonstrated by Truman, the bravery of the air crews and
the philanthropy of an exceptional people, freedom might be only a memory
today in most, if not all of Europe.
This book would be a good antidote for what college students will learn from their
professors. Daring Young Men should be on everyone’s Christmas list.