The musings of a politically incorrect dinosaur from a forgotten age where civility was the rule rather than the exception.
Webster
The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions." --American Statesman Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
Wednesday, June 24, 2020
The First time the Soviets blinked...
I wanted to get away from current events for a bit and go back to the historical post that I normally do on my blog because the current event stuff really pisses me off so to save my blood pressure, I changed up a bit, LOL
I have blogged a lot about Berlin, I was attached to one of the communities associated with Berlin during the cold war. Next to my love of Stuttgart, I have a keen attachment to that city. One day I want to return to Berlin and Stuttgart and see how thing have changed. Now for some background.
After the war, Germany and Berlin was partitioned into 4 areas of responsibility by the victors of the war, The Soviets got the eastern half of Germany and the eastern half of Berlin and according to the agreement at Yalta, I believe they got the honor of capturing Berlin, Eisenhower was fine with that idea, from what I have read, he didn't want to sacrifice American lives in a symbolic gestures of capturing the German capital, Stalin wanted that feather, he didn't care about casualties, just the bragging rights. Eisenhower had the mindset that "sure, capture the capital, then have to give half of it back to the rest of the allies" George Patton of course incensed that we let the Godless communist capture the capital.but I digress. Well anyway in my mind this factored in the attitude about forcing the allies out of Berlin in 1948 in Stalin's mind, the Red Army paid for for it, anyway they the Soviets already owned it.
I clipped the following article off one of the history magazines I have in my bookmarks.
June 25, 1948, the
Soviet Union, flush with the success of driving the Nazis out of Russia,
was becoming piqued at the US and British. Relations were rotten. The
Soviet Communists had imported their dictatorial politics to East
Germany and were losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the
Germans. You see, the Germans had seen years of Allied generosity and a
willingness to restore democratic freedoms that Hitler had removed since
the 1930s. Given a choice, the Germans were choosing the Western
ideals.
The Soviets would have no
part of it. Or should I say the Communists since the resistance to the
West did not come from the Russian people, it came from the Communist
Party which saw the clash in Berlin as a PR disaster in the making.
Soon the Communists decided
that they were simply going to elbow the Americans French and the
British out of Berlin altogether. ‘The transport division of the Soviet
military administration is ordered to halt all passenger and freight
traffic to and from Berlin tomorrow at 0600 hours because of technical
difficulties. West Berlin will receive electricity only between 11 p.m.
and 1 a.m….’
It escalated
to April 1st, 1948, when U.S. authorities had refused to submit to
Soviet inspection of military rail shipments. A fight was avoided by
negotiations. But a passive aggressive stance became the tactic of the
day when on June 15th, Communist forces shut down the autobahn. Their
claim was that it needed repairs.
General LeMay’s staff
calculated what a resupply mission of this sort would require with the
aircraft available in the theater. The 2,000 tons of coal and 1,439 tons
of food per day to for 2 million inhabitants was not possible with the
C-47s sitting around.
Berlin’s
Lord Mayor-Elect Ernst was ready to capitulate, but was talked out of
it by Americans who basically said: “have a little faith.”
All
C-47s in Western Europe were ordered to stage into Wiesbaden and
Frankfurt, where two large American bases sat near the East German
border.
Also, four-engine
Douglas C-54 Gooney Bird transports that could carry 10 tons each were
ordered from Central America, the Pacific theater, Alaska, and the
continental United States. Ground crews, mostly out of work German
civilians loaded supplies. The RAF offered 58 Douglas C-47 Dakotas, a
few Handley Page Hastings, and 40 Avro York aircraft. They used Gatow in
the British sector as a base of operations.
Within
days, a C-47 was landing at Tempelhof every eight minutes; well over
150 planeloads a day, but it was a fraction of what was needed.
Berliners were already beginning to dig into their pantries.
A
classic propaganda war ensued and this one the Soviet press could not
win. The evil Communists try and starve their unwilling constituents,
and the West comes to the rescue. Tempelhof Airbase in East Berlin had
become ground zero at the beginning of the Cold War. It had gone from
winding down to one or two flights a day to constant air traffic in and
out. Reporters from the west and the east milled about watching what the
Germans were calling Die Luftbrücke or air bridge.
Inside
West Germany, technically skilled Russians, engineers, and equipment
operators were forcibly deported to areas of need in Russia. Did they
think that after the suffering of the previous years there wouldn’t be a
network of people to leak this information? These people had been
silently resisting for so long that it was in their blood to stand up
against tyranny.
Did they think the
neighbors of the Germans who were forcibly relocated would sit by and do
nothing? Stalin was a one trick pony: he screwed everyone before they
could screw him. Stalin thought that the tactics he used to shove
competitors out of the way in post-Tsarist Russia would work in a
post-WWII multi-national alliance. He thought he could force the Allies
out of Germany, and he wanted a united German capital thriving under
Communist rule, and eventually a united Germany under his thumb.
A
U. S. Air Force C-74 Globemaster plane touched down at Gatow airfield
located in southwestern Berlin, Germany on Tuesday with more than 20
tons of flour from the United States. “Operation Vittles” otherwise
known as the Berlin Airlift (June 24, 1948-May 12, 1949) was a combined
effort of the western allies against the Soviet Union’s blockade of all
land routes into Berlin. The German children look on as the flour bags
are lowered on August 19, 1948
There
is a psychology behind his instincts. The Germans went after Stalingrad
because it was his namesake. He would try and turn the tables on Hitler
and end up ruling all of Germany instead.
Only one thing stood in his way: The US and Allied airlift capability.
In August, Allies lifted
121,000 tons and West Berliners were gradually getting enough to live on
comfortably. Seeing that two airfields could not carry the load, a new
airport Tegel, was steamrolled in the French sector. The steamrollers
had to be cut into sections and re-assembled in East Berlin because they
were too large for the C-54s.
Eventually
veteran Maj. Gen. William H. Tunner, a World War II who organized the
re-supply operations from India to China was called on. Soon he was
named commander of the Combined Airlift Task Force. The first thing he
did was schedule regular heavy maintenance. Engines were maintained by
the Navy machine shops at Alameda Naval Air Station, California.
The
bitter winter weather also strained operations. Icing was a huge
problem because the volume of the supplies allowed little time for
maintenance on runways.
Tunner
said in an interview ‘What I found was badly needed was better timing
of the flying operation….Valuable time was wasted in Berlin as crews
landed, parked, shut off engines, took off for the snack bar and then
strolled over to Operations to make out their return clearances. I laid
down an order: No crew member was to leave the side of his aircraft
while the Germans unloaded it.
Each
plane would be met by an operations officer who would hand the pilot his
return clearance all filled out, and a weather officer would give him
the latest weather back at his home base. Mobile snack bars tended by
ladies in Berlin would move to the side of each plane. Turn-around time
was cut in half to 30 minutes.’
Tunner’s
changes made the flights much more efficient. He forced crews to make
instrument landings to avoid delays due to the weather. Plus the total
route was 120 miles often through bad weather. Most of the Air Force
pilots were 30 to 60 days away from home. They were mostly part-time and
reserve force pilots.
‘Things
like poor mail service, no curtains on the windows so crews could sleep
in the daytime, and poor washing facilities took on huge proportions,’
Tunner said. He created a competition and published loading times to see
if he could motivate crews to outperform each other. Remember people
were still exhausted from the clean up of central Germany after the war.
It’s not like there wasn’t a ton to do around airfields of a country
that is trying to rebuild itself. In 1949 a 12-man crew C-54 loading
crew loaded 20,000 pounds in five minutes and 45 seconds.
There was a shortage of
trained aircraft maintenance people and crews trained for a rigorous
full load take-offs day and night. At Great Falls Air Force Base in
Montana, replacement pilots were trained. The narrow air corridors, the
approach to the three bases inside West Germany, and the instrument
landings were duplicated exactly for practice. C-54s were loaded with
64,000 pounds of sand for practice flights, and flying these re-supply
missions was so strenuous and exacting that three landings were required
at 70,000 pounds before a pilot qualified.
An RAF Short Sunderland moored on the Havel near Berlin unloading salt during the airlift
By
the end of September, the Dakotas were taken off line and 225 C-54s
were doing the hard work. An East German spy, stationed in an apartment
house and noting the unloading of every plane at Tempelhof, was
reportedly punished by authorities who thought he was just making up the
tonnage totals.
Few
realize how close this came to becoming a shooting war. American P-80
Shooting Stars and P-47 Thunderbolt aircraft flew escort and combat air
patrols. A Soviet anti-aircraft artillery unit moved in front of the RAF
field at Gatow and fired incendiary bullets at British aircraft in and
around Gatow. Over 700 times Soviets made aggressive movements towards
aircraft during Operation Vittles. These included dropping fake bombs,
releasing barrage balloons, live firing at and near aircraft and jamming
radio signals.
The
airlift didn’t actually end until September 30, 1948. Total flights:
276,926, total passengers, 227,655; Total days of operation, 321; total
supply tonnage 2,323,067; total taxpayer costs to Americans, $345
million, to the Brits, 17 million pounds; to the Germans, 150 million
Deutschmarks; total lives: Seventy-five American and British.
By
the Spring of 1949, it became obvious to the Russians that not only was
the plan going to work; The Airlift was now flying in more tonnage per
day than they were previously sending in by rail. During a 90 day period
in 1948, the total tonnage of all US 18 domestic carriers including
mail and cargo and passengers amounted to 3,119 tons. That was less than
the amount of cargo carried into Berlin in one day at the operational
zenith.
It was the first
major loss in the Cold War for the Soviets. They had miscalculated. They
couldn’t imagine the will of the Americans and British and French to
spend all this time and effort just to make a point.
It was the start of modern air traffic control. Narrow one-way corridors in and out, enforced by the Soviets. Precise timing, to the point of a plane with a malfunction was yanked out of the taxi-line and replaced by the next plane.
Palletization of cargo to even greater extent than during the Central Pacific campaign, leading eventually to the creation of standardized air containers.
And what an uplifting venture. Berliners who were initially against the Allies swung pretty much wholeheartedly towards them. Especially the extra airlift few in the West knew about. Many pilots took to dropping treats and toys out of their cockpit windows while overflying the city. I had a friend's mom who was a Berliner who remembered this.
(I also had a friend's mom who lived in West Germany and remembered the US trucks driving down the roads after the war, and the GIs tossing candy and rations towards the kids and ladies, or even stopping and handing out food.)
The Berlin Airlift was one of the greatest achievements never remembered by the post-war generation. It literally saved West Germany and Western Berlin, and by inference, saved Western Europe and eventually Eastern Europe.
Inspiring. God bless those air and ground crews who made it happen. Thank God we had generals who could do all that planning that made it work. Praise God for the political leaders who had the backbone to order it to happen and not cave in to the Communists.
It was the start of modern air traffic control. Narrow one-way corridors in and out, enforced by the Soviets. Precise timing, to the point of a plane with a malfunction was yanked out of the taxi-line and replaced by the next plane.
ReplyDeletePalletization of cargo to even greater extent than during the Central Pacific campaign, leading eventually to the creation of standardized air containers.
And what an uplifting venture. Berliners who were initially against the Allies swung pretty much wholeheartedly towards them. Especially the extra airlift few in the West knew about. Many pilots took to dropping treats and toys out of their cockpit windows while overflying the city. I had a friend's mom who was a Berliner who remembered this.
(I also had a friend's mom who lived in West Germany and remembered the US trucks driving down the roads after the war, and the GIs tossing candy and rations towards the kids and ladies, or even stopping and handing out food.)
The Berlin Airlift was one of the greatest achievements never remembered by the post-war generation. It literally saved West Germany and Western Berlin, and by inference, saved Western Europe and eventually Eastern Europe.
Great post, Mr G. Thanks. Well Done.
ReplyDeleteInspiring. God bless those air and ground crews who made it happen. Thank God we had generals who could do all that planning that made it work. Praise God for the political leaders who had the backbone to order it to happen and not cave in to the Communists.
ReplyDelete