IMPRESSIONS OF A BERLIN AIRLIFT PILOT

I began my life on small farms in Idaho and Utah. Where I grew up in Utah the closest real city was 40 miles away. Things were peaceful. In September 1941 I received a non-college flight scholarship for a private pilot license. I flew Civil Air Patrol missions. Then came Pearl Harbor. In 1943 and early 1944 I trained as a fighter pilot with the Royal Air Force. When I finished training I was assigned back to the Army Air Corps. My first assignment was as a transport pilot in the South Atlantic Theater of Operations.

The war raged and ended. The last thing I ever thought might happen was that in 1948 I would be in Europe, flying day and night to Berlin. Flights would be in thunderstorms, fog, ice and snow to feed the former enemy. On my first trip to Berlin the flattened ruins of the once proud and sophisticated capital looked like a moonscape as the wreckage passed beneath the wings of my flour laden C-54 Skymaster. Me, a farm boy, was thrust into a world gone amuck. What a change from the orderly world of the farm. Everything there was in its place. Neat bales of stacked hay, corn growing clean and tall. Now below my wings were splintered buildings, gaping to the sky with open roofs. Their once stately walls were broken into individual bricks and scattered in the streets and across lots now vacant; lots that once held architecturally classic buildings. It was a signature of war evident in countries around the world.

The Airlift was not just an Air Force operation. The Army and Navy were also heavily involved. The Navy had two top flight squadrons of R=5Ds (C-54s) and had the vital Sea Lift across the Atlantic. The Army had many roles but the greatest was moving everything on the ground. America was not alone. The British and French were partners.

On that first flight to Berlin I was deep in thought. Hitler began this war of destruction. It had interrupted the orderly progress of my life. Now I was 27 years old. I should have had one or two children by now. Instead I wasn't even engaged to be married. Several of my buddies had returned from the war to see their previously conceived child for the first time. Many did not return. They would not see their newborn child in this life. My close friend, Conrad Stefen from Tremonton, Utah was still missing. I had interested him in being a pilot by flying him in my J-3 Cub before the war. Maybe his remains were somewhere under the flight path I had flown that very day, on my way from Frankfurt to Berlin. He had been shot down three years before in his P-47 Thunderbolt.

We had just left the security and comfort of life in America. We were beginning to get our lives back to normal after the war. Now, here we were flying night and day in all kinds of weather; living in tents and tar paper shacks that had housed Hitler's Displaced Persons work gangs. As for me my bed was in the attic of a farmer's old barn in Zepplinheim! We had left for Germany so fast I had to drive the first new car of my life under the trees in Mobile Alabama, put the keys in my pocket, look back once and leave. I would never see that new, red, four-door Chevy again.

How did the ground and flight crews feel after this second disruption of their lives occasioned by what Hitler began?

Those of us who stayed in the military after the war already knew that the enemy and threat to the West was now Stalin and his Soviet Union. They wanted Berlin and West Germany. They had just taken Czechoslovakia and Hungary. West Berlin was next. We knew that Berlin was populated by mostly women and children. When word came that Stalin had cut off all the food and energy supplies to these suffering people this assignment became a worthwhile challenge. But that didn't make this second disruption without some pangs of doubt.

However these last feelings of doubt left me when I landed that first load of 20,000 pounds of flour at Tempelhof in West Berlin. The German unloading crew poured through the open cargo door in the back of my aircraft. The lead man came toward the cockpit, moist eyes hand out thrust in friendship. Unintelligible words but his expression said it all. He looked at the bags of flour and back to us like we were angels from heaven. People were hungry for food and freedom. We were giving them both and they were most grateful. Gratitude is the magic potion that makes enemies friends and seemingly impossible tasks doable. From then on the pangs of doubt were gone.

One of my fellow Airlift pilots had bombed Berlin during the war. I asked him how he felt about flying day and night on behalf of the enemy, the very ones who did their best to kill him as he flew over Berlin in 1944. He hesitated a moment, shuffling his feet and then said, "It feels a lot better to feed them than it does to kill 'em." I only knew of one person who complained of flying day and night in behalf of the former enemy. This I believe was because of the overt expression of gratitude by the West Berliners. Everyone feels peace in their heart when they serve others. This was the case even though the "others" were the former enemy.

One day in July 1948 I met 30 kids at the barbed wire fence at Tempelhof in Berlin. They were excited. They said, "When the weather gets so bad you can't land don't worry about us. We can get by on little food but if we lose our freedom we may never get it back." The principle of freedom was more important than the pleasure of enough flour. "Just don't give up on us." they asked. The Soviets had offered the Berliners food rations but they would not capitulate. For the hour I was at the fence not one child asked for gum or candy. Children I had met during and after the war like them in other countries had always begged insistently for such treasures. These Berlin children were so grateful for flour to be free they wouldn't lower themselves to be beggars for something more. It was even the more impressive because they hadn't had gum nor candy for months. When I realized this silent, mature show of gratitude and the strength that it took not to ask, I had to do something. All I had was two sticks of gum. I broke them in two and passed them through the barbed wire. The result was unbelievable. Those with the gum tore off strips of the wrapper and gave them to the others. Those with the strips put them to their noses and smelled the tiny fragrance. The expression of pleasure was unmeasurable. I was so moved by what I saw and their incredible restraint that I promised them I would drop enough gum for each of them the next day as I came over their heads to land. They would know my plane because I would wiggle the wings as I came over the airport. When I got back to Rhein-Main I attached gum and even chocolate bars to three handkerchief parachutes. We wiggled the wings and delivered the goods the next day. What a jubilant celebration. We did the same thing for several weeks before we got caught, threatened with a court martial which was followed by an immediate pardon. General Tunner said, "Keep it up."

Letters came by the hundreds. A little girl, Mercedes, wrote that I scared her chickens as I flew in to land but it was OK if I dropped the goodies where the white chickens were. "When you see the white chickens, drop it there. I don't care if it scares them." I couldn't find her chickens so I mailed her chocolate and gum through the Berlin mail. Twenty two years later, 1970, I was assigned as the commander of Tempelhof. One letter kept asking us to come to dinner. In 1972 we accepted. The lady of the house handed me a letter dated November 1948. It said, "Dear Mercedes I can't find your chickens. I hope this is OK. Your Chocolate Uncle." I had attached a box of candy and gum. The lady said, "I am Mercedes. Step over here and I will show you where the chickens were." My family and I have stayed with Mercedes and husband, Peter, over 30 times since 1972. And I will again in 2008. The same apartment she wrote from in 1948.

A little girl accompanied by her mother came to my C-54 being unloaded on the tarmac at Tempelhof. She brought me her only surviving possession; a well worn teddy bear. She offered it to me with deep emotion, "This kept me safe during the bombings. I want you to have it to keep you and the other fliers safe on your trips to Berlin." I tried to refuse it but her mother said words to the effect that I must accept it because her daughter wanted to do all in her power to help save their city. I would like to find that little girl.

In 1998 on a visit to Berlin flying an old Airlift C-54, The Spirit of Freedom, with Tim Chopp, a 60 year old man told me he had caught a parachute in 1948 with a fresh Hershey candy bar. "It took me a week to eat it. I hid it day and night. But the chocolate was not the most important thing. The most important thing was that someone in America knew I was in trouble and someone cared. That meant hope." With moist eyes he said, "Without hope the soul dies. I can live on thin rations, but not without hope." Hope is what the British, French and American Airlift, its flour, dried eggs, dried potatoes, dried milk and coal meant to the Berliners, hope for freedom. Everyone needs hope today as much as the West Berliners needed it then. Hope is a universal need. Transport aircraft, and the airlift they provide, deliver hope to the unfortunate around the world who are oppressed by man or nature.

My experience on the Airlift taught me that gratitude, hope, and service before self can bring happiness to the soul when the opposite brings despair. Because not one of 30 children begged for chocolate, thousands of children in Berlin received over 20 tons of chocolate, gum and other goodies, delivered on the ground, or dropped from C-54 Skymaster aircraft over a 14 month period. It all came from other aircraft and other crews in addition to myself.

In my view General Clay was the man for the hour. General Tunner, in particular, made the Berlin Airlift work. He was an Airlift genius. Of the rank and file military it was not the pilots who were the greatest in my view. It was the aircraft mechanics who changed engines in the middle of the night out in the open field, with but a canvas to protect them, day or night, freezing rain or snow. There would have been no aircraft over Berlin but for their efforts. Without the Ground Control Radar operators there would not have been as many planes on the ground in Berlin during much of the Lift, especially in November 1948.

There were thirty one true American heroes of the Airlift. I was not one of these. These are they who gave their lives for the Freedom of their former enemies, the Germans, who had become friends. There were 39 of my British comrades who did the same. The Berlin Airlift changed post war history and the rest of my life.