Last Tuesday we published on Page 2A a good-news story, Sweet memories mark Berlin Airlift anniversary, that provided fond memories for readers born before World War II and a history lesson for the rest of us.
That piece, by David Rising of the Associated Press, noted the 60th anniversary of the lifting of the Soviet Union’s blockade of Berlin. It also afforded me an opportunity to interview Harold Red Rethmann and Jim Belcher, local men who were players in that critical episode. First, some background:
Berlin, a pre-eminent capital today, was in ruins after WW II. Divided among French, British, U.S. and Soviet sectors, Berlin was surrounded by Soviet-occupied East Germany, linked to West Germany by a 102-mile autobahn, rail lines and canals.
But it was a chink in the Iron Curtain and Moscow wanted the Western powers out of Berlin. So in June 1948, the Soviets closed all land routes into the city from the west, hoping Western forces would abandon Berlin, and the Germans who lived there, to Soviet control.
The West responded with Operation Vittles, a bold plan to fly living necessities into West Berlin. Better known as the Berlin Airlift, when it ended in September 1949, 277,264 flights carrying 2.3 million tons of supplies had been delivered a show of resolve that broke the Soviet blockade 60 years ago last Tuesday.
Belcher, 90, was with an Army intelligence unit at Tempelhof Air Base in Berlin when the airlift started. It was utter chaos at first, he recalled, but they got organized fast.
The challenge for pilots flying into Tempelhof, he said, was to skim over bombed-out, multi-story buildings on the approach, then drop suddenly onto a runway barely long enough to land the big transports.
Planes were offloaded in five minutes, and one landed every 70 seconds, Belcher said. On the airlift’s busiest day, April 16, 1949, 1,400 planes unloaded 13,000 tons of necessities.
I asked Rethmann what he thought about his first white-knuckle landing at Tempelhof. Well, he chuckled, I figured you could at least get in there.
He got in there, and out, 84 times, each time carrying 10 tons of coal. It was a 105-minute flight from Rhein-Main Air Base near Frankfurt to Berlin. There was so much coal dust flying around, he recalled, we looked like minstrel performers by the end of the mission.
Newspapers of the era fed readers a steady diet of airlift/Cold War coverage. The May 12, 1949, San Antonio Evening News ran the story of the lifting of the Soviet blockade on Page 1 under a headline, Berlin hails blockade end as West continues airlift.
Rethmann is fairly blas about his role, as many men of that era are. I was just doing my job, he said. But, he admitted, years later he recognized the gravity of the adventure.
The Berlin Airlift showed the Russians they couldn’t freeze us out, said Belcher, whose expertise was in containing Soviet espionage, but who admired the flyboys up close.
Watching them soar into Tempelhof, he recalls thinking: Some of them are fantastic; others are very, very lucky.
So are we. Who knows where we’d be but for them just doing their jobs?
