A typical Airlift night
At
10:07 p.m. on a typical airlift night, a load of flour arrived at a railroad
siding in Zeppelinheim. There, it was
loaded by a team of DP’s (displaced
persons), working under the orders of an Army Transportation Corp private, onto
a ten-ton trailer driven by a soldier of the 63rd Truck
Company. By 10:31 the truck held 212
sacks, exactly the amount that a C54 could safely carry. The truck headed for Rhein-Main, where the
driver, Private Earl Windom, uncoupled his trailer in Bay 27 on the transfer
strip at the airfield. Then, Windom
headed back for another load.
While
the load of flour was en-route to Rhien-Main, the crew of the airplane that
would carry it was receiving up-to-date information on their flight path and
being briefed on current Soviet activity in the corridor, alternate landing
sites, and any new navigational procedures.
Then they proceeded to their plane, a C54 bearing the number 5540. Captain Douglas A. Graham slid into the
pilots seat for this leg of the trip; his co-pilot, Captain Harold Klopp would
fly the right hand seat.
The
trailer Windom had left had been on the field twenty-one minutes before the
control tower called the Air Force van at the transfer strip to let the men
there know that aircraft number 5540 would be ready for a load in four
minutes. Another 63rd Truck
Company tractor hitched up to the trailer and pulled the trailer of flour out
to the loading area of the field. By
11:00, another group of DP’s was heaving the sacks into the waiting C54. By 11:21 that work was complete, the flour
sacks were strapped down, and line mechanics were completing their servicing of
the plane.
At
12:21 a.m., C54 5540 lifted off from Rhein-Main and began a climb to nine
hundred feet while maintaining its take-off heading. Then, turning and climbing at a rate of three hundred feet per
minute, Graham headed for the Darmstadt radio beacon. There he turned again and, in the next twenty-two miles ,
continued to ascend so that he was at his assigned altitude when the plane was
over the Aschaffenburg beacon. There,
C54 5540 turned for Fulda.
The old
city of Fulda is a Baroque masterpiece, largely untouched by the destructive
bombing raids of the war. One of
Germany’s oldest churches, that of Saint Michael, was built there in the ninth
century. Pilgrims from across the
country have come there for years to worship in the magnificent
eighteenth-century cathedral, where the remains of Saint Boniface, the martyred
“ Apostle of The Germans,” lie in a crypt beneath the alter.
To
Graham and Klopp, the church and cathedral were lost in the dark landscape five
thousand feet below them. Fulda was
nothing more than a monotonous radio voice in the ether, broadcasting a cryptic refrain at 265
kilocycles. “Dit, dit, dah, dit; dah, dit, dit,” the Morse code for F and D,
was the endlessly repeated , and vital, message of the Fulda radio beacon that
came through their earphones. Those
letters marked that point in the sky where the airmen changed course
again. When the needle on their
radio-compass spun 180 degrees, indicating that the beacon was now behind them,
they made a turn of 23 degrees. That
put them on the heading of 57 degrees magnetic that pointed straight down the
southern air corridor to the city of Berlin.
When
the compass needle flipped, Klopp called in the exact time, so that the ship
just behind them could adjust its speed to reach the Fulda beacon a precise
interval later, maintaining the steady stream of aircraft.. By 12:36 a.m., C54 5540 had entered the
airspace above the Soviet Zone. Exactly
forty minutes after they passed over Fulda, co-pilot Klopp called into
Tempelhof radio control for clearance to begin to descend to two thousand on
their initial approach to Berlin. Over
the Wedding beacon, the plane turned again, slowed to 140 miles per hour, and
began to lose another five hundred feet of altitude. Two turns later, the plane was on its final approach. At 2:05 a.m. the wheels touched the runway
at Tempelhof. As it slowed, a jeep with
a large “Follow Me” sign in the rear appeared to lead 5540 to its unloading
station.
Two
minutes later the plane was stopped on its hard-stand, and by 2:09, the first
sack of flour was being heaved down a chute off the plane. The crew of DP’s doing the unloading was
supervised by Donald Chase, a young private assigned to the 26th
Infantry, but pressed into airlift duty.
By
2:27, all 212 sacks of flour had been placed on the back of a truck and were
headed to a transfer station ramp.
Within twenty-two minutes the load was transferred to a diesel truck
supplied by the Magistrat of the City of Berlin. At 3:00 a.m. Martin Bromer, a Berliner,
chugged away with it. By 3:13, it had
been delivered to the Schluterbroffabrik, the Schluter Bread Factory. There, three shifts working round the clock
produced 60,000 loaves of bread a day.
By
7:30 in the morning, the sacks of flour from Abilene Mills had been converted
to bread that was in vans on their way to be delivered to shops throughout the
city. The airlift was feeding the city. There was no alternative that anyone in the
world could see, now that diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis had
failed.
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