In the early hours of June 26, 1948, phones began ringing across
America, waking up the airmen of World War II--pilots, navigators,
and mechanics--who were finally beginning normal lives with new
houses, new jobs, new wives, and new babies. Some were given just
forty-eight hours to report to local military bases. The president,
Harry S. Truman, was recalling them to active duty to try to save
the desperate people of the western sectors of Berlin, the enemy
capital many of them had bombed to rubble only three years before.
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had ordered a blockade of the city,
isolating the people of West Berlin, using hundreds of thousands of
Red Army soldiers to close off all land and water access to the
city. He was gambling that he could drive out the small detachments
of American, British, and French occupation troops, because their
only option was to stay and watch Berliners starve--or retaliate by
starting World War III. The situation was impossible, Truman was
told by his national security advisers, including the Joint Chiefs
of Staff. His answer: "We stay in Berlin. Period." That was when
the phones started ringing and local police began banging on doors
to deliver telegrams to the vets.
Drawing on service records and hundreds of interviews in the United
States, Germany, and Great Britain, Reeves tells the stories of
these civilian airmen, the successors to Stephen Ambrose's "Citizen
Soldiers," ordinary Americans again called to extraordinary tasks.
They did the impossible, living in barns and muddy tents, flying
over Soviet-occupied territory day and night, trying to stay awake,
making it up as they went along and ignoring Russian fighters and
occasional anti-aircraft fire trying to drive them to hostile
ground.
The Berlin Airlift changed the world. It ended when Stalin backed
down and lifted the blockade, but only after the bravery and sense
of duty of those young heroes had bought the Allies enough time to
create a new West Germany and sign the mutual defense agreement
that created NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
And then they went home again. Some of them forgot where they had
parked their cars after they got the call.
General
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