Airmen in a Hurry

The secret orders to U.S. and British airlift pilots was to top their own previous record (8,246 tons in 24 hours) and fly at least 10,000 tons of food, coal and other supplies into Berlin in one day. The crews flew as they had never flown before. The four-engined C-545 and twin-engined R.A.F. Dakotas roared into Tempelhof, Tegel and Gatow airfields at the rate of one a minute. Twenty-four hours and 1,398 trips later, they paused to tot up the score. They had gone way over the top, had flown in 12,940 tons. That was equivalent to the load 22 freight trains might have carried--more than Berlin's West sectors even got by land in a single day before the nine-months-old Russian blockade began.

As the planes streaked across the sunny sky over Berlin, a Soviet officer at the Air Safety Center, charged with keeping track of the Western planes, complained bitterly : "You move around so fast I can't keep my records straight." Airlift Commander Major General William Tunner got a breezy example of his men in action. When he asked one airlift pilot at Tempelhof for a ride back to his headquarters at Wiesbaden, the pilot glanced at the general's regulation pilot's jacket which hid his rank and shouted: "You'll have to shake your tail and get aboard. We're in a hurry."

The general grinned and got aboard.

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