Douglas C-54 Skymaster

Douglas C-54 Skymaster (N500EJ)

Berlin Airlift Historical Society. The Berlin Airlift has shown up here a couple of times.

 

Lockheed C-121 Constellation

Lockheed EC-121 Constellation (N422NA)

Aerial Visuals Airplane Dossier has a history of this aircraft. It flew in the Berlin Airlift back in 1949. It was converted to a military VIP transport (VC-121) and served for sixteen years before it was handed over to NASA where it served in support of the Apollo missions.

Horch 851

1935 Horch 851

I am nearing the end of Masaryk Station by David Downing and I come across a passage where an East German bureaucrat is sent down to Aue to talk to the leader of the local labor union. His boss gives him a Horch 851 automobile to drive to "impress the Russians". He's not keen on any of this, but it's his job, so off he goes. He hasn't driven in a long time and it takes him a while to get sorted, but once he does:

"He loved trains, and the chance they gave you to sit by the window and watch the world go by; but there was something just as liberating about sitting alone in a car, controlling your own direction and speed. An illusion of independence perhaps, but an intoxicating one nonetheless." - Page 311

I've been hearing about America's love affair with the car since I was a kid, but I have seldom heard any kind of cogent explanation, and here I find one in an aside in an espionage novel. I enjoy encountering little bits of clarity like this.

This book is set in the same time period as another espionage thriller I read about a year ago: Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon. The Wismut uranium mines in Aue and the Berlin Airlift show up in both books.

Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon

RIAS, Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor in German or Radio in the American Sector

Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon is an espionage thriller set in post-WW2 Berlin. Our hero's father got him out of Germany prior to the war. Alex, for that is our hero's name, went to California, wrote a best seller and was living the good life until the HUAC started asking him questions that he refused to answer. No longer welcome in the USA he goes back to his home town in Germany: Berlin.

Brandenburg Gate

It's 1949, the Soviets and the Allies are pushing and shoving, working their way up to the cold war. Somebody in the American intelligence community realizes that Alex could be a valuable asset, never mind that he won't answer the bull-necked Senator's questions, so Alex has friends in the American sector. Because he has communist leanings, he has friends in the Soviet sector as well, and because this is his home town, there are people he knows from back in the day. Whether they are still friends might be in doubt, war changes people.

Adlon Hotel in Berlin, survived the war but burned in 1945

He quickly learns that the Soviet brand of communism is 100% bullshit, which puts him in a bit of bind. The action escalates so quickly it begins to look like a James Bond movie, but more complicated, and with real characters.

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Douglas C-54 Skymaster cargo airplanes at Templehof airport.

The Berlin airlift is going on and while it doesn't play a big part in the story, it's quite a story all by itself. I remember hearing about it when I was a kid, but I never realized just how big a deal it was. So they had to fly in some supplies from the West, I mean how many plane loads did they need? There couldn't have been more than a few hundred people living there, I mean most of them got killed in the war, right? Well, no.

Schematic Diagram of Air Lift Routes

There were almost three million people living in Berlin at the time. At one pound of food and two pounds of coal (winter in Berlin is cold) per person, that's like 5,000 tons of material a day. This is when cargo planes were hard pressed to carry five tons, which meant that there were a thousand flights a day, every day for ten months. That's a serious expenditure of effort. It paid off though, because eventually the Soviets relented and the Allies managed to keep hold of half of Berlin.

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Using a Geiger Counter on samples in a Wismut mine, c. 1960.

Another situation that bears on the story: the Soviets were mad to build their own atomic bomb and to do that they needed uranium. The only source they knew of at the time were some mines along the Czechoslovakian - German border. They went at it in a typical Stalinesque manner, using forced labor from POW's and criminals and when that wasn't enough they started conscripting regular people. While the conditions were not as bad as the German slave labor operations, they weren't good. Thousands of people died.

WISMUT mine in Thüringen, Germany. The hills are waste material that has been removed from the mine. The two white metal structures are the head ends of the elevators that go down into the mine.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Germany was left with a environmental disaster that they are still working to clean up.

Berlin Noir by Philip Kerr

The first three Bernie Gunther detective stories in one volume. I just finished the last one: A German Requiem. I don't quite know what to make of it. Too much stuff crammed into too small a box. We have Bernie being a smart mouth tough guy insulting people who you wouldn't think he should be insulting. We have post WWII Vienna under the control of the four powers (Britain, France, US & Russia), just like Berlin and Germany. The Berlin airlift starts while Bernie is in Vienna. We have intelligence agencies vying with the war crimes commission trying to get a hold of former Nazi's. In the one case to enlist their aid either for or against Russia or the Western allies, depending on who you are. In the other to arrest, try, convict and execute them. Lot's of people running around with guns with secret agendas and secret loyalties. It gets a little confused. But then we have two denouements where a couple of players explain to Bernie just what's going on. As if they would know, and as if they would explain it if they did. Wraps it all up in a neat-ish package, except that it leaves a lot of loose ends in the form of ex-Nazis disappearing.

And then there's the infamous getting-clobbered-from-behind-by-the-guy-he-didn't-know-was-there scene. I'm used to seeing it on TV, and I'm really tired of it. There are situations where it can happen, but when someone is on guard and has any sense, it doesn't. You might have a fight, or you might be struck down by a powerful blow, but you are not going to be taken unawares unless there are special circumstances. Anyway, that's the way I imagine it. It's never happened to me, so I don't really know. I could be all wet.