Master of the Air: William Tunner and the Success of Military Airlift

Introduction

Introduction In a new millennium, America stands alone as the preeminent military power on this planet. Across the globe, nations and individuals perceive the United States as a monolith of martial strength; no nation can realistically hope to cause much difficulty for its forces on a conventional battlefield. This powerful reality, however, warps history. It fosters—far too easily— inevitability, the sense that since this is the current situation, it was foreordained to occur this way, that sooner or later we would achieve this unparalleled status. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, the story of America’s military includes examples of both triumphs and incompetence, of leaders with genius and determination pitted against political officers and embedded bureaucrats.The same service that is wildly innovative , can also at times be hidebound and convention ridden, especially during peacetime. In particular, the triumphant image has no room for quirky individuals who pushed ahead an agenda of change in the face of entrenched institutions.These players—transformation agents—often found themselves in advance of conventional thinking, fighting to make the rest of the world—and especially the military—break out of standard thinking and accept, and fund, what was new and daring and risky. The armed services, on the other hand, have to make decisions , on how much to bend, how much to tolerate, from erratic geniuses, all of whom bucked tradition, but some of whom could also win wars as well. William Tunner was one of these latter characters, an American military genius so innovative, so independent, and so cantankerous he made the feisty 2 / Introduction George Patton look like a garden club’s accountant. A man with a mission, early in his career he became involved in air transport, and discovered, almost by accident, his life’s calling. Tunner became the father of military airlift, creating systems to make this the preeminent form of cargo carry for the modern armed services. Starting with work ferrying enormous numbers of planes across the country, and then turning the Burma Hump operation into a businesslike proposition capable of delivering unprecedented amounts of goods, he led the first great efforts at mass supply by air. All of this culminated with the Berlin Airlift, which still remains, toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the largest airlift in human history. Most accounts give credit to Lucius Clay, commandant of U.S. forces in Germany, for this operation. No one should remove any laurels from that general and his determined leadership, but the grim reality was that not a single leader—from Clay himself to the most senior diplomats to the Pentagon generals to the press’s most insightful commentators—believed that it was even remotely possible for airplanes to bring in enough to feed, heat, clothe, and provide for a city of over two million individuals. Everyone considered it a doomed plan, a stall for time that would soon run out of steam and hope, especially when it hit the wall of winter, a tough, demanding German season that frequently shut down air operations with suddenness and ferocity. Everyone indeed, except General William Tunner. He knew airlift could work and actually sought out this terrific challenge to prove that his theories were viable. He became the architect of the airlift, the true victor of Berlin in those dark skies of 1948 and 1949. Supported by a cadre of devoted followers, these men figured out how to make airlift work at an unprecedented scale, so that by the time the Soviets called off the blockade,Tunner’s planes were bringing in more supplies than had previously been transported by rail and truck, and rations to Berliners had actually increased. This was an amazing reversal. Prior to World War II, air transport had been seen exclusively as a kind of specialty service, capable of carrying small, precious cargoes—like diphtheria serum—but nothing more substantial than that type of delicate item. Even during a global conflict, experiments of shipping mass goods by air had been tentative, with mixed results, and hardly accepted by higher command authorities.Tunner stood that notion on its ear and proved that airplanes could carry bulk goods sufficient to serve large cities—or armies in the field. The military would never be the same. Thus, the notion that the Berlin Airlift was preordained to succeed does not square with the historical record. At the time, everyone predicted failure. Only Introduction / 3 when a determined, idiosyncratic expert took...