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

7 / A Cowboy Operation

7 / A Cowboy Operation The officers running the airlift had their work cut out for them in those early days; the need was enormous, and withoutTunner’s experienced team, they had to start from scratch. The most comprehensive analysis of Berlin’s daily food needs was a tough order to fill. Each and every day, planes would have to deliver, not just meat and potatoes and flour, but forty-three tons of milk (all dried, both skim and whole), ten tons of cheese, eleven tons of coffee, and eighty-five tons of sugar. It was a big order, and that did not include the coal.1 The first step was to choose a commanding officer, and on June 28 LeMay appointed Brigadier General Joseph Smith, head of the Wiesbaden Military Post. Smith would make the first steps to tackle this mission, working under LeMay’s direction.2 Smith’s initial move was to order more planes. United States Air Forces in Europe had, at that time, 102 C-47s, which carried three tons apiece, but only two of the larger C-54s, capable of hauling ten tons on each trip. Something more would be needed.3 On June 25, Clay contacted Brigadier General August Kissner, chief of staff at USAFE, asking him how many planes they had. According to an after-action interview, Kissner said he “told him the Air Force would do its best, that estimated tonnages would be submitted in an official message in a half hour.” That follow-up promised roughly one hundred trips a day with the C-47s, and suggested that raising the 300-ton figure to 500 tons would require another thirty C-54s.4 A Cowboy Operation / 109 The next day, Clay’s chief of staff called Kissner and told him, “Turn it on.” But at the same time LeMay was contacting Lieutenant General Lauris Norstad, the deputy chief of staff for the U.S. Air Force, in Washington. LeMay asked for those thirty C-54s, with two crews apiece to keep them flying the maximum number of hours.5 The air force came through. On June 28 the Fifty-fourth Troop Carrier Squadron left Alaska with nine planes, while the Twentieth with its dozen C54s took off from its home in the Panama Canal Zone; both were bound for Germany. The next day the Nineteenth Troop Carrier Squadron flew out of Hickam Field in Hawaii with eleven more, and on July 10 the Seventeenth Troop Carrier Squadron out of Great Falls, Montana, added its nine planes 5. General Joseph Smith, Tunner’s predecessor as head of the Berlin Airlift. This photo was taken when he was a lieutenant general and commanding officer of MATS, 1951–1953. Smith was not a fan of Tunner. (History Office, Air Mobility Command, Scott Air Force Base, Box 7, Folder 5) 110 / A Cowboy Operation to the growing fleet. In total, forty-one transports joined the Berlin Airlift, enough to raise the daily figure hundreds of tons, yet nowhere near enough to feed the city once existing stocks ran out. But at least things were looking up.6 Another bright note in those early days was the commitment of allies. On June 25 the Royal Air Force ordered one squadron of eight C-47s to start flying supplies to Berlin, and the next day doubled that with another squadron of the same size. The first flight by a British transport took off at 6 a.m. on the twenty-eighth, and over the next twenty-four hours thirteen planes brought in forty-four tons of food.7 By then, it seemed like planes “were coming in so fast and furious,” according to Paul Harris, who served in the Berlin Air Safety Center. In the last days of June the airlift had totaled only 1,404 tons, but the figures were climbing. On July 8 Berlin received 1,117 tons, but this dropped to 819 the next day; by July 15 it was up to 1,480 tons again. The air command began to refine operations : the original agreement with the Russians permitted three corridors. The central lane would no longer have two-way traffic and would be dedicated to outgoing flights only from Berlin, in order to increase efficiency.8 Coal was becoming a problem; Berlin needed a lot of it, and it was bulky and hard to manage, the antithesis of the small, high value packages most experts claimed were the only legitimate air cargo. One...