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

9 / Solving Problems

9 / Solving Problems Now it had sunk in; the sea of problems before Tunner was enormous. Berlin was not Burma; the need was far greater, and there was no time to gradually build up a successful operation. Everything had to be working, immediately, since canceled flights just meant hunger for millions of civilians. Raymond Towne recounted a story a colonel had told him, that if Tunner was running the Barnum and Bailey circus, the lion would put his head in the general’s mouth.Thus, if he was to run this show the way he wanted it, the first thing the commanding officer had to do was work harder than anyone else, be in charge of every detail of the operation. British squadron leader J. C. Douglas believedTunner worked twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours, and was thus informed on every aspect of the airlift. Earl Morrison, his crew chief, remarked , “I couldn’t believe how that man worked”; while Gail Halvorsen, who would become famous as the Candy Bomber, said that Tunner “came across as a man with a mission.”1 Tunner used this energy to lead his men, or to use the air force historian Daniel Harrington’s phrase, it was “management by walking around.” Morrison claimed, “He would show up unannounced wearing that old flight jacket,” so that often you did not even know who he was, but Richard Bodycombe, another airlift vet, noted that while he definitely recalled seeing Tunner check things out, the general remained both recognizable and “an imposing figure.” Tunner himself wrote that he would make himself “available to the pilots and crew members, seeking them out and listening to their complaints.” Some of 142 / Solving Problems this was done at night, and even if the only exchange was a quick greeting, or a few minutes standing next to a flight controller, the effect was still powerful: the general was omniscient and omnipotent, always on top of things.2 In all fairness, this meant he drove his men hard, had little patience for less than perfection. Edwin Glazener, flight surgeon at Wiesbaden, remembered howTunner dressed him down in front of his staff, a terrible breach of military protocol. Even decades later, Glazener told an interviewer, “I could not abide the man, and I really mean it.”3 The log of Tunner’s daily activities provides ample evidence of the level of work he took on to get the airlift running at full steam. On July 30, for example , the results of a staff meeting list twelve different new initiatives, ranging from checking on the assignment of C-54s at Rhein-Main to working on “possible improvements to Tempelhof airport,” to looking into a cargo backlog , to figuring out what statistics the operation would need. The August 2 report started with a list of nine key decisions made, and moved on from there to eleven other items.4 There are also hints of the approach Tunner would take to making the airlift work. On August 28 the staff began a time study of unloading procedures which would speed up this process and provide more flying hours for each plane. On August 31Tunner directed that from that point on, each craft would have an operational record detailing hours flown, time spent in maintenance, and how many minutes and hours were dedicated to loading, unloading, and servicing. As the log noted, “It is the history of the plane during each 24-hour period.” With this data, Tunner and his staff could now get a clear picture of how their fleet was being used, and where they could gain greater efficiency. Tunner dreamed of a goal of one plane landing in Berlin for each of the 1,440 minutes in a day, but eventually had to settle for one every three minutes.5 Before this could become a reality, however, he had to use that prodigious energy to solve a myriad of problems. First on the list was improvements in Berlin ’s airports, and if possible, construction of new facilities. The need was fundamental, but the problems were immense. Local airports, like everything else in this recently destroyed city, were in poor shape, way beyond what would seem adequate for an air mission of this magnitude, and their shortcomings extended to matters both large and small. Firefighting apparatus, for example, remained grossly inadequate throughout the airlift, as detailed in a May 1949 report on Rhein-Main. The authors claimed that “proper fire fighting equipment was...