The 40s: The Story of a Decade (54 page)

Here and there we encountered brief delays, waiting for groups ahead of us to move on. At one point, we were held up for quite a while because a boy from a grammar-school group, a child of seven or eight, took violently ill, possibly because of the heat, during the brain-and-kidney lecture. The traffic finally got so dense that our guide and two others decided to merge their three groups. We proceeded from the laboratories to a large exhibit room, the riches of which are so numerous and so varied that it would be impossible to describe all of them. If you can imagine a combination of the most exciting features of Mme. Tussaud’s, the entrance to the Rialto Theatre, and the cleverest advertising devices of, say, the Champion Spark Plug display at the Automobile Show in Grand Central Palace, you will have an idea of what the room is like. There is, for instance, a giant register on one of the walls that looks like a mileage recorder on a speedometer; its last digit changes every time a new set of fingerprints is received into the F.B.I. files. It clicked about twenty times while we were within sight, and the last figure we saw was 111,453,482. The walls of the room are covered with strikingly colored photographs, most of them life-size, of famous G-men and their victims. The photographs are pasted on heavy cardboard, and are cut out, silhouette style, and glued to the walls. One set of photographs is of a criminal named
Roscoe Pitts, who tried to alter his fingerprints by having skin from his torso grafted onto his fingertips. There is a stunning life-size picture of his mutilated midsection. The place has no dummies, as a waxworks has, but it is really better than Mme. Tussaud’s, because many of the properties are not reproductions but genuine relics. John Dillinger’s bullet-ridden straw hat, his bloodstained shirt collar, and the cigar he was about to light when the G-men plugged him are all on display. So is his death mask. Then, there is a collection of Guns Used by Notorious Gangs and Gangsters, and the Dead File, which contains the F.B.I.’s records on a number of spectacular public enemies who won’t be troubling the Bureau any more. It seemed to me that the exhibit room was an even greater triumph of the F.B.I.’s educational program than the laboratories were, and I gathered that the boys and girls with me felt the same way about it.

All things considered, we had been well prepared for the pièce de résistance of the tour, a visit to the F.B.I. shooting gallery, in the basement. This range is used by the G-men, each of whom is required to brush up on his marksmanship at least once a month. The man who was shooting when we got there didn’t need much brushing-up. His target, made of paper, was a life-size black-and-white drawing of an ugly customer in a snap-brim hat, pulling a rod. We stood directly behind this G-man while he gave us a short lecture on the three guns he was about to use: the .38 police revolver; the Magnum revolver, the most powerful hand weapon ever made; and the Thompson sub-machine gun. After his talk, the lights went out, except for one bright light on the target, and for a few seconds there was an almost unbearable racket as the G-man, whose ears were plugged with cotton wadding, let go with the three weapons. After he had finished, he pressed a button, the other lights went on, and the target, suspended on wires by pulleys, came rushing toward us. The paper man had been hit twice in each arm and about eight times in the chest and stomach, and there was an almost continuous slit straight across his neck, just above the collar line. After a great deal of gee-whizzing and holy-smoking, our guide spoke up. “And now, folks,” he said, for the last time, “if there are any particular questions at all, please don’t heztate.” “How do we get out of here?” one of the girls asked in a quavering voice.

MAY 14, 1949 (ON THE BERLIN AIRLIFT)

A
fter the blockade is ended next week, the Berlin airlift will probably continue for a while, on a gradually reduced scale, but for all practical purposes this prodigious operation at last appears to be over, and the score can be added up. Nothing quite like the airlift has ever happened before. For the first time in history, a community of a couple of million people, cut off from its sources of supply, as far as land and water transport are concerned, has been kept alive for months with supplies brought in by air. Specifically, the nearly two and a quarter million residents of the three Western-power sectors of Berlin have been sustained by the lift economically, and perhaps ideologically, since June 26, 1948. The fourth occupying power has, not unexpectedly, taken a disparaging view of this extraordinary delivery service. One of the Left Wing propaganda lines thrown hopefully toward West Berliners went, in effect: “Don’t let those Americans, British, and French kid you into thinking that they’re exerting themselves on your behalf. Have you forgotten so quickly that during the war, when they bombed your homes and killed your children, they never seemed to have any trouble sending four or five hundred planes to Berlin at once? So why should you get excited over this vaunted airlift of theirs? What does it consist of, anyway? Just one measly plane at a time.” Arithmetically, such an argument was unassailable. Unlike a fleet of bombers, the airlift has not filled the sky, either visually or aurally. However, the argument ignored both the obvious fact that the wartime bombers did not have to land inside Berlin to deliver their cargoes and the fact that while there have not been many
aircraft over the city at any one time since last June, there has almost always been at least one. Twenty-four hours a day, as a rule, and seven days a week, no matter where a person happened to be in the three hundred and forty-four square miles that comprise the shattered city of Berlin—an area twenty-four square miles larger than that of the five boroughs of New York—he has been able to hear the steady, patient drone of an airlift plane overhead. An instant after the sound of its engines ebbed away, the purposeful hum of another plane would come within earshot. Just as a trickle of water can, if sufficiently prolonged, wear down the stoutest rock, so the airlift, with its unostentatious but ceaseless trickle of flights, carved a large hole in the Soviet blockade of Berlin, if, indeed, it was not in large measure responsible for the Russians’ decision to lift the blockade.

The airlift has been unimpressive to the Berlin eye and its planes have averaged only seven or eight short tons apiece per trip, but it has provided the inhabitants of West Berlin with a million and a half short tons of supplies. The French have played only a modest, earth-bound role in the airlift operation. The Americans and the British have done all the flying and between them worked out so precise and smooth a procedure that, unless hampered by weather, they have been able matter-of-factly to deliver to West Berlin, from eight outlying airbases, around eight thousand short tons of airborne cargo every twenty-four hours. One day in mid-April, when ideal flying conditions prevailed and everybody worked extra hard, the airlift ferried in 12,940.9 tons of cargo. Just ten days after that performance, by what may have been pure coincidence, the American State Department announced that the Soviet Union seemed disposed to sit down with the Western powers and discuss doing away with the Russian blockade, the Western counter-blockade, and the muddled dual-currency situation here that had prompted an admirer of Samuel L. Clemens to declare that the main intention of the occupying powers in Berlin seemed to be that never the twain marks should meet.

The American and British personnel engaged in the operation call it the airlift, the literal German version of which is
“Luftversorgung,”
but the Germans themselves, uncharacteristically, prefer the shorter word
“Luftbrücke,”
which means “air-bridge.” To its direct beneficiaries, the lift is almost invariably
“die Luftbrücke.”
During the summer of 1948, the Americans and the British worked independently. In mid-October, they set up a joint organization, called the Combined Airlift Task Force, with headquarters at Wiesbaden, in the United States Occupation Zone, two
hundred and eighty miles southwest of Berlin. The United States Air Force and the Royal Air Force still have separate titles for their respective assignments. The Americans call theirs Operation Vittles. The British call theirs Operation Plainfare. They had decided on “Planefare,” to stress the manner of transport of Berlin’s supplies rather than their austerity. Shortly after the airlift began, however, an R.A.F. man inadvertently used “Plainfare” in an official document, and that spelling became official. There is no evidence that any American airman has thought of switching to “Operation Victuals.”

The names “Vittles” and “Plainfare” were invented when the airlift was starting and when its sole objective was to keep West Berlin from running short of food. Both names, once the airlift was an apparently permanent phenomenon, became metonymical misnomers. Only 30 percent of the tonnage ferried to Berlin has been edible; such is the complexity of modern urban civilization that in Berlin coal, not bread, has proved to be the staff of municipal life. It has taken only fifteen hundred tons of foodstuffs a day, or a little more than a pound per person, to provide West Berliners with an adequately nourishing, if not notably fancy, diet. But it has taken two pounds of coal per person per day to provide even the subnormal quantities of heat, electric power, gas, and other utility services they have been getting since they began living in a blockaded community. Three out of every five tons of cargo carried on the airlift have consisted of coal. Quite a bit of this has been for Berlin’s manufacturing industries, which have also been receiving a small but steady flow of raw materials, for without industrial activity there would have been even more unemployment in the Western sectors than there is now, and unemployed residents of those sectors have trouble, naturally, buying their daily allotment of food. (The Americans and British haven’t been giving the food away; they have just fetched it in.) Some of the industrial plants that have received airlift coal are below the flight paths that all airlift planes have had to follow, and now and then the smoke from the flown-in coal, as it billowed from the factories’ stacks, has obscured the vision of the airlift pilots. Among the products manufactured by the West sectors’ still-struggling factories are small locomotives, which have been exported, in airlift planes, to the coal mines of the Ruhr, where they have expedited the production of coal to be airlifted to the plants in Berlin that have created the smoke that has annoyed the pilots who have flown in the coal. The Berlin airlift has been a complicated business.

· · ·

At the Postdam Conference, in July, 1945, Germany was cut up into four zones of occupation, and Berlin, deep within the Soviet Zone, into four sectors. A belt of Russian-occupied territory, nowhere less than seventy-five miles wide and at some points twice that wide, separates the Western zones of Germany from the Western sectors of Berlin. In November, 1945, the members of the Allied Control Council, the four-power agency then supervising the Occupation, wrote down a set of rules covering air traffic to and from the quadripartite city. Straight lines were drawn, on a map, from the Allied Control Authority building, in the heart of Berlin, to three westerly cities—Frankfurt am Main, in the American Zone, and Bückeburg and Hamburg, in the British. Each line represented a twenty-mile-wide corridor, through which all non-Russian air traffic from the Western zones to Berlin would thereafter have to be routed. The Bückeburg corridor, crossing a hundred miles of Russian-occupied Germany, is the central one. The Hamburg corridor, to the north, also crossing a hundred Russian-occupied miles, and the Frankfurt corridor, to the south, crossing a hundred and eighty, converge on the Bückeburg corridor as it nears Berlin, like the outer edges of an enormous arrowhead. Each of the occupying powers, including the Soviet Union, has the right to send planes along all three corridors at any time. In 1945, there were four landing fields inside Berlin. The sectors assigned at the Potsdam Conference to the United States and Great Britain included two of them—Tempelhof, the city’s most elegant airdrome before the war, and Gatow, which had been a training center for Luftwaffe fighter pilots. The Soviet Union got the other two. It also had eight fields in its own zone, just beyond the city limits. When, on June 24, 1948, the Russians stopped all land traffic to Berlin from the west (water traffic was not halted until two days later), the Western powers had good reason to be grateful for that formal agreement about the corridors. Without them, and without the two fields in Berlin, there couldn’t have been any airlift.