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The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour
Putnam
April 2008
On Sale: April 17, 2008
640 pages
ISBN: 0399154965
EAN: 9780399154966
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The masterfully told story of the unlikely men who came
together to make the Berlin Airlift one of the great
military and humanitarian successes of American history. On the sixtieth anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, Andrei
Cherny tells a remarkable story with profound implications
for the world today. In the tradition of the best narrative
storytellers, he brings together newly unclassified
documents, unpublished letters and diaries, and fresh
primary interviews to tell the story of the ill-assorted
group of castoffs and second-stringers who not only saved
millions of desperate people from a dire threat but changed
how the world viewed the United States, and set in motion
the chain of events that would ultimately lead to the
dismantling of the Berlin Wall and to America’s victory in
the Cold War. On June 24, 1948, intent on furthering its domination of
Europe, the Soviet Union cut off all access to West Berlin,
prepared to starve the city into submission unless the
Americans abandoned it. Soviet forces hugely outnumbered the
Allies’, and most of America’s top officials considered the
situation hopeless. But not all of them. Harry Truman, an accidental president, derided by his own
party; Lucius Clay, a frustrated general, denied a combat
command and relegated to the home front; Bill Tunner, a
logistics expert downsized to a desk job in a corner of the
Pentagon; James Forrestal, a secretary of defense beginning
to mentally unravel; Hal Halvorsen, a lovesick pilot who had
served far from the conflict, flying transport missions in
the backwater of a global war—together these unlikely men
improvised and stumbled their way into a uniquely American
combination of military and moral force unprecedented in its
time. This is the forgotten foundation tale of America in the
modern world, the story of when Americans learned, for the
first time, how to act at the summit of world power—a
masterful and exciting work of historical narrative, and one
with strong resonance for our time.
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