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The Heroism and Triumph of The Berlin Airlift-June 1948-May 1949
Simon & Schuster
January 2010
On Sale: January 5, 2010
346 pages
ISBN: 1416541195
EAN: 9781416541196
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Historical
In the early hours of June 26, 1948, phones began ringing
across America, waking up the airmen of World War II—pilots,
navigators, and mechanics—who were finally beginning normal
lives with new houses, new jobs, new wives, and new babies.
Some were given just forty-eight hours to report to local
military bases. The president, Harry S. Truman, was
recalling them to active duty to try to save the desperate
people of the western sectors of Berlin, the enemy capital
many of them had bombed to rubble only three years before. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had ordered a blockade of the
city, isolating the people of West Berlin, using hundreds of
thousands of Red Army soldiers to close off all land and
water access to the city. He was gambling that he could
drive out the small detachments of American, British, and
French occupation troops, because their only option was to
stay and watch Berliners starve—or retaliate by starting
World War III. The situation was impossible, Truman was told
by his national security advisers, including the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. His answer: "We stay in Berlin. Period."
That was when the phones started ringing and local police
began banging on doors to deliver telegrams to the vets. Drawing on service records and hundreds of interviews in the
United States, Germany, and Great Britain, Reeves tells the
stories of these civilian airmen, the successors to Stephen
Ambrose’s "Citizen Soldiers," ordinary Americans again
called to extraordinary tasks. They did the impossible,
living in barns and muddy tents, flying over Soviet-occupied
territory day and night, trying to stay awake, making it up
as they went along and ignoring Russian fighters and
occasional anti-aircraft fire trying to drive them to
hostile ground. The Berlin Airlift changed the world. It ended when Stalin
backed down and lifted the blockade, but only after the
bravery and sense of duty of those young heroes had bought
the Allies enough time to create a new West Germany and sign
the mutual defense agreement that created NATO, the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization. And then they went home again. Some of them forgot where
they had parked their cars after they got the call.
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