Print

Mail

wiki links

One Candy Bomber keeps memories of Berlin airlift alive

When the first American pilot was ordered to fly to West Berlin early on June 24, 1948, defying a Soviet blockade and unofficially beginning the Berlin Airlift, he was carrying potatoes to people in need.

Fifty-five years on, one "Candy Bomber," as the aircraft became known, still flies over the German capital but its cargo has changed somewhat.

"It's really important to have fun while you're learning history. It's cruel for children and adults to have to suffer through all those museums. Oh, no... you really have to feel it," says Commander Frank Hellberg.

These days Hellberg fills a Douglas Dakota DC-3, the civilian version of the C-47 transport planes used to keep alive around two million trapped and starving people for over a year, with tourists and shows them Berlin from a new angle.

"They were taking off every two or three minutes," remembers Helmut Streamel, a 71-year-old former airman who is a passenger this time on a 45-minute flight over the German capital and neighboring Tempelhofring Potsdam.

The "they" were the pilots and crew of 500 US and British aircraft, many of them C-47s.

They helped break a stalemate on June 21, 1948 when the Soviets stopped a US supply train reaching West Berlin, which snowballed into a blockade of land and water access points aimed at uniting the city by starving the population into submission.

The pilots broke cargo transport records almost daily, shipping around 2.5 million tonnes of food and essential supplies to Tempelhof airport on some 277,000 flights.

Landing in Tempelhof today is a visually impressive but technically easy approach low over homes and shops -- 55 years ago, a pilot had to fly between multi-storey apartment buildings before he could set his aircraft down.

But a flight in Hellberg's plane over Berlin, including a stunning pirouette around the city's landmark television tower, is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.

As they fire up, the aircraft's engines throb like twin helicopters and they are screaming by the time the 12,700kg plane hauls itself slowly into the air amid a faint smell of aviation fuel.

"Sounds like a Buick engine," a businessman wearing a fine suit and a broad grin, yells over the din to a neighbor among the 25 passengers aboard.

The craft bucks and yaws and demands plenty of physical effort from its pilot and co-pilot, whom passengers clearly see through the open cockpit door.

In 1948, the crew would have been fighting with up to 3,000 additional kilograms in cargo.

While a lot of that was food, pilots also had to manoeuvre coal and fuel for homes and industry in along the three 35km wide air corridors through the Soviet zone.

When the winter hit, energy supplies dropped so low that people were forced to cut down most of the city's trees to heat their homes, scenes that have been largely forgotten these days.

With anti-American sentiment boosted in largely pacifist Germany by the US-led war on Iraq, Streamel says that many people and especially the young need reminding about the help the US gave in the past to save Berlin citizens from certain death.
This story has been viewed 1486 times.