Armageddon (82 page)

Scott was almost mad enough to tell Stan that Monika was a tank job ... but not quite.

Nick was a mosaic of assorted grins glorying in Scott’s discomfort.

As they talked to Tempelhof Airways, Stan got out of his seat for a moment and took a big carton from under the flight engineer’s table and handed it to Nick.

“What the hell’s that?” Scott asked.

“Well, every clear day I see little kids standing on the rubble piles at the end of the cemetery watching us land. Lot of times they’re at the airport, too. But did you ever notice that none of them ever came close to us, talked to us?”

“That’s the way krauts are,” Scott answered.

“Kids shouldn’t be that way,” Stan said, “anyhow, I thought I’d try something.”

“What’s in there?” Nick asked.

Stan opened the carton. The other two looked in curiously. Nick’s big paw fished out a tiny handkerchief parachute. Attached to the strings was a bar of candy. The carton held over a hundred parachutes and candy bars. “I rigged them up in my spare time,” Stan said. “I want you to toss them out of the back door just before we land.”

Nick was touched. Scott shrugged as though Stan were crazy.

The final right turn around the Tempelhof Beacon at five hundred feet began the steep glide that took them over the St. Thomas Cemetery between rows of half-bombed-out apartment houses. Stan looked out. Yes, the children were there on the rubble near the end of the runway. Full flaps ... the big bird slowed. Nick was at the back door throwing out the toy parachutes. They billowed, floated to earth. The children scrambled for them as the craft touched down on the end of the runway.

Within seconds hysterical phone calls were made from Russian spies in the apartments at the end of the runway, and from the Air Safety Center. Strange objects over St Thomas Cemetery! Parachutes! What kind of new sabotage were the Americans up to!

Candy bars?

Candy bars!

Candy bars!

People’s Radio decried it with passion. “The latest American trick is to bribe little children in a heartless effort to justify remaining in Berlin.”

In the days that followed, children in the zone made thousands of toy parachutes for their “friends” in Berlin. Sidney the Kangaroo hopped all the way to New York to collect tens of thousands of candy bars. The ritual of the candy drop took place from many Skymasters every day.

Ulrich Falkenstein said, “It is good for little children to look up to the sky and see a rain of candy bars.”

And thus, the legend of Stan Kitchek, “The
Chockolade
Flyer,” came to be.

Chapter Twenty-three

A
BATTERED ALARM CLOCK
sounded. It was two in the morning. Sean reached over the bed for Ernestine. “Honey, don’t get up,” he said, half asleep.

“I will be back as quickly as I can.”

She left the bed groggy and shivering and bundled herself in a heavy robe.

Reinickendorf Borough was receiving its two-hour morning allotment of electricity. Like the rest of the women in the building she yawned around in the middle of the night.

She heated several pans of water. They would be lukewarm by morning, but they could be partly reheated by a “blockade blitz pill” so Sean would not have to shave and wash in icy water. She put up hot thermoses of coffee and breakfast broth, ironed a few pieces of clothing, did a light wash, and cleaned, and did all of the chores that required light and electricity.

Propriety had to be served. This meant finding a room away from his own quarters for himself and Ernestine. It was a room in Reinickendorf in the French Sector close to where the new airfield was being built, a third floor walk-up with some bomb damage, but it did have its own tiny bath and kitchen alcove.

Except for a telephone that could reach him from Headquarters they lived like Berliners. Reading, eating, bathing by candlelight or by the flicker of a kerosene lamp.

“Above all, stand tall,” Berliners were told every night at another rally.

It was hard to stand tall after hours-long waits for rations, scrounging for rare and precious articles such as soap, patching unpatchable clothing, stuffing paper in shoe soles, walking five miles to and from work in darkness. Life was further reduced to semiprimitive existence.

Hospitals scheduled operations and X-rays at rare hours; schools struggled on without heat, light, textbooks. Radios were heard by pooling to save precious batteries; most of the news was broadcast on mobile trucks.

Dentists’ wives supplied power for drills by generating electricity by pumping bicycle wheels; concerts and lectures and rallies were held by candlelight; cinemas played in the middle of the night to audiences who often walked across half the city to get to them.

There was no glass to replace a broken window, no parts to repair a watch, no automobiles for civilians, no malt for beer; no typewriter ribbons for offices, no paint, no cosmetics, no hardware, no machine parts.

Rubble fields were bulldozed or cleared by hand and blockade gardens attempted to induce a few vegetables from the earth with seeds donated from Munich and Hanover and Heidelberg.

Blockade runners crossed from the Russian Zone at great risk and their black market prices were high. The Americans “officially” frowned on it, but quietly saw to it that the blockade runners got enough gasoline to keep in business, for even at smugglers’ prices any food augment was precious.

Yet, out of this darkness a legacy came into being. Berliners were hanging together, shrugging at hardship, laughing at their own plight:

“Better dried potatoes than Kumm Frau.”

“Thank goodness the Americans aren’t blockading and the Russians trying to Airlift us.”

The life of powdered eggs, scavenging for twigs, the long lines, the candlelight, the Russian abuses, the checkpoints went on, but the people became tougher with an infectious feeling of martyrdom cementing them together.

The only moment a Berliner’s heart leaped with fear was when the beat of the engines stopped above them. Berlin lived on one lung and its faint heartbeat was the sound of the engines of the birds.

In this battle of will power, they held their share of the fortress wall.

A short way from where Sean and Ernestine had their room, the third airfield raced to completion.

The engineers of the 350th Support Squadron in Berlin picked an area adjoining French Headquarters, near the Tegel Forest—a flat field an equal distance from Tempelhof and Gatow. They scoured Berlin for heavy construction equipment, but were able to come up with little more than steam rollers dated from the turn of the century.

At the Hanau Base in the American Zone the heavy equipment was assembled, cut up by torches, transported in the C-74 and C-82 transports, and put on special flying duty on the Lift. Ten thousand barrels of asphalt were brought to Berlin along with pierced steel planking.

The Airlifting of the thousands of tons of machinery and supplies for the new runway was the minor part of the story.

There was no steel or rock for foundation of a runway that had to measure from two to ten feet in thickness. Western Berlin was searched for unused rail lines which were pulled up and carted to Tegel. Rubble and paving stones were hauled in.

A volunteer labor force was assembled from the people. The pay was poor, but there would be a hot meal served on each shift to keep them going. Twenty thousand Berliners answered the call!

Nearly half this force were women and they reported to work wearing dresses, business suits, dilapidated army uniforms, wooden shoes, tennis shoes, barefooted, wearing bathing suits in the heat, rags in the rain.

Every facet of the social and professional life was represented in this labor army that in the aspects of its massiveness resembled the construction of an Egyptian pyramid. But, unlike Egyptian slaves, these people worked themselves into exhaustion with a tenacity beyond measure, for there is no way to measure human determination.

A small force of fifteen American officers and less than a hundred enlisted men governed them as they cleaned, salvaged, crushed, carted, shoveled, and spread by hand a million feet of rock and brick.

The airport which they said could not be built in a year under the circumstances was nearing completion in a mere ninety days!

Ernestine returned to bed as the lights of Reinickendorf went out and the neighboring borough of Wedding was given their two-hour quota. Sean had fallen back to sleep. She hoped there would be no early call from his Headquarters today.

Chapter Twenty-four

N
ELSON
G
OODFELLOW
B
RADBURY
I
NHERITED
the deal at a table of colleagues at the Dahlem Press Club.

“Low ball,” he announced.

“They landed another five thousand tons by GCA today,” Clarke of AP said.

“I’ll open,” said Whittsett from Hearst

“The next Russian move has got to be a corker,” Clarke mumbled.

“My next move is to call you.”

“Call.”

“Beats me.”

“Call.”

“What do you think, Nellie? Where do they hit next?” Bishop of CBS pondered.

“They’ve got a number of possibilities. Clamp down on smuggling, try a physical take-over of the City Hall and Magistrat ... number of possibilities.”

A waiter behind him bent forward to speak. “Telephone, sir.”

He passed the deal to Clarke and lumbered to the phone booth.

“Hello, Nelson Bradbury speaking.”

“You know who is here speaking?”

Nellie recognized the gauzed mouthpiece “disguise” of a Russian press officer named Sobotnik.

“Yes.”

“It would be in your interest to leave the club now and walk west on Argentinische Allee for further contact.”

Click.

Nellie shook his mop. The great Russian mania for secrecy and mystery had to be served. He cashed out of the game and left the club. The streets looked like London during the blackout days.

He walked a great enough distance to establish that he was alone and unfollowed. Sure enough, a black staff car from the Russian Embassy trolled past slowly from the other side of the street. Nellie stopped at the corner, yawned, waited for the car to make a second pass.

Two men emerged, unmistakably NKVD. They could be distinguished even in the poor light ... they played their parts like bad actors: large brim hats, ill-fitting double-breasted suits, bony faces, sinister manner.

He got into the car on orders and held up his handkerchief to offer it as a blindfold. The NKVD men did not think it was funny. They drew the curtains and whisked down the Potsdamer Chaussee and over to the suburb of castles and mansions. He was driven to the fortress of Marshal Alexei Popov, led to a library, and closed in.

He speculated on the nature of his midnight summons. The Soviet strategy was clear. They wanted to keep the West talking and force concessions because of the pressure of the blockade. Yet, they were in no hurry, because all the top Soviet planners predicted a collapse of the Airlift in the winter.

In Moscow and at the United Nations their statesmen talked in circles. Just as the West indicated breaking off negotiations, the Soviets yielded just enough to keep the talks on. They agreed to a plan for new four-power currency for Berlin. On the surface it appeared to be a Russian softening. However, Marshal Popov received instructions to prevent actual execution of the agreement.

Despite the blackmail card of the blockade, Nellie felt a number of things were giving the Russians short hours of sleep. The Berliners were proving to be pressureproof. The Americans and British came back from the disaster of Blue Monday with the ground-controlled approach landings and now some sort of engineering miracle was taking place at Tegel. The Russians wanted no part of the coming December elections in Berlin.

Finally, a rising anger of world opinion was stronger than expected. Rallies for Berlin were erupting everywhere and the German people were showing a unity that was frightening to the Russian mind.

The silver fox of the Soviets, Marshal Alexei Popov, came to the library in an amiable mood.

“So good of you to come.”

“Are you going to behead me, Marshal?”

Popov slapped Bradbury on the shoulder. “I have liked always your candor. Sit, please.”

Nellie loaded his glass with vodka and whacked away at the tray of caviar, paper-thin slices of Polish ham, smoked sturgeon, and other delectables long missing on the other side of the Brandenburg Gate.

“I want to clarify misconceptions of the Soviet position. Your press should expose your people to the truth of the situation.”

In all of his travels Big Nellie always wondered if they believed their own words. “Let us say, sir, that we expose our people to your side of the question ... almost as you expose the Russian people to our side.”

Popov laughed heartily. He knew he could not bully the journalist and wished no further repartee with him.

Popov reviewed the situation, said the West was in Berlin illegally, and had turned the city into a base for spies. In the zones of occupation Nazis were being used to rebuild the German military for a war of revenge against the Soviet Union.

Nellie doodled some notes, hearing nothing new, and knowing this was not why he was called to Potsdam.

Popov continued to say that the friendly and peace-loving Soviet people had tried to make a settlement, but talks had failed because of Western treaty-breaking.

“Mainly, it is a lie that the Soviet Union is using the threat of starvation in Berlin. There is no blockade of Berlin!”

The body blow had been delivered!

“The Airlift aggression is unnecessary. The Soviet Union guarantees food for every Berliner and to return to work all of those workers unemployed by the American and British aggression.”

Nelson Goodfellow Bradbury went away from Potsdam a worried man. No one in the American and British headquarters, and not the most optimistic Berliner, believed the Airlift could keep the city going during the winter.

The Russian guarantee of food and jobs might prove irresistible to the Berlin housewife with a couple of children and the man thrown out of work and was meant to crush the West, for the price of Russian food and jobs was acceptance of the Russian currency.