Were you disappointed?
Oh well, I thought. You salute and do what you’re told. We did take out some of our energy in Navy Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers. We had five at the base for recreational flying. After a cargo run, we jump in these airplanes and go beat up the sky, dogfight each other. Then the war ended.

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I came back stateside and was flying C-74s and C-54 Skymasters when they needed me. In our pilot meeting every month, we’d get a world briefing and were right up to snuff about Stalin. Then the call came in one night. Our commander said, “They’ve cut off stuff to Berlin, and we need to have four planes in the air tomorrow for Germany.”

How long did you expect the mission to last?
The orders were something around 23 days. But for me it lasted seven months.

Did you have misgivings about helping the Germans?
Of course. They’d started the war, and we had been told what beasts these people were—killing Jews and everybody else, whatever it took. Germans were bad news.

How did you resolve that?
Stalin was the new threat. Most of the people in West Berlin were women and children, and he was starving them, cutting off their food supply!

Did the Soviets ever interfere?
Oh sure. We got buzzed a number of times by fighters coming over from East Germany. They’d come up individually, buzz you head-on and then at last-minute pull up and come right over your wing. At first, we didn’t know whether they were going to shoot or not. When we found out they weren’t going to shoot, why, that kind of broke the monotony.

Just before the airlift started, in April 1948, in a corridor from the northern bases over East Germany into Berlin, a British airliner was coming in and one of these guys buzzed it and didn’t pull up in time—killed everybody. So we just hoped each pilot had had a physical and that his depth perception was okay.

Do your recall your first flight into Berlin?
Indelibly. We came over the top and could look through the buildings—they were like fingers pointing to the sky. It looked like a moonscape. I wondered how 2 million people could live in a place so totally devastated. Templehof Airport was right in the middle. We had to come over those bombed-out buildings and get down real quick.

Not having seen many Germans, I wondered what these supermen were going to look like. When I landed that first 20,000 pounds of flour and opened the back doors, they came right up and put out their hand. Couldn’t understand a word they said, but boy, the look in their eye and tone of their voice when they looked down at that flour. From that point on, we were on the same page.

What else did you transport?
Coal, milk, dried potatoes, dried eggs…everything. I even flew gasoline in drums before the British converted their Lancasters to tankers.

And candy. How did that start?
A buddy of mine in Berlin told me, “If you get a chance, I’ve got a driver and a jeep for you.” So I flew back to Templehof. I always had a movie camera with me, and I wanted a movie of the approach before meeting the jeep. At the end of the runway, in an open space between the bombed-out buildings and barbed wire, kids were watching the airplanes coming in over the rooftops. They came right up to the barbed wire and spoke to me in English. These kids were giving me a lecture, telling me, “Don’t give up on us. If we lose our freedom, we’ll never get it back.” American-style freedom was their dream. Hitler’s past and Stalin’s future was their nightmare. I just flipped. Got so interested, I forgot what time it was.

Did you miss your jeep?
I looked at my watch and said, “Holy cow, I gotta go! Goodbye. Don’t worry.” I took three steps. Then I realized—these kids had me stopped dead in my tracks for over an hour and not one of 30 had put out their hand. They were so grateful for flour, to be free, that they wouldn’t be beggars for something extravagant. This was stronger than overt gratitude—this was silent gratitude. How can I reward these kids?

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