The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  On June 25th, two B-17s, based in Wiesbaden and ordinarily used on passenger runs, each delivered five tons of food and medical supplies to West Berlin. The day after that, General Lucius D. Clay, the American military governor in Germany, telephoned from his headquarters here to the headquarters of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe, in Wiesbaden, an order that an all-out cargo airlift to Berlin be created immediately. (The British hurriedly took similar steps.) Before the day was over, twenty-five C-47s—the military designation for the two-engine transport known to civilians as the DC-3—had ferried eighty tons of food and medicine to Tempelhof. The airlift was under way. It was estimated that forty-five hundred tons was the minimum amount of supplies required daily—once the reserve supplies on hand were exhausted—to keep the inhabitants of that area alive, reasonably healthy, and unreceptive to whatever advances might be made to them from the east. That minimum was attained in a little over six weeks.

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  A little less than two-thirds of the freight delivered by the airlift has been coal, and a little less than one-third food; the rest, amounting to 7 percent of the total, has been industrial raw materials, liquid fuel, and whatnot—all intended to help, in one way or another, to convince the people of West Berlin that, considering their peculiarly isolated position, they were faring quite handsomely, and to give the million-odd folk in East Berlin something to think about, too. The Combined Airlift Task Force has brought West Berlin, among other things, pig iron, X-ray film, vitamin tablets, newsprint, pencils, stationery, snowplows, hand tools, machine tools, surgical instruments, combs, window glass, cement, nails, chemicals, police uniforms, matches, candles, ladies’ underwear, TNT, and detonators, the last two (for removing rubble) in separate shipments. Berlin is a big radio-manufacturing center, and the radio industry has to have magnets for loudspeakers; the airlift has furnished them, but because magnetized magnets throw airplane compasses out of whack, the magnets had to be demagnetized before they were shipped and remagnetized afterward. The list also includes bicycle parts, sheet steel, needles, thread, typewriter keys, asbestos, buttons, quicksilver, insulating tape, paints, lacquers, medicine bottles, roofing felt, and a thousand other items, among them five and a half pounds of dried-banana flakes that the airlift has ferried in every week for each of three German infants who have a rare digestive ailment and are unable to assimilate any other food.

  Once a month, the Task Force’s planning experts have got together at their headquarters, in Wiesbaden, and, with frequent recourse to the slide rules that have invariably decorated their desks, made an informed guess at the amount of tonnage they expected to be able to fly to Berlin the following month. Their estimate has been passed along to the Bipartite Economic Commission, which is a mammoth agency in Frankfurt, generally known as Bico; the information has then been sent on to a Bico subsidiary called the Berlin Airlift Coordinating Committee, or Bealcom. Meanwhile, Bealcom has obtained from German and Western officials in Berlin an estimate of the Western sectors’ requirements for the month. Bealcom, the chairman of which has been suffering from stomach ulcers, has then had to decide how much of what kind of commodities would be shipped to Berlin from each base in the Western zones. It has established priorities among commodities, so that if the Task Force should prove unable to do as well as it hoped to, the most essential items could be carried in—newsprint, say, on the eve of an election. The Task Force has nearly always done better than its announced expectations, and this has made people in some small-minded non-aviation circles suspect that the air people have set their quotas a mite low, so that they could point with pride to the regularity with which they exceeded them. Whenever there has been space to handle more than the assigned cargo, it has been given over to coal. The procedure of assembling cargoes has been little different from what it was before the blockade. Food, coal, and other commodities have simply been sent by the dealers who handle them to airbases, instead of to railway freight houses, barge piers, or truck depots. When the commodities have reached Berlin, they have been turned over to the German distributors who handled supplies before the blockade.

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  Tempelhof, the airfield in the United States sector, was among the Nazis’ most splendid ornaments before the war. Its hangars and administrative offices—quite a few of them later damaged by bombs and Russian artillery—form a continuous, curving, half-mile-long structure, with only 20 percent less floor space than the Pentagon. Surmounting the edifice is a twenty-foot eagle, clutching the earth in its talons. In the customary Nazi fashion, a swastika shield was once appended to the globe. Soon after the Americans took over the premises, they denazified the bird with a speed and ingenuity they have been accused of not always applying to livelier holdovers from the old regime. They slapped some white paint on the eagle’s head and some gold paint on its beak and then superimposed the Stars and Stripes on the swastika. They ended up with a very presentable American eagle. Tempelhof, for all its splendor, is poorly situated. A seven-story apartment house stands near the approach to the field, and a number of industrial plants, some with tall smokestacks, are nearby. One of the plants, a brewery, had a chimney almost five hundred feet high. After the owner had ignored a few oral complaints by the pilots, some American engineers came around one day and made a few exploratory nicks at the base of the offending tower—the kind of nicks designed for the insertion of charges of dynamite. The brewer soon clipped a couple of hundred feet off his chimney. The French have been more forthright in dealing with navigational hazards. A couple of hundred yards from Tegel, the airfield in their sector, there stood the two towers of Radio Berlin, a station under Soviet control. Some French engineers blew them up one day, and not only didn’t give the Russians a hint of their intentions but didn’t even tell the Americans, who were in charge of airlift flight operations at the field.

  The principal drawback of Tempelhof last June was that it had only the one runway, and that was in indifferent shape. Two weeks after the airlift got going, engineers began to repair the runway and construct a second one there. By mid-September, it was finished, and in October a third was completed. Meanwhile, the British improved the runway at Gatow, and meanwhile, too, the Americans were building the field at Tegel, with one runway. Bulldozers, graders, rock-crushers, dump trucks, asphalt, and steel matting were flown in for the work; several of the larger pieces of machinery had to be cut apart with acetylene torches in the Western zones, and then welded together here. The engineers had nowhere near as much equipment as they wanted, however, and they were obliged to follow the example set by other engineers during the Hump operation. At that time, Indians and Chinese built airfields practically by hand. Almost the same thing happened in Berlin. Six hundred thousand cubic yards of brick rubble were converted into runway foundations by Germans working with hand tools and wheelbarrows. At Tegel, twenty thousand Germans were employed, in round-the-clock shifts. Women made up 40 percent of this labor force. A Hearst man took a photograph of some of them on the job and sent it to the United States, where a Hearst paper tacked on a caption identifying the subjects as slave laborers toiling under the lash of the Reds. The runway at the Tegel airfield was completed in just under three months, and the field was officially dedicated last November, when an American airlift plane flew in with twenty thousand pounds of cheese and two Air Force generals.

  The Germans in West Berlin at first reacted to die Luftbrücke with a mixture of enthusiasm and skepticism. Most of them were certain that the venture was ill-starred, but many of them felt that it nonetheless deserved a thumping round of applause, for effort. Accordingly, they turned up at the airfields in large numbers and showered pilots, along with a few passersby in uniform, with tokens of their gratitude and esteem—bouquets, old coins and stamps, books, stickpins, souvenir plaques, songs about the airlift, and, in one instance, a pair of dogs. The Germans also spent a lot of time looking up, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, at the sky, even though there wasn’t much to see. During October, to commemorate t
he completion of the airlift’s first hundred days of operations, the West Berlin post offices cancelled all outgoing mail with a Luftbrücke postmark. In recent months, the airlift has been taken as a matter of course, and a freight-carrying plane has attracted no more attention here than a United Parcel Service truck does in Westchester. West Berliners lately have gazed at the sky only when there wasn’t an airplane in sight. In three years, they switched from being apprehensive at hearing an alien plane to being apprehensive at not hearing one.

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  Before the blockade, the American, British, and French sectors got a total of some fifteen thousand tons of cargo a day, by railroad, barge, truck, and plane. The eight thousand tons a day that have been delivered by the airlift have had a somewhat greater utility per ton. In the pre-blockade days, West Berliners got fresh potatoes. During the blockade, they have got dehydrated ones, which weigh and bulk less and which, though inferior in taste, provide equal nourishment. In addition to potatoes, their airborne bounty has included frozen and canned beef, frozen and canned pork, frozen and smoked fish, flour, processed and natural cheeses, dehydrated vegetables (mostly carrots, onions, and cabbage), lard, suet, margarine, butter, sugar, honey, salt, rolled oats, rice, grits, macaroni, spaghetti, noodles, pudding powder, yeast, cake flour, coffee, tea, cocoa, powdered eggs, soup powder, dried skim and dried whole milk, dried fruits, chocolate, and assorted baby foods. A little more than half of this has been produced in West Germany and the rest has been imported—vegetables and potatoes from England, the Netherlands, Italy, and Hungary; cheese from Switzerland and Denmark; wheat and flour, oats, dried peas and beans, meat, powdered eggs, and dehydrated potatoes from the United States. The frozen meat, the cheese, and the chocolate have had the highest shipping priority. They have been regarded as the most perishable of the foods and also the most pilferable, and the longer it has taken to get them on a plane, the more tempting they have become to the occasional weak-willed German or displaced person doing the loading.

  In recent months, no loader has had a chance to be tempted for very long. The usual elapsed time between removing meat from refrigerated freight cars at a siding at the Rhein-Main airbase, trucking it to a plane, loading it, flying it two hundred and eighty miles to Berlin, unloading it, and trucking it to a cold-storage warehouse has come down to four hours. Salt, a commodity carried exclusively by the British, was a problem of another sort, early in the airlift, because it corrodes the metal parts of aircraft. The British got around that for a while by moving it in flying boats that commuted between a lake in Hamburg and a lake in Berlin and that had already been treated to make them impervious to salt water. When winter came along, it was feared that the lakes would freeze over, and the flying boats were grounded—or, rather, docked. By then, though, somebody had come up with one of the many ingenious ideas that the airlift has inspired. Noncorrodible copper panniers were suspended from the bomb bays of several old British bombers, and the delivery of salt without harm to the delivery wagons was thus triumphantly assured.

  The American, British, and French colonies in Berlin add up to less than 1 percent of the population of the West sectors, and it has not been difficult to keep them reasonably well provided with delicacies peculiar to their tastes—kippered herring for British breakfasts, wines for French lunches, and olives for American Martinis. (The wives of some United States military-government officials in Berlin put out a cookbook entitled “Operation Vittles” during the winter, the proceeds going to charity. The recipes dealt with such unaustere concoctions as beef Stroganoff, cherries à l’eau de vie, eggnog chiffon pie, and crêpes Suzette. Only one entry, a punch called Block-ade, seemed at all indigenous. Its ingredients are two cans fruit cocktail, one cup sugar, two bottles cognac, six bottles red wine, six bottles white wine, six bottles champagne. Serves seventy-five.) All the food brought in for the Germans in the Western sectors has been rationed. The amount allotted has varied according to how strenuous the recipient’s occupation was. The average German has been authorized to buy enough food in each of a dozen major food categories—meat, potatoes, bread, sugar, salt, and so on—to give him about two thousand calories a day, which, though slightly below the amount recommended by our National Research Council for a sedentary man (twenty-four hundred), has been more than enough to sustain life. Many Berliners have amplified their food allotment by growing produce, and then there has always been the black market, for those who could afford it. The Western occupation authorities, eager to stimulate husbandry, have brought in, via the airlift, garden implements, vegetable seeds, and fertilizer, and, on one occasion a few weeks ago, a three-ton shipment of young fruit trees. West Berliners have occasionally complained, ever since the success of the airlift has made them feel secure enough to complain, that they don’t care for the taste of dehydrated potatoes, but from a strictly medical point of view, they are believed to have thrived during the blockade.

  Before the war, Berlin manufactured more than half the electrical products used in Germany, and it was a flourishing industrial center generally. Not long after the blockade began, when it became evident to the Western military governors that unless the city was to become a giant poorhouse, its economic life would have to be kept functioning, they began to permit manufacturers to import raw materials. (German manufacturers have been required to pay delivery charges, at the pre-blockade rail rate, for whatever goods they have received by airlift.) Lately, two hundred and sixty tons of raw materials have been flown in daily, and—what is equally important—a hundred tons of manufactured goods have been flown out. The value of the radio tubes, light bulbs, lathes, milling machines, telephone and telegraph equipment, and other precision instruments shipped out has been a quarter of a million dollars a day. In addition, the airlift has flown fifty thousand Germans out of Berlin. The British, who have taken care of nearly all the native passenger traffic (though there are several American Overseas Airlines flights between Berlin and Frankfurt every week, and the United States Army runs still another passenger service for its own people), decided, a few months ago, in order to demonstrate that blockaded Berlin was getting along all right not only economically but also culturally, to fly the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, seventy strong, to London for a concert. Two handsomely outfitted passenger planes, dispatched from London to pick up the musicians, stopped en route at Wunstorf, one of the airlift bases in the British Zone. To the R.A.F. men it was unthinkable that any plane should fly into Berlin without adding its mite to the airlift’s daily tonnage, so they had a hundred-pound sack of flour deposited on every seat in both ships. Each sack was tied down with a safety belt. It was undoubtedly the most stylish delivery of flour ever made.

  A NOTE BY SUSAN ORLEAN

  One thing will never change: people are interested in other people. Empires crumble, traditions shatter, formats explode, trends wither, boundaries are perforated; what endures is our curiosity to know what’s going on inside the other guy. Magazines thrive because the articles they publish are the bound and printed satisfaction of that curiosity. From the start, The New Yorker devoted lots of its prime real estate to what it called Profiles. I’d even argue that Profiles are the single essential unit of The New Yorker’s identity, the one element that is indispensable to the magazine.

  In the forties, Profiles were different, and maybe even had greater consequence than they do today. We did not know each other back then the way we know each other now. These days, Barack Obama sends us emails; the Pope tweets; celebrity divorces are posted in real time. We know, or, at least, we feel that we know, a great deal about people of power and prominence in the world, thanks to the nonstop digital gush of information—personal, professional, significant, ridiculous. In the forties, by contrast, the informational distance between celebrated people and regular people was vast. The people the magazine profiled were usually well recognized, but, for most of the public, they were well out of reach, and they kept tight control over their images. A Profile written at the length and with the
intimacy encouraged by The New Yorker offered a rare chance to get close.

  The magazine in the forties was staffed by giants of the form: E. J. Kahn, Jr., Lillian Ross, Janet Flanner, St. Clair McKelway, Joseph Mitchell. These writers didn’t invent the Profile, but sometimes it feels as if they had. Each had a distinct voice, but their writing had in common a tone of familiarity and authority—qualities that became the mark of a New Yorker Profile. Their pieces move at a majestic, leisurely pace. (So leisurely, in fact, that you could probably injure someone if you rolled up all three installments of Richard O. Boyer’s Duke Ellington Profile and swatted him with it.) There is no paragraph up top announcing the purpose of the Profile or what the subject happens to be selling at the moment. There is no grand summing up at the end of the piece. There is never that self-conscious moment in which the writer makes a plea for taking the story seriously, even when the subject is obscure. A wonderful confidence underpins every one of these stories; it seems that the writers simply believed that their interest in any subject was justification enough for writing about it. As a reader, you notice only the writer’s decisions—what to include, what to examine closely, what to describe. You never feel that the story has been stage-managed by the subject or by a publicist or, for that matter, by an editor with an agenda. Readers sense that the story is authentic, and that it grew out of a genuine interest on the part of the writer, rather than out of a press release. Having grown up in the age of celebrity journalism, I was used to reading articles that were very obviously directed by some interested party. The first time I read these pioneering New Yorker pieces, I remember being amazed; I couldn’t believe you could really find stories like this, in which the writer, and not the subject, set the pace.