On Friday the 13th of August 1948 U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Sterling P. Bettinger tried to land his Douglas C-54 Skymaster transport at Berlin’s Tempelhof Field. Aboard was a VIP passenger—Maj. Gen. William H. Tunner, the new director of operations for the seven-week-old Berlin Airlift. Unfortunately, recalled Tunner in his memoir Over the Hump, “at that moment everything was going completely to hell in Berlin. The ceiling had suddenly fallen in on Tempelhof. The clouds dropped to the tops of the apartment buildings surrounding the field, and then they suddenly gave way in a cloudburst that obscured the runway from the tower. The radar could not penetrate the sheets of rain.” One aircraft crashed; another blew out its tires braking to avoid the crash.
Bettinger joined a cluster of pilots circling over Tempelhof, waiting as ground controllers tried to sort out the mess. “The pilots filled the air with chatter, calling in constantly in near panic to find out what was going on,” Tunner recalled. “On the ground a traffic jam was building up as planes came off the unloading line…but were refused permission to take off for fear of collision with the planes milling around overhead. ‘This is a hell of a way to run a railroad,’ I snarled.”
the Cold War had heated up dramatically. Unhappy with plans by the Western Allies (France, Britain and the United States) to create a federal government uniting the portions of Germany they occupied, the Soviet Union in retaliation blockaded the American, British and French occupation sectors in isolated West Berlin. On June 19 the Russians blocked automotive and rail passenger service between western Germany and Berlin. On the 24th they halted all barge and rail freight shipments, cutting the primary supply and commerce links for more than 2 million Berliners. The only means left to the Western Allies to sustain the city was by air transport. “Members of the Soviet military administration in Germany celebrated when the blockade began,” wrote U.S. Air Force historian Roger Miller. “None hadthe American occupied zone of Germany, recalled the Russians were “confident that it would be physically impossible for the Western Allies to maintain their position in Berlin.” The chaos Tunner and Bettinger encountered at Tempelhof seemed to validate Soviet confidence the airlift would fail.
