Now where were we ?
Early January1949. We landed back from India in a very cold ,newly Socialist Britain and it was quite a shock to find that rationing was still in force for virtually everything including coal for heating and there was absolutely nothing that could be even faintly called a luxury to be found in the shops. Plus that there were queues for all the rationed goods and people joined a queue without even knowing what they were going to get at the end of their wait. Housing was impossible to find and we were lucky to be put up by my Wife's sister in her small flat in the, then, very desirable district of Peckham for a while and then we were very, very fortunate in obtaining a nice, almost luxurious, ground floor flat on a council estate in Clapham in Albion Ave, just off Wandsworth Rd.
There was only "Utility" Furniture to be had but we were grateful for anything and soon had the place cosy.. Before we had any living room furniture we installed our pride and joy.....an eight inch screen Pye, black and white television set. There were no colour transmissions yet in 1949. It was mounted on top of an old box and we were the only people around to have such a thing so we had every child in the neighbourhood watching Muffin the Mule, Bill and Ben, the flower pot men not forgetting "Little Weed ". Dora was expecting a baby in a couple of months and ir was important that I found a new job.
At the end of the war , Berlin was divided into zones. The Western zone occupied and administered by the USA, the UK and France and the Eastern zone by Russia. In July 1948 a new currency, the Deutschmark, was introduced into the Western zone and to Allied West Berlin to help to combat inflation and bring back prosperity to the beaten Nation. The USSR viewed this as an ominous threat and feared that this would bring the whole of Berlin including the Soviet Eastern zone under Capitalist Western influence. Stalin immediately closed down all road, rail and canal links from the Western half of Berlin to try and starve the people and therefore the western powers out of Berlin.
The Allied response was to fly every vital need of the West Berliners into the existing aerodromes of Tempelhof and, initially Gatow. The French had an unsuitable aerodrome at Tegel which in an unbelievably short time was turned into a vital part of the Airlift by German labourers including thousands of women. Gatow was thus enabled to continue as the British civilian passenger airfield but with certain supplies being flown in there as well.
From June 1948 until May 1949, the Allies flew 278,247 sorties and their planes delivered roughly, a total of over two million tonnes of supplies including clothing, medicine,coal, building material,petrol and diesel oil. It was calculated that there was a plane landing every three minutes of the day and night, week in week out.
According to reports, Stalin wqs shaken to the core by the magnitude and the skilled performance of the Western Powers in performing the fantastic operation throughout nearly a year and in every possible sort of weather.
He was shown that the Western Powers were not going to yield and opened up the links on the 11th. May 1948.
There is absolutely no doubt that the magnificent ,concerted effort of the allies had averted the very real nightmare reality of WW3. I am indebted to Colin Cruddas's terrific book "In Cobham's Company" for most of the foregoing introduction of "Der Luftbrucke" or "The Berlin Airlift" as I had the privilege of flying on it for the renowned pioneer of British Aviation, Sir Alan Cobham whose Company "Flight Refuelling " now known as "Cobhams" flew all the fuel oil and gasoline into Berlin during the Airlift.
As a boy I had been an eager spectator of the "Flying Circuses " that toured the country before the war. Alan Cobham and a Capt. Barnard were two of the main ones and the shows that they put on were wonderful and were always supported by crowds of air minded spectators. There would always be "a trip round Blackpool Tower for about seven shillings and sixpence and I can remember being a horrified spectator when the grand finale of one of the circuses which was a formation of aircraft including a three engined high wing monoplane and two or three biplanes over the town and there was a collision. Well over thirty years later, when I was a Captain in Sabena , we had a dinner party for some friends from EuroControl, the ATC set up in Brussels . I told them that I had been on the ground when I had seen the collision of two of these planes over Blackpool's Central Station and was amazed to hear one of the guests, my friend, Gordon Burch, say "I was a passenger in one of those planes, Reg ". He had been treated , by his Father, to a ride in one of the biplanes not concerned in the collision which caused a lot of fatalities and was newspaper headlines at the time.
To get back to the Berlin Airlift. Pilots, of course, were now flavour of the month as everyone with anything that could get off the ground was trying to get in on the Milk Cow that the Airlift was becoming. Don Bennet bought some Tudors, a chap called Bond bought a couple of Halifaxes , flew one himself and hired a crew for the other one. Silver City got in on it and I decided that I would contact "Flight Refuelling" because of my boyhood affinity with Sir Alan Cobham. Once again "Lady Luck" was riding with me when I went down to Tarrant Rushton for an interview with their Chief Pilot. I walked into the office and the chap behind the desk said "Hello Reg,. Long time no see." It was Tommy Marks, a fellow cadet from my training in Georgia in 1941 that was now Chief Pilot of "Flight Refuelling" . I had to take him up in one of their converted Lancastrians and I thought that I would show him a bit of the "limit flying" that we had used to teach at the EFS at Hullavington. I had just completed a steep turn with sixty degrees of bank and was preparing to stall it when he, rather hastily , said that he had seen enough and could I be ready to take a Lancastrian over to RAF Wunstorf tomorrow to join the airlift?