Danny is sent on detachment to Gatow.
The major event in '61 came in the late summer. Thirteen years before Stalin had angrily reacted to the introduction of the Deutschmark in West Germany by blockading West Berlin on the assumption that the NATO powers would be unable to sustain their zones in it by air; our sector would fall into his hands like a rotten apple.
By a strange arrangement that I do not fully understand, it seems that he had been allowed to keep administrative control of the road and rail corridors into W.Berlin, which made it easy for him to throttle movement without our being able to resist effectively. But air access was another matter, that freedom was enshrined in the Potsdam Agreemeent (?): any attempt to choke that off could be a casus belli. We all know the result. His original assumption proved incorrect, we did keep our zone alive with the Airlift; after a year he admitted defeat and lifted the blockade.
So matters stood in mid-August '61, when the good people of Berlin awoke to find a wall arising rapidly, just inside the E/W zone boundary, cutting the city in half. It was to stand for 30 years. This was an ominous development: what next ? Of course we all knew why this was being done. Ostensibly a defensive measure against the supposedly aggressive intentions of the NATO powers, the plain fact was that the younger and more productive sector of the East German working population were "voting with their feet", and getting out to the West while they still could, with the result that all that would soon be left in E. Germany would be children and pensioners. The Wall was to keep the E. Germans in , not to keep us out .
But apart from that, it seemed quite possible that this might herald a second Blockade of the city. Undeterred by their earlier experience, Kruschev might attempt to succeed where Stalin had failed. A second Airlift might have to be mounted.
If that happened, the British effort would depend, as before, on the capacity of RAF Gatow to handle all the incoming fuel, goods and food. In '48-'49 its only approach aid had been an MPN-1 GCA; after it was all over they left it there, as it was more than adequate to handle the small volume of civil and RAF Communications flights still operating. Now it looked as if the 13 year veteran might grow very busy again very soon. I think that a two-watch ATC system was running: this would have to be at least doubled-up, to allow round-the-clock operation.
The ATC Controllers with recent MPN-1 experience were quickly earmarked, and detached in turn for two-weeks each to Gatow. I was one of the early ones. Now there seemed no reason why we should not go by train to (say) RAF Wunsdorf and be flown in to Gatow. But we were instructed to make the whole journey by road, and travel in uniform. All I can imagine is that that would test the Russian road semi-blockade (to see how far they were prepared to go). Delaying or messing-about a W.German civilian car or truck was one thing - obstructing a NATO officer on duty in uniform quite another. (But all this is guesswork).
And it was inconvenient, to say the least. Your wife would be without transport for the whole fortnight: you didn't need the car in Berlin. But that was the way it had to be done. It must have been at the end of August that I packed a fortnight's kit into the car and set out for Helmstedt - the Western end of the British road corridor.
And as the description of the transit to Berlin, and the rest of the story in Gatow, will take up another thousand words at least, I shall call it a night now, and put the rest in my next Post.
Goodnight, all.
Danny42C.
It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.