Danny sums up his fortnight in Gatow.
Compared with my total recall of the journey into Berlin, I seem to have almost complete amnesia where RAF Gatow is concerned. What I can remember is that it was a solid, well built, comfortable place (I understand that it had been Hitler's "Cranwell") and that it had an MPN-1 on the field.
Why on earth hadn't they replaced this museum piece with a more modern CPN-4 before ? I at first asked myself. For now, if push came to shove, what was certain was that the Russians would frustrate any attempt to get a CPN-4 in by road or rail, even supposing that they did not close these two routes completely (as they had done before in '48). And I still don't believe we had anything which could fly in a load so big and awkward, and so heavy.
Then I got to thinking. The old "Bendix" had one thing going for it: it could be moved from one site to another to cover PAR approaches to 08 and 26. Sadly, I cannot now remember the approach pattern for 26 (but there looks to have been room for one in our Zone); as for 08, we were so close to the edge of the Zone that the approach can only have been started with the aircraft still in the corridor.
Either way in the '48 Airlift, landing in the winter with 10 tons of braunkohle behind you on only 2,000 yds of icy runway, the last thing you needed was a tailwind. They must have used both ends then and would do so again.
And the superior aspect of the CPN-4 lay only in its PPI "Search" capability (about double the range of the "Bendix"). A properly set up Talkdown tube in an MPN-1 could work every bit as well as the simpler, more advanced one in the CPN-4. At the end of the day, the limiting factor in all PARs is the length of the talkdown: 3½ minutes (say 7 miles).
You couldn't feed them in any faster than that whatever you'd got . The old MPN-1 could do that, and at Gatow there was no "search" involved, they all came in off the middle of the corridor (otherwise they'd have been shot down before they got to you); you just picked them up from there (or so I'm told).
Of course the first thing we had to do was to re-familiarise ourselves with the old "Truck". It had been three years since I last saw one, but everything came flooding back. The only thing was - there was hardly any practice ! I think a Communications "Pembroke" came in from time to time, and BEA (?) had a DC-3, but that was about all. No matter, if the balloon went up we'd soon have all the work we could handle (in fact it never did).
In the Tower there was little to do other than watch the E.German watchtower just over the boundary fence on the far side. With binoculars, you could usually see the watchkeeper there with his binocs, keeping an eye on you. We waited for something to happen. Names ? - all forgotten now.
In our spare time, we went round to see a bit of Berlin. I was impressed with the Gedachniskirche, a severely bomb-damaged church which had been left in that state as a permanent reminder of the reality of war. The yachts on Havel Lake made a pretty picture in the sunshine, a visit to the large US "PX", which served their garrison, was an eye-opener; it showed what can be done by way of looking after your troops if you really try. They had a huge range of electrical "white" goods at very modest prices, and were quite happy to sell them to us, but we couldn't take advantage as they were all 115 v.
On the Sunday a group of us went out to lunch at the Belgian Army Officers' Club (which was somewhere in our Zone) : all I remember was how smart their people looked in their red-tabbed khaki and how good the steaks were (almost certainly horse, but we didn't know it then).
Everybody went to have a look at our side of the Brandenburg Gate; somewhere a smaller Russian memorial of the Battle of Berlin was a tank on a plinth. All the openings were welded shut, but local legend had it that the skeletons of the crew were still inside. Regular guided tours of the E.German Zone were available, but I didn't bother.
One particular road traffic control system was interesting: a long straight boulevard had a number of crossroads. The timings of the traffic lights was fixed so that, if you kept exactly to the 50 kph (30 mph) limit, it would be "greens" all the way. I never remember meeting anything like that anywhere since.
At the end of two weeks our reliefs came in and I was anxious to be off on the road home. The panic didn't last more than a few weeks (IIRC), and it was all over before it came to my turn again. The zone transit was far more relaxed in the West direction, I don't think the autobahn police "buzzed" me at all. It had been an Experience.
Goodnight, chaps,
Danny 42C.
"This Airlift is a Piece of Gâteau" (worst pun of the decade).
PS: (À propos of nothing at all : The German equivalent of our "Oom-pah-pah" is "Tsching-dérassa-boom"; a good example to "get those arms up !" is Paul Carl Lincke's "Berliner Luft" [the unofficial Berlin "anthem"], available on You Tube - #Berliner%Luft%20 -).
Last edited by Danny42C; 21st Dec 2013 at 15:55.
Reason: Typos and Sorting it out after Messing it About.