The Berlin Airlift - Victories, Myths, and the Berlin Blockade (432)

28:17Take it a step farther here with Henry Rees. He saw these are people that had killed his family, right? And at the same time, Henry had this inside-outside feeling, which I found very fascinating to write about. He's at one time a Berliner. He knows the city inside-out. He speaks the language. He's part of it. But he's gone away because of the Nazis to remake himself as an American, coming back with an American salary, an American job, an American passport. and this inside-outsideness makes him also a very compassionate observer. He both at the same time is angry with the Germans but also looks at the lives of Berliners, the people living in the ruins, and is very compassionate at their hunger, at the rubble they're living in.

29:03So for me, in terms of researching this, he's a very compelling character. Absolutely, absolutely. And he is responsible for some of the most iconic photos of the airlift. I think he's responsible for that one of the children standing on the rubble mound as a U.S. aircraft flies into Tempelhof. Yeah. So Henry Reese is the iconic photographer of the operation. First, he's an extraordinary photographer. I mean, he has an eye for the detail of the everyday. he's able to connect the event, this big event, the largest air relief operation in history, to the experience of the everyday person living it, the everyday Berliner.

29:48And you see that in this photograph that you mentioned that was taken at Tempelhof Airport with an American plane that's landing. And you have a hill of rubble. And on it are children and Berliners looking up to the sky with hope and admiration. And it's also just beautifully composed, the weight of the plane against the people on the ground and you have one figure in the middle on the hill staring back at you straight in the eyes of the observer of the photograph. It's a fabulous photograph. And every time you Google, go and Google Berlin Airlift and look under images. And this is the image that you'll get.

30:24You'll get it 50 times on one page because it's such an iconic shot. You'll imagine I've Googled Berlin Airlift quite a few times down the years. And that photo always comes up. And I'm delighted to see it's on the cover of the book as well. You know, okay, I have a little story about that, because when I was writing the book, I wrote in the book, you know, and it's inevitably the picture that ends up on the cover of these books. And I was thinking to myself, I'm going to be the one book, I'm going to have the one book that does not have the Henry Reese photograph on its cover. And then I submitted all of these other photographs to my editors saying, look at this one, isn't this one great?

31:02And in the end, the editors said, you know what, it's got to be this one because it's the best one. And in the end, it's on the cover of the book. I'm intrigued. Are they featured within the book, the other photos? Yes, there are other ones. In the middle, there's a photo section in the middle of the book. And I have photographs of, for example, there's a wonderful photograph from the U.S. Air Force of all of these Dakotas. They're all lining up at Temple Off Airport. And it seems limitless, this great line of them, as they're going in to unload what they've brought from the Western sectors. There are also wonderful photographs you can see of people looking up into the sky, just this expression on their faces of hope.

31:46And this story was very striking to me, just how important the Berlin airlift remains to West Berliners and to former West Germans as the moment when they became friends with the West again. And this is a very central part of the book, which is how was it that these people who were being bombed by these planes came to be people worth saving, people that should be fed by these same planes that had bombed them during the Second World War? And this friendship narrative is, for me, absolutely fascinating. How is it that suddenly, just, I mean, it's 1948, three years before, these were the evil Hun, this was the enemy Nazi, all of our propaganda efforts in the West were bent against this terrible enemy.

32:33And then three years later, they need to be converted as allies against the Soviets at the beginning of the Cold War. And the airlift succeeds in creating this transformation on both sides. In the West, they saw pictures of women and children who were seen as mostly blameless, especially the children. women, we can think about whether they, a lot of them were perfectly aware of what was happening during the Nazi years, but especially the pictures of children who were too young to be involved in the Nazi project really pulled at the heartstrings of the British and the American public. These are people worth being saved, being fed, and being saved from Stalin.

33:12And on the ground, suddenly Berliners could look up at these aircraft that had terrified them during World War II. That sound, the sound of the war, of the Brum in German, the Brum, the sound of the aircraft, was psychologically terrifying to Berliners. And I read again and again in diaries and talking to people how this sound changed for them during the course of the airlift to become something hopeful. It was a very interesting, again, this move from just a single sound having a completely different meaning because of the airlift. And I think in that there's a clue, a clue to how Germans began to see the Americans and the British differently at the beginning, at this first, I think, the most important first event of the, there are many events that began the Cold War, but I think this is the big first one.

34:02And it happened with this. Now, the airlift is also flying out some West Berlin citizens, but it flies in an unusual cargo at one point because the British have decided that they're going to launch an Elizabethan festival, which also has a connection with one of the Cambridge Five spying as well. Can you just explain what's going on there? It's another one of these crazy stories that one stumbles across while one is living in the city. I discovered that the British had countered the Soviet propaganda offensive, which was to bring the Red Army Choir and dancers, the Alexander Ensemble, to do these big bread and circuses events in squares of East German cities.

34:50they decided to do, as a counter, to bring in Cambridge students playing Shakespeare in the ruins or singing English madrigals. And it doesn't seem like it's—I don't know. I love Shakespeare and I love English madrigals, but in terms of really capturing the public imagination, I somehow think that the Red Army Choir has a little bit more heft. Nonetheless, this is what they decided on to show the best of British culture to the Berliners, part of this soft power operation. So what they did is they flew in all of these undergraduates, all these Cambridge students. They put on a boat across to the Hookaholland, and they put them on a train.

35:33And then from the Western sectors, they flew them into Berlin like sacks of flour. And it was later commented that, in terms of the weight, that the number of people that could have been fed by the weight of each of these undergraduates and their tutors who were brought over. But, obviously, this wasn't just an operation of bringing the Bard to the ruins of Berlin. It also had a British intelligence side to it that became very obvious the more I researched it. It was organized by the Foreign Office, and the main person who was involved in it was actually working for British intelligence. The people that they brought over from King's College were members of the Apostle Society, which of course is deeply implicated in the Cambridge, or connected to the Cambridge Five ring.

36:23And Donald Beaves, who was the provost of King's College, was the man later cleared as being part of this Cambridge spy ring. Noel Anand, who was also a fellow at King's, came along. He was also involved in British intelligence. And then I started to do a little bit of research on the students who came over. And all I had was a photograph of them from a German newspaper with their names under it. So I then took the names from the photograph and I cross-referenced them with searching in alumni magazines from Cambridge and looking in lists in the Cambridge University Archive. And I found a lot of them.

37:01And remarkably, I mean, I found one, for example, a guy named Bernard Keith, who worked at the Royal Academy of Music and was an opera editor of the BBC, who had worked at Bletchley Park during the war, and then was sent to Japan to do intelligence in Hiroshima after the war. And then I found another one who, when he was in Berlin with the operation, they were sent out into East Berlin to do little investigations, to find out what black market prices were, etc., etc. So this was very fascinating to find out that unexpected, that Cambridge, already being a hotbed of spies, was chosen not just because these were sweet undergraduates who would make the Germans like them, you know, with their young college-type productions.

37:47Very hard to criticize young students who are performing this, but also pretty useful intelligence gatherers, young, fresh-faced undergraduates from Cambridge, people who stumble into the ruins for, in one case of Hitler's old chancellery building, and they go, oh, we're just lost. We're just looking around here. It's the kind of person that a Soviet guard will let go. I mean, if it was someone my age, you know, going into one of these places, they would think I would know what I was doing. And students sometimes look like they don't know when in fact they do. Yeah, don't they pretend they're Swiss tourists or something, I think, to get out of that scrape?

38:27That was a huge surprise because I wanted a firsthand description. I was looking so hard for a firsthand description of one of these undergraduates walking around the ruins of Berlin. in. And I was in the archive of King's College in Cambridge, and I came across the diary of a name that I recognised from the photograph from the newspaper. And in it, he has four or five pages where he describes just walking around the city and ending up in Hitler's chancery buildings, now in ruins, and being caught by Soviet guards. And the guards are trying to figure out what nationality these people are. And then finally, they say that they're Swiss and they abscond very quickly.

39:05Brilliant eyewitness stories. And we're just covering a fraction of them in the chat we're having now. There is loads more detail in the book. And I think one of the things I was pleased to see is you had mention of the French, because they quite often get written out of the history of West Berlin, but they make a massive contribution in their sector. Indeed. I mean, they were very belittled by the Berliners. They're seen as the poor third of the occupying powers. I mean, many people wonder why the French were given a zone. Even the French, of course, were defeated by the Germans. But there was the real sense that they needed to be brought back into the European family with the Germans.

39:52And we see this today with the European Union, that the driving force of it remains, and we'll see what happens with elections and so forth remains the German-French friendship. And I think even back then they knew this, that Europe, to have a future in the post-war and to be economically successful, would require French involvement. And so they were involved as an occupier in Berlin. They were given a small part, a quite poor part of northern Berlin. But it was a place where there was an enormous field, where there were kind of allotment gardens. And they decided this would be an excellent place to build a new airport.

40:25Now, anyone who knows about Berlin today and the story of our airport that opened a few years ago realized that that airport took a decade, more than a decade to build. I don't remember the exact number of years. It was such a terrible waste of money and so disorganized and such a nightmare that it seems unbelievable today to believe that the French in their sector, using Berlin labor were able to build an airport in three months at this enormous field that became this very famous airport of West Berlin, Tegel, Tegel Airport. And this was essential to the airlift operation because there were a couple of problems with the other airports.

41:12Gatow was small. Gatow was very close to the border with the Soviets. Gatow also was close to canals, so it It was very important to the liquid lift. And this occupied a lot of space, a lot of in terms of flights going in there. Tempelhof had this crazy steep approach over a graveyard. And people in the apartment buildings along this graveyard could look out their windows and see airplanes just diving in front of their windows. Again, capacity was a problem. You needed 5 ,000 tons a day to keep the Western occupation, its presence, going in West Berlin. and they needed more airfield to make that happen.

41:49So the French provided this and they got people together to work day and night around the clock, basically leveling this place that was full of huge piles of sand and to lay the foundation of the airstrip. They did this by going around Berlin and collecting bricks because during the airlift day, you couldn't make concrete, right? You had to, there were real limitations in terms of building an airfield when this isolation of the city was preventing supplies from going in. So they went around the collective bricks from destroyed churches, from houses, and they put down this layer. They rolled in bitumen from the eastern zone in the night through the barbed wire, and they brought in all of these amazing vehicles and trucks to do the work by cutting them up in pieces, putting them on planes, and then putting them back together again with the torch once they arrived in Berlin.

42:43So it was really ingenious, the whole thing. One of the remarkable things about it was that there were 10 ,000 people working on this operation, and most of them were women. And this has to do, of course, with the demographics of Berlin, that there just weren't that many men around after the war, because for obvious reasons. but also women ended up doing this, a lot of whom had lost their homes. And so they ended up on Tegel Airfield working with spades and so forth. With, you know, when you go to the bunker and your house is about to be bombed, you take your best clothes with you. So a lot of them were wearing evening dress.

43:19They were wearing gowns. So they had high heels or... So is it really, you look at the photographs from the building at Tegel Airport and you look closely at these little figures working this enormous operation. and you're like wow she's wearing an evening dress she looks like she's going to the opera i mean a bit a bit ragged right you know because it's it's berlin after the war but nonetheless it was it made a remarkable shot in terms of a picture of this operation well they were essentially stealing bitumen from the eastern zone and wheeling it through the barbed wire did you say well one source says so i mean this is one of the things is that is trying to piece together through the archive and through the documents, what exactly came over, what did not come over.

44:02But a lot came over. We're dealing with enormous quantities of goods that entered into West Berlin from the East, mostly through the black market. And then these efforts by the British and the Americans and the French in order to confiscate this. Berliners were really ingenious at getting goods across. And about one third of all Berliners' food during the airlift operation, mostly through the black market came from the eastern parts of the city and from the Soviet zone, for example. Wow. Wow. That's an incredible number. Back with Tegel. Now, they build the airfield there, but they have a challenge with a couple of Soviet radio towers that are obstructing the flight path.

44:46Yes. So there's this remarkable story about the French commander of Berlin, Jean Garnival, who had trouble with two Soviet radio towers that were at the end of his runway, just at Tegel, just inside the Soviet zones. And he had warned the Soviets a number of times that these were pesky and very inconvenient for him because they blocked planes as they tried to take off and to land. I think what the Soviets didn't expect was that he would detonate them. And so he invited the top brass of the West to his office with a good view. And as the story goes, and it's a bit apocryphal. I found it in some sources and not in others, but I'm going to tell it because it's such a great story.

45:33He gets the top brass together to observe the towers through a window, gives them champagne, says, just watch. And then, boom, the towers go up in smoke because he has men who have crept across to the Soviet zone, and they've detonated the towers. And then later on, the Soviets This General Yakov asked the general, he said, how could you have done this? You know, you invaded our territory, you blew up our property, you put Radio Berlin and all of its Stalinist propaganda off the air, much to the content of a lot of Berliners. and the French general replied reportedly said well with the dynamite mon cher I love the story and it shows that the French had a certain amount of style with how they went about things with the Soviets but as we would find out the Soviets retaliated in a particular way.

46:25And yeah can you tell me about that retaliation? Yeah so I visited a little village on the edge of Berlin just outside of Berlin called Stolpe. S-T-O-L-P-E. Stolpe. And I was interested because I had heard through my readings that this little village had been once part of the French zone, but at the end of December 1948 had been given to the Soviets. And I thought, this is wild. How is this little part of Berlin that was French suddenly being given over to the Soviets? And the more I researched and I visited the town and I talked to old people living there, I realized that the Soviets came and occupied it.

47:10And they did it as retaliation for the attacks on these antenna at the end of Tegel Airfield. Although, this is the story. But the more that I dug, the more I discovered that actually for a long time, the Soviets and the French had been negotiating in terms to give this village that was in the French zone to the Soviets. And this was because the Soviets originally had the village and given it to the French to build an airfield there. And once they built the airfield in Tegel, then Stolpe was no longer needed by the French for the airfield. But it came as a huge surprise for the people living in Stolpe because they were a very productive community with a huge, huge farm.

47:52They produced a lot of food for West Berlin. A lot of West Berlin is really urban, right? There's the park in the middle of Berlin that had been turned the Tiergarten. They'd been turned into a huge vegetable garden. But generally around West Berlin, there wasn't a lot of farming land. And Stolpe was one of these places. So it was valuable to the West Berliners. And basically, in the middle of the night, the Soviets arrived and took over the place. Huge surprise to the Berliners, huge surprise to the people in Stolpe. And it's significant because West Berliners, who had put all of their faith into the Americans and the British and the French to save them from Stalin, suddenly had in miniature an example of what it would look like if they lost, if the airlift failed, or if they were suddenly abandoned by the Western Allies.

48:39And it frightened them because this was a situation where precisely that had happened, where the West had abandoned these Berliners to the Soviets, to the Stalinist system. And it should be made very clear here that what the Soviets offered to Berliners in the West, if they took over, was rather nasty. We were looking at the height of living in a very controlling, authoritarian style in the state that looked a lot to West Berliners like what they had just endured under the Nazis. And this is the last thing they wanted to happen. They didn't want to happen to them what had just happened to the people in Stolpe.

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50:03Joseph Pearson:Bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. Indeed. Indeed. And... Can we return to Ken Slaker in his potato field and continue his story? So, Kenneth Slaker wakes up in this potato field in Thuringia, in Turingen, which is a German land, a state of what is now in the former east, very close to the border of Bavaria. And he wakes up in this potato field, and he's not really sure where he is until he sees a sign that directs him towards the border.

50:51And he realizes that he's east in the Harz Mountains, the southern part of the Harz Mountains. And so what he does is he has incredible pain in his back because he's fallen down on his back. He's wearing a pilot uniform. He has stripes on him. So he has to turn his jacket inside out to disguise himself. He puts some mud on his face, and he starts trudging along. And, I mean, it's a crazy story. And it's a wonderful story, the story of this man walking through the forest and along roads and through farms, heading, heading west. And he says in his autobiography, he has a series of interviews with the Library of Congress.

51:30I found also newspaper articles, a number of different sources, where he talks about how he learned in the forest as a Boy Scout that he should look at the moths on the trees. that it grows on the north side of the tree, the moist north side of the tree, to figure out where he needed to go in terms of what direction, which was west. As he goes through the forest, he stumbles across a German who's scavenging there for firewoods and so forth. So imagine Germans are starving. Germans, they don't have enough to heat their homes and so forth. And he tries out his best German. Ken Slaker tries to speak German, unfortunately, with this German who immediately picks him out as an American.

52:08and is trying to figure out what is this American doing in the forest here? And for a moment, Ken Slaker is ready to kill this person. He feels that if he needed to, to defend himself, to not get caught out, he would have the capacity to kill this German in the forest. In fact, he had killed many Germans before, you know, during the war. But this Rudolph takes out of his jacket and shows that he was a prisoner of war in the States and tries to speak to him in English. And in the forest, in this tense situation, this German and this American begin to communicate. An American who had always hated the Germans and this man who is fearing for his life.

52:50And Rudolf, Rudolf Schnabel is his name, says, come with me, I will get you across because I want to get across as well. And this leads into this remarkable story of these two unlikely friends trying to get across the border, across the Iron Curtain into the West, finding the right clothes, bribing border officers, crawling through a cabbage patch, being shot at. The story of Rudolf after when he's then in the West and captured by U.S. forces is another crazy story. But at the same time, for my theme, it's very important to understand how is it that Germans and Americans could become friends out of this airlift experience.

53:31And what does it is this triangulation that they have a common enemy now, which are the Soviets. They're trying to both get out of East Germany, or what would be East Germany, across the Iron Curtain and the West together. They have a common cause. yeah and it is an incredible story because at one point a soviet soldier walks past him and he's obviously as you say he's wearing his u.s air force uniform albeit with the jacket inside out and the the soviet guy doesn't even check him out or anything like that just ignores him yeah there were another situation a bit later in which he is noticed because there are things he's forgotten about.

54:14He forgets that he's wearing very nice Oxford shoes, which is not something that starving Germans have on them. And also he has a very, very nice watch on his arm. And we know from pictures of the occupation that the Soviets liked their watches. There's these photographs of Soviet soldiers in Berlin wearing two, three, four, five watches on their arms that they had plundered from Berliners. Yeah, so the watch was of interest, but it was precisely at the moment where a train needed to leave and all these soldiers had to leave. So we sort of saved by the bell in this situation. Wow. Well, yeah, there's that famous photo of the Soviet troops raising the red flag on the Reichstag in 1945.

54:59And the story goes is the three or four watches on the wrists of these soldiers are airbrushed out of the photo. So it wouldn't have necessarily looked too good propaganda-wise. I've heard that version of the story, and I've also heard a different version. You can tell me which one you think is more accurate, which is that Stalin really wanted the photograph for the 1st of May for International Workers' Day. And he received this photograph, which was very embarrassing because of all the watches on the arm. And the photograph needed to be retaken without the watches on the arms. But I don't know.

55:34That's perhaps apocryphal. I'm not so sure. But certainly something of that nature may have happened. Yeah, yeah. I'm not so sure. I mean, Soviets are renowned for their retouching of photos, aren't they? There's that famous one with, is it Trotsky? There's a row of them with Stalin in them. And one of the characters is airbrushed out of it when he gets a shot in the back of the head or something like that. I can't remember who it was. Also, after the Prague Spring, there were all of these photographs in which people, Czech politicians, suddenly disappeared from photographs who had been there before, people who had lent their support to the uprising.

56:13So it's certainly an art form in the Eastern Bloc. Indeed. Now, we were talking about the amount of food that came into the Western sectors of Berlin from the East a little while back. I think you said it was a third of the food for West Berliners. That's right. At least a third, yes. Right. And as you said right at the start, I mean, the image you get is that Berlin is completely sealed. And we've already discussed that there was free crossing between the sectors. Was that ever tightened up during the blockade? Did the Soviets try and seal the sector boundaries to stop this seepage? Well, they did try to control.

57:02You know, there were checks on what went in from the East to the West, but they were very ineffective. But in general, it was very leaky. A lot of German historians who talk about this talk about a leaky blockade. I don't like the term leaky or the phrase leaky blockade because I think a blockade by its dictionary definition is a block. It's blocked. I think it's an oxymoron that a leaky blockade. But yeah, to answer your question, the city remained very, very leaky throughout the airlift operation. And the Soviets are trying to incentivize West Berliners to cross into the east as well by offering them food rations.

57:44That's right. So, I mean, this is one of the things that first confused me, because like everyone else I know, I shared this almost universal belief that Berlin was completely cut off during the airlift by the Soviets in an attempt to starve the Berliners. And this is something you can read on the websites of the UK government, the German government, on the NATO website. There's this German television series that was very popular called Only the Sky Was Free. And also, if you go to the Berlin Central Memorial for the airlift, it's called the Hunger Hacke, the Hunger Rake. So the whole Cold War myth about the airlift revolves around this being an operation where the city was completely sealed and the Berliners in the West were starving and being fed to survive by the West.

58:41And I felt all of this dissonance while reading because I would read, for example, like you just mentioned, that the Soviets offered rations to the West Berliners and encouraged them across the register to get food in the East. I thought, oh, well, that doesn't really jive with the starvation myth. You know, if the Soviets, in fact, are not trying to starve the West Berliners, but are actually offering them food. And as we mentioned before, the question of the black market, then how is it that they can simply take the U-Bahn or the S-Bahn, these trains, into the East and buy food and bring it back and eat it at home from the black market?

59:16Or food was coming in to the West on the black market. And so I slowly had to revise my opinion. And I often, I must be honest here, I come across a certain amount of resistance when talking to people about this, because I think we all have confirmation bias. It took me a really long time to give up on the idea of the Berlin blockade because it's something I learned. It's something that British children learn for their GCSEs still, that the city was completely sealed. And I realized that it was a very convenient propaganda myth in order to get people in the U.S. and U.K. to pay for this extraordinary operation that cost about very expensive operation that cost about$3 billion in today's coin.

1:00:01And what you needed to do to get that support was to show images of starving women and children. And then I verified this by going into the archive and queue and really tried to find, and I found all these documents where the British very clearly know what they're doing, that they want the press to believe that there is a blockade in order to provide the kind of support necessary. The Americans feel the same. It's an election year. Truman wants this to be his great kind of theater piece in order to give him the support he needs to win the next election. And so, yeah, it was an enormous performance of sorts.

1:00:40But on the other hand, I admire in a way, I don't admire that there's a myth, but I think it's extraordinary that this provided the support necessary to keep the West in Berlin and to hold on, and hold on there against Stalin and against the Soviets. It was a completely necessary act. It held the tide. I am absolutely convinced that the Soviets would not have stopped there. The same way that I am convinced today that the Russians will not stop in Ukraine if given the opportunity to go farther. You know, there was back in at the time of the Erlefer before in February 1948, the coup in Prague, and then next was Berlin.

1:01:19What was next? They needed to step in. And they did it with means that justified the ends.

1:01:24Joseph Pearson:Hi, this is Rhonda in Virginia, and I support Cold War conversations because I think the work that Ian is doing is critically important. I think it's vital to record the firsthand accounts of people who lived and experienced the Cold War because it illustrates history in a way that a book never can. So thank you so much for the podcast. It's my favorite podcast, and I look forward to it every week. to be like ronda and help to preserve these incredible stories of the cold war as a monthly or annual supporter you'll be able to listen ad-free you'll become one of our community get the sought after cold war conversations drinks coaster as a thank you and you'll bask in the warm glow of knowing that you're helping to preserve cold war history just go to cold worldwarconversations.com slash donate to find out more even hollywood gets in on the act so the big lift is made in 1950 starring montgomery clift and even that reveals that berliners were going back and forth between the zones all the time yeah that's a it's an amazing film because it was filmed with the cooperation of the u.s air force right with montgomery clift playing one of these pilots bringing in food to Berlin.

1:02:44And there were only a couple, or four or five professional actors in this film. Everyone else were the actual people operating the airlift. So from a historian's perspective, it's an absolutely amazing document because you see the airlift in film before your eyes. And what the director does is shows a lot of the tensions. Montgomery Cliff meets a charming German woman, gets her number, and then has a day off and goes into Berlin with her and goes around the city and lives the life of an everyday German. And that involves taking the subway between sectors, getting into the Soviet sector, going to the black market, all of these things that are elements that should degrade this Cold War myth.

1:03:28What I find amazing is that most people came out of this film still believing that Berlin was completely blockaded, even though the evidence was before their eyes. And maybe they were like, oh, it's a film. It's not the reality. But of course, this was a film that really used a lot of footage from the reality of the Berlin Airlift. Yeah, I'll see if I can find a link for that. Now, Joseph, I said earlier on in the interview, I'd like you to put me in touch with some of your guests. And one of the stories we didn't talk about was the young girl who was friends with Gail Halverson. Any chance of sending her an email on my behalf?

1:04:06I could definitely do so. I actually just received an email from her the other day. And she's very well, and she's coming to a reading I'm doing in Berlin on the 20th of January, which is marvelous. She was a little girl who ended up having a lifelong friendship with her chocolate uncle, she called him, because she, as a little girl, collected some of the chocolate that dropped from the sky from the Candy Bomber's plane. So when I heard from her recently, I was a little worried, because one of the things you worry about as an author when you do interviews with living witnesses is how they're going to react to your book.

1:04:41So I sent off copies of the book to the widow of Henry Reese, this Berlin photographer, New York photographer, to Mercedes Ville, to his little girl who collected the chocolate, the family of Alex Chambers, this rascal who was the flight engineer. And I was a little worried. I thought, for example, I mean, the story of Alex Chambers, the flight engineer in my book, is pretty unvarnished. It's all about him meeting women in Hamburg and black market coffee and getting drunk on his plane and smoking on board and all of these things that you wonder how the family are going to react. But I also hopefully captured some of the youthful energy and charm of this person.

1:05:22Unvarnished, but just such a wonderful person. And I was glad that it seems like all of my witnesses were happy with how I tried to bring back the sense of these people, these people living a historical moment that often gets lost in historiography. Yeah, and it's hard to do that in print as well. I mean, that's one of the reasons why I started Cold War Conversations, because I have this tagline, there's nothing like hearing history from someone who was there. But you do get across the personalities there, and it'll be great if Mercedes agrees to come on Cold War Conversations. Oh, she's amazing, and she's so with it and she's also a very very good english speaker because when gail halverson would come to berlin she would be his translator and they would travel around berlin together so she would be a great guest i can definitely let her know excellent thank you very much joseph you're most welcome you have been listening to joseph pearson the author of the airlift Victories, Myths and the Berlin Blockade.

1:06:28It's being published in the US as Sweet Victory. So there is a different title there, but there'll be links in the episode information for you to buy the book and support the podcast. Joseph, thank you very much for coming on Cold War Conversations. Ian, it's been such a pleasure. Thanks for the amazing conversation. I appreciate it. The episode extras such as videos, photos and other content are available via a link in the episode information. The podcast wouldn't exist without the generous efforts of our financial supporters and I'd like to thank one and all of them for keeping the podcast on the road.

1:07:09The Cold War conversation continues in our Facebook discussion group. Just search for Cold War Conversations in Facebook. Thanks very much for listening and look forward to seeing you next week.

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