18 May 2010
Operation Vittles
(Zentrallufthaven Templehof. Photo Socotra)
I got back to the room at the Armony before four, and collapsed on the bed. My attempt at a Rave was over. I was happy I had seen some of the night-life, and that the lives of the new generation are not demonstrably different than that of their elders, even unto the generation of their great grandparents who partied down hard in this town after the First War that made the second one inevitable.
There is a big gray granite memorial in a little park across the street from the hotel. I stopped to look at it, and there were four inset metal panels with names in sadly long lists.
They were the dead from the 1914-1918 catastrophe. In front there was another one with some sanctimony in German. The last three words were in capital letters: “Nie Wierder Krieg!” it read. Never again, War.
It didn’t work out that way. My eyes flashed open at nine-thirty on Sunday morning. My head hurt. I was way behind.
The younger residents of PO 36 had just gone to bed. My time in Berlin was growing short, and I had not been to Templehof.
We had made no plans for Sunday before brunch, which is an activity in Berlin that can happen until mid-afternoon. The Cold War had many icons, ranging from the Civil Defense signs on all the public buildings and the home fallout shelters that everyone had in the 1950s. The Wall was naturally among the most enduring of the icons, but there was another before that: the ubiquitous C-47 Skytrain aircraft of the Berlin Airlift, and above all, the field into which aid for a locked-down city were poured from the air.
The military version of the venerable DC-3 was about to become the potent workhorse of the Allied response to the chess-match of brinksmanship that the new superpowers would play for another forty-one years.
Operation VITTLES was the unofficial codeword, a queer game of brinksmanship that occurred as the Superpowers began to explore a new and hostile relationship bounded by rules as eccentric but rigid as the path of the Mauer would be across the divided city.
I stumbled into the shower and tried to sluice off the fog of the night. I pulled on some clothes and took the lift down to the lobby. Nothing was moving on the street except the occasional bicyclist peddling down the street before the formal rows of staid German buildings, their flanks dashed with the mad exuberance of the graffiti.
Mostly silence.
I got down to Oranienstrasse before I saw the first cab with a driver asleep at the wheel. I tapped on the window and he started, suddenly alert.
I climbed in the back.
“Sie haben sie Anglishce?” I asked.
“Nein,” said the Turk. Jeeze.
“Templehof Lufthaven?” I said hopefully.
“Ja, sere gut.” The engine came to life and off we went. I rolled down the window and the cool breeze of the coldest May in two hundred years flooded the back seat.
You can get to Tempelhof by the U6 U-Bahn line along Mehringdamm and up Friedrichstrasse to the Platz der Luftbrücke station, but I was uncertain of my bearings and knew how vast the complex was. The cab was much more expensive but better in time and on my aching legs.
I hung out the window as south Berlin rolled by. The reason people liked Templehof- and the reason that it was vital to the Airlift- was that it is close in. We were there in maybe ten minutes, turning off Fredericksrasse and right into one of those freaking eagles.
The concrete inset was one of two symbols from an undigested past. I am sure that if the West Germans had owned the field all those years they would have been chiseled away. The American military occupation preserved them for posterity.
There is very little in Berlin that shouts out “National Socialism.” So much of it was eradicated, though oddly the biggest public edifice that survived unscathed was Goering’s Air Ministry. There may be bullet holes in Templehof- they say there are- but mostly the huge arcing line of hangers is pristine, as if the Reich had not been incinerated.
Templehof shouts out across the years of a dream that nearly destroyed us all, and then became a symbol of hope. We wheeled up to the main terminal and I hopped out and snapped pictures of the entrance, which fronted a public space that was intended to soar four stories to the roof.
A false ceiling wa installed in the 1960s, but the place was supposed to be heroic in scale.
Tempelhof became the world's first airport with an underground railway station in 1927, and was one of Europe's three iconic pre-World-War-II airports along with London’s long-gone Croydon Airport and Le Bourget in Paris.
(Templhof in the day. US Army Photo.)
As part of Albert Speer's plan for the reconstruction of Berlin, Prof. Ernst Sagebiel was ordered to replace the old terminal with a new terminal building in 1934. It was supposed to be the gateway to a Europe unified under Germany. The façades is constructed of shell limestone, the terminal building, built between 1936 and 1941, is almost a mile long.
Numerous basement rooms under the administrative sections of the building were finished as air-raid shelters in which not only Lufthansa and airport employees took refuge during the war, but also people from the neighborhood. Some of these rooms are decorated with paintings in the style of Wilhelm Busch that are on the official tours.
Apparently the Reich also used the airport as an assembly plant for JU-87 Stuka dive-bombers, and later the Focke-Wulf 190 fighter. The parts were brought in through tunnels from all over the city, and workshops on five levels below the terminal integrated the airframes and then flew them out.
As the Red Army approached, the German commander ordered booby-traps to be set and shot himself. The Red Army tried to force open a vault used to store top-secret film, highly flammable, and managed to kill some troops. The new owners decided to flood the complex, and the lower levels are still awash today.
In accordance with the Yalta agreements, Zentralflughafen Tempelhof-Berlin was turned over to the United States Army 2nd Armored Division on 2 July 1945 by the Red Army as part of the American occupation zone of Berlin. This agreement was later formalized by the August 1945 Potsdam Agreement, which formally divided Berlin into four occupation zones.
On 20 June 1948 Soviet authorities halted all land and by water traffic in or out into of the western-controlled section of Berlin. The only remaining access routes into the city were three 25 mile-wide air corridors across the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. It was put up of shut up. Either something could be done by air or the Soviets would have taken the city again, without a shot.
Operation Vittles, initially brought eighty tons of food into Tempelhof, far less than what was needed, but the Air Force was soon augmented by USN, Royal Air Force cargo aircraft and British European Airways commercial aircraft. It was enough to hang on, and the Soviets eventually grudgingly complied with their treaty obligations.
They did not get over it though. The next thoroughly German response to the Allies in th divided city was the construction of the Wall in 1961.
There were a couple tourists in the Luftbruke Plaza, and cars parked here and there in the complex, but otherwise the Turkish cabbie and I were alone. I asked him to drive me along the long line of hangars. The curve of the long terminal complex was intended to resemble the wings of a gigantic eagle, with passport control and the terminal entrance being the fierce beak.
The mile-long hangar roof was to have had bleacher seats built in for spectators to witness annual Luftwaffe exhibitions. The place was colossal. It was never completed. War overcame the plans.
Templehof closed at midnight on 30 October 2008. The last flights out were symbolic- a classic Junkers Tri-motor and a C-47 from Luftbruke days.
The battle over what to do about the historic field has been going on since. They will eventually padlock Tegel and concentrate air operations for the national capital region at Schoenefeld to the southeast.
No plan that I have heard of has the terminal at risk- and it is amazing. The latest is that it will be a park, and my associate was one of the 200,000 people who went out there two weeks ago to celebrate the open space. Later this year there is going to be a music festival there.
We passed the three-pronged monument to the Airlift, signifying the three air corridors into Berlin. A C-47 sits next to it.
The cabbie turned around and shrugged, looking for direction.
“Marienenplatz,” I said. I was suddenly hungry and the adrenaline was wearing off. “Marienenplatz, I repeated. “And step on me.”
Editor's note. I think I am traveling today. Maybe there will be something in the morning. Maybe not.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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