Armageddon - Leon Uris

Igor Karlovy had arrived early at the Berlin Air Safety Center so he could follow the progress of the day when he learned of the bad weather. He monitored the American and British confusion, and heard them sent home in defeat He smiled inwardly as his prediction came to pass.

Chapter Nineteen

CLINT WAS SO WORRIED that the general would have a seizure on the return trip that he forgot how rough the flight was. But the general was amazingly calm. The worst had happened. While the young hands floundered, his years of experience averted a crash. On the return to Rhein/Main he sat at Nick’s seat with a pad and pencil searching for an illusive bit of magic.

Clint Loveless was down as he had never been down. He hardly heard Judy’s cry for joy when he returned to the hotel. As luck, or someone else’s misfortune had it, an Army colonel from Camp Perry had broken with his wife and their house became available. Judy had seen it. It was a lovely six-room place on Gustav Freytag Strasse in a beautiful area where most of the American families lived in requisitioned houses.

What she did not know was that Hiram Stonebraker had threatened the housing procurement officer’s life if he failed to find a place for the Loveless family.

“What the hell’s the difference,” Clint said sourly, “we’ll probably be going back to the States soon. The Lift was finished today.”

“Oh, Clint ... I’m so sorry. The general?”

“He still refuses to believe it.”

A mantle of gloom fell on Airlift Headquarters as the Tonnage Board in the Control Center read ZERO for the second straight day as the weather closed Berlin down.

Hiram Stonebraker stayed in his suite and studied. The Lift in basic form was two one-way streets into Berlin, the North and South corridors. A single one-way street, the Central corridor, was used to leave Berlin.

Similar makes of aircraft flew in bloc times at the same speed and staggered altitudes of five hundred feet. Precision flying in the narrow air lanes through absolute power settings had become a science. It all narrowed down to a single bottleneck—the air over Berlin.

The ground-controlled approach system had put down the first three planes of the bloc cleanly. When Big Easy Four made two missed approaches it caused the rest of the bloc behind him to stack ... and then the breakdown in communications, radar control, holding patterns. The key lay somewhere in the behavior of Big Easy Four.

What was it? What was it? What was it?

M.J. broke up Hiram’s two-day meditation. There was to be a cocktail party and dinner to honor the arrival of his British counterpart, Air Commodore Rodman, for the formal signing of the joint Bases Agreement at Celle and Fassberg. He sent his chief of staff to meet the Commodore and his party at Y 80 and took him to the Schwarzer Bock Hotel.

Stonebraker stopped by at Rodman’s suite later and apologized for not meeting him earlier.

Rodman understood. “Bloody nuisance, this weather,” he said in the understatement of the year.

On the main floor of the Schwarzer Bock was a room rebuilt intact from a fifteenth-century castle. The general’s cocktail parties were held here, and on such occasions he baffled his staff by making a lie of the terrible stories about him. He was the epitome of charm to the ladies and his British guests.

Over cocktails:

Judy Loveless gushed with joy over the new house. M J. would be happy to go hunting for household wares.

Jo Ann Sindlinger, wife of the chief of staff, a tall, gravel-throated, happy Texan, gave Judy the word on where she might obtain a German maid. “They work for little more than room and board, you know.”

Clint and Group Commander Dudley speculated about the Burtonwood Base. Clint didn’t think that the base would be able to handle more than five craft a day on the two-hundred-hour overhaul.

Chief of Staff Sindlinger and Group Captain Cady were pleased with the way American/ British cooperation was shaping up.

Sid Swing, the logistics chief, talked to Lieutenant Colonel Mendoza, the maintenance chief, and Ben Scudder, the chief communicator, about changing the VHF crystals at Erding and they told Squadron Leader Nevins they wanted to study the British Eureka/Rebecca radar systems more closely.

Sid’s wife, Mary, was flirting with a British officer, as usual.

Ann Mendoza and Sue Scudder complained about the overcrowding at the high school.

Lou Edmonds told Chief Pilot Matt Beck the weather might clear.

Sarah Beck told Betty Edmonds there was a crystal factory at Neu-Isenburg that cut glass to your own pattern, was dirt cheap, and they made a date to drive over.

Air Commodore Rodman said he had landed a twenty-two pound salmon in Scotland on twelve-pound line. Hiram reckoned that the best battle, pound for pound, was with the Chinook salmon and invited the Commodore to come to Malibu some day when the albacore were running.

Dinner was served. As the first course arrived, Hiram Stonebraker stood up suddenly. “Commodore. Would you ask your people to adjourn immediately to the next room?”

The Englishman looked baffled.

“Ladies, will you excuse us?” Hiram said. “Gentlemen, please.”

Those who knew Hiram Stonebraker were not surprised at the sudden conference call. He shut the door, then had a tablecloth pinned on the wall. “Gentlemen. I have just solved the way to end the stacks over Berlin.”

They were all stunned.

He drew a diagram of the flow of the air bridge: planes following each other at three-minute intervals to the Planter Beacon on the first approach leg at Tempelhof.

“Here is the new difference. There will be no more stacking in case of weather. If a plane misses his approach or for any reason cannot land he is to return to his home base in the Center corridor and come back in the next bloc.”

If Big Easy Four had been sent back after his first attempt during the fiasco, there would have been no stack over Berlin!

It was so utterly simple, but so utterly perfect!

“We will not only fly to Berlin in three-minute intervals, we will land in three-minute intervals. The rhythm will not be broken by a missed approach. The craft will return to base and the beat ... beat ... beat will continue behind him.”

For a moment no one moved, scarcely breathed.

“He’s got it,” sputtered Air Commodore Rodman.

“Why in the hell didn’t we think of this earlier?” Stonebraker admonished himself. “Well ... let’s return to the ladies.”

Born from the fiasco of Blue Monday and Black Tuesday, Hiram Stonebraker had found the magic key to convert disaster into victory.

TO ALL AIRLIFT STATIONS: IN CASE OF MISSED APPROACH, AIRCRAFT IS TO BE DIVERTED TO HOME BASE THROUGH CENTER CORRIDOR AND RETURNED ON NEXT BLOC. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES WILL AIRCRAFT BE ALLOWED TO STACK. STONEBRAKER.

For the first time in the history of aviation the ancient ritual of stacking and holding patterns was eliminated and there was the feeling for the first time that the Airlift could succeed.

In a matter of days the tonnage rose from three thousand to thirty-five hundred tons ... to four thousand tons ... and then the daily goal of forty-five hundred tons was reached. It was reached on a stormy day during which ground-controlled approach talked down 80 per cent of the flights.

The joint British and American bases at Fassberg and Celle went into operation with the arrival of more Skymasters. The daily tonnage went over five thousand! The inevitable merger of forces came into being. As in war, the old Allies combined in peace with Hiram Stonebraker commander and Air Commodore Rodman vice commander of COMBINED AIRLIFT TASK FORCE.

The air bridge roared on day and night, and now the beat ... beat ... beat ... was that of a giant metronome, and with each beat another ten tons was transfused into the city of Berlin.