I recently posted an eight-part series called “Berlin Memoir” recounting my recollections of my 2½ years as an intelligence officer in West Berlin from July 1971 to February 1974. (The memoir was posted on 16 and 31 December 2016, 20 January, 9 and 19 February, 11 and 29 March, and 13 April 2017.) The memoir originated as a series of long e-mails I sent my friend Kirk Woodward back in 2005, and the impetus for those were an old movie I watched on cable TV that precipitated a Proustian experience for me. That flick was The Big Lift (1950, directed and written for Twentieth Century Fox by George Seaton) starring Montgomery Clift (1920-66) and Paul Douglas (1907-59) as a couple of U.S. airmen assigned to Operation Vittles, also known as the Berlin Airlift (26 June 1948-30 September 1949).
The
airing of The Big Lift that I watched
12 years ago was on AMC on the evening of Thursday, 31 July 2005; the stream of
e-mails started within days of that. On
Saturday evening, 19 August 2017, WNET, the PBS outlet on New York City’s channel
13, ran the same film on its Reel 13
and I taped it to watch again later.
When I did, I was prompted to write about the movie, not as any kind of
film review—the movie’s been around far too long already for me to do that
now—but from the perspective of that Proustian time trip back 30 years I made a
dozen years ago. The Big Lift isn’t a terribly remarkable
movie as far as cinema goes—Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times of 27 April 1950
that the film “merits favor without too high acclaim”—but it had some
startling, small moments of reflected reality. Not Realism—reality.
The
movie was made on location in Berlin (using both local German actors for the
German roles and actual military personnel for all the army and air force
characters except Clift and Douglas) starting in May 1949, just after the end
of the Soviet blockade. (The airlift
was, in fact, still going on—to build up a supply surplus and guard against a
Soviet resumption of the blockade.) Berlin was still digging out from the wartime
rubble, which is visible all around the filming locations, and Berliners were
suffering under infrastructure deficiencies, exacerbated by the Soviet
blockade. They still had the freedom of
the city, however, despite the four-party occupation that divided it into four
sectors; the Berlin Wall, which separated the Soviet Sector that became East
Berlin from the U.S., British, and French Sectors that became West Berlin, wasn’t
built until August 1961, over 11 years after the movie was released.
When
I was in Berlin in the early ’70s, West Berlin, two-thirds of the city, had 2.5
million inhabitants; East Berlin, one-third of the former German capital, was
home to 1.25 million people; in the film a character speaks of 2.5 million
people in the city, though statistics I’ve seen put the population at 3.3
million in 1950. (Today the population
is 3.7 million in the city proper and 6
million in metro Berlin.) At the time the
airlift launched, the country as a whole was also still separated into
occupation zones. The Federal Republic of
Germany, formed from the British, French, and U.S. Zones of Occupation and colloquially
known as West Germany, wasn’t proclaimed until 23 May 1949; the German Democratic
Republic, the former Soviet Zone of Occupation usually called East Germany, was
proclaimed on 7 October.
At
the start of The Big Lift, there’s a voice-over that explains how the
Soviets started the Berlin Blockade (which ran from 24 June 1948 to 12 May 1949).
The western presence in a foothold 110 miles inside the Soviet Zone of Occupied
Germany so rankled the Soviets that they launched an attempt to force the
Allies out of Berlin by starving the city. Richard Peña, the host of Reel 13 and a film professor at Columbia University, explained that
first, the Soviets turned off the electricity and then the VO describes how they
sealed all the crossing points between West and East Germany and East Germany
and West Berlin, halted the trains at the border of the Soviet Zone and actually
removed lengths of track, blocked river and canal routes into the city, and closed
the Autobahns connecting Berlin to the western zones to Allied traffic. With all access to land and water routes into
and out of Berlin denied to them, the Western Allies determined to airlift
supplies of fuel, food, and medicines to the city, using Rhein-Main Air Base,
part of the main international airport in Frankfurt-am-Main in the U.S. Zone of
Occupied Germany, as the base of operations in the west and Tempelhof Air Base,
the military airfield of Berlin’s central airport, located in the occupied
city’s U.S. Sector, as the principal off-loading depot in the east.
(British,
French, and Australian forces participated in the airlift alongside the U.S.
Air Force; as we see in the flick, even the U.S. Navy, which had no forces in
Berlin, detached sailors to help unload cargo at Tempelhof. The British effort was called Operation
Plainfare and the Aussies’ was codenamed Operation Pelican. The French, having committed the bulk of
their post-war aircraft to their war in Indochina, 1946-54—the precursor to the
U.S. conflict in Vietnam—couldn’t supply any planes, but they expanded the
airport in their sector of Berlin, Tegel, to accommodate cargo flights from
Frankfurt. Tempelhof Airport, built in 1927,
was West Berlin’s main airport until it was closed in 2008; it ceased to be a
U.S. Air Force Base in 1994. Its place
was taken by Tegel Airport, which had served mostly French military flights during
the Cold War. During the era of the
divided city, the British and Soviet forces had airports in their sectors as
well, Gatow and Schönefeld, respectively; Gatow, also a landing site for
airlift flights, was mostly used for British military aircraft and Schönefeld,
now Berlin’s secondary international
airport, was the central airfield for the Soviet Sector/East Berlin.)
The
Berlin Airlift, flying over 200,000 flights in 12 months, carrying almost 9,000
pounds of cargo a day, defeated the Soviet action and they never tried it again—but,
still miffed at the existence of the democratic outpost decades later, they did
keep up the same tactics on a sporadic and short-term basis. Every few
months, they’d stop the supply trains from West Germany and keep them on a
siding for hours, maybe a day. On another occasion, they’d stop all the
traffic on the Autobahn—official Allied traffic was restricted to one
designated route through the German Democratic Republic between Berlin and
Helmstedt on the border—and back cars and trucks up at one or another of their internal
checkpoints. (Checkpoint Able, or Alpha as I was called after 1956, was located
at Helmstedt-Marienborn on the border between the British Zone of Occupation in
the west and the Soviet Zone in the east; Checkpoint Baker, later Bravo, was
the crossing point from the Soviet Zone into the American Sector of occupied
Berlin at Dreilinden-Drewitz in the city’s southwest region; Checkpoint Charlie
was located at Friedrichstrasse, the access point from the three western
occupation sectors of Berlin into the Soviet Sector. After 1961, Checkpoint Charlie was the only
military gateway between West and East Berlin.)
With
a scene of some GI’s watching a Movietone newsreel report of the Soviet
blockade of Berlin and the start of the airlift, The Big Lift begins in July 1948, a little over two weeks after the
airlift began. The newsreel is
interrupted by an announcement ordering the off-duty airmen of the 19th Troop
Carrier Squadron at Hickam Field in Honolulu to report to their squadron. At a briefing, the men are told they’re being
sent on temporary assignment to Westover Field in Chicopee Falls,
Massachusetts, for “operational training,” but some men in the squadron, among
them Master Sergeant Hank Kowalski (Douglas), a ground-controlled approach
(GCA) operator, guess that they’re really on their way to Germany to help run the Soviet blockade they just heard
about on the newsreel. As one “ground-gripper” sergeant tells them: “I just
put 15 hundred pounds of coffee aboard there, and I haven’t heard of any coffee
shortage in Massachusetts lately.” Those
feelings turn out to be right and the men of the crews of the C-54 Skymasters
of the 19th, including Technical Sergeant Danny MacCullough (Clift), flight
engineer of a troop transport nicknamed The
White Hibiscus, take off for a flight halfway around the globe to Rhein-Main
Air Base in Germany.
(A
GCA operator is a special air-traffic controller who uses advanced—for the
time—technology and instrumentation to help planes in hazardous circumstances, such
as bad weather or mechanical problems, land safely. The United States Air Force had only become a
separate service in 1947; during the war, it was known as the U.S. Army Air
Force and in 1949, the ranks were still the same as the army’s. A tech sergeant, Clift’s character’s rank, was
the equivalent of today’s sergeant first class: three chevrons on top and two
rockers below; a master sergeant, Douglas’s character’s rank, is the same now
as it was then: three chevrons with three rockers. The air force still uses both ranks today,
but the insignia for NCO’s have changed.
(Frankfurt
Airport is one of the largest and busiest in Europe. When I lived in West Germany from 1962 to
1967, I flew into and out of Frankfurt many times. I also landed at Rhein-Main, the military
part of the Frankfurt airport, in July 1971 when I reported for duty in Berlin
because I had to change planes there; I also had to change out of my uniform,
required attire for the military transport flight from McGuire Air Force Base,
New Jersey, into a civilian suit for my arrival in Berlin, where I was
instructed not to appear in uniform.
When I lived in West Germany, Frankfurt was also the army base where my
mother went for some of her periodic shopping trips at the PX and commissary;
until he was transferred to the embassy in Bonn, my father was officially assigned
to the U.S. Consulate General in Frankfurt-am-Main and that’s where his boss
worked. Frankfurt’s also where I took my
PSAT’s and SAT’s in 1964 and where I registered for the draft in 1965.)
Showing
on a world map the route from Honolulu, halfway across the Pacific Ocean to San
Francisco, across the continental U.S. to Chicopee Falls, then across the
Atlantic and half of Europe to Frankfurt, Germany—a
long flight in a propeller plane that had to make refueling stops en route—Danny
and Hank’s C-54, all the seats removed to make room for cargo, heads
for Rhein-Main Air Base. When
they arrive, other planes from Alaska and Puerto Rico are also coming in to
land. When the squadron sets down in
Frankfurt, Danny and his crew are immediately ordered to fly a load of coal
into Berlin’s Tempelhof Air Base.
Danny’s friend Hank hitches a ride with them to his new post at
Tempelhof. A POW of the Germans during
World War II who’d been mistreated by a guard who hated both Americans and
Poles—and he was both—Hank holds a grudge against the German people and goes
out of his way to be rude and overbearing to them. (In 1948, the war, which ended only a little
over three years earlier, was still such a recent memory that on the entry gate
to Hickam Field was still the notation: “TOKYO: 4394 mi. / FLYING TIME: 26 hrs. 27 mins.”) Danny, who wants to see some of Berlin, is disappointed
at being restricted to the air base so the plane can be unloaded quickly and
return to Frankfurt. Their time on the
ground at Tempelhof is 20 minutes!
Hank
hates being sent to Berlin for personal reasons, and we see in the film that
the city is still a disaster area anyway.
(When my parents visited Berlin in June 1963 for Kennedy’s “Ich bin
ein Berliner” speech, they reported that the city seemed artificial, that
life was sort of staged and forced, like a Potemkin city.) In my day, however, West Berlin was a vibrant
and active city, with a full social and cultural life; it was a plum
assignment. Berlin Brigade and its
attached units had the best of everything in USAREUR (U.S. Army, Europe) and
USAFE (U.S. Air Force, Europe)—PX/BX (and we also had access to the British NAAFI
and the French Économat), service clubs, army hospital, recreation facilities,
housing, everything—and, at least with respect to military intelligence, the
best of the best were sent there.
Generals from The Zone, as we called West Germany (a hold-over from the
days of the occupation zones of Germany), came to Berlin to play—especially
golf—or get treatment at the Berlin Army Hospital; GI’s stationed in The Zone
were brought in by the bus- or train-load for “Berlin Orientation Tours” (about
which I comment in “Berlin Stories – Three SNAFU’s,” 18 August 2012, and
“Berlin Memoir, Part 1,” 16 December 2016).
On
that first flight into Berlin, the pilot of Danny’s plane (Lt. Gerald Arons) gives
a detailed description of flying into Tempelhof Air Base: “All you have to do
is to stay in this 20-mile corridor, hold exactly 170 miles an hour, maintain
exactly 6,000 feet, fly instruments continuously, keeping a three-minute
interval, making radar checks on the second, maintain . . . .” (He’s interrupted by Tempelhof tower on the
radio warning him of two Soviet fighters about to buzz their C-54.) The
Soviets controlled the airspace over their occupation zone of Germany and
restricted Allied flights to a very narrow corridor. Plus, Tempelhof is
actually in downtown Berlin: planes come in to land over city buildings. As
Danny quips on that first flight, they “certainly put this field in a nice
place, didn’t they?” and Hank winces as he looks out the window to see
buildings looming up beneath them, shutting his eyes tight until he hears the
landing gear hit the runway. As the
plane comes in over rooftops, Lieutenant Arons jokes, “It’s just like landing
in the Rose Bowl!”
Once
they’re safely on the ground, Hank remarks that because pilots have to drop
“200 feet in a quarter of a mile,” a steep descent, “I guess you could use GCA
over all those apartment houses.”
Indeed, there are several shots of this, both from the air as the flyers
make their approaches and from the city as planes land or take off practically
outside apartment windows. We see the
second flight of Danny’s plane shown in the film come in right over the rooves
of apartment buildings until the aircraft actually disappears from sight beneath
the roof line, the airport and its landing strips still in front of it. Whenever I flew into Berlin, I had the same
response that Hank had. (It reminded me a little of the airport in Geneva,
where I graduated from high school. That airport is in a little trough
surrounded by mountains—including Mont Blanc, at 15,774 feet, Western Europe’s
highest peak—and the planes have to fly in high to get over the mountains and
then drop suddenly to land before they hit the mountains on the other side. If I watched out the window during our
approaches, my heart ended up in my throat!)
The
same flight restrictions were in force for flights to and from Berlin in the
’70s as in the ’40s and ’50s; only specially certified pilots were allowed to
fly in and out of Berlin. One of these was the newly-appointed CO of Tempelhof,
Col. Gail Halvorsen (b. 1920). In 1948-49, then-Lieutenant Halvorsen
became a hero to the children of Berlin (by the 1970s, the adults running the
city): he was known as the Candy Bomber because he dropped Hershey bars from
his plane whenever he flew over the city on his landing approach. (He would wiggle his plane’s wings to
signal the children below that it was their Candy Bomber. This provided another nickname for the flier:
Uncle Wiggly Wings.) Halvorsen inspired
others, both military and civilian, to lend a hand in this effort, which
acquired the name Operation Little Vittles.
I knew Colonel Halvorsen when I was stationed in West Berlin—his
daughter was a member of our theater group, which met at the air base—and once
when I took an air force hop from Ramstein, then USAFE headquarters, into Tempelhof,
the former Candy Bomber piloted the plane. My little brush with actual
history. (I relate this incident in “Berlin Memoir, Part 7,” 29 March
2017.)
Months
after their first flight, the crew of “Big Easy 37” (the craft’s radio call
sign) rename their plane Der Schwarze
Hibiscus (“The Black Hibiscus”) because
of the coal dust that’s accumulated from hauling the fuel. They become surprise celebrities in Berlin
when they are the 100,000th flight of Operation Vittles to land in the city. At an airfield ceremony, complete with “the
honor guard of the Office of Military Government” (which we called the U.S.
Command, Berlin, or USCOB, by the ’70s),
by “representatives of the people of Berlin,” as ABC radio correspondent
Lyford Moore (who appears as himself), the commentator of the proceedings, put
it, three crew members are singled out to receive token gifts: Capt. William A.
Stewart, the pilot, Lt. Alfred L. Freiburger, co-pilot; and Danny. Amusingly, the gifts the Berliners hand out
are German-style briefcases like the ones every man, from street and
construction workers (who used it to carry their zweite Frühstück—‘second breakfast’—and their lunch) to business
executives, carried in West Germany when I was a teenager there. The co-pilot, Lieutenant Freiburger, was
addressed in behalf of the children of Berlin by 10-year-old Helmut Braucher
(who’d been coached for his speech by a GI from the deep South so that little
Helmut, with his pronounced German accent, uses southernisms like “y’all”—very droll). It struck me that Freiburger was a stand-in
for, or at least a reference to, Lieutenant Halvorsen’s Candy Bomber—whose
exploits, I suspect, would have been known to audiences in 1950.
At
the tarmac ceremony, Frederica Burkhardt (Cornell Borchers) is introduced to
thank Danny in behalf of the women of Berlin and he’s immediately taken with
the pretty German war widow. Then Richard
O’Malley, an AP correspondent covering the ceremony (also himself), recruits
Danny for a public relations stunt. O’Malley
wants Danny to follow a load of flour airlifted from Rhein-Main to a bakery in
Berlin, and see it turned into a loaf of bread, which will end up in the hands
of a Berlin child. When the
correspondent tells Danny he can get him a 24-hour pass in Berlin for a couple
of hours work, the airman jumps at the offer as a way of getting to see
Frederica again.
Danny
gets TDY (temporary duty) orders to travel to Berlin with O’Malley and a few
days later, the AP reporter has met Danny in Frankfurt and is accompanying him
in the cockpit on the C-54’s flight to Tempelhof. Fog has descended on the city, obscuring the
approach to the air field and O’Malley listens in as the crew responds to Hank’s
GCA guidance from Tempelhof’s tower as he talks the plane in through the
“building area” until the pilot can see the runway and resumes a “visual landing.” (“That I gotta see,” says O’Malley, as he
shifts over to see out the cockpit window.)
In the next scene, Hank gives Danny and O’Malley a lesson in the
equipment and procedures of GCA in his control station in the tower.)
After
doing his PR gig for O’Malley, Danny calls the phone number Frederica gave him
for her neighbor who has a telephone and finds that she’s at work. Danny locates her at her work—shoveling rubble
from bombed-out buildings off the streets of Berlin into what look like mine trolleys on tracks. In the movie, there are several scenes of Frederica
and other Berliners scooping up war wreckage into various carts and
wheelbarrows. The destruction, still in
evidence both in the early ’60s when I lived in West Germany and in the early ’70s
when I was in Berlin, had to be cleared by hand because the deprivations of
Germany after the war, especially in Berlin, made gasoline-powered machinery unavailable. In addition, the post-war unemployment was so
great until the Wirtschaftswunder—the
Economic Miracle—of the 1960s, that hiring out-of-work Berliners to clear the
rubble served a benefit. (In a couple of scenes, the bomb-damaged Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche
is visible in the background. While most
of the bomb debris was long removed by the time I arrived in Berlin—when my
parents were in Berlin in ’63, they told me that there was still war
rubble visible around the city—the iconic Memorial Church’s silhouette was
unchanged, as it is even today, the bell tower having been kept in its
distressed condition as a reminder of the war and its consequences.)
What
the movie doesn’t tell is that most of that debris was taken to a site in the
borough of Wilmersdorf near the Grunewald, Berlin’s forested “Central Park.” (Some of the reclaimed bricks were reused.) The rubble was piled into an artificial
mountain named Teufelsberg (“Devil Mountain”), the highest spot in the city at
about 395 feet. On top of that mountain,
the Army Security Agency, the military counterpart of the NSA, built an
elaborate spy site for communications surveillance (“signal intelligence,”
known as SIGINT) called Field Station Berlin, the most secret place in the city.
Usually just called Teufelsberg—the facility was known to insiders simply as “The
Hill”—the listening facility was located in the British Sector even though it
was a U.S. site. (The Brits had a small section on the site, but
essentially we just shared whatever poop we got with them and the French.) Bristling with antennas, domes, spheres, and
silos, FSB looked like a set from the space opera Star Trek (or Raumschiff Enterprise, as it was
entitled on German TV—what a hoot to see Spock speaking dubbed German!).
There were enough microwave transmitters and receivers on top of the complex
to zap all the “grunie pigs,” the wild boar that roamed the Grunewald, into roast pork!
Everyone
knew FSB was there—you could see the bulbous towers and antennas, looking like
some futuristic city, from many parts of Berlin—but very few who didn’t work
there knew what went on. (One of my
classmates from the Russian language program was assigned to the companion
listening station in Helmstedt and despite my clearances as an intel officer—I
had clearances for which you’d need clearances just to know what the initials
stood for—he couldn’t tell me what he did, aside from the obvious: listening in
on Russian, East German, and Warsaw Pact communications. The transcripts I got from Potsdam, which I
mention in passing later, came from FSB.
As a counterintelligence Special Agent, I was involved in “human
intelligence,” or HUMINT—that’s spies and counterspies, “sources,” and
“subjects”—and “electronic intelligence,” or ELINT, more familiar as bugs, taps,
and electronic eavesdropping.)
Teufelsberg was used as a debris dump site through the 1950s and was
finally landscaped in 1972; construction of FSB was begun in 1963 (a mobile
listening station was installed on Teufelsberg in 1961), so it didn’t exist when
The Big Lift was filmed. Even if it did, the filmmakers probably
wouldn’t have been allowed to mention that that’s where all the rubble was
heading. Now, of course, Teufelsberg’s
all over the ’Net—looking like a sci-fi ghost town!
After
Frederica gets off work, she takes Danny on a tour of the city and he sees a worker putting posters up on a
Litfass column, a cylinder-shaped sidewalk structure used for advertisements in
cities like Berlin and Paris (where they’re called Morris columns). When the man sifts through some street trash
to fish out cigarette butts, the soft-hearted flight engineer gives him some
fresh cigarettes but in the exchange, the worker’s buddy on a ladder above them
spills a bucket of poster paste all over Danny’s uniform. This forces Danny and Frederica to rush back
to her apartment where he can change clothes so the young widow can take his
uniform to a cleaner; he has to borrow civilian working clothes from Herr
Stieber (O. E. Hasse), Frederica’s neighbor, until the uniform is cleaned. Being out of uniform was a serious offense in
the occupied Berlin of the postwar decade.
Danny asserts later, only half joking: “If I’m seen out of uniform, I’ve
had it. They give me ten days, goodbye
stripes; worse than that, they’ll take away my PX card.” In my era, wearing civvies off duty was
perfectly fine—although GI’s couldn’t ride the buses and subways for free
unless they were in uniform.
(The cigarette-butt bit reminded me of one of the constants of intel work at Berlin Station: “walk-ins”—people who came in off the street to the HQ compound and said they had something to report. As you might imagine, 99% of walk-ins were nonsense. Many, even a majority I’d say, were nuts. As a result, we often got kooks calling or walking in with all manner of strange reports to make. One such swore that the KGB was leaving poisoned cigarette butts on the streets so that GI’s would pick them up, smoke them, and get sick. To prove this, he had brought little bottles of his own blood, which he carried around with him in a tote bag. Riiight. I used to see GI’s picking up discarded cigarette butts all the time. I mean, who could afford 25¢ a pack at the PX?)
While he’s waiting in Frederica’s apartment for her to retrieve his uniform, Danny gets to know Stieber, the neighbor with the telephone. They introduce themselves to one another and chit-chat briefly, then Stieber takes a seat by the window and takes out a pad and makes notes as planes land at the airport. (I told you, the planes flew right by the windows!) Danny asks the man what he’s doing. “I’m a Russian spy,” he answers matter-of-factly. Clift is taken aback slightly, as you might expect. Danny asks if Stieber’s not afraid that the GI might report him. “Americans know I do this,” Stieber states. He explains that because the Russians don’t believe the official announcements of the airlift’s progress—since the Russians lie, they assume everyone else does, too—they insist on getting their own statistics. (This is why Stieber has a phone when so few others can get one—so he can report regularly to his Soviet handler.) Since the official reports are accurate—the U.S. wants everyone to know what they’re doing; it’s good propaganda—he tells Clift that he leaves out one or two flights, just so the Russians feel they’re getting “real” figures. Later in the movie, Stieber’s steps out of the living room briefly just as a plane comes in to land. He sticks his head around the corner, then smiles at Danny and says, “That one was only American propaganda!”
While he’s waiting in Frederica’s apartment for her to retrieve his uniform, Danny gets to know Stieber, the neighbor with the telephone. They introduce themselves to one another and chit-chat briefly, then Stieber takes a seat by the window and takes out a pad and makes notes as planes land at the airport. (I told you, the planes flew right by the windows!) Danny asks the man what he’s doing. “I’m a Russian spy,” he answers matter-of-factly. Clift is taken aback slightly, as you might expect. Danny asks if Stieber’s not afraid that the GI might report him. “Americans know I do this,” Stieber states. He explains that because the Russians don’t believe the official announcements of the airlift’s progress—since the Russians lie, they assume everyone else does, too—they insist on getting their own statistics. (This is why Stieber has a phone when so few others can get one—so he can report regularly to his Soviet handler.) Since the official reports are accurate—the U.S. wants everyone to know what they’re doing; it’s good propaganda—he tells Clift that he leaves out one or two flights, just so the Russians feel they’re getting “real” figures. Later in the movie, Stieber’s steps out of the living room briefly just as a plane comes in to land. He sticks his head around the corner, then smiles at Danny and says, “That one was only American propaganda!”
Stieber tells Danny that the Russians are spying on
the Americans with 15,000 German agents in Berlin, and the Americans are spying
on the Russians, only with just 10,000 German spies. (In my Berlin days, there were about 10,000 GI’s
and official U.S. civilians posted in the city.
Of those, perhaps 2,000 were engaged in some kind of intelligence work.) Both sides know that the other side is
spying, and that each side also knows that the other side knows. “Things must get a little gemischt [mixed up],” observes Danny. “Oh, ja,
a little sehr gemischt [very mixed up],” laughs Herr
Stieber. “But there’s also maybe 500
Russians who are spying for both
sides.” It’s very good for the
unemployment problem, he quips. It’s all very absurd—but not
inaccurate.
When I was in Berlin in the ’70s, not only were the
Russians (and the East Germans, of course) spying on us and we on them,
but, of course, the French and British were also spying on the Russians and
vice versa. But we were also spying on one another. And there were
spies in Berlin from Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Soviet Bloc
countries, all spying on everyone else—including each other. There were
even countries with no obvious need to be in Berlin operating there—Chinese
spies, for example. Berlin was espionage-central in that era—the
counterpart of, say, Lisbon in WWII. With the possible exception of
Saigon, Berlin in that period may have had more spies per capita than any other
place on Earth. It certainly had spies from more countries and agencies
than anywhere else. As the label for one exhibit at Washington’s
International Spy Museum (see my report “Spook
Museum,” 25 March 2010) had it: “BERLIN – City of Spies”! (I’m sure
there’s a comedy of errors in this somewhere!)
The first day I arrived in the city and reported to Berlin
Station’s offices, which were in the headquarters compound on Clayallee, named
for Gen. Lucius Clay (1897-1978), “father” of the Berlin airlift (who appears in the
newsreel at the beginning of the movie), I noticed two black Russian sedans
parked, one by each exit from the compound. (Volgas and Moscvitches were
easy to spot: even in the 1970s, they looked like cars from the 1950s!) I asked about them, and my sponsor told me
that they were almost always there, just watching, taking notes and probably
photos—and that within an hour of my arrival, they knew my name, rank, and
assignment. (We weren’t clandestine, but low profile. We wore civilian clothes on duty and were all
addressed as “Mr.” or “Miss” outside the office. When we had to wear
fatigues—for the firing range, say, or during an alert—we wore no branch or
rank insignia, only the “U.S.” device. Our addresses and phone numbers
were unlisted, and our private cars were all registered in Munich—the 66th Military
Intelligence Group headquarters—not Berlin.) By the same token, I got
info copies of the transcripts of the wiretaps from Potsdam, the Soviet
military HQ in East Germany. The Cold War was mighty crowded in Berlin! Sehr
gemischt, indeed.
When it comes time to retrieve Danny’s uniform, Frederica
discovers that the cleaner has been called into the Soviet Sector on a family
emergency and the shop is closed. Frederica
suggests that if Danny, an American, goes and asks him, the cleaning shop-owner
will more likely give him a key than if she went alone—so he goes off in the
clothes he borrowed from Herr Stieber.
On the way to the Soviet Sector, they arrive at an U-Bahn (for Untergrundbahn,
the German word for ‘underground railway’ or ‘subway’) station, marked with a
large letter U. These signs were ubiquitous in Berlin, designating
one of two underground systems in the city; the other was the S-Bahn (for Stadtschnellbahn,
‘city rapid transit,’ a commuter rail line similar to New York/New Jersey’s
PATH trains). Both systems predated
World War II so both went into all
the occupied sectors—even after the Wall went up. The difference was that, according to the
occupation agreement, the U-Bahn was controlled by the Western allies (and
later, the West Berlin authorities) and the S-Bahn by the Soviets (and then the
East Berlin government). And because the
S-Bahn was considered East German territory, even in West Berlin, I wasn’t
allowed even in the stations, let alone the trains, because of my security
status. (I could use the U-Bahn, even
though it went to East Berlin—as long as I stayed on our side of the Wall.)
As they’re about to go into the U-Bahn, Danny realizes
that he forgot his cigarettes. Frederica
says he can get some in the station, but Danny says all he has is “scrip.” During the occupation, so that U.S. cash
wouldn’t circulate on the black market, GI’s were issued scrip, a kind of
substitute currency that was only good on military bases and in PX’s and
service clubs; Germans weren’t supposed to possess scrip (though a black market
in it quickly arose), so Danny couldn’t buy anything on the German economy or
exchange his scrip for German money.
(One of the reasons the Soviets started the blockade was because the
western sectors of Berlin had announced that they would begin accepting the
newly-adopted West German Deutsche Mark, loosening the Soviet’s grip on the
city.) Danny can’t even exchange some
scrip for Frederica’s marks because she’s not supposed to have any and can’t
spend or exchange it legally. (She offers
to buy his cigs for him and he’ll pay her back later.)
Scrip was no longer in use by the U.S. military in Germany either in the ’60s or the ’70s—though ration books were for items like tobacco, liquor, and gasoline, among some other commodities, to prevent GI’s from buying them in bulk, tax free and subsidized, at the PX or commissary and then reselling them to unauthorized people—such as German civilians. I worked on a surveillance of a guy suspected of doing just that—as well as selling classified information, a kind of all-purpose sleeze—but the op fell apart and as I was just a hired hand, I don’t know what happened after that; see my post “Berlin Stories – Three SNAFU’s.”
Scrip was no longer in use by the U.S. military in Germany either in the ’60s or the ’70s—though ration books were for items like tobacco, liquor, and gasoline, among some other commodities, to prevent GI’s from buying them in bulk, tax free and subsidized, at the PX or commissary and then reselling them to unauthorized people—such as German civilians. I worked on a surveillance of a guy suspected of doing just that—as well as selling classified information, a kind of all-purpose sleeze—but the op fell apart and as I was just a hired hand, I don’t know what happened after that; see my post “Berlin Stories – Three SNAFU’s.”
In the U-Bahn station, they find a vendor who sells loose
cigarettes (among other, probably black market goods). You could still
buy loosies in much of Europe when I was in school there—a pack was relatively
pricey even in the ’60s. (Of course, I
mostly bought my smokes at the PX where a pack of American cigs went for a quarter
with a ration booklet; the average price at home was 30¢. Thanks to the U.S. taxpayer and duty-free
agreements, my cancer sticks were subsidized!
When I was in high school in Geneva and ran out of my PX butts, I had to
pony up the local price. Since French
cigarettes like Gauloises and Gitanes were strong, unfiltered, and stinky, I
had to pay for English cigs or American, the most expensive ones but the ones I
smoked—around SFr3.25 at the time for a pack of twenty, about 70-75¢. That’s worth almost $6 today.)
Despite
the potential penalty for Danny’s being caught out of uniform, he and Frederica
meet Hank and his “Schatzi,” the intelligent but naïve Gerda (Bruni Löbel), at
a night club, where Hank treats Gerda as an inferior. (“Schatzi” was GI-German slang for something
like ‘sweetie’ or ‘tootsie’; it’s derived from the German word Schatz, or ‘treasure,’ which is a common
German term for ‘sweetheart,’ as in mein
Schatz, ‘my treasure,’ ‘my darling.’)
He’s also rude to Frederica, pumping her about her late husband whom
she’s told Danny died in Russia, and her father. Hank accuses her husband of having been in
the SS, but she insists that he was just a draftee, like so many U.S. soldiers. Hank shoots back, “Some day I’d like to meet
just one German who enlisted.” Her
father, Frederica continued, had resisted the Nazis: as a university professor,
he protested the burning of books until they burned his books. When my family lived in West Germany in the
early ’60s, we were amused that every German who’d have been of military age
during the war insisted that he fought on the Russian front. Not one former Wehrmacht soldier we
encountered had served on the western front.
With so many Germans fighting in the east . . . who was it
that was shooting at Brits and Americans like my dad, we wondered.
Before
Hank and Gerda arrive at the restaurant, Danny and Frederica talk about their
day in Berlin, riding the U-Bahn and the streetcar (which no longer existed by
the time I arrived there). Danny’s been
learning German and he asks Frederica about the difference between addressing
people as Sie (the formal form of
‘you’) and saying du (the informal
‘you,’ comparable to the archaic ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ in English). Frederica explains the distinction and Danny
wonders how long it takes for two people to duzen
one another—to get to call each other du
instead of Sie. Frederica tells him that “usually this would
take a long time.”
“When
you only got 24 hours and you’ve used up eight of them already . . .,” Danny replies.
“For such emergencies we have the Duzis.
We link arms and drink . . . and then we . . . .” Danny kisses her.
This
is a bit of a thorny issue in Germany—I assume still today. (The French and most other European cultures,
except the British, have the same distinction.)
Who duzens whom and who must siezen is sticky for foreigners. When I first went to live in Germany, I was
still a teenager, so the situation was a little clearer: I could automatically duzen my peers, even when we were just
introduced, and I had to siezen their
parents and any other adults I met. My
parents had it rougher since over time, they became friendly with some of the
Germans they met through my dad’s job or other circumstances. Since Dad was a diplomat, that put him at a
formal distance from most men and women he met, so it was basically safer
socially just to keep to Sie for the
most part. Of course, as foreigners. we
were given a lot of latitude by our German hosts, who were just delighted that
we even tried to speak German, even if we made mistakes. No one ever invited me to duzen him or her, even though I called
Germany home until after I was 20. (I
never participated in a Duzis or drank
a Bruderschaft—another ceremony for transitioning
from Sie to du—or witnessed either one.)
By the way, connected to the distinction of Sie and du is also the
practice of calling people by their first names or, even more familiar,
nicknames, which aren’t used as casually as they are in English, especially for
us Americans. The post-war situation in The Big Lift abbreviated the time it
would take for two people to get to that level of familiarity, further
shortened by the facts that Danny and Hank are Americans—we jump right to first
names and nicknames as soon as we meet—and have so little time to get
acquainted to new people like Frederica and Gerda.
In
the restaurant, Hank happens to spot the former camp guard who tormented and
beat him as a POW, and attacks him and nearly kills him. Danny’s able to stop Hank only by knocking
him down and passing military police mistake him for a German attacking Hank. Still in civvies (in which he can’t be
caught), Danny’s chased into the Soviet Sector accompanied by Frederica. She explains that “Germans go back and forth
all day long,” crossing between the sectors—remember, there’s no Wall yet. Not in my day, of course. Besides the Wall, the East Germans prohibited
West Berliners from entering East Berlin from 1961 to 1973 (though they often
got around this by holding ID documents that showed that they came from a city
in the Federal Republic, a pretty common gambit). In addition, U.S. personnel with high
clearances like me were forbidden by our government from traveling into East
Berlin and East Germany—though, incongruously, not other Eastern Bloc countries. As a result, I lived in West Berlin for 2½
years and never visited East Berlin (where most of the historic sights were). (I wrote about this in “The Berlin Wall,” 29
November 2009.)
Danny
and Frederica narrowly escape back into the American Sector, where Hank is
waiting for them at Frederica’s apartment.
A group of neighbors gathers late in the evening, drinking, noshing,
playing music, and singing—a kind of impromptu party. Another woman who
lives in the building is just arriving from work and stops in to say
hello. When she arrives, she makes the rounds of all the partiers,
stopping at each one, shaking his or her hand, and saying, “Guten Abend.”
When she reaches the last person, she says she’s tired and off home to turn in
and immediately reverses her route, shaking all the same hands in reverse
order, saying. “Gute Nacht,” as she works her way back out the door.
That’s so
German—the formal, hand-shaking greeting of each and every person present, even
though you don’t plan to stay, and then doing the exact same thing to say good
night. Even Hank remarks in a later scene on how often the Germans shake
hands; in the scene after Danny’s been to the bakery and given the loaf of
bread to a little girl, everyone shakes hands to say auf Wiedersehen, even Hank—except that he mumbles dismissively,
“Yeah, yeah,” as he shakes each person’s hand.
In Germany, at least back then—they may have caught the American
casualness disease since my day—you can’t just stick your head in the door,
wave, and say to everyone at once, “Hi. And good night,” and then
leave. It couldn’t have been realer if it had been a documentary!
By
now, Danny’s fallen in love with Frederica, despite learning from Hank that she
lied about the backgrounds of her dead husband, who’d indeed been a member of
the SS—and almost certainly not a draftee—and her father, who “never saw a
university,” and had cooperated with the Nazis because “he had a little dough,
and wanted to keep it . . . . Walked out
on her mother in ’39 because she was Polish,” Hank reported. “Nice guy,” snaps Hank. He explains to Danny that a friend of his in
“the Document Center” checked Frederica out and found a record of her from the
war years. (As I revealed in “Berlin
Memoir, Part 4,” posted on 9 February 2017, we actually had to conduct records
checks on people with whom we got friendly outside the unit.)
The
Berlin Document Center was, in fact, the records repository for the Third
Reich’s official files, and it was in the American Sector so we kept it as a
resource. It was one of the agencies we always checked when we did
background investigations of a German native who was old enough to have lived
in the Third Reich. Mind you, the BDC held all the Reich’s official
records, so a file might reveal only that someone was an old-age pensioner, had
been a dues-paying member of the musicians guild, or had held a job as a school
teacher in Frankfurt. Only occasionally did a file check of the BDC
reveal a criminal record or service in the SS or something nefarious.
Danny
confronts Frederica with the BDC file, and she acknowledges the facts. Her explanation for the lies is that, like
others in post-war Germany, she’s learned to make herself seem brave and
pitiful to evoke sympathy from their occupiers.
“When you live in a sewer, you soon discover that the sewer rats are
best equipped to survive,” she explains.
After contemplating the significance of Frederica’s lies about her
husband and father, and seeing that she’s capable of deception, Danny realizes that
he still loves her. When he reads in the
Air Force Times that GI’s like his
crew who’ve served in Operation Vittles for six months are due to rotate back
to the States soon, he applies to marry Frederica.
The Air
Force Times, like its companion weeklies the Army Times, Navy Times,
and Marine Corps Times, publishes
official information from the services and the Department of Defense, or
National Military Establishment as it was known in 1948. The Stars
and Stripes, a quasi-independent daily newspaper published the by U.S.
armed forces abroad, headlines from which are also seen in the The Big Lift, covers the news stories of
the day as well as events in the military community, but doesn’t publish
official notices and announcements. So,
for instance, the headline “Rotation to Start for Lift Personnel Who Have
Served Six Months” ran in the military Times,
while the story slugged “Record Fog
Shrouds Europe; Sea and Air Travel at Standstill; Air Lift Manages to Deliver
Only 70 Tons in 24 Hour Period” was published in Stars and Stripes. When the
list for promotions to captain, in which my name appeared, was released by the
Pentagon in November 1973, it was published in the Army Times but not Stars and
Stripes—which, however, had run a long story in July about the
newly-founded Tempelhof American Theatre that I helped start.
When
Danny’s squadron commander uses the telephone to try to expedite Danny’s marriage
application, the connection is so bad that the two officers have to spell out
their names to each other using the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet, used in
the U.S. military from 1941 to 1956 (when a uniform NATO alphabet was
adopted). The JAN, commonly called “Able Baker” after the words for the
letters A and B, was developed so that
soldiers and airmen using radio-telephone communications could spell out important
information (or any time when initials or letters were spoken) with letters represented
by words that can’t easily be confused for letters that sound similar (like B and D, for example). When I had to serve as Duty Agent, I had to
stay in the station all night to answer the phones (sort of like the Charge of
Quarters in a line unit—except spooky). One phone was, of course, the red
alert phone which rang once a night to check the communications system, and the
DA had to answer it with a prescribed phrase: the name of the unit and the DA’s
initials in phonetic alphabet. So, when I was DA, I’d have to say, “66th
MI. Romeo-Echo-Kilo.” (That would have been “Roger-Easy-King” in 1948.)
Danny
rushes back to Berlin to get Frederica and marry her before he has to report
for transfer back to the States. Fog has
enveloped the whole continent so badly that pilots have been instructed that if
their planes and crews are in danger, they should turn the aircraft around and
return to Rhein-Main. Indeed, Danny’s
plane is enshrouded in fog en route to Berlin and Captain Stewart is about to
order it to turn around and go back to Frankfurt when it suffers another
hazard: one of the engines catches fire and the crew can’t extinguish the
flames. Before we see Danny’s plane land
safely at Tempelhof under Hank’s GCA guidance, there’s a shot of an earlier
plane that crashed and is in flames by the side of the runway. Once on the ground, Danny runs off to find
Frederica, rounding up Hank and Gerda as witnesses and telling them to meet him
and Frederica at the Bürgermeister’s office.
Herr
Stieber suspects Frederica of duplicity when he delivers a letter to her from
St. Louis; he intercepts the reply she’s written to her German lover living there,
revealing that she intends to divorce Danny as soon as she can without being
sent back to Germany after he brings her to the States, and see her lover
behind his back until that happens. In
the meantime, Hank, while trying to teach Gerda the meaning of democracy, comes
to see that he’s been hypocritical in his own behavior toward Germans. He’s also now deeply ashamed of the beating
he gave the former POW guard, explaining that he had spent seven years waiting
for “satisfaction,” but now he doesn’t feel satisfied; he feels “dirty.” He begins treating Gerda as an equal and with
affection as they meet Frederica at the Berlin city hall to be witnesses at her
wedding to Danny. When Danny arrives, he
tells Frederica it’ll be a long time, if ever, before she gets to America and
turns on his heel and leaves. Herr
Stieber has given Danny the letter she wrote.
Gerda says she prefers to stay in Germany and do what she can to help
rebuild her country, and Hank reveals to Danny that he’s not going home but has
switched his temporary assignment in Berlin to permanent duty. Danny’s flight out departs, amidst rumors
that the Russians will soon end the blockade (which they did on 12 May 1949).
What
most often caught me while watching The
Big Lift were the little bits of actual German culture and custom that were
incorporated in the movie. Some of the
little things in the flick that hit me were specifically about life in post-war
Germany and occupied Berlin. As odd as it may seem from a chronological
perspective, life in Germany was not very different in the early ’60s when I
was there as a teen than it was right after the war. Less rubble, more
prosperity (just beginning), but otherwise, it was still “post-war.” (Of
course, it was also the Federal Republic by then—no longer Allied occupied
territory.) Even in the ’70s, when I was there ten years further on,
Berlin was still occupied and, except for new uniforms (and still less rubble),
plus the addition of the Wall, things were much the same in many ways as they
were depicted in The Big Lift, right after the war ended. It was
a time warp, in both instances.
