Along the Way: Pilot details first flight in ‘impossible’ Berlin Airlift

Bill Lafferty wasn’t as concerned about his place in history that November day in 1948 as he was with the Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia.

Here he was, in the pilot’s seat of a C-47 cargo plane engaged in the spectacular Berlin Airlift, flying from Weisbaden to Berlin, trying to listen to the broadcast of the big game over an ingenious military radio relay.

Winless Navy (0-8) jumped ahead of undefeated Army (8-0). Then Army caught up and went ahead of the Midshipmen at halftime.

But Navy’s Bill Hawkins scored a touchdown to tie Army in the fourth quarter, then batted away an Arnold Galiffa pass on the final play of the game and it ended up 21-21.

The real excitement, though, had to do with geography.

Berlin wasn’t where Berlin was supposed to be. At least Bill and his co-pilot couldn’t find it.

“We contacted the RAF (Royal Air Force) and they laughed,” Col. Lafferty (USAF, Retired) told the Green Valley Forum one day last week.

“When we had come upon a city and there were Russian Yak fighter planes parked on the ramp, we knew we were in the wrong place.” They were, in fact, on the Polish border.

“Fortunately, nothing happened,” Lafferty said. “Being a dummy, I had simply been paying attention to the wrong things.”

That didn’t happen often in Bill’s distinguished 32-year Air Force career. He not only flew 198 missions in the Berlin Airlift, he flew the first one. With no fanfare at all, he took off in a C-47 in June 1948. When he landed in Berlin, a superior asked, “Did you get an intelligence briefing?”

“No,” Bill replied.

“No one told you that the Soviets threatened to shoot down the first aircraft they saw?”

“Nope.”

Col. Lafferty’s 198 missions were stretched between June 26, 1948, and when the supply effort actually ended in late September 1949.

Bill was part of one of the most amazing feats of the 20th century, supplying an entire city, blocked off via ground and barge by the Soviets. In all, 2,343,000 tons of food, coal and other necessities were delivered.

There were, Bill told a large audience at the Green Valley Forum, 277,264 flights in the Berlin Airlift.

The operation was impossible, the Soviet Union had haughtily told the world beforehand. But with an all-out effort by the U.S. British and French, the operation was a stunning success.

In 1948, we were filling our Chevys and Fords, Buicks, Studebackers and Hudsons with 26-cent-a-gallon gasoline.

Radio had us rolling on the linoleum with laughter at Amos ‘n Andy, Jack Benny and Fibber McGee and Molly.

President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, took the lowest approval ratings of his presidency into the thick of a re-election campaign against Republican Thomas E. Dewey.

And a world away, the U.S. and our allies faced the Soviets in the first major confrontation of the Cold War, the Berlin blockade and subsequent airlift.

There were fears, Lafferty said, that World War III could break out. The Russians did a lot of jamming, trying to interfere with communications between aircraft and ground operations. The Soviets patrolled the corridor and sent some aircraft buzzing allied cargo planes.

“We had a lot of head-on passes, but none of our U.S. planes got shot down,” Lafferty said.

Aircraft had to fly perilously near apartment houses — at some point between the structures — to land in Berlin. “Precision was necessary, to say the least,” Lafferty told the forum.

Weather was a problem, too. “Ice was a major hazard,” Lafferty said. “At Weisbaden, to de-ice, we closed the plane up, it was sprayed with alcohol — and we hoped for no (engine) backfires!”

There were problems, too, with out-of-date traffic control. But through tremendous grit and determination, the daring allied plan worked.

The success of the operation humiliated the Soviets, especially after they insisted it couldn’t work. After all, when Germany’s 6th Army was frozen in at Stalingrad in World War II, requiring some 300 tons of supplies per day, the Nazis rarely were able to deliver that much.

But from June 24, 1948, until the actual end of the shipments in September 1949, Lafferty said, the Berlin Airlift transported 2,343,000 tons of food, coal and other necessities. Of some 277,264 flights, the U.S. was involved in 76 percent, he said.

The Soviets gave up on the blockade and officially lifted it at 12:01 a.m. on May 12, 1949. Deliveries continued, however, into September.

Truman had overcome his awful approval rating to upset Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 elections.

Oh yeah, and Army got revenge in the big game against Navy in 1949, winning 38-0.

Corky Simpson, former Tucson Citizen columnist and first inductee into the Arizona Associated Press Sports Editors Hall of Fame, writes a Friday column for the Green Valley News. Comment on this story online at www.gvnews.com