by Noel Hynd
“As I said, Irv. I’m inclined to turn you down,” Cochrane said. “And thanks for the attempt to make me feel guilty if I do.”
“Any time, meatball,” Goff said. “By the way, when do your classes start? Your lectures?”
“In twelve weeks.”
“You’ll be into Berlin and back with eleven weeks to spare. Maybe eleven and a half. It’s going to be smooth as silk,” Goff promised.
“I’ve heard things like that before, Irv, and I didn’t believe them then, either. Goodnight.”
Chapter 20
Berlin – June 1948
The United States Air Force continued to launch the full-scale airlift on June 26, 1948. On the first day, American and British pilots flew thirty-two missions in and out of Tempelhof. The USAF used Douglas C-47 Skytrains to ferry eighty tons of supplies from Wiesbaden to Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. USAF-Europe headquarters rounded up more than a hundred of the Gooney Birds and readied them for the Big Lift of humanitarian aid to Berlin.
The lumbering, two-engine, crew-of-two airplane carried three tons of cargo at a cruising speed of 175 miles per hour over a range of fifteen hundred miles. Many of the aircraft pressed into service were already war-weary, still emblazoned with the three horizontal stripes which had been used to identify them as aircraft during the D-Day landings at Normandy four years earlier. But the Gooney Birds accomplished the mission.
Deliveries to Berlin on the second day increased to three hundred tons. By the third day, deliveries had soared to nearly four hundred tons. The airplanes were coming in and taking off so quickly that crews barely had time to eat and use the restroom facilities before turning around again. Tempelhof solved the turnaround problem by creating a sub-industry: food and snack trucks on wheels that could roll up to incoming and outgoing aircraft. The trucks were operated by the prettiest German girls that management could find. They were kept busy.
Inbound American cargo airplanes flying over Berlin were under the jurisdiction of the Tempelhof tower for the final twelve miles of the inbound flight. The air traffic control tower was packed so tightly that some controllers worked standing up at the Berlin Air Safety Center. Americans worked alongside British, French, and – surprisingly to some - Russian counterparts on the first days of the airlift.
The Russian controllers remained amicable despite the tensions that had provoked the crisis. The Russian air controllers knew what the Allies were doing and noted the spiked numbers on the control board. But they were surprisingly a charming and ingratiating bunch, the Russians, even though none of the other nationalities trusted them. Most were men under thirty, pilots who had been shot down and had injuries like a missing foot and could no longer fly.
Perhaps their close flirtations with death had made them more worldly. They manifested no bitterness. And there was a give and take: Bourbon from the PX was swapped for Polish vodka. American cigarettes were swapped for small packets of smoked sturgeon or caviar that the Russians had stolen from their officers’ mess.
One of the Russians turned up one day with passes to a private club for Russian officers called “Minuet” in the Eastern Zone, which now had a collection of sleazy clubs that operated during the late evening hours. “Very sexy. Very kinky. Perverted!” the Russian announced proudly. An air traffic guy obtained the passes and passed them along to a flyer. The Americans donated U.S.-made cigarettes to them. Otherwise, the Russians smoked their Belomorkanals, a cheap, unfiltered, cough-inducing brand introduced in 1932 to commemorate the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal. The tobacco blend was unique and unpopular among non-Russians.
“Those things smell like a mixture of sheep dung and horsehair,” Glenn Taylor remarked one day. He wasn’t far off. He brought a pack back to the barracks and passed them around. They were universally but good-naturedly panned. Tommy Olson tried one in the PX just to be one of the boys. She drew three long drags and suppressed the urge to cough.
“Whaddya think, Tommy?” asked Glenn Taylor.
“Barf!” she said snuffing it out. “It reminds me of the time I was flying from Labrador to Syracuse during the war. I land and part of the HQ building is off-limits. Quarantined. I asked why and some sergeant says the army has a couple of cases of beriberi. Before I can say anything, some G.I. Joe says, ‘Send the cases to the Marines. They’ll drink anything’.”
So it went, with morale high in the opening days of the lift and everyone punching far above his or her listed weight.
The Germans called the operation Die Luftbruecke, or “the air bridge.” The British labeled their phase of the lift, “Operation Carter-Patterson,” named after a popular moving company back in England. Then an order came around from Air Commodore Waite to drop that nickname. The invocations of a moving company’s name suggested that the British were planning to move out of Berlin, which they weren’t. So the British settled on “Operation Plainfare.”
Weary American pilots called it “The LeMay Coal and Feed Delivery Service.” Then Brig. Gen. Joseph Smith, the first U.S. commander of the operation, grabbed the first code name that came to mind. “Hell’s fire! We’re hauling grub,” Smith told aides. “Vittles! If you must have a name, call it ‘Operation Vittles’.”
So “Operation Vittles” it became, except in the newspapers across the English-speaking world. The worldwide press had already dubbed the actions of the Soviet Union halting needed supplies to Berlin as “The Berlin Blockade.”
So it wasn’t much of a jump to call what now followed as “The Berlin Airlift.”
In truth, that’s exactly what it was.
Chapter 21
Cambridge – June 1948
Caroline Cochrane was still awake when her parents arrived home after dinner with Irv Goff at The Hero of The Thames. The little girl had insisted on staying up until her parents returned. Victoria, falling under Caroline’s charm, had acquiesced. Bill and Laura came in shortly before ten PM, however, so no lasting damage was done.
Bill paid the sitter the two pounds sterling that he had promised. Victoria disappeared downstairs to her basement apartment. Laura promised Caroline one more bedtime story from a book before she had to go to sleep. Mother and daughter repaired to a sofa in the salon area while Bill Cochrane poured himself a nightcap and sat down in the kitchen eating nook to examine the confidential pages given to him by Goff.
He reread the typed but personally signed note from Jim Forrestal and the meager one-page document on the woman who had provided a safe house and safe passage through Berlin for him in 1943. Sadly, Cochrane knew, Frau Schneidhuber by now could have been anywhere from a cemetery to an unmarked grave, a Soviet labor camp, or in the basement under a pile of rubble in her old neighborhood. Or just plain “missing.”
Cochrane reread the single page on the woman whom he remembered so favorably. While Cochrane had stayed with her while he had had young Freida in transit, Bettina’s home had been filled with seditious anti-Nazi material: works by Brecht, music by Kurt Weill, books by the great Weimar authors such as Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin. For whatever reason, the local Nazi block captain had looked the other way and never ratted her out, something that at the time seemed understandable but had still raised his suspicions.
According to the pages in front of Cochrane, in the latter days of the war, her home and everything in it had been destroyed. But she seemed to have survived. There was a link to a medical-sounding facility in 1946, presumably an employment reference, but nothing more current than that.
Nineteen forty-six. Two years ago, he pondered. A lot can happen in two minutes, much less two years. Cochrane glanced up from the page before him. He sighed. Few people wanted to admit it, but there had been no winners in the war. Only losers. Victories were measured by having taken fewer painful losses than the other side.
Across the small interior of their rented house in Cambridge, Laura sat quietly reading a bedtime story to their daughter. He held the two ladies in his life in view for a long moment, not wan
ting to give up the vision. How lucky he was, how lucky they were, he reminded himself, to have been in America during the war. There were no bombs falling on them from the sky, just as on this night in Cambridge there were no bombs. He glanced back down at the papers before him. Like most documents Cochrane had read in his life, the page on Bettina Schneidhuber was meaningless taken out of context and without the knowledge and worldview that he brought to it.
A feeling was brewing within him. Ne now had his own interests to protect, his own family to be with, and for whom to provide safety. On top of this, the more he considered it, locating Bettina Schneidhuber in the middle of the chaos and rubble of 1948-Berlin resembled an impossibility. Only so much could be asked of one man.
He glanced back up at Laura and Caroline. Laura must have read his mind. She often did. That or she felt his eyes upon her. She gave him a smile and a wink and gave Caroline an extra hug around her shoulders. Cochrane returned the smile and looked at the second envelope, the one thrust upon him by Goff on the sidewalk of King Street at the end of their evening.
He asked himself: why even open the second missive? He exercised a moment of caution. His decision was made. He was not going to Berlin or Moscow or Timbuktu or anywhere else. Didn’t a man deserve some downtime, a drop of peace, and some personal fulfillment in the second chapter of his life?
There was nothing dishonorable, he reminded himself, about picking up his chips and leaving life’s casino with a winning hand. Why not take up oil painting, he pondered. Why not leave the intelligence community and go into private banking? How about grabbing the wife and daughter and dragging them off to one of the prehistoric caves in the south of France and becoming a family of happy hermits?
Then, through the absurdity of all this, he recognized that it was his exhaustion and world-weariness speaking, and not his common sense. He also recognized that special sense that all professional spies are cursed with, one that usually follows them to the grave. Specifically, that at any given time an assignment will come in that may seem innocent enough at first, but which demands that spy’s personal involvement. Otherwise, his world – both in the large sense and the personal sense – would self-incinerate.
He grabbed the second envelope and tore it open.
Read it at your own risk, Bill, he told himself. This is designed to bring you into their orbit if you’re not already there.
Damn you all, he thought to Goff and Forrestal in response.
He picked up the pages and read. The additional document ran only three pages but it discussed the fate of German women upon the collapse of the Third Reich.
The postwar world in Europe had been a living hell for German women. Here before Cochrane was a subject rarely discussed but which often lurked beneath the surface of postwar German political reality.
Perhaps the most terrorizing tactic of the invading Red Army was assaulting females and rape. In the twilight of the war, women in dozens of German cities had been victimized by sexual assault, a condition that contributed severely to the widespread public panic as the Red Army had advanced from the east. Two months passed between the arrival of the Soviet Army in Berlin on May 2, 1945, and the arrival of American soldiers under General Patton the following July. During that time, there were more than a million rapes inflicted on the surviving women in the city, from girls under ten to women over eighty.
Many women found themselves forced to "concede" to one soldier in the hope that he would protect them from others. The report cited specifics. Magda Wieland, a 24-year-old actress, was dragged from a cupboard in her apartment just off the Kurfürstendamm. A young soldier from central Asia hauled her out. By sign language, she offered herself to him as a permanent girlfriend if he would protect her from other Russian soldiers. But he laughed, ravished her, and went off to boast to his comrades, whereupon another soldier raped her.
Ellen Goetz, a Jewish friend of Magda's since childhood, was also raped. When other Germans tried to explain to the Russians that she was Jewish and had been persecuted, they received the retort, “Frau ist Frau." The next day, still in custody, both Magda and Ellen used their garments to commit suicide by hanging.
Women in Berlin and the occupied territories soon learned to disappear during the "hunting hours" of the evening. Young daughters were hidden in storage lofts for days on end. Mothers emerged onto the street to fetch water only in the early morning when Soviet soldiers were sleeping off the alcohol from the night before. Sometimes the greatest danger came from one mother giving away the hiding place of another girl in a desperate bid to save her own daughter.
“In the summer, Berliners became accustomed to female screams every night,” reported an unnamed Soviet witness now in the employ of the West. “It was impossible not to hear them. It was impossible because all the windows had been blown in from British and American bombing and Russian artillery fire before the great surrender.”
Beria and Stalin, back in Moscow, received detailed reports of what their armies were “accomplishing.” They laughed. One report stated that "many Germans declare that all German women in East Prussia who stayed behind were raped by Red Army soldiers." Numerous examples of gang rape were documented in detail: young girls and old women, often ten or twelve soldiers to a single female who was often murdered afterward.
Stalin replied with a shrug. The terror of sexual assault was a weapon the same as any other, except perhaps better, in his opinion. When Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas complained about rapes against the women of Yugoslavia in 1945, Stalin stated that the world should "understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle." On another occasion, when told that Red Army soldiers sexually maltreated German refugees, he replied, "We lecture our brave soldiers far too much! Let them have their initiative."
Initiative.
The report continued with the affirmation that similar activity continued into the present in the Eastern Zone. British, Canadian, and American troops were not blameless in their zones, the report acknowledged, but commanders from the top down had warned Allied officers against the practice. Court-martials had taken place and offending instances had decreased dramatically with the demilitarization after Nuremberg.
Cochrane had heard the stories of Japanese troops in Nanking, China, in the late 1930s. He was sickened every time he heard them.
Initiative. At least, he was sure, such had never been official Allied policy, such as it had been for forces coming to Germany from the east. He began to think anew about how brave men and women in the anti-Hitler underground had put their lives on the line during the war to defeat Hitler, only to have to hide from Russian troops when the German capital was overrun and as anarchy reigned in the late spring and early summer of 1945.
Cochrane folded away the papers in front of him. His eyes rose. His gaze found Laura and Caroline. The bedtime story ended. He watched Laura give her daughter a hug in the safety of Cambridge. Caroline came to him and they exchanged a good night kiss. Cochrane held his daughter more than he otherwise might have until with a giggle she struggled away. Thank God, he thought to himself, thank God a million times, his own family was safe.
Yet he was still torn about a return to Berlin.
Chapter 22
Cambridge – June 1948
After Bill and Laura put Caroline to bed, they returned to their sitting room. They sat down together. “What was in the envelopes?” Laura asked.
“More than any decent man should have to read,” Bill answered. “Nothing that’s classified, it would appear,” Cochrane said. “Want to have a look?”
“Do you want me to?”
“It’s thoroughly distasteful. But I wish you would.”
“Show me,” she requested without hesitation.
Cochrane fetched the envelopes from where he had left them. He returned, sat down next to his wife again, and handed her the correspondence. Quietly, she read and absorbed the contents. Then s
he folded them away and handed them back to him.
“When do you leave?” she asked. “I already know. You’re going.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I know you too well, my love. This woman. Frau Schneidhuber. She helped you. If she’s still alive, now she needs your help.” She paused. “What more is there to understand than that?”
There was a pause of many seconds before he answered.
“Frieda would not have reached safety and the United States without her and whoever was protecting her,” Cochrane said. “I may well have been captured and executed without her.” He thought of the normal execution for spies in Nazi Germany. The guillotine.
He suppressed an involuntary shudder. He thought of the White Rose victims the guillotine had claimed among hundreds of others. Involuntarily, in his mind’s eye, he could see the White Rose victims – Hans, Sophie, and Christoph – being led to their deaths. He could picture the guillotine. He could hear the blade falling.
The recollection of all that caught him in a weak moment, so much that it sent him into a maze of deep thoughts, so much so that Laura jarred him from it when she spoke again. “Bill?” she said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he said, yanked back into the present.
“Look,” he said. “I wish to be clear in case you’ve ever wondered. There was nothing further, nothing additional to the relationship between me and Frau Bettina Schneidhuber. You know all there is to know. I want you to be certain of that.”
“I already am certain,” she said. “A wife can tell.”
“I miss the obvious sometimes, don’t I?” he asked.
She smiled and squeezed his hand. He closed the files and resealed the envelope.