by Noel Hynd
“You’re familiar with the ATC?” Olson asked.
“Very much so. The female pilots had a better safety record than the men. Not surprising. The women had to prove they were good enough to be pilots. The men were so bad that they had to prove that they should even be at the controls of an aircraft.”
Olson smiled. Cochrane could see her in a mirror reflection amidst the controls.
“Hear that, Nutsy?” she said good-naturedly to Taylor. “‘The men.’ He’s talking about you.”
“‘Nutsy’?” Cochrane asked with a laugh.
“Yeah. My co-pilot’s nickname is ‘Nutsy.’ Remember that if you’re ever assigned to fly solo with him.”
“Is that true?” Cochrane asked.
“I have no comment on that, sir,” Taylor said.
“Well, I’ll make a point to not remember it.”
“We’re cleared for takeoff,” Olson said.
The two pilots disappeared into their headphones. The engines revved in the body of the C-47. Cochrane tightened his seat belt and removed any slack. Olson moved the Gooney Bird to the tarmac and the plane was shortly in the air bound for Berlin.
After a successful takeoff, the aircraft angled to the northeast over the Netherlands, proceeding smoothly toward Germany after some rough air over the channel. Cochrane scanned the heavy industrial equipment that the cargo plane was carrying. The cargo still befuddled him.
Cochrane tuned into the conversation between the pilot and co-pilot, to the extent that he could hear it. They were discussing how two other aviators had fallen asleep on a night flight from Wiesbaden to Tempelhof and had both awakened over the Baltic Sea, nearing an approach to Finland. The pilot and co-pilot involved, Marino and Gerstenfeld as they recalled, had pulled out just in time, opened their throttles, and arrived only eighteen minutes overdue.
The story perplexed Cochrane. He tapped Olson on the shoulder for a clarification.
“The overshoot would have been well over Soviet airspace,” he said. “I would have thought the Russians would have scrambled a fighter and forced the aircraft down.”
Taylor was already shaking his head as Cochrane leaned forward to listen over the drone of the C-47’s two engines. “They were out over no-man’s land,” Taylor said. “Russians don’t have radar set up everywhere. We’re not supposed to know that, but we do.”
“So there are radar gaps?”
“None to the west of Berlin, but plenty to the east,” Tommy Olson shouted.
“Remarkable,” said Cochrane, settling back.
“Everything’s remarkable up in the air,” Taylor said.
Olson laughed and the flight continued toward the German capital.
An hour later into their flight, Olson and Taylor opened a small bag of provisions they had brought with them. They had coffee in a Thermos, paper cups, Coca-Cola in bottles, packaged cheese, apples, chips, and chocolate bars. They offered what they had to Cochrane who indulged in Coke, chips, and a slice of English cheddar.
The flight was steady at this point with the minimal necessary contact by radio. The situation gave Cochrane the opportunity to snoop. “I thought I’d be traveling with coal and sacks of flour,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been reading about.”
“You will be eventually if you go in and out of Berlin regularly with us,” Olson said. “Just not today. Or maybe later today. We’ll see.”
“Then what’s all this stuff?” Cochrane said, indicating the cargo.
“Chopped-up machinery,” said Taylor.
“Of what sort?” Cochrane inquired amiably. “And why are we flying it to Berlin?”
“Oh, I think you can trust me,” Cochrane said. “Can’t be anymore classified cargo than your passenger today,” he said. “Plus I’m the only other person in the plane unless you’ve got a body stashed somewhere. So we’re speaking in confidence. What is all this stuff?”
“What’s it look like to you, Mr. Lewis?” Olson asked.
“Construction equipment.”
Olson and Taylor laughed.
“You got a good eye, sir,” Taylor said. Then Glenn Taylor spilled the beans.
When the Soviets arrived in Berlin in April 1945, he explained, the Soviets took apart the surviving German factories piece by piece, wall by wall, pillar by pillar, and, in some cases, brick by brick. They shipped everything back to the Soviet Union. Then they removed every bit of construction equipment they could find.
From bulldozers to hammers and nails, from tool belts to work gloves. They shipped everything back to Mother Russia. Then they came back and rounded up every German with a heartbeat who knew how to operate and reassemble the machinery and shipped them off to Russia to operate the equipment.
“If you didn’t want to go to Russia,” Taylor said. “Your other option was to be sent to a labor camp in Siberia.”
“Not too many chose that option,” Olson said.
“I imagine not,” said Cochrane. “How do you know this?”
“Well, you can’t find any equipment anywhere,” Taylor said, “and our German work crews like us. So they talk.”
“A lot of Berliners lost relatives and mates after the war,” Olson added. “The Russian soldiers would just snatch people away. Particularly women.”
“Never saw them again,” Taylor said, lighting a smoke from a pack of Old Golds. He jerked the pack so that a couple popped up. He offered them to Cochrane and Olson. Bill Cochrane declined, Olson leaned to her left and plucked a smoke from the back with her lips. Taylor produced a lighter with a USAF insignia, screaming eagle, Latin phrase and all, and lit it for her. VINCIT QUI PRIMUM GERIT. Involuntarily, the Latin processed in his teeming, overworked mind, a skill that bounced back from university days. “He conquers who gets there first.”
Something else processed also, equally involuntarily. Olson and Taylor seemed more than professionally chummy. He wondered if they were having an affair. Then a third thought processed: whether they were or not was none of his damned business.
When the British and American powers arrived, Taylor continued, not only was there no construction equipment but no factories or shops in which to build equipment. There was little to be had in England or France, either. Like the fuel to power the destroyed city and the food to feed the starving populace, everything had to be manufactured in the United States and shipped to England. Factories in the United States boomed. Convoys in the sky across the Atlantic were often like moving vans with wings.
But when the heavy equipment arrived in England, such as what Cochrane had seen on the loading docks, there was a bottleneck. Getting heavier supplies to Berlin created its own series of logistical nightmares. The runways at Gatow, Wiesbaden, Rhein-Main, and Tempelhof needed to be repaired and expanded. Otherwise, they’d be destroyed under the weight of the bigger aircraft needed to transport the new machinery.
Construction equipment needed to be flown in. Yet it couldn’t be flown in because the bulldozers, cement mixers, and steamrollers were too big and too heavy for the C-47s or C-54s. Larger cargo planes were too heavy to land and needed longer runways. Yet until the bulldozers arrived, improvements to Tempelhof could not take place. It was a chicken and egg routine, but this time the eggs and chickens were bulldozers and steamrollers.
An anonymous genius, or several of them, came up with a solution. Using acetylene torches, workers in the United States or England cut up older bulldozers and steamrollers, marked the pieces, then shipped the fragments piece by piece to England to ship to West Germany using jumbo cargo aircraft.
“Mostly C-82s,” said Taylor. “Beautiful, big, new jumbo cargo transport.”
“Sure as hell is,” said the Lady Snowbird. “Can’t wait to fly one. Four engines!”
“From there, smaller cargo C-47s and C54s ferry the pieces to Berlin,” Taylor said.
In hangars near the airport, teams of Germans and displaced persons put the equipment back together, he continued. As new equipment rolled off assembly lines, work comme
nced on improvements and extensions to the landing strips at Tempelhof.
“There’s going to be a new air approach to Tempelhof soon,” Olson said. “It’ll be safer and more efficient.”
“What’s wrong with the approach now?” Cochrane asked.
Both pilot and co-pilot laughed.
“You’ll find out soon enough, Mr. Lewis,” Tommy Olson said.
“Just sit back,” Nutsy Taylor said. “We’ll warn you when you need to be nervous.”
To get to Berlin during the World War had taken millions of men and tens of thousands of lives and several years. Now, after the war, it was still not easy to arrive in Berlin by air.
The flight was under three hours. On approach, Cochrane peered through the co-pilot’s window and saw Tempelhof in the near distance. He drew a breath. He had not seen the city since its defeat. And for all the time Bill Cochrane had spent in Berlin — before the war and in 1943 on a special operation — he had never flown in. He had always accessed the city by rail or by motor vehicle. Now, as the plane banked so that they could approach from the air, he could see the troubled city before him, the point where East met West in the new world of the Iron Curtain. He was transfixed, one strong emotion in revolt with the next and the next and the next.
“This is sadly far from the city I last saw,” Cochrane said as the plane descended low on the final approach part of the C-47’s approach. He looked around. “Where do people live?” he asked.
“See all those bombed-out ruins beyond the landing strip?” Taylor asked as Olson spoke with air traffic control. There was an American-accented voice on the other end of the radio contact.
“It’s impossible not to see it,” Cochrane said.
“Those ruins, that rubble? That’s where people live,” Olson said.
The aircraft came in low over the city, threading the aerial needle between the buildings. Under Tommy Olson’s guidance, the C-47 avoided the ruined spires of St. Thomas’s Church and the obstructive chimney of what appeared to Cochrane to be an abandoned brewery.
Cochrane saw the field of graves below him in St. Thomas Cemetery as they whizzed by on the ground beneath the C-47.
The approach was only fifty feet above the tombstones of the cemetery, many of which had been overturned. Cochrane moved in his seat and lifted himself up as much as safety would allow so he could see the ground below him. On the far edge of the graveyard, a gang of local children was sitting and playing. They looked up at the American C-47 and waved. They smiled and jumped and shouted. Cochrane could see no adults with them. Ahead, as he shifted his gaze to look through the plane’s front windshield, he saw the runway with its illuminated path.
It beckoned.
The day was overcast but there was visibility. The plane gave a wobble. He could see another small horde of children gathered before the runway, kids looking up, probably with mixed feelings, at the Western airpower coming into their defeated city.
“Three years ago I would have bombed these people,” Taylor added. “Now I feel sorry for them. They weren’t all Nazis. Their leaders sold them out.”
Then Cochrane suppressed a gasp and a shudder of horror. Beyond the landing field was an endless sea of urban destruction, a landscape far worse than it had seemed minutes earlier. These were the neighborhoods he had known as a younger man, before the war and as a spy. There were people he knew and cared about who had lived in these bombed-out places. Now their homes and businesses were agone and for the first time the bare-eyeball truth was upon him that all these people may also be gone, including Frau Schneidhuber, the woman he had come all this way to find.
Suddenly, Tommy Olson shouted.
“Hold on, sir!” she bellowed. Her words jolted her passenger.
The aircraft flew a few feet over the roof of a final apartment house, then took its perfunctory steep dive as a wicked downdraft rocked it and drove it into an even sharper descent. For an instant, Cochrane was sure they were going to crash. Then the aircraft leveled out. Olson grinned and Taylor laughed.
“Sorry, sir,” Olson said.
“Normal Berlin landing,” Taylor said.
“All in a day’s work,” Cochrane said. “Right?”
“Roger that,” Olson said.
Seconds later, the C-47’s wheels bounced on the runway. Then a second, a third, and a fourth time they bounced as Olson pulled her aircraft to a perfect stop fifty feet shy of the end of the bumpy runway.
Moments later, Cochrane, easing back, exhaling a sigh, his stomach still filled with several dozen butterflies, was enjoying the taxiing to the terminal. The more things changed, the more they echoed his perilous past: he was back in Berlin.
Chapter 32
Berlin – July 1948
Cochrane, carrying his two suitcases, was no sooner in the airport when a heard a voice. “Mr. Lewis? Major Lewis?” the voice asked.
Major Haley Pickford stepped out of a small crowd that was on hand to meet arrivals. He extended a hand. He introduced himself to Cochrane.
“Good to have you with us,” Pickford said. “You’ll be billeted at the airport for a short time. You’ll find it more convenient. Decent trip in the air?”
“No complaints,” Cochrane answered.
“Wouldn’t do you much good, anyway. Come along with me. I’ll give you a quick orientation.”
From behind Major Pickford appeared a uniformed private first-class, an open-faced kid named Crenshaw with a Midwestern dairy-state smile. Crenshaw took Cochrane’s bags. Small talk between the two “majors” continued until the men were in Major Pickford’s office. Pickford instructed Crenshaw to take the bags to an assigned room where Cochrane would be staying.
The private saluted, closed the door, and departed.
“Here to find trouble, huh?” Major Pickford said with a smile, leaning back at his desk, flanked by an American flag and a U.S. Army flag. A map of Berlin was on the wall behind him.
“I suppose I won’t have to look too far to find it,” Cochrane said.
“Nope. May I call you William, ‘Major Lewis’?” he asked with a knowing glint in his eye.
“Sure.”
There was a bottle of Glenlivet Scotch on the major’s desk with an odd assortment of glasses next to it. “Drink?” Pickford asked. “Join me?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” Cochrane said.
The host grabbed two whiskey tumblers and poured. There was a carafe of water near the liquor, but both men drank the liquor neat. Cochrane also noticed that to the left of where he sat there was a chunky piece of furniture which had been deliberately covered with a sheet and two army unit flags, those of a supply regiment and an artillery unit.
“I’m told you’re here to find someone of interest to Washington,” Major Pickford continued.
“Correct. Someone I knew before the fall of Germany.”
“During the war? Or before it?”
“Either. Or both,” Cochrane said. “You’ve read the file, major, and you’re the intelligence officer. You’re as up to speed as I am.”
“I’ve seen part of the file,” Major Pickford said. “I like to have as good an idea as possible as to what’s going on in my bailiwick. In case something blows up, you understand.”
“Sure,” said Cochrane. “Hopefully, nothing will.”
“It’s a season for stuff blowing up,” Pickford said. “There’s only so much we can keep a lid on.” A pause, then, “I have some associated files for you to look at,” Major Pickford continued. “Recent stuff but not much. There’s a reading room down the hall. Don’t take them beyond that. Leave them on the desk when you’re finished. Private Crenshaw will pick the files up and return them to me. This area is more secure than the billeting wing where you’ll be staying. Any questions?”
“Plenty.”
“Fire away.”
“Is there any central agency in Berlin that has a list of names of people missing from the war?” Cochrane asked. “This was a city of more than four million before
the war and is down to something like two and a half million now. Is there any central accounting for all the people missing?”
Pickford shook his head. “Not really. No,” he said. “Not that we know of, and if there was, it would have the type of information we’d love to get our paws on. In another year or two, there might be. Right now the individual state governments in the occupied zones oversee the care and location of displaced persons. They keep count. Numbers. Names and addresses where possible. I’ll be blunt: it’s haphazard. And individually, these local governments can’t be trusted. Not for a moment. They lie like rugs, all of them, including ours, and if you ever quote me on that, I’ll say I never said it.”
“Why does it work that way?” Cochrane asked.
“In the Western Zone of Berlin the agencies – ours - are run by former Nazis. Not high-level, of course, but middle-level. Bureaucrats. They were administrators before the war and they’re administrators now. In the Eastern Zone, the agencies are run by Germans also, but they’re pro-Soviet ass-kissers. So don’t trust them, don’t give them any information, and don’t take anything they tell you to heart. Smoke?” Major Pickford asked, breaking out a pack of Luckies and offering them.
“No thanks.”
Pickford lit up, took another sip of Glenlivet, and continued. “If I were you, major, I wouldn’t even let them know you’re in the city, much less who you’re looking for.”
“That’s the way I’m thinking. So it’s a shoe-leather job?” Cochrane said. “Walking around the city. Snooping. Nosing around.”
“I’m told you’re good at that,” Pickford said with a snort.
“My reputation precedes me?”
“You have a reputation for getting a job done if left alone to do it and provided with the proper support. So I’ll give you what you need. Just whistle. Anything you want, within reason. I’ll make it happen.”
“Thanks.”
Pickford drained his first shot of Scotch then poured himself another.
“You’re a married man, right?” Pickford asked.
“Yes, sir. And hoping to remain so.”