by Noel Hynd
Complaints to the Soviet administrators about the Yaks and balloons were ignored. In back-channel communication, the response was clearer. The Big Lift could not possibly keep pace with the city’s needs, so why were the Yanks and the Brits even attempting to do such a thing? And the blockade would only be lifted if the Allies began their withdrawal and abandoned their stand on the Western currency.
“You may have a legal right to be in Berlin,” a Soviet diplomat named Vassiliev said to General Lucious Clay one evening at a diplomatic function, that had become tense toward the end. “But do you have the ethical right to inflict such pain on civilians?”
“It’s not us inflicting the pain, comrade” snapped Clay in response.
“That’s a matter of opinion,” Vassiliev countered.
General Clay had to walk away to control his temper. “These fucking Russian bastards are a pain in the ass,” Clay muttered to General LeMay when they met at the punch bowl. “They’re going to start a war.”
“Fine with me,” LeMay said, puffing an Aroma de Cuba. “We’re ready to blow their nuts to kingdom come. Can’t wait to get the job done if you really want to know.”
A reporter from Time Magazine heard the comment through the cigar smoke and wrote it down but publisher Time’s publisher, Henry Luce, spiked it in the interest of world peace.
Nonetheless, there was pain in Berlin. Pain, hardship, and anxiety. And in the early days of the Big Lift, it was as difficult to see through the morass on the ground as it was to navigate through one of the thunderstorms that afflicted the city.
On the ground at Tempelhof and Gatow, the fueling sections were overworked and disorganized. Loading and servicing went on all night. Unusable Avro Yorks and Douglas C-47s cluttered the sides of runways making takeoffs and landings more difficult. Telephone service in the key operations room and air traffic tower was out of commission for hours at a time with no repair technicians available to address the situation. A goal was set to accelerate the flow of incoming and outgoing aircraft every ten minutes at night, but the lighting wouldn’t cooperate, and neither would the weather.
Sometimes the weather conditions were an even fiercer adversary than the Russians.
July should have been the best weather for flying in and out of northern Europe, but the summer of 1948 was extraordinarily unpredictable. Wild swings of temperature led to an unending series of violent thunderstorms. There was driving rain, vicious hail, and often snow and ice at higher elevations.
If the wind dropped, there was fog worthy of London’s worst. Often the ceiling was below two hundred or even one hundred fifty feet.
During rainstorms, Tempelhof was frequently closed while two bulldozers swept water from the runway. Gatow needed to shut down sporadically due to vicious, unprecedented tailwinds and billowing fog. Then the thickest fog anyone had seen since the war gripped Tempelhof for two days before it relented.
“The ghost of Hermann Göring,” remarked Nutsy Taylor one evening with a smirk. No one appreciated his sense of humor.
Taylor’s sense of humor and irony was sorely tested on the morning of July ninth from Wiesbaden to Tempelhof. He and his co-pilot on this shift, a twenty-one-year-old kid named Frasier Cole, who had been a schoolteacher in Alabama seventeen days earlier, encountered such sudden icing that they had to use full power to stay in the air.
Taylor used his deicing equipment just as the sun broke through the clouds. Minutes later, the warmed outside air combined with the deicing process. Great chunks of ice cracked off his wings and shattered against his fuselage so hard that it caused his Gooney Bird to buck, lurch, and shudder in the sky. Taylor thought for sure the fuselage had been pierced and that he was going down. But he managed to stay aloft and then hit the mess hall and officers’ club for a tall four-ounce glass of neat Scotch after he and the shaken young co-pilot successfully touched down at Tempelhof.
Live and learn. “Wow. That was something, wasn’t it?” Taylor asked.
Cole didn’t reply.
There was a knack of using the wing deicer boot and Taylor had blown it with an assist from the sudden sunshine. The deicers had to be used intermittently. If they were left on continuously, ice could build up in front of the boot and its pulsing would be working inside a pocket, not touching the ice. The secret was to allow just the right amount of ice to build up and then turn the boots on. Then turn them off until enough ice had built up again. Slightly more than six hundred Allied aircraft had been lost flying the "Hump," from India to China during the war. Half of those that went down crashed due to severe icing conditions.
“Damn,” Taylor said again as the whiskey kicked in. “Learn something new every sortie about flying over Germany, huh? You having a drink?”
“No, but I’m stopping in at the chapel,” Frasier said.
“Suit yourself.”
Squads of American and British airmen on their off-hours led scores of German civilians out into Berlin to scrounge in stores and homes for anything that could be used: old car parts, metal bed frames, anything that could be welded into something useful. Radios, fuel lines, hoses, spare tires, car parts. Major Pickford served as the head bursar, paying a fair price in American dollars, which, in turn, fueled the black market and the vice district at the end of the S-Bahn.
At the same time, a squad of U.S. Army sergeants hit the streets of Berlin and signed on hundreds of civilians, Germans, DPs — anyone who was hanging around and wanted to work — as a laborer, cleaner, or loader. It was not unusual to see these squads of people reporting to work in suits. Often the women wore bathing suits when the warmer weather returned. It was the only clothing these people had for work.
They joined a battery of people who had been hired in the weeks and months earlier. Among those who had already become dependable workers were two blond-haired, blue-eyed sisters: Lena Schroeder, twenty-three, and her younger sister Anna, now twenty-one. They had fled from the small city of Demmin, a community in Pomerania, when it had been overrun by the Red Army in April of 1945. Educated and pretty, they were hired as female cleaning staff at the airport, though both also held evening jobs in a club in the Eastern Sector.
Also previously hired was a former German soldier named Heinrich Roth who had become a baggage laborer. Roth would work for another German, a man named Otto Kern, who in six weeks had earned the trust of the American sergeants who supervised his work crews and had made him a manager of the night-shift baggage handlers. Trained in electricity at university before the war, Kern had also graduated to being an informal electrician around Tempelhof, doing quick and efficient repairs as needed. Roth and Kern, it developed, had spent part of their childhood in pre-Hitler Berlin. They developed a friendship. A young sergeant named Jimmy Jerome Pearson from Long Island City, New York was the supervisor, age twenty-five. Kern taught Pearson the basics of electricity as he worked. A German American bond developed between the two.
So it went.
Chapter 40
Berlin - July 1948
The medical facility in question was in Hohenschönhausen at the far reaches of East Berlin. Cochrane took the S-Bahn to get there. The train was crowded and jerky as it moved through the city, taking him farther from the Western Zone than common sense would have dictated. His Czech pistol was tucked carefully under his jacket along with his William Lewis passport. On this day he wore a raincoat as well. The weather was warm but wet, with a steady rain sweeping the city. The humidity was climbing, and he had sweated through his shirt well before he arrived at an S-Bahn station two blocks from his street destination.
He traveled alone. Cochrane carried his “Lewis” passport as a precaution. But he dreaded having to present it to anyone. Major Pickford had briefed him on the location, sketched a street map on an index card from what they knew of the area from aerial photography, and had informed him that the East Berlin police, the unit led by the re-educated Colonel Markgraf, had set up a prison in the area, a place believed to be used for executions as well as
incarceration.
The prison was patterned on the KGB Headquarters in Moscow. Lubyanka.
“It’s no place to be confined,” Major Pickford explained, “and I doubt whether we could get you out of it for several weeks. But if you can find out where it is, street location, address, and all entrances and exits, that’s information we could use.”
“Sure,” Cochrane had said, taking the map on the file card and placing it in his pocket. “I’ll let you know anything I find out if I happen to return.”
“You nervous about this?”
“Shouldn’t I be? Who knows what the Russians are up to these days? The Marxist regime has been hostile to the West since 1918. It just happens, as Americans, that we had a common enemy from 1933 to 1945. Now we’re back to business as usual.”
“Point taken,” Major Pickford conceded.
Cochrane took the crowded S-Bahn to the final stop in the city. He left the train station at Rentnerstrasse and walked, the day’s rain an annoyance. The streets were a rat’s warren of impasses and contradictions: they stopped, continued, twisted, and changed their names with impunity. He consulted the card twice and found it of almost no use. Most streets had no identifying signs. Some signs were flat-out wrong. He wondered if such were intentional.
As he walked, he thought he spotted the medical facility – a damaged, brown-brick edifice of four stories that had been repaired with steel frontage and odd narrow windows. When he drew closer, however, he stopped short. Three police guards at the front gate, huge men in red helmets and white flak vests, stood guard. He had heard that the Russians had brought in some Polish Communist militias – accountable now to Russian state security — to reinforce the German police.
The current administration in East Berlin did things their way, no questions asked, no local responsibility. There had already been some incidents, Helmut had explained. Berliners had already learned to hate them. Cochrane had a hunch that was what he was looking at here. The guards rudely summoned him and tried to engage him in conversation as to where he was going and what he was doing. Fortunately, they didn’t point with their rifles. Had they done so, he would have immediately stopped.
Butterflies erupted in a swarm in his guts, his heart flashed into overdrive, and his fresh shirt, already damp, was suddenly soaked. He waved off the heavily armed men, realizing that he had involuntarily found the prison – heavy guards and narrow slatted windows - that Major Pickford had mentioned. He played it dumb, gestured awkwardly that he was hard of hearing, and kept going. After half a block, he stole a look back through the rain and heaved a heavy sigh of relief: he was not being followed. The guards were instead watching a woman passing and shouting at her. She was fool enough to stop as Cochrane slipped out of their view.
A few of Helmut’s well-chosen words echoed somewhere in the back of his mind. “The Soviets have their military in Karlhorst and the political section in Potsdam,” the barman had said. Karlhorst, Cochrane recalled from the map Pickford had sketched, was the next community over, meaning that he was drawing ever closer to exactly what he wished to avoid: the epicenter of the Soviet military in Berlin. He connected that with the prison and its proximity to Karlhorst.
A Sonnenfinsternis moment played out in the darkest reaches of his psyche: Darkness at Noon. He could easily understand how a man could walk into, or be dragged into, such a Lubyanka-styled place and end up in the incinerator out back in a matter of hours.
He shuddered again, his confidence wavering, teetering. He wondered if he would ever see Laura and Caroline again. A wave of rain battered him, almost blinding him. He cursed low to himself, his head down, his arm before his face. Never again, he muttered. Never!
Where the hell, he demanded, was this medical facility and why did he have the poor judgment to attempt to find it?
There was another surge of rain. It swept across him. His common sense was in open revolt against his sense of duty. But he convinced himself to push onward for a few more minutes.
“Then, after five more minutes, turn and run!” his instincts screamed within him.
He drew a breath to steady himself. Both of his shoes were soaked. He was walking at half a mile an hour, he guessed, which today, blinded as he was by the rain, was full throttle.
“What’s happened to me?” he asked himself. “I’m over the damned hill.”
Then, as abruptly as the rain had intensified, it relented.
When he looked up again in front of him, he saw a hand-inscribed sign on a similar building to the prison, an edifice that made him wonder how it could still be standing: wrecked by air raids and repaired by a hodgepodge of Soviet steel. A dingy, perilous building on a dingy, oppressive block.
The sign read, Medizinische Klinik für die Freien Berliner.
He had arrived. The front doors were missing but there was a steel gate that was probably pulled shut after dark. It was open now. He drew a final breath, wondered if this was the biggest mistake of his life, and walked up five uneven, unsteady, wet steps.
Chapter 41
Berlin - July 1948
Inside the front entrance of the medical facility in East Berlin, there was a guard’s station, but no one was in it. Cochrane walked past it into a giant open space. Corridors spewed off to several sides, all of them unmarked. The concrete floor was rough and uneven, small bits of grit and brick reduced to pebbles. He guessed the place had been stripped of its interior but hadn’t been thoroughly rehabbed since the war. It had probably been a factory. But the Russians had done makeshift repairs to minimize the risk of collapse and put it into use anyway. That was how they were always doing things, to Cochrane’s intrusive and overeducated Western eyes.
To one side there were two elevators, the doors open, no cars inside, just open, vandalized shafts. Wooden barricades blocked them, not that anyone would voluntarily step in.
Footsteps approached. Three big men in military or police uniforms approached. He didn’t recognize the uniforms and didn’t wish to arouse suspicion by taking too close a look. Cochrane steadied himself and tried to act as if he belonged. As the three drew nearer, Cochrane pegged the language: Polish. Polish always sounded to him like a melodic version of Russian. They passed him and exited behind him, giving him no notice.
It was normally Cochrane’s method when he arrived in a place like this to establish who was in charge, then decide whether that person was to be avoided or approached for assistance. In the new world he encountered here, however, it appeared that no one was in charge. Very well, he would take himself on a tour.
On the main floor, there was an assortment of administrative offices. Each of them was closed. At the back of the ground floor were steps leading up and another set leading down. A plan of investigation emerged. He would start at the top floor, see what he could find, then descend all the way down and hopefully out.
The staircase was wooden and unsteady. He walked up five floors, then did a tour of each floor. There were secondary administrative offices and medical units. Some rooms were empty and dark, a few were crowded with people who appeared to be waiting to see doctors. Windows were narrow, slatted, and high on the wall: same architecture as the prison. Cochrane saw a lot of glum faces with sad eyes, many mutilated people from the war who had climbed the stairs with one crutch or a twisted cane. There were intermittent silences, shouts, and arguments. There were yells and screams. Most conversation was in German, Russian and Polish. He passed people in hallways and open spaces. Most were women; they avoided him.
Cochrane worked his way back down to the entrance level over the next half hour. He saw no one he wanted to talk to. He caught no one’s attention, for which he was grateful. There was no directory of offices or people. Hence no Frau Schneidhuber.
In his mind, he had formed a layout of the building. Each floor had an elliptical path that came back, more or less, to where it had started. This held true when he visited the basement as well.
But the basement was the busiest of all the floors.
He quickly discovered why. He was in a local morgue, one that was large and probably served the surrounding area. In some hallways, corpses were piled on shelves under blankets or in bags, feet protruding with tags on the right big toes unless the right foot was missing. The area was cool, creepy cool, like a cemetery. He was reminded of the overturned graves at St. Thomas’s near Tempelhof. Eventually, nearly finished his tour, Cochrane saw an open door and heard the last thing he expected in this place: laughter.
Male voices.
They sounded like young men. He moved to the door. The room was very cold and from the signs that he read on the door, he knew the chamber was an examination room for autopsies.
He pushed the door open and looked in. The room was poorly lit and depressing, just like the rest of the country. At the center of the room was an examination table, surrounded by a boisterous group of a dozen young German men in uniform, military and police. He had seen enough on the streets to know that these were young men of the Eastern Zone. A second glance suggested that they were cadets or trainees of some sort. He took a quick further assessment and guessed that not one of them was older than eighteen.
Someone joked about a body on the examination table. Cochrane couldn’t hear exactly what was said, but it was followed by laughter. The young men pushed at each other, another told a joke, and they all laughed again and starting shoving at each other. Then a couple of them seemed to reach out to touch and fuss with whatever was on the table.
Their German was low and peasanty. They were obviously from the rural provinces by their accent, probably too young to have been in the war. Cochrane scanned the few faces he could see and guessed that probably none of them was old enough to have served in the war.
From an angle, Cochrane could see the nearest end of the table. It stood sideways to him. Feet protruded as they would from a corpse. One of the young soldiers rustled a canvas sheet that covered the body. Cochrane saw that the ankles were those of a woman.