@wretchard
In your post you pointed ourt the eery parallels with the Berlin Airlift. There is an excellent book I ran across recently:
The Candy Bombers:
The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour
by Andrei Cherny
http://www.amazon.com/Candy-Bombers-Untold-Airlift-Americas/dp/0399154965/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218683403&sr=1-1
The central point of the book is that the overwhelming success of that “impossible” and “miraculous” victory over evil Ivan came down to determined contributions of a few humble, humbled, or simply obscure Americans.
1) The military commander was being kicked out in favor of the State Department. His determined stance that we could not lose Berlin and expect to keep all Europe from going ruddy red kept the window open while the airlift creaked hopelessly into action as a stopgap.
When the blockade began and he was ordered to stay, his wife said, “You can’t, you haven’t any trowsers.” They had just shipped al their possessions off to what was to have been his next billet!
2) The passed-over and mcuh-rejected commander who had engineered the greatest military airlift of all time–our resupply of the Chinese Army “over the hump” during WWII, was remembered by one officer who managed to get him into Berlin. He turned a cowboy’s weekend style operation into an industrial efficiency machine, lofting magnitudes more tonnage than anyone had imagined possible.
3) The greatest hero of the battle was a lonely pilot who volunteered to take a friend’s place so the friend could get married, even though he was not qualified to fly big transports. While flying in and out, in and out, he noticed children gathering at the end of the airfield every day, and, against his own better judgment, made parachutes out of handkerchiefs and “bombed” the kids with his and his crew’s stashes of chocolate bars.
After doing this a few times, the crowds of children became huge. He saw a huge pile of mail in the center of the PX, all addressed to variations of “Dear Mr. Candy Bomber”, and was appalled to realize he was being exposed for doing some very off-regulation things.
Investigating at the end of the field he realized that many of these children, in 1948, HAD NEVER, EVER, TASTED CANDY. He and his crew resolved to continue the “bombing” with parachutes improvised from a “borrowed” parachute.
When he was found out he expected a court martial. Instead he had become a hero and turned a desperate campaign to stave off an inevitable defeat into one of the greatest information warfare victories of all time.
Masses of bitter, defeated and fearful Berliners now poured out thanks and joy that the Americans who had been killing them with munitions, were now giving their poor children a taste of childhood. Have so many hearts ever opened so wide so quickly?
When JFK said “Ich bin eine Berliner” [sp.?], it was believable and believed because, a decade before, our military did not blink at Ivan’s terrible threats, and our guys’ humanity made it plain why.
Great stuff! We are capable of leading an humanitarian empire, a colossus of love that fights if she has to.
God bless America.
God Bless Georgia and Azerbaijan.
God Bless Russia–even in her looming defeat.
