The Trouble with Cargoes - A Forgotten Aspect of the Berlin Airlift
The Berlin Airlift was all about delivering goods to Berlin. Yet the process of delivering goods by air is different from delivering it by train. All the goods that Berlin needed first had to be turned into aircraft cargoes — and that wasn’t as easy as it sounded.
On the one hand, cargoes for Berlin had be packed in the lightest weight packaging practical in order to ensure the highest net delivery of needed goods to Berlin. On the other hand, packaging had to be sufficiently robust to prevent damage, spoilage, or loss of cargoes and aircraft. (In one incident, honey in barrels broke while in the air, oozed all over the cargo compartment of the aircraft and then out onto the tarmac when the doors were opened; the trip was a complete waste and the aircraft was u/s for an inordinately long time while it was cleaned out again.) Packaging things in small containers increased the amount of packaging per net delivered ton of cargo, which was undesirable, but packaging things in large containers often made it impossible for one man alone to carry the load or off-loading process. All these factors had to be considered.
Another problem was the behaviour of cargo in the air. Loose cargo could shift, causing a change in the centre of gravity. Issues of hygiene also had to be considered; any aircraft might carry a mixed cargo, and almost all had carried cargoes of coal at one time or another, meaning that coal dust was everywhere and seeped into subsequent cargoes if the packaging was not sufficiently air-tight. Yet another consideration was the impact of temperature. In the winter months, cargoes were subjected to freezing temperatures in the cargo compartment, while excessive heat in summer was likely to be even more disastrous. In one case it almost came to a “diplomatic incident” when the freezing crew of a Hastings turned the heat on in the aircraft – forgetting that they were carrying a cargo of frozen fish.
Yet another difficulty arouse in ensuring that the total weight did not exceed the capacity of the aircraft – bearing in mind that different aircraft types had different capabilities – but also ensuring that each aircraft’s space was used to the optimal extent. In other words, both bulk and weight had to be optimized. For example, an aircraft filled to the gills with noodles would in fact be carrying only one third of its tonnage capacity, but if PSP plates were to be loaded in the hold in the same manner, the aircraft would never get off the ground. The result was an effort to “marry” cargoes such that both weight and space were used effectively.
Naturally, and particularly in the early days, the wrong configurations of cargo did get sometimes get put aboard the wrong aircraft type. At least one Dakota pilot reported astonishing sluggishness at take-off and sweated his way to Berlin suspecting serious technical difficulties only to discover on landing that he was carrying the load intended for a larger aircraft. Allegedly, the Dakota had just carried more than twice what it was certified for.[i]
Sometimes the problem of weight was not the fault of the marshalling teams and dispatchers, but rather of the packers. General Tunner, after reading repeated reports of “sluggish” C-54s flying like “lame ducks,” visited the facilities where coal was loaded into sacks for transport by air to Berlin. He found:
The men were really working away, filling the sacks to the brim and hoisting them onto the big trucks with vim and vigour. They only bothered to weigh about one sack out of a hundred, and when it was overweight, as it invariably was, they simply poured a little coal out and threw it up on the truck. I stepped forward and had fifty of the sacks already on the truck taken down and weighed. Some of those so-called one-hundred-pound sacks ran up to 125 pounds; they averaged out at 115 – a 15% overloading that would mean a ton and a half extra weight on a C-54 full of coal. No wonder the planes seemed sluggish!...It had to be carefully explained to the loading crews that their overzealousness was hurting instead of helping us.[ii]
Another
serious problem, even if the weight of a consignment was theoretically correct
for the aircraft type, was the loading itself. Freight had to be very carefully
balanced to ensure that the aircraft’s centre of gravity was not altered.
Experienced teams placed the light cargo in the front of the trailer so that it
was unloaded last and so ended in the tail of the aircraft or spread out over
the heavier cargo. In the early stages of the Airlift, it took air force
personnel to oversee loading, explain about the needs of aircraft in flight and
to over-see loading to ensure that no aircraft was loaded in a manner to
endanger its aerodynamics. Almost as important, even if the aircraft was
correctly loaded in the first place, cargoes had to be properly secured to stop
them from shifting while in flight. Again, air force experts were initially
needed to make sure that cargoes were properly tied down.
Some cargoes, of course, required special handling. One of these was salt. It was so corrosive to aircraft and particularly their controls, that it could not be carried in normal cargo compartments. To the relief of the USAF, the RAF took exclusive responsibility for supplying the 38 short tons of salt required each day in Berlin. At first the Sunderland flying boats were tasked with delivering this cargo, not – as some have suggested – because the hulls were treated to withstand salt water, but because all the controls were in the ceiling and so less subject to corrosion. After the Sunderland’s were withdrawn from the Airlift, the British assigned converted Halifax bombers to the salt-run, carrying the salt in panniers slung in the bomb-bay.
Off-loading
at Gatow had one distinct disadvantage over off-loading at either Tempelhof or,
later, Tegel. Gatow lay on the very outskirts of Berlin, beyond most of the
verdant, neighbourhoods of the rich and far from the population centres of the
city where the consumers of the goods being flown in lived. This meant that
even after off-loading at Gatow, the cargoes had to be transhipped again onto
vehicles to take them into the city proper. To move, for example, a thousand
tons of cargo by lorry from Gatow into the heart of the city required 5 tons of
gasoline and roughly one and half tons of diesel oil. Fortunately, some forty
barges had been trapped on the Havel when the blockade began. One tug could
haul three thousand tons of freight on barges at the cost of burning just one
ton of coal. The forty barges together had a cargo capacity of 15,000 tons. So
a large portion of Gatow bulk cargoes were transhipped onto barge and hauled
into central Berlin by tug.
Yet no discussion of cargoes of the Airlift would be complete without remembering that not all cargoes had to be transported into Berlin. Some cargoes had to be transported out as well -- although this was – at least initially – underestimated and controversial. The Americans, particularly under Tunner’s leadership, were interested in maximizing efficiency and clearly it was easier to increase delivery tonnages if aircraft were turned around rapidly in Berlin. Loading return cargoes cost hours and so reduced significantly the number of in-bound flights that each aircraft made, reducing daily delivery tonnages.
The British, on the other hand, reasoned that failure to fly out products produced by Berlin’s factories would result in those factories closing down, putting their workers on the dole, and so adversely impact civilian morale. As the back-log of finished products building up at Tempelhof grew, the Americans simply dumped the problem on the RAF. It was decided that henceforth the RAF would be responsible for flying cargoes out of Berlin – at the expense of its aircraft utility and cargo delivery rates.
Justifiable as the “back-lift” was in morale terms, it was difficult to organise. Products from Berlin’s factories required the same care as cargoes going in – attention had to be paid to the packaging of the individual products, to the mixing of consignments for aircraft by type and to loading the aircraft itself. Again, special problems could arise.
Yet arguably the most important cargoes that the RAF carried out of Berlin were passengers. Altogether, the RAF flew out over 50,000 adults and about 17,000 children from the beleaguered city.
They did not fly in luxury! One passenger described the experience vividly:
The inside of the machine was filthy from coal dust. The metal seats were fixed on sides of the fuselage and folded down. We sat down and were told to buckle up…With a deafening noise – the freight room of a Dakota was not noise-insulated – the aircraft rolled onto the runway and took off. The flight was due to turbulence at low altitude very rough…My brother, who was looking out of the window, noticed that the engine of the war-weary Dakota was losing oil. After a flight of about one and a half hours we landed at Lübeck. It was not a gentle landing, probably because the runway wasn’t in the best condition….[iii]
As described, the Dakotas were at best equipped with inward facing bucket seats down the sides of the fuselage designed for paratroopers – who of course were disciplined. The passengers being flown out of Berlin, particularly the children, often were not. This was one reason why many felt that the most difficult cargoes on the Airlift were children. An RAF pilot remembers:
When we picked [the children] up at Gatow they would be loaded some 25 or 30 at a time by their German escorts, harangued with a briefing in German, and then the doors slammed shut. From then on they were all ours and some were very young. No interpreter to help out should an emergency situation arise.[iv]
Or, as another pilot remembers:
Kids wriggle. They wriggle out to play on the icy cold and filthy floor. Then one of them wants to go. And all at once a rush to the tail unbalances the plane. Its nose rises. The captain wonders what the heck is going on, and all this amid the world’s number one current crisis with Russian-held territory below.[v]
Another RAF aircrew remembers:
The real problem arose after landing at Fassberg. A truck was supposed to meet each aeroplane that was carrying children and transport the load to a nearby transit centre. We often had to wait over an hour in the dispersal area at night with aircraft taxiing around until a truck arrived. Safe-guarding the children was rather like shepherding a flock of geese in the dark and not what we had signed on for at all. This led to some pretty hot R/T exchanges with the tower e.g. “Where’s the bloody truck etc. etc.”[vi]
Fortunately, the children appear to have been blissfully unaware of the trouble they were causing. The many stories told of being flown out of Berlin are dominated by the thrill of flying for the first time and memories of kindly pilots inviting small boys into the cockpit or giving away sweets.
[i] W/C Manning, p. 195.
[ii] Tunner, p. 204.
[iii] Anita Scholl, letter to the author, Sept. 30, 2005.
[iv] Pearcy, p. 50.
[v] Bob Needham, The Friends Quarterly, April 2001, p. 277.
[vi] Pearcy. p. 50.
NOTE: The content of this blog post is based on Helena P. Schrader. The Blockade Breakers. Pen & Sword, 2008
The Berlin Airlift is the subject of Bridge to Tomorrow, a trilogy of novels starting with Cold Peace, winner of Silver in the 2023 Readers' Favorites Book Awards.
Berlin 1948.
In the ruins of Hitler’s capital, former RAF officers, a woman pilot, and the victim of Russian brutality form an air ambulance company. But the West is on a collision course with Stalin’s aggression and Berlin is about to become a flashpoint. World War Three is only a misstep away.
View a video teaser at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTuE7m5InZM&t=5s
My novels about the RAF in WWII are intended as tributes to the men in the air and on the ground that made a victory against fascism in Europe possible.
they took the war to Hitler.
Their chances of survival were less than fifty percent.
Their average age was 21.
This is the story of just one bomber pilot, his crew and the woman he loved.
It is intended as a tribute to them all.
Buy now on amazon or Barnes and Noble.
MORAL FIBRE is the WINNER OF A HEMINGWAY AWARD 2022 and was a FINALIST for the BOOK EXCELLENCE AWARD IN HISTORICAL FICTION.
"Where Eagles Never Flew" was the the winner of a Hemingway Award for 20th Century Wartime Fiction and a Maincrest Media Award for Military Fiction. Find out more at: https://crossseaspress.com/where-eagles-never-flew
For more information about all my aviation books visit: https://www.helenapschrader.com/aviation.html
Comments
Post a Comment