The Airlift Faulters: Fatal Flaw in the Command Structure

   By October 1948, despite the Allies best efforts and the Berliner's determination and willing to live under extraordinary hardships, it was becoming evident to the experts that the Airlift was slowly failing. Three factors contributed to the situation: inadequate assets, poor morale among Allied forces, and a major flaw in the command structure. This entry looks at the fatal flaw in the command structure.

 

By far the most dangerous negative influence on the performance of the Airlift in the autumn of 1948 came from the top not the bottom. Just before the equinox, when the days were about to become shorter than the nights, General Tunner got a new boss. General LeMay had never been welcoming, but he had let Tunner do his job to the best of his ability. From the day General Cannon took over as Commander-in-Chief of USAFE, Tunner found himself inhibited in his ability to run the Airlift.

The problems started with his new orders which expressly prohibited him from speaking with the various commands in the U.S. which supported the Airlift from afar by providing it with aircraft, supplies, maintenance, training and replacement pilots. One immediate consequence was that Tunner lost the ability to control intermediate maintenance on Airlift aircraft. The vital 200 hour checks were conducted not at the squadron level but at the central maintenance depot in Burtonwood, England. Tunner himself had been behind the move from Oberpfaffenhofen to Burtonwood, because he thought that winter conditions in Bavaria would impact negatively on maintenance results, while Burtonwood not only enjoyed a milder climate but was large enough to accommodate the assembly-line type of maintenance procedures that Tunner favoured. But all Tunner’s planning had been based on the assumption that at Burtonwood eight 200-hour inspections would be carried out every day. In anticipation of Burtonwood taking over the burden of 200-hour checks, Tunner had transferred maintenance personnel away from the squadrons in Germany and from Oberpfaffenhofen to Burtonwood.

In November, however, it rapidly became evident that Burtonwood was not completing 200-hour inspections per day on eight aircraft: it was barely managing two per day. Since aircraft due for maintenance were grounded until the inspections could be completed, this amounted to aircraft coming off flying but not being replaced by those, whose inspections were completed. The poor performance of Burtonwood translated into a shortfall of 35 aircraft every week or 150 in a month. Clearly the entire Airlift would grind to a halt very rapidly unless something could be done to improve efficiency at Burtonwood. Tunner flew to Burtonwood. He identified a long list of problems - and fixes. But Burtonwood was not under his command. He could not implement a single change. All he could do was beg General Cannon to take action.

Meanwhile, Tunner was too devoted to his mission to let these shortages even develop. If Burtonwood could not deliver, then the only choice Tunner saw was to transfer the responsibility for 200-hour checks back to the squadrons. Since many mechanics had already been dispatched to Burtonwood, this meant, however, that those few mechanics still in Germany had to do more than ever. Tunner himself says: “The men remaining had to carry a double load and they were justified in resenting it bitterly. It meant twelve-hour days for my maintenance men.”[i]

Nor was over-working the only problem Tunner’s mechanics faced. Even something as simple as spares and tools became a problem. The reason was not that these were absent in theatre, but rather that General Cannon – not General Tunner – controlled the supply depot at Erding, and he had other priorities. “Cannon proceeded as if Operation Vittels amounted to only a subsidiary concern for USAFE; under his regime, spare parts and tools craved by [Airlift] mechanics…would remain on the shelves at Erding Air Force Depot in Bavaria in case they should be needed by any USAFE unit in Germany.”[ii] Tunner more generously suggests that Cannon’s staff simply didn’t know what they had because the stuff had been dumped there after the war and never properly inventoried. But to allow Tunner to request supplies from the U.S. might have prompted the Pentagon into pointing out that the requested supplies were already at Erding – and this in turn would have exposed the chaos and lack of inventory at the Depot. That however would have reflected poorly on Cannon, so the best bureaucratic solution to the problem (from Cannon’s point of view) was to ignore it. Whatever the reason, Tunner’s mechanics were reduced to buying tools on the local economy.

And Tunner’s problems did not end there. Aircraft returning to the U.S. for their thousand hour checks were also being lost to the Airlift for far longer than anticipated and planned. Instead of being absent from theatre for 22 days, they were gone 57 days. The reasons for the delays were legion. First and foremost: to the commanders at the scattered maintenance facilities in the U.S., the Airlift was far away and its urgency completely alien. No one in Texas or Idaho was working around the clock, seven days a week.

Then there was the problem of finding pilots to fly the aircraft across the Atlantic. With the bulk of the U.S. Air Force’s multi-engine transport pilots flying the daily runs to Berlin, there was a shortage of pilots to take over the task of trans-Atlantic ferrying. There were a substantial number of trained women transport pilots who had been qualified on four-engine aircraft during the War. The majority of these pilots had even been part of Ferrying Division, then under General Tunner. But the USAF had discharged the women in haste before the end of the war, did not acknowledge them as veterans, and was in fact doing its best to pretend they had never existed. Certainly, no one in the USAF dreamed of reactivating them, so the Airlift just had to live with the slower return of aircraft – and President Truman had to order even more aircraft assigned to the Airlift to ensure that Clay had the aircraft he needed actually “hauling freight.”

The final problem created by Tunner’s unsatisfactory command position was that he had no control over assignments and leave for his personnel. Tunner argued then and latter that no commander of a major operation should be denied these tools. What it meant was quite simply that he could not give the men what they wanted most: certainty about their tours of duty. Because he did not know how many or when replacements would arrive, he could not tell the men under his command how long they would have to serve. This was worse even than the War, when aircrews flew a set number of missions and then returned home. Every wartime airman could count his missions and look forward to the day when the last one was complete. Not so during the Airlift. There was no prospect of relief and return home. This, as has been mentioned several times already, created severe morale problems and spawned much dark humour as well. A fictional “diary” started circulating which described the Airlift in the year 2000 with the pilots then in their 70s and 80s pottering about still hoping for relief….

Tunner was equally powerless when it came to improving housing and food for his troops – an utterly frustrating situation for a commander. As he puts it: “…all that my officers or I could do was point out wherein the trouble lay to the responsible persons…and hope that something would be done. But instead of action we got excuses and empty promises.”[iii]

These various factors combined had contributed to a decrease in Airlift efficiency at the very time when it needed to increase. As predicted and expected, the weather turned nasty in November.  It almost closed down the Airlift.

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[i] William Tunner, Over the Hump, USAF Warrior Studies, 1964, 193.

[ii] Thomas Parrish, Berlin in the Balance, Perseus Books, 1998, 292.

[iii] Tunner, p.193.

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.

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