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Product Description: The masterfully told story of the unlikely men who came together to make the Berlin Airlift one of the great military and humanitarian successes of American history.
On the sixtieth anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, Andrei Cherny tells a remarkable story with profound implications for the world today. In the tradition of the best narrative storytellers, he brings together newly unclassified documents, unpublished letters and diaries, and fresh primary interviews to tell the story of the ill-assorted group of castoffs and second-stringers who not only saved millions of desperate people from a dire threat but changed how the world viewed the United States, and set in motion the chain of events that would ultimately lead to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and to America’s victory in the Cold War.
On June 24, 1948, intent on furthering its domination of Europe, the Soviet Union cut off all access to West Berlin, prepared to starve the city into submission unless the Americans abandoned it. Soviet forces hugely outnumbered the Allies’, and most of America’s top officials considered the situation hopeless. But not all of them.
Harry Truman, an accidental president, derided by his own party; Lucius Clay, a frustrated general, denied a combat command and relegated to the home front; Bill Tunner, a logistics expert downsized to a desk job in a corner of the Pentagon; James Forrestal, a secretary of defense beginning to mentally unravel; Hal Halvorsen, a lovesick pilot who had served far from the conflict, flying transport missions in the backwater of a global war—together these unlikely men improvised and stumbled their way into a uniquely American combination of military and moral force unprecedented in its time.
This is the forgotten foundation tale of America in the modern world, the story of when Americans learned, for the first time, how to act at the summit of world power—a masterful and exciting work of historical narrative, and one with strong resonance for our time. Customer Reviews: Rating: 
Date: 2008-07-06
My Candy Bombers Book Review
I am a Korean War veteran and somewhat of a history buff, especially during the period leading up to and including the aftermath of World War II. I cannot praise this book enough. Andrei Cherney has written the absolutely best description I have read of the events and people that resulted in the Berlin Airlift and how close we came to World War III at that time. Of special interest to me is the way he describes our great military leaders of that time, especially Generals Clay, Bedell Smith, Curtis LeMay, Marshall, Tunner and Omar Bradley, along with Secretary Forrestal, Thomas Dewey, John Foster Dulles and President Truman. With the exception of President Truman I have formed through Mr. Cherney's eyes a completely different opinion of these great men, somewhat less stellar giants than I previously supposed them to be.
This book is an extaordinary effort on the part of the author and may very well be the most interesting book I have ever read. Rating:
Date: 2008-06-30
A positive bit of history
I began reading this book because my husband (Lt. Ben Knight) flew one of the first missions over the corridor into Berlin in 1948, probably before the official airlift began. I hoped to learn more about his activity during this time. What I learned was how close we came to losing Berlin and so much more, but for the efforts of a caring pilot.
It was a pleasure to meet the author and to hear that Hal Halvorsen is still a great hero to the German people.
It was a hard book to put down and I shall read it again. Rating:
Date: 2008-06-16
C-54's to the Rescue
In June 1948 the Soviets blockaded Berlin by cutting all rail and road links to the parts of occupied Germany held by the three Western powers. Food, fuel and all other necessities for the city came then only from the Soviet occupied eastern regions and were available only to the eastern portion of Berlin, the sector of the city controlled by the Soviets. Berlin was an island in the middle of the Soviet occupation zone and was utterly dependent on the outside for all of its needs. Not that many of these needs were being met. Berlin remained largely in a state of ruin, its populace wretched and impoverished, unemployed, living in the ruins (sometimes open to the weather), underfed and subject to a stench from wartime dead still lying beneath the rubble or buried in shallow graves. Only a few weeks worth of food, fuel and other needs were stockpiled in the city and western Berlin faced the prospect of starvation and economic annihilation. This state of affairs resulted in part from the attitude of the occupying powers, all of whom had entered the occupation of Germany to punish the "evil" Germans. None were concerned that the Germans were suffering dire hardships.
The Western Allies accordingly saw the blockade as simply a diplomatic and policy problem at first, a furtherance of the campaign of subversion of free governments that the USSR was perceived as undertaking in Europe. Because Berlin could be neither militarily defended nor supplied without resort to atomic weapons (the Red Army was vastly superior in numbers and otherwise to any conventional military forces available in Europe), the alternatives seemed to be to risk atomic war or abandon Berlin. Because both of these alternativs seemed unacceptable, there arose a need to buy further time for decision. From this in turn came the idea for a temporary airlift, a desperate and ad hoc measure to slightly bolster existing stockpiles in Berlin and thus buy time for the policy debates.
This book tells the story of how a stopgap airlift became The Airlift a legendary operation that ran like a clock and supplied all of Berlin's needs until the Soviets caved in May 1949. In fact it did not supply all of the needs and some starved in Berlin that winter. But the Airlift, by dint of heroic and highly organized efforts, did supply enough to stave off total collapse and to provide hope for Berliners. The efforts of the original "candy bomber," Gail S. "Hal" Halvorsen, in dropping candy to children caused the US and others to see the human issues at stake and to appreciate the heroism of the Berliners in resisting the blandishments and threats of the Soviets. The Berliners were won over by acts of human kindness such as those of Halvorsen and by the Herculean efforts of the Airlift. It also helped to get the Marshall plan enacted and was a major factor in the rearmament of America (including the first peacetime draft in our history) and it helped create the imperial presidency that we still have today.The Berlin Crisis and the Airlift, the author believes, were also the determinative factors in deciding the 1948 presidential election for Truman.
The book tells all of this with both power and eloquence. It ranges from high policy and political scheming to the experiences of ordinary people. There are incicsive portraits of men such as Truman, LeMay, the tragic Forrestal, Bill Tanner and others. It tells a story that many Americans today do not know, when the US achieved the moral high ground worldwide, in a way it has never been able to duplicate since.
The book has some flaws. It is told almost entirely from the American viewpoint, and it is the Americans who are the good guys and the Soviets who are bad. There is almost nothing about what was going on in Russian thinking. Indeed, the book appears to be based almost exclusively on published sources and all of them listed in the bibliography are in English. Only a handful of contemporaneous documents and private paper collections appear to have been consulted. Nonetheless this is popular history at its best.
Rating:
Date: 2008-06-02
Great story of little known events
This book was way more than a recounting of the "candy bombings"-the dropping of chocolates to the children of Berlin. It was a fascinating history of the events surrounding the Berlin airlift, and the dicey relations with the Stalin -led Soviets, so recently our allies, but fast proving to b a stubborn, committed adversary. I learned so much about this incredible time in our history, and realized for the first time how close we were to WW III but for a chain of events, great leaders, and plain ole luck, and perhaps the grace of God. As a student of history, this was a great read. Rating: 
Date: 2008-06-01
Twentieth Century Pivot Point
First, I must agree with Mr. Fishman's guibble about the aptness of the title "The Candy Bombers," which tends to capitalize on an aspect of the event for, perhaps, commercial impact. The sub-title more usefully describes the content of the book, if not particularly catchy.
Having said that, I found the book to be an immensely useful examination of this crucial development in post-WWII geopolitics. The time spent on the contemporary American political environment including the 1948 election was very useful and does more to explain why Harry Truman was elected President than anything else I can remember reading. The inter-personal dynamics between members of the US military command structure comes through clear and believable.
What eliminates this book, in my view, from the top ranks of history books are some of the blind spots that I would not expect from a more complete study of the subject. For instance, I would like to know what was going through the minds of the Russians. Why didn't Stalin just charge through all of this and takeover Berlin with the power he obviously had available to him? With all of Europe as the prize, why was he not willing to suffer a few American A-bombs? Most un-Stalin like. And further down the ranks there were some interesting characters on the Russian side, too, that probably deserve some spotlight time. Were they conflicted or not to be in the their tenuous positions?
Also, what effect did the Berlin Airlift have on the global strategic positioning of the Truman Administration? While it was going on, developments in China and other parts of Asia seem to have been ignored in relative terms. When the disasterous Korean War boiled up a year after the Airlift, the Truman Administration was caught with its pants down. To what extent was that made possible by the single-minded fucus on the Berlin Airlift and Europe?
Still, an excellent book as far as it goes. |
