Articles about The Unheralded
Amherst Bulletin | January 29, 2003
Daily Hampshire Gazette, Weekend Hampshire Gazette
Tribute to Berlin Air Lift
by PHYLLIS LEHRER, Staff Writer
LEVERETT - Edwin Gere, a retired professor at the
University of Massachusetts, uses his latest book to illuminate
little-known aspects of a great 20th century event.
His book, "The Unheralded: Men and Women of
the Berlin Blockade and Airlift," is about that historical
event, which lasted from May 1948 until September 1949.
Gere was a pilot who flew two or three missions
a day during the Berlin air lift. Though that experience gave
him deep insight into the mission, this isn't a pilot's chronicle.
Instead, Gere focuses on the unsung workers who
made it happen.
"It took 10 people on the ground to keep one
in the air," Gere said, sitting in his Leverett farmhouse
recently. The people included mechanics, loaders, cooks, medical
personnel, clerks, drivers and military police, who were involved
in the operation that provided 2.4 million Berliners with food,
fuel, medical supplies and equipment.
The 282-page illustrated paperback came out in November
and provides brief biographies of people from England, United
States, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Germany who participated
in the effort.
"You read books about generals and high ranking
officials who get all the glory but the terrific contributions
of these people should be recorded," said Gere, who retired
in 1990 after 33 years of teaching at the University of Massachusetts.
For example, there's Cpl. John Ross, the 18-year-old
line mechanic from Mississippi. Or Cpl. Albert Tindall from Ira,
N.Y., who enlisted two weeks after his 17th birthday to be a truck
driver. Or Joyce Peachy from Brighton, England, who served in
air traffic control, while Elizabeth O'Neal from Georgia was an
air force civilian secretary who worked 10 hours a day, seven
days a week.
Gere kept in touch with Dorothea Meier, doing her
part as a chambermaid at the air force barracks in Fassberg, where
Gere was stationed with his wife, Doris.
The Germans and displaced persons involved in the
airlift took extraordinary pride in their work, Gere said.
"They could unload 10 tons of coal in seven
minutes. They were paid and received one hot meal a day."
His book described how some Germans hand-built an airfield in
the city.
While the two countries were at war just years earlier,
there was little hostility between Germans and Americans during
the airlift, Gere said. He said the Germans expressed gratitude
for the Americans' efforts during the airlift.
The book also includes a history of the airlift.
After the Second World War, England, France, the U.S. and U.S.S.R.
divided Germany and Berlin into four sectors. In May 1948, the
Soviet Union blocked all land, rail and water routes into Berlin
since it controlled the territory surrounding the city.
Gere speculated that the blockade was Stalin's attempt
to drive the western allies out of Europe and Germany. "Whoever
controlled Germany would control Europe," Gere said. "The
airlift stopped him. It was Stalin's most embarrassing political
defeat. The founding of NATO in 1949 was a reaction to the blockade."
"When you think of the airlift, there are two
points. There was military readiness to the Soviet blockade. Then
it turned into greatest humanitarian effort seen in modern history,"
said Gere, who served as Leverett moderator for 22 years.
Gere was in the Army Air Corps in World War II,
serving in the Pacific. He received a purple heart and left with
the rank of lieutenant. He returned to duty for the airlift because
he was in the reserves. He had just finished an undergraduate
degree in history and political science at Alfred University in
New York and was headed for graduate school when he was called.
He served for 13 months coming home in September 1949.
"It was boring, exciting and dangerous,"
Gere said of those days. "When you're 24, you're not afraid.
When you're that age and flying, you think you're immune,"
he said, despite the fact that he and the others knew that war
could break out.
The book also pays homage to and lists the 32 American
personnel and the 39 British staff who died during the airlift
because of accidents and plane crashes.
The book was born from Gere's trip to Germany in
1999 to mark the anniversary of the blockade's end. "I was
so emotionally taken by the drama of the 50th that when I got
home I had to write about it," he said.
The book's text and biographies come from the questionnaire
he sent to veterans and from interviews he conducted in Germany.
He also read books on the subject. Gere regrets that he didn't
write the book sooner since more people would have been alive
to appreciate its contents.
The project was a family effort. His children and
their spouses helped with editing, photos and cover design. One
son traveled with him to Germany for the interviews.
The book costs $21.95 and is available at Jeffrey
Amherst Bookshop and the Pelham General Store. It also can also
be printed on request through Trafford Publishing.
Greenfield Recorder | March 6, 2003
Local Author Honors History of Berlin
Airlift
By Ritchie Davis, Recorder Staff
Like many other World War II veterans, Edwin Gere
had barely caught his breath from his service on Guam and Okinawa
when, three years after discharge, he was called back to fly again.
It was August 1948, and Gere and thousands of other
pilots were ordered to carry food and coal, not bombs, to the
people of Berlin, whom the Soviets had blockaded that June 24.
The Berlin Airlift, which the United States and
British began four days later, delivered 2.3 million tons of flour;
dried eggs, beans salt, coal and other supplies in the 14 months
it flew, in more than 278,000 flights.
“It all began as a military response to Soviet
aggression, but in the end it also became the greatest humanitarian
mission in modern history,” recalls Gere, whose recent self-published
book, “The Unheralded,” is a tribute to the thousands
of men and women who were the unsung heroes of the multi-nation
operation.
For Gere, a retired University of Massachusetts
professor and former Leverett town moderator; “The Unheralded”
was a three-year labor of love that contrasted with the academic
tomes he has felt obligated to write over the years as part of
his work.
Returning from the 50th anniversary commemoration
of the airlift in 1999, after experiencing and emotional reunion
with other airlift veterans, he realized the power of the 13 months
he spent, at first flying C-47s and then C-54s loaded with rations
and then helping oversee operations at a Berlin airbase.
"Before I started on this in 1999, I’d
read three or four books about the airlift,” the 80-year-old
Leverett resident said. “Then I read it all, and what I
read was overwhelming: it was all about the air crews. I think
these people worked their hearts out and gave everything they
had.”
He explains in the preface, “I had to write
this book...This book’s primary focus remains on the enlisted
soldiers, sailors, airmen and civil laborers, who despite their
disavowals, were truly the unheralded heroes of the blockade and
airlift.
These were the workers from the United States, the
British Commonwealth and Germany who not only flew the planes
but also did the loading and unloading, dispatching, weather forecasting,
navigating as well as mechanical, kitchen and medical tasks.
Gere, who flew 184 missions, doesn’t even
include his own story among the 90 or so presented in the book,
which is being sold in Greenfield’s World Eye Bookshop and
Amherst’s Jeffrey Amherst Bookshop.
When he was called back into service, recently married
and a recent college graduate who was about to begin work on his
master’s degree, Gere didn’t have a clear picture
of the scope of the operation.
At first stationed at Wiesbaden, West Germany, Gere
at first flew a twin-engine “Gooneybird,” the famous
C–47 transport. This military version of the DC–3
airliner had carried tens of thousands of soldiers around the
world.
But as the larger, faster four-engine C–54s
were called in from around the world, he moved up and the amount
of cargo he could carry in each flight increased from three to
10 tons.
Later, in flights originating from Fassberg, he
flew coal packed into 100-pound bags loaded from rail cars by
civilians, many of them displaced eastern Europeans.
"You looked like a coal man when you finished,”
the tall, gray-haired author recalled.“
"It was a real catch-as-catch-can operation
in the beginning.” He said. “As days and weeks went
by, it became more efficient.”
In Berlin, where German civilians—many of
them younger than 20—unloaded the rations, the appreciation
was palpable.
“My God—the people who came to Tempelhof
Air Base and Gatow Air Base, and later Tegel Air Base carried
flowers, pictures, little gift and thousands of mementos.”
One man presented Gere with a picture book, with
the simple explanation, “I want you to have this. My son
was in the Luftwaffe.”
His words cut to the heart of the airlift’s
irony as a Herculean humanitarian undertaking on behalf of people
whom some of the pilots had bombed as the enemy just a few years
earlier. Some of the more than 200 British and American veterans
who responded to Gere’s questionnaire mentioned this.
As for the Berliners, about 20 of whom were interviewed,
many feared the airlift would never work.
“When the Soviets started the blockade, a
terrible sigh of torment went through the 2.24 million Berliners
living in the three western sectors,” recalled Christian
Seifert, who had been 5 when the effort began. “Everybody
believed the British and Americans would give up Berlin and succumb
to the Soviets. For many people suicide seemed the only way out.”
Another Berliner, Inge Stanneck, was 13 at the time.
“We were all swept away by the spirit of the airlift,”
she wrote. To hear the plane’s engines above us, continuously,
day and night, was very reassuring. But how can it last? How long
can they keep supplies coming at this impossible rate? Such questions
were on every Berliner’s mind.”
Winter was the great fear, Gere remembers, and the
Berliners made tremendous sacrifices to survive.
“The coal rations were so tiny that people
developed neighborhood warming centers to pool their coal,”
he said. “Thousands of them stayed in bed all day, or came
home after work and got into bed and covered up.”
Then came “Operation Easter,” with aircraft
flying nearly 1,400 sorties with a total of practically 13,000
tons—landing at the rate of one plane per minute.
“That’s what broke the back of the blockade,”
said Gere. “Stalin had seen the handwriting on the wall.
The Easter Parade was the icing on the cake.”
Within a month, the blockade ended—on May
12, 1949—although the airlift continued until Sept. 30 in
case it was reinstituted.
Although there were concerns at the time about “harassment”
by the Soviets, there was hardly any attempt to attack the airlift.
“There were a few events, incidents, in which
a few people thought they’d been shot at, Gere said. Still,
more than 70 lost their lives in accidents.
“It was Stalin’s most humiliating defeat
of the whole war,” said Gere, who believes that the dedication
of people like those recalled in his book “stopped Stalin
in his tracks. His ambitions were to grab all of Germany, and
after that, who knows? He might have grabbed all the way to the
Atlantic.”
In that way, the Blockade marked a turning point
in Stalin’s plans. Yet he said it’s been overshadowed
in recent events by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration
of the Iron Curtain. “And the Berliners are still saying
thank you,” he added.
Gere is up-front about his late interest in chronicling
this episode of history.“
Most everything I know about the airlift I’ve
learned in the past three years,” he said. “When I
was flying the airlift, we were a high-flying, hard-drinking bunch.
Carefree. We thought we were bulletproof at the time and nothing
could happen.”
He began working on the book a month after returning
from the 50th anniversary observance, and he went back to Germany
the following March for interviews.
If the “The Unheralded” is a labor of
love by Gere, it’s also a family affair, with his sons and
daughter-in-laws playing a major role in editing, cover design
and illustration, interviewing, production and marketing.
The Gargantuan effort easily over-looked between
World War II and the Korean War is vividly recalled by those who
served behind the scenes of the airlift.“
The hours were long, the food was bad and there
were so may take-offs and landings that it became tiresome,”
recalled Donald W. Measley, who piloted one of the C–54s.
“Still, it was all part of the job, and the allure of participating
in an as-yet undefined historical event was enough to make it
worthwhile and interesting. We were helping people to survive,
and everyone realized that much.”
Lewis Dale Whipple, who worked as a supply clerk
at the Celle air base, supplying bedding, uniforms and office
equipment, returned to Celle in 1992. In a wine shop there a sales
woman told him she’d been a little girl during the airlift,
and thanked him for saving her country.“
I firmly believe the airlift saved Berlin, also
Germany and possibly all of Europe from falling under Soviet rule,”
he writes. “
To me, this was a very moving experience.”
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