Armageddon (77 page)

A bottleneck had developed at the two-hundred-hour interim overhaul at the new base at Obie. This two-hundred-hour inspection meant the training of hundreds of Germans and the loss of thousands of flying hours. Stonebraker wanted to eliminate the Obie Base and the two-hundred-hour overhaul, but both USAFE and MATS were against him. He returned to his office to receive a call from Clint Loveless, who had just gotten in from his latest trip, this one to British Headquarters on the possibility of setting up a jointly run operation at their fields at Celle and Fassberg. The British had more fields than planes to fill them, was closer to Berlin, and more Skymasters were coming into the American Zone than their two fields could handle.

Clint went to the general’s office and was startled at first sight. The general seemed to be chalky-colored. He showed Clint the message on the navy engines. Clint blew a sigh of relief.

The general called in his aide, told him to phone M.J. and say he would not be there for dinner, and told his aide to get something to eat for Colonel Loveless and himself.

“Clint. This hundred navy engines won’t be enough. I’m meeting with USAFE tomorrow to try to cut out the two-hundred-hour inspections. I want you to support my position.”

Clint pondered. The Skymasters were being asked to do a job for which they were never designed. All the manuals no longer applied.

The chief pilots had worked out methods to get the greatest efficiency with the least wear through absolute power settings and by cutting down ground-idling time.

Yet, the repeated stress of take-offs with heavy loads and high manifold pressure had resulted in piston erosion. The high usage of craft simply played hell on combustion chambers and there was excessive wear on seals, gaskets, ignition wiring.

Hydraulic systems, particularly the gear-retracting mechanism, were overworked and the coal and flour cargoes eroded cables, wires, contacts, plugs, instruments, radios.

There were breakdowns on the long, delicate nose wheel, never designed for the unusual poundings they were receiving in the many take-offs and landings; fuel leaks were a constant source of headache.

The two-hundred-hour overhaul meant they needed greater logistical support, would have to find and build up 30 per cent more spare parts, find facilities and train aircraft and engine mechanics far beyond the capacity of the base at Obie.

Clinton Loveless and Hiram Stonebraker knew that in the unromantic, poorly lit, drafty hangars, mechanics torn from families and living in muddy tin-hut camps were going to make or break the Airlift.

It was the one problem that could never be solved, only appeased, for the Lift demanded the greatest maintenance and logistics operation in aviation’s history.

“What about it, Clint?”

“I’m sorry, General. I can’t support your view. We have to continue the two-hundred-hour overhaul.”

Stonebraker knew he was whipped. His own staff would not back him on this issue. The Obie Base could only work during summer and autumn and there was no base in Germany that had the facilities to do a two-hundred-hour overhaul in winter. It meant that a wartime British base would have to be reactivated and the C-54’s would have to fly out of Germany.

The dinner came. General Stonebraker ate at his desk, Clint on the coffee table in front of the couch.

“You’ll have to go to England, Clint. Some MATS people will be looking over bases. I have the old Burtonwood Base in mind. Let me know if we’ll be able to get it into shape quick enough.”

“When do I go, sir?”

“Well ... you might as well take a day off tomorrow.” He nibbled at his food and asked Clint how the cooperation with the British was shaping up. Clint said, no strain. The general knew the British would come through from the old CBI days. With joint American/British bases operating soon in Fassberg and Celle and running nothing but coal perhaps they could build up the precariously low reserves in Berlin.

Lieutenant Beaver knocked, entered. Stonebraker ran through his papers, studied the cartoon for the next day’s
Task Force Times.
It depicted Airman Kimacyoyo (Kiss My Ass, Colonel, You’re on Your Own) at a desk marked,
DEPENDENTS HOUSING PROCUREMENT.
An exploded cigar had blackened his face and the caption read: “I Told You it was a Thankless Job.” Hiram snickered as he initialed an okay. The cartoon would burn up Buff Morgan.

He studied the incoming VIP list. Beaver persisted that one of the journalists was a “must see.” There was a British Cabinet Minister to be escorted on an inspection of Y 80 and also a French general.

“Frigg the French. They’re not doing a goddamned thing for the Airlift.”

“They fly the flag in Berlin, sir, and we’re intending to lay down an airport in their sector.”

“Any more of your goddamned friends coming in here to interfere with this operation, Beaver?”

The next week Vice President Alben Barkley was due and Garry Moore was scheduled to put on a show at the requisitioned Opera House.

“Where the hell are the Howgozit figures?”

Beaver produced a slip of paper taken from the Control Center with figures listing by squadron the number of flights and total tonnage. It was a terrible day. They had only set down six hundred tons when the weather put the Lift out of business.

His face grew long. How do you whip the weather? He thanked Beaver quietly and dismissed him.

A phone call came on the red line from Chip Hansen in Berlin. Buff Morgan had taken the air-space beef to him. Stonebraker refused to back down; Hansen said he would try to smooth USAFE’s ruffled feathers.

“Crusty, I just got the figures on the new airfield.”

“How many barrels of asphalt?” Stonebraker asked quickly.

“Ten thousand.”

Stonebraker grunted.

“And Crusty ... the Magistrat appealed to Neal Hazzard today. The hospital inventories are dangerously low. We are going to have to get several thousand tons of emergency drugs and supplies in immediately.” At last, Chip Hansen sent his regards to M.J.

Stonebraker set the phone down slowly. “We have to fly in ten thousand barrels of asphalt,” he said to Clint.

Clint wanted to cry.

“What the hell, Clint. No matter how rough we have it, it’s ten times rougher on those people in Berlin.”

Stonebraker pulled himself out of his chair. He reeled back suddenly, falling against the wall, groaned from a terrible pain in his chest, sunk to his knees, then began to crawl back to his desk.

“General!”

“Clint ... top ... drawer ...”

Clint found a box of nitroglycerin tablets.
Take One in Case of Attack.
He administered the pill, laid a cushion beneath his head, loosened his collar, and went back to the phone as the general writhed and gasped for breath.

“No ... no ... phone ... lock ... door ...”

Clint wavered. The general’s life hung in the balance, yet with pain-wracked effort it had the sound of an order. Clint set the receiver down, and locked both entrances.

The general groaned and broke into a cold sweat, and then it subsided. Clint wiped his face with a damp rag.

The general clutched his wrists. “You keep your mouth shut about this.”

“It’s not worth your life, General. We’re not going to make it, anyhow.”

“Goddamn you, Clint! Goddamn you! Don’t let me ever hear you say that again.”

Chapter Seventeen

A
FLIGHT SURGEON, SWORN
to secrecy, left the general’s suite after assuring M.J. and Clint that he was resting well.

Clint remained shaken and M.J. tried to comfort him. “His seizures come and go. It is something we have to live with and I made up my mind a long time ago we weren’t going to live in fear.”

“They had no right to call him back,” Clint said.

“At first, I thought that. But it would have killed him quicker if they had left him behind.”

“This mission burns out airplanes and breaks down men. Neither we nor the machines are meant to stand up under this kind of pounding.”

“Then, Clint, the only way the general will survive is if he continues to believe it can be done.”

Clint returned to his room at the Rose Hotel and was awake far into the night. Hiram Stonebraker, those G-5 people in Berlin, the flyers at Y 80, and the mechanics at Rhein/Mud made up for a lot of those whorehouses on Madison Avenue. He was glad now that he had come.

The next day was Sunday; he called M.J. to inquire.

“The general has gone to his office,” she said.

“I’ll be damned.”

What a day! Clint looked around the street outside the Rose Hotel. His first day off and the sun was shining.

Stonebraker kept his staff housed in a cluster of requisitioned hotels diagonally across the Koch Brunnen Square from Headquarters. The plush Schwarzer Bock, Rose, and Palast held the top-ranking people. Lesser hotels scattered all over the city were requisitioned for junior officers and enlisted personnel.

Clint walked to the main exchange for toilet gear and cigarettes. Wiesbaden had been spared except for a single stray stick of bombs. In the heart of the city all the grandiose civic and commercial buildings had been requisitioned by the Air Force for USAFE and all those other offices and wings needed to run the tremendous air establishment. Beer halls had been converted into mess halls and the late-comer, the First Airlift Task Force, took a block on Taunusstrasse with shops and apartments and converted it into a makeshift command post.

Clint returned to the Rose, wondered what the hell to do. He went to the Bier Stube at the Palast, a congregation point for Airlift people. The Lift was back in full operation; no one was around this early. Might as well see a little of Wiesbaden, he thought, and strolled to the Wilhelmstrasse along a line of once elegant shops and still lovely sidewalk cafes.

Out of the immediate bailiwick of Headquarters Clint could see that the city was a crown jewel, with tradition and grandeur. It had a history as a spa dating back to Roman times, and was heavily patronized by the aristocracy and Rhineland industrialists.

He crossed the Wilhelmstrasse to the flower-studded colonnade, which began with a statue of Bismarck. On one side was the Opera House and on the other a park and fountains. As airmen and their girls passed him, he began to feel lonely.

Clint hummed, “Sunday in the Park.” Christ, he hated Sunday in the park in New York; it was like a ghetto boxed in by sheer walls of high buildings.

He was drawn toward the end of the colonnade by the sound of the Air Force band playing a Sunday concert before the Kurhaus.

AQUIS MATTIACIS
read the carved lettering above six columns supporting the domed roof of the Kurhaus. The original Roman name of the city and the site of the springs with curative powers held a building rumored to have been built by twenty-six millionaires each having put up huge sums.

The Kurhaus had been requisitioned as the Eagle Club to serve American families. Ping-pong tables stood on marble floors and a soda fountain was installed in one end of a dining room. The German books were gone from the oriental-carpeted library and replaced by English tomes.

Behind the Kurhaus stretched a magnificent park of lakes and little bridges and riding trails and tennis courts, once patronized by arrogant monocled barons, slash-cheeked steel kings, and their hourglass-figured ladies.

He could hear the band playing “William Tell Overture.” Why the hell did all bands play “William Tell Overture”? Maybe it wasn’t a good idea having a day off.

Clint caught a taxi and drove up the hills to the Neroberg Officers’ Club. The great hotel was in a lush setting, a forest on a foothill of the Taunus Mountains looking down on Wiesbaden and the Rhine. Clint sat at the bar, listened to Egon at the piano.

There were mostly USAFE people around and even though they didn’t give a damn what was happening at Erding and Rhein/Main and Obie they could not escape the Airlift. Along with the gossip and complaints of how tough it was to live off the German economy, there was tension. There was a lot of talk about wanting to get dependents out of Germany before the Berlin thing blew up.

Clint looked around in growing desperation for a face from Headquarters. He bought Egon a round; the German played, “This Love of Mine,” which he and Judy thought of as “their” song.

He bummed a bathing suit, took a drive down to the Opelbad, a luxurious pool set in the woods and vineyards over the city. He studied the women at pool side with a practiced eye, but none of them was as voluptuous as Judy....Screw it, Clint thought.

“Where to, sir?” the taxi driver asked.

“Airlift Headquarters.”

Clint sighed with relief as he entered Taunusstrasse 11. He went first to the Control Center and chatted with the duty control officer, who gave him a capsule briefing, then went upstairs to Operations and made his own hasty calculation that they would set down three thousand tons.

He went to his office, put the hot plate on for coffee, took off his blouse, and began to read over the preliminary agreement drawn up with the British for the joint operation of bases at Celle and Fassberg. He dialed General Stonebraker’s office.

The general’s secretary answered.

“This is Colonel Loveless. General in for me?”

“Hello.”

“Clint Loveless, sir.”

“Yes, Clint.”

“How’s your ... indigestion, sir.”

“Fine.”

“I’m working over the agreement with the British. I’ll try to have it on your desk tomorrow afternoon before I shove off for Burtonwood.”

“I thought I gave you the day off.”

“You did, sir. I don’t know what to do with a day off.”

“Well, long as you’re here, have the agreement on my desk this afternoon.”

Clint clenched his teeth for a long second. “Yes, sir. By the way, General, did you see the memo on how the British are getting the sparrows off the Gatow airfield?”

“No.”

“Seems like one of their airmen used to train falcons for hunting. They’re sending some over from England. Say they’ll have those sparrows out of there in an hour.”

“Why the hell didn’t we think of that!”