None of the Allied officials contemplated a fight by the tiny Western garrison in Berlin, which in total comprised about 15,000 troops. A possibly more viable option involved breaking the blockade by dispatching an armed convoy from western Germany. Clay was an avid proponent of this gambit, going so far as to lay plans for a 6,000-man task force to storm 110 miles down the autobahn from Helmstedt to Berlin. Clay asked General Curtis LeMay, commander of the U.S. Air Force in Europe, to provide air support in case the Russians started shooting—an eventuality that the fiery LeMay welcomed as a fine opportunity for a preemptive strike on all Russian airfields in Germany. “Naturally we knew where they were,” LeMay said. “We had observed the Russian fighters lined up in a nice smooth line on the aprons at every place. If it had happened, I think we could have cleaned them up pretty well, in no time at all.”
But of course “it” didn’t happen. The State Department considered the convoy option far too risky, while the Pentagon dismissed it as unworkable. As General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote later: “The Russians could stop an armed convoy without opening fire on it. Roads could be closed for repair or a bridge could go up just ahead of you and then another bridge behind you and you’d be in a hell of a fix.”
If the Western powers were determined to stay in Berlin, they had to find a way to keep the city better supplied, pending a still hoped for diplomatic solution. In the given circumstances an airlift of some kind seemed the best answer, but at first only Bevin pressed it with any vigor. He argued forcefully that an airlift would at once reinforce the morale of the West Berliners and show Moscow that “we are not powerless but on the contrary possess a wealth of technical ability and spectacular air strength.” Clay, having reluctantly given up his convoy idea, soon came around to Bevin’s view. But the State Department and Pentagon still dithered, worried that this gambit, too, posed the risk of war. Finally, on June 26, President Harry Truman put an end to all the equivocation by ordering that an airlift to Berlin be made operational as soon as possible. To Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall’s objection that this might mean war, he replied that America would “have to deal with the situation as it developed.”
Even if an airlift did not lead to war, there were reasons to worry that it might not be effective with the equipment available in the immediate area. The U.S. Air Force in Europe had only two C-54 Douglas Skymasters, which could ferry about ten tons, and 102 battered C-47’s, known as Gooney Birds, each with a three-ton capacity. The British air command in Germany could deploy a total of fourteen Dakotas, their version of the C-47. The French had six Junkers and one Dakota, all derelict. Existing loading and landing facilities were also inadequate. America’s primary air base in western Germany, Rhein-Main, had a runway of good length, but its surface was not designed for heavy transport use. The RAF’s Wunstorf base in the British zone had little hardstand for parking and loading. At the Berlin end, Tempelhof in the American sector, expanded by the Nazis in the 1930s, had an adequate administrative complex, but its single runway (another was soon added) was surfaced with tire-busting steel planks, and the approach to it from the west required coming in between high apartment buildings and a 400-foot-tall brewery chimney. A cemetery near the field reminded pilots of what would probably happen to them if they miscalculated the approach. Gatow in the British sector was much easier to fly into but lacked a good offloading area. There were no airfields at all in the French sector, though Paris allowed the Americans to start building a new one at Tegel in July 1948. Because access to Tegel was impeded by transmitting towers belonging to the Soviet-controlled Berliner Rundfunk, France’s Berlin commandant asked the Russians to dismantle them. When he refused, the Frenchman ordered them blown up.
