Cold War

The sergeants’ mess at Wunstorf in July 1948 was like no other Virginia had encountered before. She could detect nothing orderly anywhere. Luggage and flying kit lay about blocking the corridors and halls. Men were slumped on all the chairs, some still in their working overalls, and most of them were sleeping. Indeed, some men were stretched out to sleep on the floor behind the sofas. Those not sleeping were eating or drinking — right there in the lobby! This was so chaotic and irregular, that Virginia decided she should try the officers’ mess instead.

Her expectations of a more civilised environment, however, were disappointed. The same over-crowding, chaos, and sense of dislocation greeted her. One man was sleeping on a billiard table! After a moment, she spotted a flying officer putting on his flight jacket and grabbing his hat, apparently preparing to leave. She went straight over to him. Putting on her best smile, she addressed him as he stepped over someone’s outstretched legs. “Flying Officer! I’m Virginia Cox of the Times. Would you have just a couple of minutes to talk to me?”

He shook his head and kept moving towards the door. Virginia fell in beside him and walked with him. “Have you been on the Airlift long?”

“A couple of days.”

“How has it been going?”

“Let’s see. We’re sleeping five to a room and lucky to have a room. They’ve changed the location of the ops centre three times. The dining room can’t work round the clock, so if we miss a meal, all we get is NAAFI buns and tea — and even that is hit-and-miss in this chaos. We never know which aircraft we’ll be flying in, which means we don’t know the ground crew. Nor do we have a clue about what cargo we have in the crate.”

They had left the mess behind and were making for the line of aircraft beside the runway. Around them, parked aircraft filled every available space. Notably, the twin-engine Dakotas had been pushed off anything concrete to make way for the heavier Yorks, and the grass was turning into a morass of mud. Meanwhile, the Yorks hogged the few hardstandings in front of the hangars and were lined up on the perimeter track. While aircraftmen crawled over the Yorks to ensure serviceability by the next day, the Dakotas doggedly lined up to take off.

Virginia’s escort led her towards a bevy of Dakotas surrounded by stevedores heaving canvas sacks from lorries to men standing in the open cargo doors. The latter flung the sacks inside the aircraft. The teams worked rhythmically and steadily. All the loaders were German, although British soldiers drove the trucks and supervised the work to ensure nothing was stolen or sabotaged.

A man started waving to Virginia’s companion. “That’s my skipper,” the Flying Officer explained. Only then did Virginia register that her interlocutor was a navigator rather than a pilot. “Better go,” he announced as he picked up his pace to a jog, leaving the reporter in his wake.

Virginia didn’t try to keep up. She just watched as he scrambled into the cockpit of the Dakota at the head of the queue. He was barely inside when the cargo door clanged shut and the first engine started spinning slowly. The last of the stevedores fell onto the back of the empty lorry, which pulled away as the second engine settled into a steady buzz. The Dakota started to ease out onto the taxiway, while the Dakota behind it closed its door and started its engines.

“What wonderful copy!” Virginia thought. Unlike the dreary briefing that highlighted all the problems, out here in the midst of the action she felt a thrill. At the root of all this chaos was urgency and a sense of purpose reminiscent of the war itself. She particularly loved the fact that bureaucracy appeared to be lacking. The fact that no one had yet shepherded her back to where she belonged was an indication of how disorganised everything was. True, she liked to make fun of British muddling through, but as she watched a Dakota take to the air with a dozen more waiting like ducks in a row, her heart swelled with pride. In all this improvisation there was something glorious too.

She had to get that across in her article. If she combined what she’d seen at the USAF base yesterday it would be a terrific piece of reporting. The Americans were bringing in crews and aircraft not just from the Continental United States but from South America and the Pacific too. Meanwhile, she’d been told that if a plane was loaded and no crew was standing by, staff officers dropped whatever they were doing to rush out and fly it to Berlin and back. That kind of excitement and enthusiasm would inspire readers. After all, everyone understood that feeding two and a half million people was important work. All the boring facts from the briefing underlined that this mission was impossible in the long run, but that was not what people wanted to read today. They didn’t want more bad news about what Britain couldn’t do. They wanted to be inspired and proud again.

But she needed a catchy title. Something that captured both that enthusiasm and the improvisation. Maybe “Enthusiastic Improvisation”? Or “Wartime Spirit for Humanitarian Effort”? No, too clumsy. Better to stick to something simple like “Creative Chaos.”