Book Of The Month for February 2011 - "The Candy Bombers"

Oh my gosh, I've been negligent!

I just realized that I never did a Book of the Month for January, and today is the last day of February.  I hustled over to my book stacks and pulled a few good candidates off the shelves.  Plenty of fodder for future months!

This month's choice was a surprise book.  It's one I had never heard of and picked it up from the bargain rack at Barnes & Noble, thinking I'd give it a read when all else had been devoured.  I got it home and started glancing at the opening chapters and realized I needed to put this book at the head of the reading list.

"The Candy Bombers, The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour" by Andrei Cherny is a must-read for anyone interested in early post-war Europe and early Cold War history.  In fact, the drama and situations Cherny outlines regarding immediate post-war Germany and our more recent history at 'peace enforcement' post-war Iraq share startling parallels.

I had always thought that America ended the war in Europe with a clear vision of just what to do with this conquered country.  Cherny makes it clear that America stumbled into her post-war role in Germany, moving hesitantly towards the realization that we bore not just a huge responsibility in getting this wrecked nation back on its feet, but that unless America and her post-war allies, the British and French,  took decisive steps the Soviets would have their way with Berlin and ultimately the entire German nation.

Cherny's story pivots around two key players in post-war Germany; General Lucius Clay and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal.

Clay was Harry Truman's very last choice for the post of military governor of Germany.  A number of seemingly more suitable civilian candidates turned the president down flat when offered the position - the job and all it implied was viewed as political suicide.  Out of frustration Truman told the Pentagon to find a general officer who could be ordered to take the job.  They shoved Lucius Clay through the door to the Oval Office and a few minutes later he came out the effective overlord of post-war Germany.

As it turned out, Lucius Clay was perfect for the job.  An extremely talented Army Corps of Engineer officer with extensive wartime project and program management experience, Clay had the intelligence, experience, education, political savvy and powers of observation that were precisely what the ruler of post-war Germany needed to not just set the defeated nation on the course to reconstruction but to stare down the Russians in what were effectively the opening gambits of the Cold War.  Cherny does a great job of tracing Clay's metamorphosis from a believer in the good intentions of the post-war Soviet Union to a ram-rod believer in the Soviet Union's evil intent towards Germany and all of Eastern Europe.  Clay arrived in Germany in 1946 believing in and determined to abide by the the Allied agreements on the partitioning and control of Germany and Berlin.  In a very short time he realized the Russians had long since stopped abiding by wartime agreements and were charting their own course for domination in Eastern Europe.  Clay's observations often put him at odds with Truman administration officials who still viewed the Soviets through the lens of wartime cooperation and good will.

Clay found an able, if somewhat unstable ally in James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy who was about to become Truman's first Secretary of Defense.  Forrestal was a self-made man, a multi-millionaire investor and Democrat who was driven and passionate about national defense.  Forrestal was also nobody's fool, and he quickly discerned that the Soviets were now the emerging global enemy - an enemy that needed to be stared down wherever they tried to force their hand.

And the first place the Soviets tried to force their hand was in Berlin.  I won't go into the details of mechanics of the Berlin Airlift.  The book tells the story quite well.  The Airlift is not just a simple story of the movement of supplies to keep a city alive, it is the story of a defenseless nation watching as their former conquers marshaled all the technology of war to beat back a looming menace and set the conditions for the rise of a free and democratic Germany.

This book demonstrates that America is a force for good in this world.  It's a lesson far too many of today's  politicians need to learn and understand.

AFRTS

Stumbled on this blog earlier today and spent some time listening to the archived broadcasts:

AFRTS Archive

AFRTS stands for Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, and it is the 'command information' service that brings news and entertainment to US service members and their families stationed worldwide.

Before the advent of internet, cable TV and satellite communications AFRTS was often the only 'voice of home' available to service members.  AFRTS, through its local and regional AFN (Armed Forces Network) affiliates like AFN Europe and AFN Korea provided (and still provides) American TV and radio broadcasts and programming to meet the unique needs of the regional listening audiences.  For example, AFN Europe would provide radio and TV news coverage of events happening in Germany that impacted soldiers and their families, like daily monetary exchange rates, local weather reports (helpfully provided by US Air Force weather forecasters), local traffic conditions on German roads and even local community festival schedules.

AFN would provide a mix of stateside TV programming (Sesame Street or 20 year old episodes of 'Gunsmoke' or current soap operas), the occasional live sporting event (we always got to see the Super Bowl) and old movies interspersed with locally produced shows like 'Gasthaus', a weekly program on German culture and events, or local news spots about unit football competitions or upcoming military exercises.  Since AFRTS is a non-profit operation specifically for US military consumption the major networks provided programming at reduced rates.  However, the commercials had to be stripped out and replaced with government 'infomercials'.  These informercials were often quite drab - 30 second or minute long spots on such scintillating topics as "Safeguarding your military ID card" or "Remember to keep your barracks door locked to prevent theft".

Since much of the local programming was done by young service members who joined the military specifically to learn the ins and outs of radio and TV production the locally produced infomercials and other TV spots could be quite humorous.  When you turn a bunch of 19-year olds loose with a camera and orders to come up with a TV spot on, say, ways to alleviate the family housing shortage you can end up with some pretty funny stuff.

AFN was our link to home.  AFN TV provided the kids and wives a window back in to what was happening in America, and AFN Radio was the 'background noise' to our life in Germany.  Every unit kept a radio tuned to AFN (after all, it was a 'command information' service).  Walk in to any orderly room, barracks, motor pool or supply room in Germany and you'd hear AFN booming from a radio.  Heck, even Germans tuned regularly to AFN radio for the music programming, it was that good.

Today when I listen to an old AFN Radio broadcast and hear the distinctive AFN Europe hourly time signal ("beep, beep, beep, beep, BEEEEEEP - From AP, UPI and the major American networks, the news is next on AFN") I am pulled back to Germany in the early 1980s and the height of the Cold War, walks through the quiet snow blanketed market square of Heidelberg on a Christmas night, drives through the Bavarian Alps on bright sunlit summer days, cruises down the Rhine River through the Loreli Gorge and strolls through small towns so old the cobblestones in the streets were placed well before the American Revolution.

Great times and wonderful memories all framed by the sights and sounds of AFRTS.

Brian