In drenching rain and heavy cloud, aircraft after aircraft landed at the British airfield at Gatow. All over Berlin, the air was filled with the noise of planes, a sound well remembered by Corstorphine man Stan Wilkinson as the 60th anniversary of t
he Berlin airlift is marked this week.
The American pilots with the help of RAF radio engineers, including 80-year-old Stan of Belgrave Road, landed once event six minutes.
Only a small proportion of the aircraft that were landed at the Gatow airstrip were British, explained grandfather-of-four Stan, a radio operator with the RAF in the German city.
He remembered: "It was June 29 and the city was just living with the barest essentials, with rations far below what the United Nations said was needed to prevent starvation. Only a quarter of the housing in the city was seen as a place where people could live."
The airlift was an extraordinary, 11-month effort by the US, Great Britain and France to defy the Soviet Union's blockade of the former Nazi capital.
By flying in enough food, coal and other essentials for the city's two-million plus inhabitants, the Berlin airlift helped avert a humanitarian crisis and kept hope alive in a city nearly destroyed by Allied bombing.
Stan said: "There was a decision to start flying a small amount of food into Berlin and my job was to make sure every aircraft that went up had working radio equipment and radar at all times because they were virtually flying non-stop.
"There was one time we literally had to guide a Dakota down because the pilot was so tired he had dozed off and didn't see the runway until 20 seconds before landing. There were some very hairy moments back on base."
Berlin was blockaded by the Soviet Army, vastly outnumbering the allied soldiers.
The RAF men would joke that if they were captured by the Russians they would spend the rest of their lives working the salt mines in Siberia.
"It was something we did think about and made jokes to deal with what was happening.
"We did worry because we didn't know how long it was going to be going on for and we knew there were far more Russians than us on the ground," said Stan.
Stan, who was 20 years old at the time, said: "When I first went over there I had no real idea of what it was all about and what was going on. But as I started seeing the airlift in action and what we all doing to help the situation, my ideas changed.
"Here was something good being done and I was proud to be part of that."
The full article contains 493 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
