Daring Young Men: The Heroism and Triumph of The Berlin Airlift-June 1948-May 1949 »

Richard Reeves is the author of presidential bestsellers, including President Nixon and President Kennedy, acclaimed as the best nonfiction book of the year by Time magazine. A syndicated columnist and winner of the American Political Science Association's Carey McWilliams Award, he lives in New York and Los Angeles.

In the early hours of June 26, 1948, phones began ringing across America, waking up the airmen of World War II—pilots, navigators, and mechanics—who were finally beginning normal lives with new houses, new jobs, new wives, and new babies. Some were given just forty-eight hours to report to local military bases. The president, Harry S. Truman, was recalling them to active duty to try to save the desperate people of the western sectors of Berlin, the enemy capital many of them had bombed to rubble only three years before.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had ordered a blockade of the city, isolating the people of West Berlin, using hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers to close off all land and water access to the city. He was gambling that he could drive out the small detachments of American, British, and French occupation troops, because their only option was to stay and watch Berliners starve—or retaliate by starting World War III. The situation was impossible, Truman was told by his national security advisers, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His answer: "We stay in Berlin. Period." That was when the phones started ringing and local police began banging on doors to deliver telegrams to the vets.

Drawing on service records and hundreds of interviews in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain, Reeves tells the stories of these civilian airmen, the successors to Stephen Ambrose’s "Citizen Soldiers," ordinary Americans again called to extraordinary tasks. They did the impossible, living in barns and muddy tents, flying over Soviet-occupied territory day and night, trying to stay awake, making it up as they went along and ignoring Russian fighters and occasional anti-aircraft fire trying to drive them to hostile ground.

The Berlin Airlift changed the world. It ended when Stalin backed down and lifted the blockade, but only after the bravery and sense of duty of those young heroes had bought the Allies enough time to create a new West Germany and sign the mutual defense agreement that created NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

And then they went home again. Some of them forgot where they had parked their cars after they got the call.

The Barnes & Noble Review

The Cold War's opening moves were simultaneous with the Allied checkmate of the Nazis in the spring of 1945, with the Soviet army pushing westward into Berlin while the armies of the United States, Great Britain, and France raced eastward to occupy German territory as the Reich collapsed. By war's end, a defeated Germany would be divided in two and the city of Berlin sectioned off, an island of multinational governance in the midst of the Soviet Zone. As Russian intentions to dominate Europe became apparent, the tense stalemate between the remaining two global superpowers set the stage for decades of competition. In his new book, the historian and presidential biographer Richard Reeves gives us a compelling portrait of a divided Berlin as the first front line of the new Cold War.

1 "City of Zombies" June 20, 1948 1

2 "Absolutely Impossible!" June 28, 1948 31

3 "Cowboy Operation" July 29, 1948 61

4 "Black Friday" August 13, 1948 93

5 "We Are Close to War" September 13, 1948 115

6 "Rubble Women" October 29, 1948 131

7 "It Looks Like Curtains" November 28, 1948 155

8 "Flying to His Death" December 6, 1948 175

9 "Stalin Says ..." January 30,1949 197

10 "Zero-Zero" February 20, 1949 215

11 "A Big Hock Shop" March 12, 1949 227

12 "Here Comes a Yankee" April 16, 1949 241

13 "We Are Alive!" May 12, 1949 259

Epilogue 273

Notes 285

Bibliography 299

Acknowledgments 303

Index 305