A Clear and Necessary Mission
1st Lt. Gail Halvorsen, who retired from the Air Force much later in 1974 as a colonel and is now 100 years old (as of October 2020), was one of the American pilots tasked with flying around-the-clock missions. Day in, day out, he flew from Rhein-Main Air Base in West Germany to the Tempelhof Airfield in Berlin. In total, he flew 126 missions delivering food and supplies between July 1948 and February 1949.
Lt. Gail Halvorson. Source: Shutterstock
To Halvorsen, his mission was clear and necessary: “We learned very clearly that the new enemy was Stalin. He was taking over where Hitler left off. We knew exactly what Stalin had in mind,” he said. But not all airmen were on the same page as Halvorsen…