Clay's Pigeons

Americans had done jobs as marvelous as the Berlin air lift before. Take the time Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox dug the St. Lawrence River in three weeks. When Billy Pilgrim tried to make it tough for Babe by wetting and stretching the buckskin ropes attached to the scoop shovel, Babe just sat down until the sun came out and dried the ropes. As they dried they shrank, and pulled that scoop for miles & miles up to Babe. And there was the St. Lawrence, practically dug.

The air lift was not that easy, but it had the genuine Bunyanesque flavor. The boasting and the wry understatement were as American as the fabulous Babe.

The boys were not indulging in self-pity when they named themselves Clay's Pigeons. They were merely expressing the realization of everybody from General Lucius D. Clay down that the Russians could wing them down if they so decided.

One thick morning, the control tower at Tempelhof was hushed as operators tried for contact with a C-54, lost for an hour over the city. Finally the plane landed. "Here they got the fifth largest city in the world," muttered a relieved tower operator, "and they miss it."

Over at Gatow Airport, in the British sector of Berlin, pilots had fun with a British WAAF operator known as Squeaky Mary. Whenever she told a pilot his course in her high-pitched voice, he answered in an equally squeaky imitation. Squeaky Mary called the U.S. airport. An American answered briskly: "Shoot, Luke, you're faded." Mary was momentarily nonplussed. After giving her message, she explained: "You see, it's been so long since I've had close contact with Americans--it's good to be at it again."

At Berlin's quadripartite air-safety center, U.S., British and French officers busily recorded the arrival and departure of planes. Off in a quiet corner sat the Soviet officer on duty, curled up with a good book. It was Alexander Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter, a short novel studded with Russian proverbs. One of the proverbs could well be applied to the carefully planned but, so far, unsuccessful Russian blockade. It read: "A horse has four legs, and yet it stumbles."

If Billy Pilgrim had read that, he might not have spent so much time thinking up those nasty, complicated tricks to play on Paul and his Blue-Ox, Babe.

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