On Friday 13 August 1948, a C-54 Skymaster carrying the new boss of the Berlin Airlift circled blind above Tempelhof. The clouds had dropped to the rooftops, a cloudburst had swallowed the runway, one transport had crashed and burned at the end of it, and a stack of transports circled overhead in the murk with nowhere to go.

The passenger was Major General William H. Tunner, and he had been in Germany barely two weeks. What he did next, from the cabin of his own circling aircraft, turned a heroic improvisation into the most efficient airlift the world had ever seen.

Tunner is the man Berliners named a street after and most aviation fans have never heard of. The Candy Bomber gets the films. Curtis LeMay got much of the early credit. But the airlift that fed two million people for more than a year ran on Tunner’s clockwork, and he had already built that clock once before, over the Himalayas.

The ferry pilot who loved a timetable

Tunner graduated from West Point in 1928 and earned his pilot’s wings in 1929, his final check ride flown with a captain named Claire Chennault. A decade of routine postings followed. Then, in June 1941, he became one of the first staff officers of the new Air Corps Ferrying Command, the outfit that delivered aircraft from American factories to the front and grew into the Air Transport Command.

As head of its Ferrying Division, Tunner backed a plan drawn up by pilot Nancy Harkness Love and in September 1942 set up the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, the women civilians who flew new warplanes from factory to airfield. That story has its own chapter on Afterburner: Nancy Harkness Love: The Pilot Who Founded the WAFS.

Taming the Hump

In 1944 he was sent to fix the most dangerous supply route of the war. Since Japan had cut the Burma Road, everything China needed to keep fighting was flown from India over the Himalayas, a route crews simply called the Hump. Tonnage was rising, but so was the toll of wrecked transports and dead crews.

Tunner piloted a C-46 Commando over the Hump himself on an inspection trip that June and took command of the India-China Division on 4 September 1944. He ran it like a big business. Each base got daily and monthly tonnage quotas, the larger four-engined C-54 took over more and more of the load, and in February 1945 he brought in production-line maintenance, towing each aircraft through a row of specialised stations.

He also brought back inspections, parades and dress standards, which earned him the nickname “Willie the Whip”. It worked. In July 1945 the airlift hauled 71,042 net tons into China, its peak month, while the accident rate fell far below where it had been when he arrived.

British Pathé newsreel footage from 1945 of transports flying the Hump between India and China.

Black Friday over Tempelhof

On 24 June 1948, the Soviet Union cut all rail and barge traffic into West Berlin. The Americans and British answered with an airlift that was brave, busy and badly organised. The US Air Force in Europe was a tactical command with no airlift experience, and the operation was being run like a bombing campaign.

Washington sent for Tunner. He arrived in Wiesbaden on 28 July 1948 and two weeks later flew to Berlin to present an award to the pilot with the most trips into the city. That was the flight that ended up in the stack over Tempelhof on Black Friday. On the ground, unloaded planes were refused permission to take off for fear of collision, so the jam grew in both directions.

Tunner radioed the tower and, as quoted in HistoryNet’s account, said: “This is 5549, Tunner talking, and you better listen. Send every plane in the stack back to its home base.” Nobody was killed that day, but he later said the success of the airlift dated from it.

The new rules came fast. Every flight would fly on instruments, whatever the weather. Every aircraft got exactly one chance to land in Berlin; if it missed, it flew home with its load and rejoined the flow. Stacking was abolished. According to US Air Force historian Roger Miller, in the 90 minutes it had taken to bring in nine stacked aircraft, 30 C-54s carrying 300 tons could now land on straight-in approaches at three-minute intervals.

The cadence: a city on a conveyor belt

Tunner’s whole philosophy fitted into one idea: rhythm. Aircraft moved through the corridors at fixed intervals, crews reported their times over radio beacons and adjusted speed to hold their slot, and the system could be sped up or slowed down like a conveyor belt. He hated the romance of the early days, the crews sprinting to planes for the newsreels.

He attacked every wasted minute on the ground. Crews in Berlin were no longer allowed to leave their aircraft; mobile snack bars came to them while the cargo came off. He replaced the C-47s with C-54s, because unloading a C-47’s three-odd tons took as long as unloading a C-54’s ten, and the switch was complete by the end of September 1948. In mid-October 1948 the American and Royal Air Force efforts were merged under one Combined Airlift Task Force, with Tunner in charge.

When a young pilot named Gail Halvorsen got into trouble for dropping sweets to Berlin children on tiny parachutes, Tunner approved and expanded it into Operation Little Vittles. You can read that story in Der Süßigkeitenbomber: Zwei Kaugummis, die Berlin veränderten.

British Pathé newsreel of the Berlin Airlift in 1948, the operation Tunner turned into a conveyor belt.

The Easter Parade

By April 1949 the airlift was running so smoothly that Tunner worried about complacency. So he staged a show. From noon on 15 April to noon on Easter Sunday, 16 April, crews flew coal and only coal, around the clock. They delivered 12,941 tons in nearly 1,400 flights in 24 hours, without a single accident.

That was about what West Berlin had received daily by rail, road and water in peacetime. Daily tonnage stayed higher afterwards. On 12 May 1949 the Soviets lifted the blockade. Flights continued until 30 September 1949 to build up stocks, by which time the airlift had flown some 277,000 flights and delivered roughly 2.3 million tons.

Afterburner has told the bigger story of the airlift in Ein Flugzeug alle 62 Sekunden: Die Berliner Luftbrücke. The man who set the metronome summed up what he wanted in a line that is pure Tunner.

Korea: airlift under fire

A year after leaving Germany he was in Tokyo. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, Tunner was sent to build Combat Cargo Command, which handled airlift inside the theatre: supply runs, paratroop drops and casualty evacuation. Its first big job was supporting the Inchon landings and the drive north that followed.

General Douglas MacArthur pinned the Distinguished Service Cross on him on the spot. When Chinese armies struck in late 1950, Combat Cargo carried out what the National Museum of the US Air Force calls the largest airdrops in history up to that time, keeping retreating UN troops supplied. In early 1951 the command was replaced by a permanent organisation, and Tunner went home.

The general who made airlift a weapon

He later commanded US Air Forces in Europe and, from 1 July 1958, the Military Air Transport Service itself, before retiring in 1960. He died on 6 April 1983 and is buried at Arlington. Today Air Mobility Command gives the Lieutenant General William H. Tunner Award to its outstanding strategic airlift crew, and Berlin has a William-H.-Tunner-Straße.

The opening of the Legends of Airpower episode on William Tunner.

Every C-17 that lands on a schedule, every humanitarian airlift that runs like a timetable, owes something to the general who stood in a stack over Tempelhof and decided that heroism was not a system. Tunner’s gift was making it boring. That boredom kept a city alive.

Sources: Wikipedia (William H. Tunner; Berlin Blockade; The Hump), HistoryNet, Air & Space Forces Magazine, PBS American Experience, National Museum of the US Air Force, The Army Air Forces in World War II (Vol. VII)