The Big Lift - Wikipedia
The Big Lift is a very interesting film, set during the Berlin airlift and was actually partly filmed on location in Berlin in 1950. The devastation of the city is clear to see. Also an interesting fact is apart from a couple of actors all the military personnel were in fact real life servicemen!...
Let me first say that this will be a great thread to contribute to, being a member of the "Defenders of Freedom" during the Cold War period and being stationed in the heart of the Iron Curtain 110 miles behind enemy lines in the city of Berlin..
Our training consisted of MOUT (Military Operations in Urban Terrain) CIC Combat in the City.. We trained very hard to stop the possible Soviet/East German advance..
Some of the pictures I will be posting show what we did to prepare defensive positions in and around the American Sector. We would do what is called a "Terrain Walk" and familiarize ourselves with the actual city buildings that we were assigned to defend. Most of the buildings were of no importance to our mission, it was the roads and what we called high avenues and most likely avenues of approach that the Soviet and East German armored divisions would take to level the allied sectors of the city. These streets would have been the scenes of some very bitter and contested fighting, very similar to what the German defenders faced in the final days of the Battle for Berlin. Ironically 40 years later the American Army faced the Soviet Army not as an ally, but as the aggressor.
We trained in two mock cities on the outskirts of Berlin, one in the American Sector known as "Doughboy City" and the other city in the British Sector known as Rhueleban. These mock cities consisted of concrete structures that simulated the real buildings within the city, ie. Apartment complexes, hospitals, churches, banks, gasthaus and other structures. We became very intimate with each type of building and what defensive positions we were to construct in them..
Being alerted to go to the field was very surreal. In our barracks basement were ammunition bunkers that held our initial supply of ammunition. In the event of an alert, we would draw weapons and then be issued our basic combat load of live ammo, to include hand grenades, and other items.. This ammo was obviously meticulously accounted for after each alert and placed back into the bunker. During our alert rotations, we had one platoon that was the QRF (Quick reaction force) which was on duty 24 hours a day. They would be the first to roll out in an alert and secure our assembly areas. One platoon in each company of the Infantry battalions was equipped with M113 Armored Personnel carriers, and the remaining 2 platoons were light infantry. The mortar section in each company were equipped with 81mm mortars and they were also in M113 APCs.
I will now post a few pictures of training in Berlin in Doughboy city. The pictures may not be the best as I only had a small 110 instamatic camera that I carried with me on deployments to capture photos so forgive me for the clarity on some of the shots..
The last pictures show East German Guard Towers and the perimeter fence line.. This was how close our adversary was to our training site. The East Germans could observe all of our training and see our armored vehicles and tanks and of course they would take pictures of us training but this for us was a way of life..
So, here are a few of the pictures, I have many many more, but I wanted to start you off with some of these "Battle For Berlin 1980's Style"
All comments and questions are of course welcome...
Smitty
Thanks for taking the time to post Smitty, a very interesting group of photos. I like the old U or Sbahn train!...
Thanks Gunny,
The S-Bahn station was defended by my platoon during one battle. We prepared for 3 days and barricaded ourselves inside the basement level. We were defending against 2 battalions of infantry supported by 3 tanks, and the opposing force was not successful in capturing the S-bahn station. During the simulated battle, we fired over 20,000 rounds of M-60 machine gun ammunition, 5,000 rounds of .50 caliber machine gun ammo, 80,000 rounds of m16 ammunition and we successfully "killed" two of the tanks with 90 mm recoilless rifles and M47 Dragon anti-tank guided missiles..
Obviously all the ammo was blank, but during the fighting, for a few moments when a breach was imminent, I thought I may have known what the German defenders 40 years earlier had felt..,, It was a little unnerving to think we could have lost that train station, and with it the battalion sector..
Smitty
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. As a young tank platoon leader in Germany in the early 1990's I can tell you that despite the "wall coming down" or "end of the Cold War", we still did alerts. Sometimes it was just getting everyone assembled in the company area with all of our TA-50 on, and sometimes it was rolling our tanks out of the motor pool and lining up at the gate, ready to march out. We wouldn't actually leave the post because driving down the German streets would have scared the locals and caused a lot of damage to their nice German streets.
However, one time we were deploying to Grafenwoehr for tank gunnery and our regular rail head was undergoing repairs/renovations and we had to use the rail head in the middle of our city. This necessitated a road march of our tanks through the city streets with Polizei blocking off intersections along the route. Boy, you would have thought we were the Wehrmacht. Numerous German civilians cheered, waved and some even gave us gifts. My maintenance guys in their M88 recovery vehicle were approached by an elderly German woman who gave them a wicker basket full of food and a couple bottles of beer!
I'm currently watching ( on free to air TV ) a series called "After Hitler" made last year.
( you can find it also on Discovery / the History Channel / Yesterday Channel in the UK )
Synopsis
In the five years that separated the end of the Second World War from the start of the Cold War, the world had hoped for a lasting peace, but instead found itself on the brink of apocalypse.
Five years of chaos and hope for the people of a shattered Europe, who became pawns in the games of the major powers. May 8th, 1945 : A terrible war finally ended in the smoking ruins of the Reich. The civilian populations celebrated the victory. It was a time for jubilation. But the celebration lasted little more than a few days. The defeat of Nazi Germany did not mean a rosy future lay around the corner. A shattered Europe had to rebuild, heal its wounds, and deal with the fall-out from an interminable and barbarous conflict, whilst sketching the outlines of its future.
In 1945, Europe was a continent of refugees. Millions of men and women who had been deported, interned, or subjected to forced labour, waited for weeks, sometimes months, to return to their homelands. For many civilians, the aftermath of the war was even more brutal than the conflict itself.
Five years marked by founding events: the liberation, the founding of the United Nations, the Nuremberg Trials, the Marshall Plan, the Czech coup, Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, the expulsion of German minorities, changes in borders, the Berlin blockade, the division of Germany, and so on. Five years of confusion tinged with optimism, before finding themselves one side or the other of the Iron Curtain.
This special is based entirely on remastered and recoloured archives, After Hitler will immerse the viewer into the searing reality of these post war years with compiled unseen Russian, British, German, French, Canadian and American archives.
Worth tracking it down I feel......
Dan
" I'm putting off procrastination until next week "
I was going to post the same thing. After Hitler documentary does a great job.
Nick
Click on the youtube link below.
YouTube
Some very interesting information and stories being shared here..
TWS, Thank you for your service my friend.. In the 80's when I was stationed in Berlin, the Company Commander of "F" Company 40th Armor in Berlin, stationed at Turner Barracks was Captain Dana Pittard. He later went on to a General Pittard and was the commander of the 1st Armored Division at Fort Bliss, Texas.
General and Mrs. Pittard became very good friends of myself and my wife and when he left Fort Bliss for another assignment, he gave me his dress green uniform with all his decorations, several photos, an embroidered 40th Armor Berlin BDE plaque his wife made and his Desert uniform he wore in Iraq when he was on General Odierno's staff.
After the General retired he came back to Fort Bliss with a reunion group of the 37th Armor and he stopped by our museum to see us. He was a great Soldier..
Smitty
Smitty, that's nuts! Crazy small world here: I worked directly for Dana J.H. Pittard! While a Major, he was the S-3 of 1-67 Armor at Fort Hood and I was a newly minted Captain and his S-3 Air, or basically his right-hand man. Outstanding officer and great leader.
He went straight from being my boss to being the Army aide to Pres. Clinton.
Thanks for your service as well! By the time I got to Germany for my first tour, Berlin Brigade was already starting to inactivate and officially completed closing down before my tour ended.
TWS,
Thanks for sharing.. Indeed a small world...
Smitty
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