Armed Forces: The Big Lift

Soon after midnight, the cabin door of a C-135 Stratolifter slammed shut behind Major General Edwin Burba, commander of the U.S. Army’s “Hell on Wheels” 2nd Armored Division.

Slowly the giant jet taxied into the darkness beyond the floodlit operations building at Bergstrom Air Force Base, Texas. At the edge of a runway it paused, shuddered with the full power of its four jets, then roared into the starry Texas sky to begin a nonstop, 5,600-mile hop to West Germany. Thus, one balmy night last week, “Operation Big Lift” got under way.

It was the biggest, fastest troop lift ever attempted. For three days and three nights, the endless whine of jet engines and the thunder of a thousand propellers pierced the air at a dozen U.S. airbases from Texas to Virginia as 206 Military Air Transport Service planes hauled 15,278 soldiers to bases in Germany. Normally it would take six weeks to transport a full division overseas, even longer to get it into combat. Big Lift was designed to move a full armored division from the U.S. to Europe in 72 hours, equip it with heavy hardware “prepositioned” at depots near the front lines, and throw it into “combat” two or three days after arrival. Said General Paul Adams, boss of the U.S. Strike Command, to departing members of the 2nd Armored: “The eyes of the world, not only of Texas, are upon you.”

Continental Commotion. Judging from the commotion that Big Lift caused all over the Continent (see cover story), Adams certainly had a point. Even before the operation got off the ground, statesmen in the NATO capitals were beginning to press the U.S. for assurances that it did not presage any large-scale pull-out of American combat troops from overseas bases. A slew of Administration officials, from Dean Rusk on down, hastened to offer such assurances, but nobody really seemed convinced.

Whatever its political implications, Big Lift was undeniably one whale of a show. No fewer than 30 airbases in the U.S., Canada, Bermuda, the Azores, Scotland, England, France and Germany were involved. Two-fifths of the total MATS fleet was mobilized. To support the 2nd Armored, some 1,600 artillerymen and truck drivers from places like Fort Sill, Okla., and Fort Bragg, N.C., were brought into the picture. From Dow and Loring Air Force bases in Maine, 119 supersonic fighters and reconnaissance planes flew to bases in France as a strike force assigned to fly cover missions for the tankers during maneuvers in Germany.

Traveling Light. The nexus of activity was Fort Hood, Texas, home of the 2nd Armored. The “Hell on Wheels” outfit lived up to its name in Germany in 1945, when it bridged the Rhine in seven hours under heavy fire and began the race to Berlin. Some of the soldiers in Big Lift had not even been born then, and for two weeks before the operation began, all traffic signs at Fort Hood bore identical English and German phrases for the benefit of young tankers and truck drivers.

On departure day, the troops shook the mothballs out of their heavy winter uniforms and put them on. It was 80° in Texas, but temperatures in the 40s were forecast for Germany. Otherwise, the soldiers traveled light, toting 30-lb. field packs with pup tents and a single change of underwear and socks inside, M-14 automatic rifles, bayonets, gas masks and helmets.

Day and night, a fleet of 70 chartered buses shuttled the G.I.s across the flat, dusty Texas plains to four nearby air-bases. So tight was the schedule they followed that on the 75-minute trip from Fort Hood to Bergstrom, precisely eleven minutes were allowed for stop lights. In groups of 70 or 80, perspiring soldiers in itchy o.d.s tramped up the ramps; inside the windowless cargo planes the temperature hit 110°, and the men shucked shirts and even T shirts until they were airborne and began cooling off.

To the Chow Line. For the more fortunate, it was a ten-hour, nonstop trip in 600-m.p.h. C-135s that skirted the Arctic Circle on the northern route.

The others spent up to 32 hours in lumbering C124 Globemasters that wheezed along the southern route at 270 m.p.h., stopping to refuel at Bermuda and the Azores.

Often in total darkness, the troops debarked at Germany’s Rhein-Main, Sembach and Ramstein airbases. As they moved down from the ramps, they were steered straight onto chow lines, where cooks from the German-based U.S. Seventh Army had a total of 20,000 piping-hot steaks and tons of French fries ready. At Rhein-Main, outside Frankfurt, one mess sergeant baked a 200-lb. cake in the shape of a tank.

Fully refueled, the troops boarded trucks bound for depots at Kaiserslautern, Mannheim, Pirmasens and Germersheim to pick up their prepositioned hardware—319 M48 medium, 50-ton tanks, 76 howitzers, 429 armored personnel carriers. Stockpiled during the 1961 Berlin crisis, the equipment has been sitting idle ever since. At Kaiserslautern three unbroken columns of tanks, guns and ammunition stretch caterpillar-like for two miles along an abandoned highway. Later, in forested bivouac areas ablaze with the golds and russets of autumn, the troops set up pup tents, took hot showers in tents equipped with gas-powered water heaters, wolfed down mountainous helpings of chicken, turkey, potatoes, ice cream, crisp red apples, bread and fresh butter at improvised field kitchens.

Ahead of Schedule. Exactly 63 hr. 5 min. after the first Big Lift plane left Texas, a C-130 Hercules touched down at Sembach with the last 60 men of the 2nd Armored, nearly nine hours ahead of schedule. With the last arrivals on hand, the scattered units of the 2nd Armored began assembling for week-long maneuvers at Fulda Gap, a classical invasion route just across the border from Communist East Germany.

As a logistical exercise, Big Lift was a triumph. Despite occasionally impenetrable ground fog in Germany and Hurricane Ginny’s winds off the Southeastern U.S., the Air Force flew 236 missions, toted 459.6 tons of combat gear, logged 13,000 flying hours and burned up 6,500,000 gallons of fuel—all without mishap.

Deservedly jubilant, some Air Force officials claimed that in a real crisis they could do it all over in a bare 40 hours-though in an emergency they would hardly have the time to plot every move with the painstaking care of chess masters. Other “Big Lifts” are tentatively being plotted. Army Secretary Cyrus Vance announced last week that full divisions will be airlifted to the Far East and the Middle East next year, and Defense Department officials are thinking of flying two full divisions to Europe in one massive operation.