Are "Incidents" Exaggerated?

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 84, 20 August 1948, Page 5

Are "Incidents" Exaggerated?

LONDON POPULAR PRESS AND BERLIN (By Reece Smith, New Zealand Kemsley Empire Journalist) Berlin, July 27. The pilot of the air lift York which flew me into Berlin had, a few days previously, seen a Yak in the air corridor. Thereupon he heaved his cumbrous charabanc round towards the fighter which, suitably astonished, made off. The English pilot then proceeded on his lawful occasions, thinking little of the incident, and a lot of when he would get leave he was forgoing to keep the air lift working. For same days he had flown three return trips a day from Wunsdorf to Berlin. His aircraft had flown more.

When the London popular press got hold of it, this distant aerial nod blossomed into a flagrant act of provocation, and readers were left in no doubt as to the menace of Russian fighters swarming thick about our transport planes. It may be left that the Transport Command pilot knew more than the penny paper pudits of the danger offering from fighters over -Berlin. He had dropped around there from time to time between 1939 and 1945. His navigator's opinion also might have been of some help. The crew still debates whether a dent in a paddock they fly over every trip, on the outskirts of Brunswick, is a bomb crater or the spot where the navigator arrived by parachute after attending a lesson in German night fighter tactics in 1943. These Transport Command fliers do not feel threatened, as yet anyway, though they are more inclined to put down such incidents to deliberate annoyance than accidental encroachment of the air corridor. They remember there are two Russian fighter aerodromes near Gatow within the limits of the air corridor, and know it is hardly possible to operate these dromes without sometime coming near an R.A.F. transport aircraft.

The Russians, we can safely take it, are not joining the western allies in joy at the, air lift's success, but so far they have done nothing more' serious about it than pull aeronautical faces. The lift is far and away the most magnificent gesture the western allies have made. So often our Berlin diplomacy smacked of -an Ozark simplicity. Time and again the Russians were first away with sudden and awkward moves, which we met less suddenly, but much more awkwardly. With the air lift all this has gone. It is Russia who is floundering. Her offer to feed all Berlin may, in New Zealand, have appeared a shrewd enough counter, but it is not working.