Airlift Programme

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 506, 4 March 1949, Page 8

Airlift Programme

T is both the virtue and the defect of documentaries that they tend to approximate towards the life they portray. In that well-directed if shapeless documentary on the Berlin Airlift, listeners, like the airmen themselves, had to take the rough with the smooth, to do a certain amount of straining to catch a pilot’s words above the roar of propellers, to appreciate in his own person (even though to a very slight extent) the harsh mechanics of the undertakings portrayed in the programme. Yet at the end of threequarters of an hour I felt (to a commensurably slight extent) a sense of sharing in the triumph of the business, as well as the feeling of achievement that comes from being able to file into a reproachfully empty pigeonhole of the mind a few necessary and useworthy facts. But the programme could. well have been longer, for, on thinking it over afterwards, I felt rather dissatisfied at not hearing more of the human reactions to Implications Airlift. The scene in the canteen was one of the most vivid in the programme, and, significantly, the talk was much the same as that which might have been heard at any R.A.F. mess during the war. I think more could have been done to probe beneath the surface talk and !to estimate the effect of humanitarian

ends on men who, a few years ago, had perhaps flown the same corridor on a different type of mission.