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The Hump permanently expanded Will Tunner's vision of the possibilities of air transport. "We who worked the Hump," said Tunner once, "always knew that what was done there could be picked up bodily, carried to any part of the world and started up again."
"Persistent Beat." Two and a half years after he had left the Hump, Tunner got a chance to prove his point. In July 1948 Major General Laurence Kuter's Military Air Transport Service was given responsibility for the Berlin airlift, which General Curtis Le May's U.S. Air Force in Europe had instituted only one month before. Kuter promptly ordered Tunner to take command of the Air Lift Task Force.
Tunner went to Germany with personal problems much on his mind. The death of his wife not long before had left him lonely. He was worrying over how to bring up his two sons, William and Joseph. William, 16, is now at Taft School in Connecticut, ten-year-old Joseph with his uncle, Colonel Williams Sams, in Macon, Ga.
Tunner settled down in a small room in a Wiesbaden hotel and began to apply his extraordinary powers of concentration to the problem of getting more flight time and hence more payloads out of his airplanes. (A Tunner-made truism: "When an airplane is sitting on the ground, it's going to waste.")
With the aid of officers and men who still wore the bright CBI theater patch, Tunner worked to give the Berlin lift a regular pulse. Said he: "The basic concept ... is to get the entire lift procedure down to a steady, even rhythm with hundreds of airplanes doing exactly the same thing every hour, day & night, at the same persistent beat." Soon his airmen were getting their between-flights lunch from a jeep-borne snack bar on the airfield and listening to a briefing for the return flight before they had finished their hot dogs.
The pilots accepted such unprecedented regimentation and the humble nature of their cargo (much of it coal) with surprising equanimity. Tunner still remembers with amusement the coaldust-covered pilot who told him: "General, there is one thing we can be thankful for in hauling all this coal to Berlin. At least we don't have to carry out the ashes." And by imposing rigid synchronization on every aspect of the lift, Tunner upped the daily tonnage moved from 3,000 to 13,000 during his 15 months in command.
"Hell of a Hurry." Armed with the lessons of Berlin, Tunner returned to the U.S. late in 1949 firmly established as the leading theorist and practitioner of air transport in the U.S. Air Force. When the Korean war began, 5,000 miles from the U.S., Will Tunner's talents suddenly became all-important.
As deputy operational chief of the Military Air Transport Service, Tunner spent the early weeks of the war helping to set up the vital trans-Pacific airlift between California's Fairfield-Suisun Air Force base and Japan (TIME, Aug. 21). By the time the trans-Pacific airlift had hit its stride, it had become necessary to expand the intra-theater Japan-to-Korea lift, which until then had been handled chiefly by Fifth Air Force C-47s flying into Taegu and Pusan. (The sea end of the Pusan strip, barely long enough to get a C-47 into the air, was marked by a sign reading "Oops! That's all.")