When you drive a thousand miles south in autumn, you actually get to watch the season rewind itself. By the time we got to Texas, we were back in high summer.
We had a blast and a half playing with the grandkids for a week. Jay got a lot of work done and several rounds of golf were played.
I took advantage of seven days without working to do other things like read books. I finished the Candy Bombers, which I've been reading all summer. That makes it sound like I didn't enjoy it but the truth is that this summer has simply been so hectic I never had time to read.
The Candy Bombers, by Andrei Cherny is an excellent book about a wonderful peice of American history that really must not be lost. It's about the Berlin Airlift of 1948.
Here's what I knew: the Allies beat the Nazis in WWII. Berlin was the capital of Nazi Germany. Until the '90s, West Germany and East Germany were separate nations, East Germany being behind the Iron Curtain and part of the Soviet Union. When I was a toddler, the Berlin wall was built, physically dividing the city into Free vs. Soviet halves.
What I didn't know: the Candy Bombers is the story of how the world teetered on the edge of WWIII a mere three years after defeating Hitler, due to the tensions of Democratic governments refusing to allow Communist Russia (the Soviet Union) to force them out of Berlin. I didn't know that the Soviets, in their attempt to convince the Germans to all become communists, they tried to strangle the western (Democratic governed) half of the city with an old fashioned siege. The Allies (mostly Americans) kept the western half alive with an airlift, the scope of which had never been tried before and is unlikely to ever happen again. In doing so, the American Air force not only kept west Berlin alive, it completely changed the attitudes of the Germans who lived there. Before the airlift, the German people considered the Americans a conquering enemy, as despised as the Soviets who denied them food and coal. By the end of the airlift they thought the Americans were the greatest people on earth.
The Candy Bombers is the story of how that happened. It's a wonderful true tale that will make you cry over and over again, first in horror,then in happiness and pride.
It's hard to believe that there was a time in our history when all of our politicians recognized the enemy and eagerly did whatever it took to defeat it.