Hello, my name is Dr Will Butler and I am the Head of Military Records at The National Archives. And today we’re going to look at a document in our AIR collection.
This collection relates to records from the Air Ministry. The Air Ministry was formed in 1918 after the creation of the Royal Air Force and was responsible for the administration of the Air Force itself until the Ministry of Defence was established in 1964. And within this collection it’s possible to find a whole range of different records and documents from the operational side and the administrative side of the RAF. So things like minutes of meetings, intelligence reports, other kinds of reports and manuals, to also the personnel records of individuals who served within the Royal Air Force from 1918 up until around about the Second World War. The National Archives holds this material as the official government archive and the records themselves were transferred to us from the Ministry of Defence.
Before we actually look at the particular document in front of me we’ll notice that there is a specific reference number – in this case AIR 10/5067, which is a unique number which allows us to identify individual records within our collection.
The report here relates to ‘Operation Plainfare’, which is also known as the Berlin airlift, which was the military operation established to try and ensure that constant supplies of things like food and coal in particular, important during the winter, was transported to what was the cut-off city of Berlin.
And if we open up the report we can see some really useful and interesting additional information. So we see here that the report itself was authored by Air Marshal T. M. Williams who at the time was the commander-in-chief of British Air Forces of occupation in Germany.
The report itself had a number of different functions. It’s there to provide a history of the operation from the RAF’s perspective but also to be used as a training manual really for any future operations of this kind. We can get a bit of an idea about why again this report was produced by looking at the end of the contents here, which explains a summary of recommendations and talks about some of the lessons learnt from the operation itself. And the report is also incredibly detailed. It comes to almost 600 pages in length covering many many different aspects relating to the Berlin airlift itself, from planning, the initial planning of those operations in the early days, to things like the impact of the weather on how operations were conducted, to also including things like the amounts, the tonnage, that was being transported into Berlin at various points within the operation itself. And we also get a bit of an insight into other things, so things like the welfare of the individuals who were taking part in the operation, their medical treatment. We also have things like how loading and unloading was carried out both at British airfields and then within Berlin itself.
And obviously with the length and detail of this report we’re able to pick out some really significant and interesting points about especially the British operations as they related to the airlift itself. So we see for example that 2.3 million tonnes of coal, food and military supplies were lifted into Berlin during the course of the operation and British aircraft carried around about 500 000 tonnes of those supplies, and this included over 2,300 tonnes lifted in a single day, on the 5th of July 1949, the largest single day and largest amount within a single day during the whole operation.
We also get an insight into the working conditions of those individuals responsible for taking part in the airlift itself. So the report states for example that the morale was excellent in all ranks. For most of the period air crew were flying in very bad weather conditions and the ground crews were working long hours in wet and muddy surroundings but their spirit was extremely good. And rather handily included towards the end of the report we have a chronology of events, which summarises some of the main milestones of the operation but also talks about things like changes in organisation and how the operation itself was conducted.
So how useful is the report itself when thinking about the Berlin airlift and how we understand it and how well it went, how the operation was carried out? While of course the report itself was written by British military officials, it provides us a very British perspective on events, it does also include lots of other information though about the U.S. operation and how that related to the British operation as well, so that can give us slightly different perspectives. But of course the audience for this report was very much the Royal Air Force itself and how they might learn the lessons of the operation and use that practically going forward, so there are some limitations. We don’t get the American perspective in this context, we don’t get a German, a Berlin perspective on those operations available within the AIR series, which relates to the Berlin airlift and there are many other reports within that AIR series, many other documents which relate to the airlift itself – other reports, manuals, diaries of operation, which exist to really document the day-to-day comings and goings during that operation.
And this is just one document from our AIR series which relates to the Berlin airlift itself. We have many others within that collection, so do please take a look at our online resources to find out more.