Operation Air Lift

Less than 24 hours after the U.N. Security Council in Manhattan voted to send troops and aid to the beleaguered Congo, the first silver-bodied, red-tailed Hercules plane whined off the runway of the U.S. Air Station at Chateauroux in southern France. At Donaldson Air Force Base in South Carolina and at Dover Base in Delaware, ponderous Globemasters lumbered into the air. By last week 132 U.S. transport planes were flying across half the world in the vast United Nations airlift to and from the Congo.

Disgorged Troops. The huge U.S. operation, directed from U.S.A.F.E. headquarters in Wiesbaden, West Germany, delivered hundreds of tons of flour from U.S. depots in France and West Germany, ferried in troops from Ghana, Morocco, Tunisia and Guinea. U.S. planes touched down at Cairo, swallowed up 650 blue-helmeted Swedish troops from the UNEF force at Gaza, disgorged them again 2,700 miles away in Leopoldville. Out of the shuttling intercontinental planes came food rations, Jeeps, heavy trucks, communications equipment, dismantled light planes. At the request of the U.N. command, the U.S. flew in ten Douglas C-47s, turned them over to U.N. pilots to help ferry U.N. troops around the country.

Instead of flying back empty, the airlift planes made short runs to Portuguese Angola and French Congo, and to such Congolese cities as Stanleyville and Co-quilhatville, loaded up with Belgian, British and American refugees and flew them back to Europe.

Other nations contributed. Britain's R.A.F. flew in 850 troops: Ethiopia airlifted some 600 of its 1,000 troops in its own air transports. Even Russia got in on the act, sent three turboprop Ilyushin transports to ferry Ghanian troops from Accra to the Congo.* But overall, it was overwhelmingly a U.S. show. U.S. planes brought in 75% of the troops, 19 of every 20 tons of supplies.

In ten days of nonstop flying, U.S. transports brought in some 7,000 U.N. troops, carried away some 10,000 refugees. Says Lieut. Colonel Frank Merritt, in command of operations at the Leopoldville end: "The boys have been at it long, hard hours, and so have the planes. Some of my boys have had to go 36 hours without sleep. Our Hercules planes have had remarkably little maintenance --they're the best damn planes we've ever had."

The remarkable Lockheed C-130 Hercules cruises at 350 m.p.h., carries 92 passengers, takes less runway than even a DC-4 and, at a pinch, can get in and out of airstrips only 2,000 ft. long. It has self-contained air starters for its turboprop engines and therefore does not need ground power--a vital factor in equipment-short Congo. Merritt's men sleep when and where they can--in hangars, machine shops, the planes themselves. They have been joyfully received in the Congo, and ground personnel as well as Congolese volunteers help in the unloading without pay. There have been no accidents and no real flying hazards.

For those who wondered at the smoothness of the operation, the Air Force had a reminder that much experience has been gained since the famed 1948-49 Berlin airlift. In 1958 the Air Force transported 8,000,000 Ibs. of equipment and 8,000 troops to Lebanon; last February it airlifted 1,000 tons of supplies to earth quake-ravaged Agadir in Morocco and, in recent months, gave a repeat performance in devastated Chile. Says Colonel Merritt in proud understatement: "It's just routine."

Dense Air. Among the early loads were dismantled U.S. Army helicopters and a couple of seven-passenger de Havilland Beavers. Assembled in a matter of hours, they were set to work under the command of Lieut. Colonel Jerome B. Feldt of Kansas, flying into the bush to pick up handfuls of isolated missionaries.

The helicopters fanned out from small, serviceable fields, brought back groups of missionaries who were then flown to the larger centers by the Beavers and a DC-3 borrowed from the U.S. embassy in South Africa. The choppers usually went out loaded with fuel drums, and refueled when necessary--sometimes in the air. Only navigational aids available were ancient and outdated road maps, which were so inadequate that pilots sometimes had to set down in a village and ask for directions. Congolese guides were little help; from a few hundred feet up, the familiar jungle looked utterly strange to them.

Another problem is the density of the air in the equatorial Congo, which forced the choppers to use more fuel per mile than at their Seventh Army base in Stuttgart, West Germany. Several choppers were shot at by Congolese soldiers who mistook them for Belgian craft. Pilot Captain James Sanders of Nashville, Tenn. had his helicopter holed eight times by machine-gun bullets while on a search mission near Inkisi. But, says Captain Sanders philosophically, "the Congolese are right friendly when they find out you're not Belgian. They come up and shake your hand. I was impressed."

That Congolese friendliness was an unsolicited testimonial to the fact that, despite the best efforts of Communist propaganda, Africa's emergent nationalists consider the U.S. a sympathetic friend.

* A flight of Czechoslovak turbojets, carrying relief supplies to the Congo, took advantage of the opportunity to try a bit of espionage. Straying from their original flight plan over the Mediterranean, they swung over Spain on a course that would take them over U.S. airbases near the cities of Saragossa, Madrid and Seville, presumably to make a radar survey for possible future use. The Czech planes were intercepted by Spanish F-86 fighters and herded back across the border.

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