Armed Forces: The Big Lift

Soon after midnight, the cabin door of a C-135 Stratolifter slammed shut behind Major General Edwin Burba, commander of the U.S. Army's "Hell on Wheels" 2nd Armored Division.

Slowly the giant jet taxied into the darkness beyond the floodlit operations building at Bergstrom Air Force Base, Texas. At the edge of a runway it paused, shuddered with the full power of its four jets, then roared into the starry Texas sky to begin a nonstop, 5,600-mile hop to West Germany. Thus, one balmy night last week, "Operation Big Lift" got under way.

It was the biggest, fastest troop lift ever attempted. For three days and three nights, the endless whine of jet engines and the thunder of a thousand propellers pierced the air at a dozen U.S. airbases from Texas to Virginia as 206 Military Air Transport Service planes hauled 15,278 soldiers to bases in Germany. Normally it would take six weeks to transport a full division overseas, even longer to get it into combat. Big Lift was designed to move a full armored division from the U.S. to Europe in 72 hours, equip it with heavy hardware "prepositioned" at depots near the front lines, and throw it into "combat" two or three days after arrival. Said General Paul Adams, boss of the U.S. Strike Command, to departing members of the 2nd Armored: "The eyes of the world, not only of Texas, are upon you."

Continental Commotion. Judging from the commotion that Big Lift caused all over the Continent (see cover story), Adams certainly had a point. Even before the operation got off the ground, statesmen in the NATO capitals were beginning to press the U.S. for assurances that it did not presage any large-scale pull-out of American combat troops from overseas bases. A slew of Administration officials, from Dean Rusk on down, hastened to offer such assurances, but nobody really seemed convinced.

Whatever its political implications, Big Lift was undeniably one whale of a show. No fewer than 30 airbases in the U.S., Canada, Bermuda, the Azores, Scotland, England, France and Germany were involved. Two-fifths of the total MATS fleet was mobilized. To support the 2nd Armored, some 1,600 artillerymen and truck drivers from places like Fort Sill, Okla., and Fort Bragg, N.C., were brought into the picture. From Dow and Loring Air Force bases in Maine, 119 supersonic fighters and reconnaissance planes flew to bases in France as a strike force assigned to fly cover missions for the tankers during maneuvers in Germany.

Traveling Light. The nexus of activity was Fort Hood, Texas, home of the 2nd Armored. The "Hell on Wheels" outfit lived up to its name in Germany in 1945, when it bridged the Rhine in seven hours under heavy fire and began the race to Berlin. Some of the soldiers in Big Lift had not even been born then, and for two weeks before the operation began, all traffic signs at Fort Hood bore identical English and German phrases for the benefit of young tankers and truck drivers.