Please thank your grandfather for me, and let him know that he was part of an effort that reached millions. The Berlin airlifts were so important to the German people and it helped secure them as allies for the US.
I am a US citizen born to a German mother and a father who was a GI stationed in Germany during the cold war. My Opa once showed me a picture of himself walking down the street after the war, with a woman on each arm, wearing a pretty fancy suit.
He pointed the suit out to me and told me that it was made of recycled paper...It was a suit that the Americans dropped over Berlin, just as an example of the kind of stuff that was needed and delivered by the Americans.
It is my firm belief that the just and honorable way the Americans treated the German people in the aftermath of that war helped assure that there would never be a third world war with Germany "on the wrong side", ever again, because it was so UNLIKE how the UK or the Soviet Union or France might have treated a defeated Germany. The Cold War certainly didn't hurt in making Germany a "western" aligned country of course, but I put so much stock and faith into how the Americans helped to rebuild.
I don't think my post is making much sense, but this is a topic that is close to my heart and gets me a little emotional...It is like Reconstruction after the American Civil War or something....It is so unlike what happened with the Versailles Treaty and WW1...The tone of reconciliation and just general humaneness. It counts, and we see so little of it when it is most needed.
That airlift helped bind two peoples, and I am so much a product of that, I owe my whole life to it...
So, again...Please thank him for me. Thank him for my Opa, who fought in that war and survived the eastern front. I don't think he was sure there would even be a Germany left after what they had done, and American reconciliation opened his eyes to the evil of the Nazis. Thank him for my mother and my father, who would not have met had the americans been cruel or let the russians overtake germany.
So often, people see the US military as being like another army...Not as liberators...And I like to tell them about efforts like the Berlin Air Lift. My mother told me once about how she could remember, as a child, seeing US army trucks full of soldiers driving down the autobahns, waving and passing candy...What other armies would do that? Go out of their way to protect a conquered people? They could have rounded them all up, put them through hell, or into camps - As the Germans themselves did so often in the East....As the russians then did to the Germans on the way back West...intimidated and raped, or treated the country like personal loot...Burning and pillaging. But they didn't. That, to me, is so very American, and represents the best of us.
wannabeemperor11 karma
Please thank your grandfather for me, and let him know that he was part of an effort that reached millions. The Berlin airlifts were so important to the German people and it helped secure them as allies for the US.
I am a US citizen born to a German mother and a father who was a GI stationed in Germany during the cold war. My Opa once showed me a picture of himself walking down the street after the war, with a woman on each arm, wearing a pretty fancy suit.
He pointed the suit out to me and told me that it was made of recycled paper...It was a suit that the Americans dropped over Berlin, just as an example of the kind of stuff that was needed and delivered by the Americans.
It is my firm belief that the just and honorable way the Americans treated the German people in the aftermath of that war helped assure that there would never be a third world war with Germany "on the wrong side", ever again, because it was so UNLIKE how the UK or the Soviet Union or France might have treated a defeated Germany. The Cold War certainly didn't hurt in making Germany a "western" aligned country of course, but I put so much stock and faith into how the Americans helped to rebuild.
I don't think my post is making much sense, but this is a topic that is close to my heart and gets me a little emotional...It is like Reconstruction after the American Civil War or something....It is so unlike what happened with the Versailles Treaty and WW1...The tone of reconciliation and just general humaneness. It counts, and we see so little of it when it is most needed.
That airlift helped bind two peoples, and I am so much a product of that, I owe my whole life to it...
So, again...Please thank him for me. Thank him for my Opa, who fought in that war and survived the eastern front. I don't think he was sure there would even be a Germany left after what they had done, and American reconciliation opened his eyes to the evil of the Nazis. Thank him for my mother and my father, who would not have met had the americans been cruel or let the russians overtake germany.
So often, people see the US military as being like another army...Not as liberators...And I like to tell them about efforts like the Berlin Air Lift. My mother told me once about how she could remember, as a child, seeing US army trucks full of soldiers driving down the autobahns, waving and passing candy...What other armies would do that? Go out of their way to protect a conquered people? They could have rounded them all up, put them through hell, or into camps - As the Germans themselves did so often in the East....As the russians then did to the Germans on the way back West...intimidated and raped, or treated the country like personal loot...Burning and pillaging. But they didn't. That, to me, is so very American, and represents the best of us.
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