COLD WAR

Schrader continues her dramatization of the Berlin Airlift in this sequel.

During the 15-month operation from the spring of 1948 to the summer of ’49, Allied aircraft dropped millions of tons of food and fuel into West Germany after the Soviet Union blocked shipping by rail and by sea. British Journalist Virginia Cox-Gordon, one of the many characters in this follow-up to Cold Peace (2023), thinks of the operation as “the Western Allies’ hopeless plan to supply the entire civilian population of Berlin by air” and as the most important news story since Germany’s surrender. Virginia and other characters return from Cold Peace, and new players are introduced as the Berlin operation complicates the lives of members of the Royal Air Force, the U.S. Air Force, Emergency Air Services, the Berlin city government, and Berlin’s civilian population, who are living under a new dictatorship as Josef Stalin’s grip tightens. The novel covers a few months of the operation, and by making use of the large cast, Schrader is able to take readers into virtually every aspect of the drama, including the experiences of ordinary Germans and their representatives, such as city councilor Jakob Liebherr (“a glance at his surroundings reminded him of just how important hope was”), and those of the flyers, who risk their lives in the continuous air missions and also note how the world is changing. Even Soviet personnel feel the same: “All the good men,” one reflects, “the men who fought the war, are being replaced by party hacks, by NKVD stooges.”

The size of Schrader’s cast may be especially daunting for readers coming to this book without having read the first in the series. However, she effectively overcomes this element of intimidation in several well-deployed ways. She peppers her cast with intriguing characters, including Women’s Auxiliary Air Force Cpl. Galyna Borisenko, a Soviet-born Ukrainian who’s now a British citizen but still very much in alien territory, and wing commander and Battle of Britain veteran Robert Priestman, who bravely continues the airlift even in the face of a Soviet takeover of the entire city: “If I can help save 17,000 civilians—the bulk of them children—from Stalin, then I will,” he declares at one point. “It’s the moral equivalent of going down fighting.” Priestman also notes the emergence of a new world in which the British Empire “could no longer shower largesse upon the poor of the world as America could.” The most colorful aspect of the Berlin Airlift—when planes delivered candies to the children of the city—is in many ways the dramatic centerpiece of this novel. The whimsical happiness of these “candy drops” helps to counterbalance the novel’s unfortunate penchant for delivering large blocks of exposition. Also, as in many wartime stories, several members of the cast feel more like familiar types than fully developed characters. Still, the power of the book is in how a true sense of humanity prevails.

A carefully researched and accessible novel about a pivotal operation in postwar Germany.