<text id=00he1300><title>Air Bridge to the East: Introduction</title>
<history>US Air Force: Events History</history>
<article><hdr>Air Bridge to the East: Introduction</hdr><body>
<p>It was a strange question, and the listener wasn't quite sure what he had heard. It was repeated: "Can you transport coal by air'?" "Sir," said Major General Curtis LeMay, "The Air Force can deliver anything." LeMay completed the conversation, hung up the telephone, and started thinking. He had just been asked by General Lucius D. Clay, the US military governor of Germany, to start an aerial supply line from the US zone of occupation to Berlin, bringing in the necessities of life to a city of 2.5 million people. It was a formidable challenge, but LeMay must have been used to such tasks by then. Nobody from President Truman on down expected that LeMay's USAFE command could meet the requirements. At best, they hoped the Air Force would be able to deliver enough so that the Berliners could get by for a while on those deliveries plus inventories, and that the airlift would buy time for negotiations with the Russians. They had underestimated LeMay and USAFE, and the organization that would grow out of their initial efforts.
