The ceremony included a military firing party rendering honors. His burial at Provo City Cemetery placed him, in the end, in the Utah landscape where he had grown up watching training aircraft fly north toward Canada. The arc from that farm in Garland, Utah, to the barbed-wire fence at Tempelhof and back to Provo spanned a century and carried, embedded in it, one of the stranger stories of the postwar period: how two sticks of gum became parachutes, and how parachutes became something that two nations agreed to remember.
## The Airlift in German Memory
The Berlin Airlift occupies a distinctive place in German historical memory, particularly in Berlin. It is remembered as an event in which the city’s former enemies became its protectors, and in which the city’s population demonstrated under pressure that it preferred the Western political order to the Soviet alternative. This memory has been shaped and reshaped by subsequent events, particularly by the Cold War division, the construction and fall of the Berlin Wall, and German reunification in 1990.
For West Berliners of the generation that lived through the airlift, the event had a specific emotional texture that subsequent generations have only been able to understand secondhand. The direct memory was of dependence: an entire city relying on the aircraft that flew into Tempelhof every minute or two. This was not the comfortable dependence of peacetime trade but the acute dependence of people who understood that if the aircraft stopped coming, they would be in serious trouble. The pilots who flew those aircraft were not abstract symbols. They were specific individuals arriving in specific aircraft at specific intervals, and West Berliners who lived near the approach path could track the airlift’s continuation by listening for the engines.