Good stuff - I got to meet one of the pilots many years ago - IIRC, he said they would throw chocolate bars out of the cockpits to kids who would line the airstrips...
Freedom rocks!
No GPS, ILS, DME, VOR, ground avoidance radar, or flight services and accurate weather and radar coverage, yet packing the sky chalk full of planes; and Germany isn’t known for its great weather (i.e. clouds, fog and rain) wasn’t just a routine easy task. Realize at the time the runways both in the West and Berlin were not what they are today either. One of the airstrips in Berlin was literally scratched together by German women working 24/7; Frankfurt, Wiesbaden where they took off from weren’t the giant concrete perfectly smooth strips either. This needs to be put into the technological backdrop of the time. I don’t even think those planes had de-icing capabilities (C-54 I think?). Needless to say, if you look at the monument at Rhein Main you’d see several names of guys that didn’t make it, something that goes without mention in the media. This was dangerous work.