Operation Vittles: A Recipe Book. An Airlift. A Song.

• Author: Bushnell, Prudence
• Position: Personal account

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) turns 70 this year as pundits and politicians debate what is in it for us today. The 1949 recipe book found among MY mother's final effects has answers. Having escaped her down-sizing impulses cultivated through years in the Foreign Service, it must have been very special to her. "Operation Vittles" was published by the American Women's Club in Berlin during the 1948-49 airlift. Its contents were dedicated to showing how American food--like tomato drop biscuits--could emerge from foodstuff flown from Frankfurt.

On the book's cover, three airplanes swoop from the west, noses curved down to support packages of food destined for the large, open mouths of hungry chicks nested on a thick, west-facing tree limb; three perky maple leaves denoting the flags of the U.S., France and Great Britain wave from its tip. Perched on a smaller branch on the eastern side of the tree, an unhappy creature from a tiny nest uses a saw to cut himself off from the tree trunk, a solitary leaf of the USSR flag dripping sadly from the end of the scrawny limb. Inside the book, photos of children gazing up expectantly for incoming airplanes dominate the first two pages; on the last two, children's drawings show happy people enjoying American chocolate bars. The pages in between give recipes signed by the contributor, often accompanied with an anecdote about life as an American housewife in occupied Berlin.

My mother, Bernice Duflo Bushnell, who called herself "Dufie", was among those housewives. Self-described as risk-averse, she nonetheless climbed aboard a troop carrier in the summer of 1948 with sister Susan and me, both toddlers, and a mother-in-law she disliked, heading for occupied Germany. We were meeting up with my father, Gerry Bushnell, who had been deployed as a civilian with the Occupying Military Government, U.S. (OMGUS), headed by Army General Lucius Clay.

Their first overseas post, Berlin remained my parents' favorite even after serving in other parts of Germany, France, Pakistan and Iran. However, they seldom went into details about why it was so meaningful. I decided to learn myself and went to the internet. What were American civilians doing at the epicenter of tension between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.? I found lots of military narratives about logistics and the most enlightening accounts in the first-hand reports from the Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training...