Zero Hour

• The Berlin Blockade by Ann Tusa and John Tusa
  Hodder, 445 pp, £16.95, June 1988, ISBN 0 340 41607 6

The last Dakota to fly supplies into Berlin in 1949, at the end of the Soviet road-and-rail blockade of that city, was inscribed with one of those apt Biblical references which the Services (usually the Royal Navy) seem able to conjure up at will: Psalm 21, verse 11. The verse reads: ‘For they intended evil against thee; they imagined a mischievous device, which they are not able to perform.’