Cold Victory

In the third volume in her Bridge to Tomorrow series, the author concentrates on the year-long Berlin Blockade of the late 1940s, during which the Soviet Union thuggishly blocked rail, road, and water routes in and out of Berlin in an attempt to coerce the Allies into granting concessions. In response, American and British air forces conducted a massive campaign to make hundreds of thousands of air drops of food and fuel to the citizens of the beleaguered city. As Schrader’s novel opens, the Berlin Airlift is in full force and the Russian government is responding by clamping down more viciously on Berlin’s citizens while at the same time promulgating the idea of a “collective amnesty” that would allow briefly displaced Nazis to return to power in city government. The author’s canvas for this series of books is vast, but she grounds her story in a manageable cast of characters (some fictional, many historical) that she follows through the breakneck cut-and-thrust of the political and military events of the famed Berlin Airlift. The book includes maps and a handy preface orienting readers who may be coming to this installment without having read the previous volumes. With her usual deft blending of carefully researched history and well-crafted scene development, Schrader gives a sense of three-dimensional human life to an event that’s now all but faded from living memory. There’s occasional lazy, redundant writing like, “The Soviets released crumbs of information about the crash in dribs and dabs.” The lively character work (particularly in the case of Anna Savage, who’s distrusted by the Soviet authorities because she’s a Black nurse helping white patients) is the novel’s strongest element, keeping the reader fully invested right up through the dramatic climax.

May 12, 2025 - 05:22

In the third volume in her Bridge to Tomorrow series, the author concentrates on the year-long Berlin Blockade of the late 1940s, during which the Soviet Union thuggishly blocked rail, road, and water routes in and out of Berlin in an attempt to coerce the Allies into granting concessions. In response, American and British air forces conducted a massive campaign to make hundreds of thousands of air drops of food and fuel to the citizens of the beleaguered city. As Schrader’s novel opens, the Berlin Airlift is in full force and the Russian government is responding by clamping down more viciously on Berlin’s citizens while at the same time promulgating the idea of a “collective amnesty” that would allow briefly displaced Nazis to return to power in city government. The author’s canvas for this series of books is vast, but she grounds her story in a manageable cast of characters (some fictional, many historical) that she follows through the breakneck cut-and-thrust of the political and military events of the famed Berlin Airlift. The book includes maps and a handy preface orienting readers who may be coming to this installment without having read the previous volumes. With her usual deft blending of carefully researched history and well-crafted scene development, Schrader gives a sense of three-dimensional human life to an event that’s now all but faded from living memory. There’s occasional lazy, redundant writing like, “The Soviets released crumbs of information about the crash in dribs and dabs.” The lively character work (particularly in the case of Anna Savage, who’s distrusted by the Soviet authorities because she’s a Black nurse helping white patients) is the novel’s strongest element, keeping the reader fully invested right up through the dramatic climax.