By DOUGLAS K. JENNINGS, Staff Writer (Photos provided by George Richmond and Horace Ray in lieu of article photos)
12 January 1954
When a man is first assigned to Tulln, he doesn't sleep nights. When he's thirsty, he can't walk down the road a piece to a gasthaus and get a glass of beer. When he says he's going to town, he can mean only one town--Vienna--21 miles down a Soviet Zone road nicknamed "Devil's Highway". He must travel over this one road or by a lackadaisical train.
As he goes about his daily duties, he can look in any direction and see the fence. Tulln is a patch of dirt about a mile on each side. He can be walking to chow and suddenly see a MIG-15 buzz the landing strip. The Soviet air base across the Danube is only a rifle shot away. On the base itself, gutted skeletons of buildings rise alongside the renovated structures in which Tulln men live, work and play. German demolition experts did their tasks well when the Nazis evacuated in 1945. The Soviet gunboats in the Danube shelled the remnants. After the Russians took over, the dying Luftwaffe struck with firebombs. Since the summer of 1945, the U.S. Air Force has maintained the island-like post as an aerial port of entry, chiefly serving the needs of the State Department in Vienna. It is the only U.S. air base entirely surrounded by Soviet occupied territory. After Stalin's death last March and the resultant easing of Soviet restriction in Austria, things became quite calm at Tulln. Before that, however, there was a long string of incidents, some of them humorous, some of them serious.
Ninety miles inside the Soviet Zone of Austria is a United States air base. Its name is Tulln. Its borders are marked by a wire mesh fence--a thin "iron curtain" separating American airmen and Soviet soldiers.
Last Christmas an airman who had been in Vienna celebrating and was feeling no pain, stopped by the Soviet naval unit--then located on the Danube along the Vienna-Tulln road-- leaned out of his car and said to the Russian sentry, "Happy New Year!"
a ride from Vienna to Tulln
He found himself looking into six burp guns. After several hours he was released but it took two days to get his car out.
Recently, two burp gun carrying, Russian soldiers approached a Tulln guard. The guard called the Air Police. The APs and the Russians pointed guns at each other. The APs hurriedly set up a .50-cal machinegun. ("We'd been cleaning it and forgot the barrel but the Russians didn't know that."). Eventually the Soviets got their point across. They only wanted the APs to pick up two airmen they were holding who had overslept on the train from Vienna and missed getting off at Langenlebarn.
The road to Vienna is closed from 1 to 6 am. The Russians have, in the past trundled up to the outside of the gate in a half-track and parked during those hours. Never said why.
In June 1952, a two-place passenger plane, towing a glider, landed at the base. One Czechoslovakian stepped from the plane and another from the glider. They sought political asylum. On several occasions, Russians have stopped the bus carrying airmen and dependents to hitchhike rides. They have also set up roadblocks, halting U.S. cars for careful checks.
There is a strong feeling of comradeship at the base. The number of men at Tulln is small, about 200, and almost everybody knows everybody else, either by name or face. Units now at Tulln are the 7360 Base Complement Squadron, the 18th Weather Detachment, and the 1972-3 Airways and Air Communications System Detachment.
Like his predecessors, Col. Loren Cornell, Field Commander, has one ever-present problem--"the feeling of the men that they're tied up here."
To combat this, Cornell supports a liberal pass policy and encourages the men to see such memorable events in Vienna as the changing of the guard when snapshots of the Russian soldiers (at left) are permitted.
Tulln is not authorized a swimming pool but it has one. The airmen explain it by a story.
One day a bombed out building fell down. The next day, by coincidence, it rained, filling the basement with water. Boys will be boys and they got to diving and tossing out the rubble. They got lazy as they worked to one end, and that's why the bottom slopes. A wooden beam fell on to a little tower at one end--the deep end--by luck and somebody tacked some matting on it and called it a diving board. Natural seepage and new rains keep the water clean. To an observer it looks amazingly like a custom-built pool.
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A popular off-duty center is the Tulln Terrace Club, finished last year after extensive remodeling of a war damaged building. Here an airman can make use of a four-lane bowling alley, pool tables, ping pong tables, and a library.
Tulln also has a good baseball diamond and in 1951 won the league championship of U.S. Forces, Austria.
Tulln's strip handles a daily Pan American flight, the usual route of entry to Vienna for visiting U.S. dignitaries. When the British air base at Schwechat closes for repairs, Scandinavian, French, Dutch, and British airlines use Tulln. The base also has its own small "air force", two L5s and one C-47.
While it is impossible to tell what the Soviets will come up with next, friction is at low ebb now and the Tulln troops have to take things as they come. They echo Cornell's remarks, "One soon gets over worrying."