Berlin Airlift
The eleven-month operation that supplied two million blockaded West Berliners entirely by air, and turned a defeated enemy city into an allied one.
At midnight on June 24, 1948, the Soviet military administration cut every road, rail line, and canal into the western sectors of Berlin. The city lay a hundred miles inside the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, and its western half held roughly two and a half million people with about a month of food and rather less coal. Moscow's calculation was straightforward: the Western allies could not supply a city that size by air, could not shoot their way up the autobahn without starting a war, and would therefore have to leave. Two days later American C-47s began flying in flour, and they did not stop for fifteen months.
Why Stalin closed the roads
The blockade was a response to what the West was building. Britain, France, and the United States had merged their occupation zones economically and were moving toward a West German state. On June 20, 1948, they introduced a new currency, the Deutsche Mark, in their zones, and then extended it to their sectors of Berlin. A stable currency in the western zones meant the end of any hope of a unified Germany on Soviet terms and, in the immediate sense, wrecked the Soviet zone's own inflated money. Berlin was the one point where the Western position was physically indefensible, so that is where the pressure was applied.
Flying a city
The scale was without precedent and the arithmetic looked impossible. Planners initially reckoned the city needed something over four thousand tons a day of food, coal, and medicine. General William Tunner, who had run the wartime airlift over the Himalayas into China, took charge in July and turned improvisation into a production line: aircraft flew fixed altitudes in stacked corridors, one landing every few minutes, crews forbidden to leave their planes while cargo was unloaded, a single missed approach meaning a return to base rather than a second try that would break the rhythm. The French built an entire new airfield at Tegel in under three months; when a Soviet-controlled radio tower obstructed the approach, French engineers blew it up.
On Easter Sunday 1949 the operation staged a demonstration, delivering 12,941 tons of coal in 1,383 flights in twenty-four hours, roughly one landing every minute. Over the whole operation, allied aircraft flew 278,228 sorties and delivered about 2.3 million tons. One hundred and one people died, most of them in crashes in bad weather, including forty Britons, thirty-one Americans, and German ground crew. American pilot Gail Halvorsen began dropping candy on handkerchief parachutes to children waiting by the fence at Tempelhof, and the practice spread across the fleet as Operation Little Vittles.
Stalin lifted the blockade at one minute past midnight on May 12, 1949. The airlift continued until September 30 to build a stockpile in case he changed his mind.
What it settled
The blockade produced the opposite of everything it was meant to produce. It accelerated the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany, proclaimed in May 1949 while the airlift was still flying. It supplied the argument that carried the North Atlantic Treaty through the United States Senate, signed in April 1949. It kept American forces in Europe permanently. And it completed a political transformation that had seemed impossible three years earlier: Berliners who in 1945 had been enemy civilians in a bombed capital were now, in the eyes of American and British airmen and their publics, people worth feeding through a winter.
The airlift also established a pattern that ran through the rest of the Cold War. Both sides had found a way to fight a serious contest of will without firing, by shifting the burden of starting the shooting onto the other. The Soviets never blocked the corridors. The Americans never sent an armed convoy up the road. Each side, in the crisis that mattered most, left the other an exit.