Berlin Blockade

• 1. Introduction

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  The Berlin Blockade began at one minute past midnight on the 24th of June 1948, when Stalin ordered Soviet troops to cut every railway, road, and canal leading into the western sectors of Berlin. Two and a half million people in a city deep inside Soviet-controlled territory were suddenly dependent on a thin thread of air corridors that remained technically open under a 1945 agreement. The Soviets publicly blamed the closure on "technical difficulties" on the railways and roads, and restricted electricity in western Berlin to just two hours a day, explaining this as the result of "severe shortages of electric current." Nobody believed them.

  The questions that followed were not merely logistical. Could an entire city of millions actually be supplied by air alone? Would Western governments hold their nerve, or would they accept Soviet terms and withdraw the new Deutsche Mark from Berlin? Would the crisis spark a third world war? The answers that emerged over the next eleven months would reshape the map of postwar Europe and pull West Germany into an entirely new alliance.

• 2. A City Already Divided

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  From the 17th of July to the 2nd of August 1945, the victorious Allied powers signed the Potsdam Agreement, dividing defeated Germany into four occupation zones. Berlin sat one hundred miles inside Soviet-controlled eastern Germany, yet it too was split into four sectors. The arrangement was always fragile. The Western powers had only a verbal agreement with Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov, the Soviet commander, for access to the city; on the 30th of November 1945, the Allied Control Council approved the sole written document covering transport, granting three air corridors of twenty miles width each. No land access was ever formally guaranteed in writing.

  By 1946, the city's prewar population of 4.3 million had fallen to 2.8 million. The Soviet zone had endured forced emigration, political repression, and a particularly harsh winter in 1945-1946. Local elections that year returned an overwhelming anti-communist vote, especially in the Soviet sector. The Soviets responded by suppressing political opposition, forcibly merging the Communist Party of Germany with the Social Democratic Party into the Socialist Unity Party, and removing factories, equipment, and skilled personnel to the Soviet Union.

  Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov captured the stakes with a single line: "What happens to Berlin, happens to Germany; what happens to Germany, happens to Europe." Stalin told German communist leaders in a June 1945 meeting that he expected the Americans to withdraw within a year or two, leaving nothing to stand in the way of a united communist Germany.

• 3. The Currency That Broke the Peace

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  By early 1948, tensions over Germany's economic future had become acute. The Reichsmark was in collapse; wartime inflation had been compounded by Soviet over-printing, and many Germans were using cigarettes as a de facto currency. American planners had decided during the war that a strong, allied Germany was necessary to rebuild the West European economy, and the Marshall Plan, introduced in June 1947, was a direct expression of that conviction.

  The London Six-Power Conference, held in two rounds in early 1948 among the UK, US, France, and the Benelux nations, produced what became known as the London Programme. On the 7th of March 1948, the participating governments approved extending the Marshall Plan to Germany, merging the western zones economically, and establishing a federal government. After a meeting on the 9th of March, Stalin sent a secret memorandum to Molotov on the 12th of March outlining a plan to "regulate" access to Berlin and force the Western Allies to abandon their policies.

  On the 18th of June 1948, the United States, Britain, and France announced that the Deutsche Mark would be introduced on the 21st of June. The Soviets refused to permit its use in Berlin. The Allies had already transported 250,000,000 Deutsche Marks into the city. The day after the announcement, Soviet guards halted all passenger trains and autobahn traffic to Berlin. On the 21st of June, the day the currency launched, the Soviet military stopped a United States supply train and sent it back to western Germany. On the 22nd of June, the Soviets announced their own currency, the East German mark. Four days later, the blockade was formally in place.

• 4. Building the Air Bridge

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  On the 25th of June 1948, General Lucius D. Clay gave the order to launch Operation Vittles. The next day, 32 C-47 transport aircraft lifted off for Berlin carrying 80 tons of cargo, including milk, flour, and medicine. The British named their parallel operation Operation Plainfare; their first aircraft flew on the 28th of June. At that moment, the airlift was expected to last three weeks.

  The early numbers were discouraging. During the first week, the airlift averaged only ninety tons a day. The original planning target was 3,475 tons daily. West Berlin needed roughly 2,000 tons in normal foods alone; the military assessment was blunt. On the 17th of July 1948, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney told the National Security Council that "the Air Staff was firmly convinced the air operation is doomed to failure."

  What changed everything was the arrival of Major General William H. Tunner, nicknamed "Willie the Whip," who took command on the 28th of July 1948. Tunner had previously reorganised the Hump airlift between India and China during World War II, doubling tonnage and hours flown. His philosophy was a "conveyor belt" approach: continuous, precisely timed movements that could be sped up or slowed down as conditions required. He envisioned operations at three-minute intervals and targeted 1,440 landings in Berlin per day, one for each minute in the day.

  A crisis on the 13th of August, later called Black Friday, proved the value of his approach. Cloud cover over Berlin dropped to building height, a C-54 crashed at the end of a runway, and a second burst its tires trying to avoid it. Dozens of inbound aircraft were stacked from 3,000 to 12,000 feet with the risk of mid-air collision. Tunner radioed for all stacked aircraft except his own to be sent home immediately. From that date, he abolished stacking entirely and gave each aircraft exactly one attempt to land in Berlin. The result: where the old system had landed nine aircraft in a given window, the new straight-in approach landed thirty, bringing in 300 tons.

• 5. Feeding a City Through Winter

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  Summer estimates had placed the daily supply requirement at 4,000 to 5,000 tons. When autumn arrived and the airlift showed no signs of ending, the calculation changed sharply. The food requirement held steady at around 1,500 tons per day, but heating coal drove the total need upward by an additional 6,000 tons. On the 20th of October 1948, the daily requirement was formally revised to 5,620 tons, itemised to the level of 35 tons for newsprint, 16 tons for liquid fuel, and 2 tons for medical supplies.

  The runways at Tempelhof and Gatow were not built for the constant pounding of loaded C-54s. Hundreds of labourers ran onto the runways between landings to pack sand into the pierced steel planking to keep it from buckling. Between July and September 1948, a new 1,800-metre asphalt runway was built at Tempelhof, with the approach path running over Berlin's apartment blocks. In the French sector, military engineers managing German construction crews completed an entirely new airport at Tegel in under ninety days. Because the heaviest equipment needed for Tegel's second runway was too large for any existing cargo aircraft, the machines were dismantled, flown in on five American C-82 Packet transports, and reassembled on site.

  The winter of 1948-1949 was one of the worst on record. Fog and low ceilings were the operational enemy. Allied forecasters assembled weather data from the previous forty years and stationed a radio operator in every seventh aircraft to report conditions in real time. At the peak of the operation, ninety officers from the Army Airways and Air Communications Service were assisting with air traffic control. Tunner had complained to the MATS commander as early as the 21st of August 1948 about the shortage of controllers. Former Luftwaffe mechanics, hired by Tunner, kept the fleet serviceable through the cold months.

• 6. Operation Little Vittles

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  Lieutenant Gail Halvorsen arrived at Tempelhof on the 17th of July 1948 on a C-54 and walked over to a crowd of children gathered at the end of the runway to watch the aircraft. He had only two sticks of Wrigley's Doublemint Gum. He handed them over. The children divided the sticks as best they could and passed the wrapper around so others could smell it. Their restraint and gratitude struck him. Before he left, a child asked how they would know it was him flying over. Halvorsen replied, "I'll wiggle my wings."

  The next day he rocked the aircraft and dropped chocolate bars attached to a parachute made from a handkerchief. Mail began arriving at Base Ops addressed to "Uncle Wiggly Wings," "The Chocolate Uncle," and "The Chocolate Flier." His commanding officer was not pleased when the story reached the news. When Tunner heard of it, however, he approved the gesture immediately and expanded it into the formally organised Operation Little Vittles. Other pilots joined in, children across the United States sent their own candy to contribute, and major candy manufacturers followed. In the end, over three tons of candy were dropped on Berlin. German children named the aircraft responsible "raisin bombers."

  The British ran a parallel kind of soft power in late August and early September 1948, when University of Cambridge students performed works by William Shakespeare and Henry Purcell in the Soviet zone as part of an Elizabethan Festival. The contrast with the Red Army Choir's mass-audience performances in public squares prompted Der Spiegel to write: "The change from the Russians to the British was like a lesson in international psychology."

• 7. The Easter Offensive and Collapse

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  By April 1949, the airlift had far surpassed what anyone had originally thought possible. Tunner decided to use Easter Sunday to force the operation to its absolute limit. To simplify cargo-handling, only coal would be flown. Coal stockpiles were pre-positioned, maintenance schedules were reshuffled so the maximum number of aircraft were available, and crews worked continuously from noon on the 15th of April to noon on the 16th. When the count was finished, 12,941 tons of coal had been delivered in 1,383 flights, without a single accident. Total deliveries in April reached 234,476 tons, and the daily average afterward climbed from 6,729 tons to 8,893 tons.

  The Soviet position had been steadily eroding. A poll from August 1948 had already shown that 80 percent of those surveyed in Berlin listened primarily to RIAS, the US-sponsored station, while only 15 percent favoured Radio Berlin, the Soviet-run station. On the 9th of September 1948, a crowd of 500,000 people gathered at the Brandenburg Gate after RIAS urged Berliners to protest communist actions against the city government. SPD city councillor Ernst Reuter took the microphone: "You peoples of the world, you people of America, of England, of France, look on this city, and recognise that this city, this people, must not be abandoned -- cannot be abandoned!" The crowd surged toward the Soviet-occupied sector; someone climbed the Brandenburg Gate and tore down the Soviet flag. Soviet military police responded; one person in the crowd was killed. A British deputy provost intervened, pushing the Soviet MPs back with his swagger stick.

  The December 1948 municipal elections told the same story numerically: almost 85 percent of West Berliners voted against communist parties. In April 1949, the Soviet news agency TASS announced willingness to lift the blockade. On the 4th of May 1949, the Allies announced an agreement. On the 12th of May 1949, at one minute past midnight, the blockade ended. A British convoy drove through immediately; the first train from West Germany arrived at Charlottenburg Station at 5:32 in the morning.

• 8. Costs and Consequences

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  The Berlin Airlift officially ended on the 30th of September 1949, fifteen months after it began. The final totals: the US Air Force delivered 1,783,573 tons, the RAF 541,937 tons, for a combined 2,334,374 tons on 278,228 flights. Nearly two-thirds of all cargo was coal. American C-47s and C-54s together flew over 92,000,000 miles in the process, a distance close to that from the Earth to the Sun. At the height of the operation, one aircraft reached West Berlin every thirty seconds.

  The human cost was 101 fatalities. Forty were British, thirty-one were American, and one Royal Australian Air Force member was killed in an aircraft crash at Lübeck. Seventeen American and eight British aircraft were destroyed. Pilots came from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa; the Royal Australian Air Force alone flew 2,062 sorties, delivering 7,968 tons of freight and transporting 6,964 passengers. The estimated cost to the US, UK, and German authorities in the western sectors ranged from roughly US$224 million to over US$500 million.

  The political consequences extended well beyond Berlin. The blockade, together with the Czechoslovak coup of 1948, persuaded Western leaders to accelerate the creation of a West German state and to draw it into a formal alliance. West Germany joined NATO in 1955. Historian Joseph Pearson has since argued, in his book Sweet Victory, that the narrative of a hermetically sealed city was shaped partly by the need for a persuasive public story: foot traffic between East and West Berlin continued throughout the operation, public transport ran across zonal boundaries, and nearly half a million tons of goods entered the western sectors from Soviet zone sources. The record flight count during the entire operation was 404 flights by Flt Lt Roy Mather DFC AFC and his crew of 206 Squadron, who returned to Wunstorf for the last time on the 18th of August 1949.