What was the Berlin Airlift?

Why Moscow closed the roads

Berlin lay about 160 kilometers (100 miles) inside the Soviet zone of Germany, divided into four sectors; more than two million people lived in the three western ones. In June 1948 the Western powers launched a new currency, the Deutsche Mark, in their zones and then in their sectors of Berlin, and they were preparing a separate West German government. For them the new money was the cure for an economy running on the black market, part of the same recovery drive as the Marshall Plan. On June 24 Soviet troops closed every road, railway and canal into West Berlin. In public, Moscow blamed “technical difficulties.” In private, on August 2, Stalin told the Western envoys in Moscow that the reasons were the currency and the London decisions on a West German state, according to the American record. For a country Germany had invaded twice in thirty years, a rebuilt West Germany on the American side was the outcome to prevent.

Planes instead of tanks

General Lucius Clay, the American military governor, wanted to send an armed convoy down the autobahn to break the blockade. Washington feared that would start a war and chose planes. The Western powers had a written agreement from 1945 on three air corridors into Berlin, but none for the roads, so the sky was the one route Moscow could not close without shooting. The Americans called the operation Vittles, the British Plainfare, and crews from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa flew with the British. It began with a few dozen worn-out planes. Under General William Tunner, big four-engine C-54s were soon landing at Tempelhof and Gatow every few minutes, day and night, and Berliners built a third airfield, at Tegel, in about ninety days. The city needed about 4,500 tons a day, mostly coal. Over Easter 1949, crews landed almost 13,000 tons in twenty-four hours.

Halvorsen and the candy

In July 1948 a 27-year-old pilot raised on a Utah farm, Gail Halvorsen, met about thirty children at the Tempelhof fence and gave them the two sticks of gum in his pocket. Watching them share the tiny pieces, he promised to drop candy the next day and to wiggle his wings so they would know his plane. His crew tied chocolate to handkerchief parachutes. When his commanders read about it in the newspapers, they made it official as Operation Little Vittles. Before it ended, more than 250,000 little parachutes had carried about 23 tons of sweets down to the city, and the children’s name for him, “Uncle Wiggly Wings,” followed him for life. Berliners still call the airlift planes Rosinenbomber, raisin bombers.

The cost and the outcome

The work was dangerous: 101 people died, most of them in crashes. Moscow offered free rations to West Berliners who registered in the East, and few accepted. In September 1948 hundreds of thousands rallied before the ruined Reichstag, where Ernst Reuter, elected mayor but kept from office by the Soviets, appealed to the “nations of the world.” In April 1949 twelve nations signed the North Atlantic Treaty. The blockade ended one minute after midnight on May 12, 1949, though flights went on until September 30 to build up stocks. It had not stopped a West German state: the Federal Republic was founded that May and the German Democratic Republic in October, leaving Berlin divided on the front line, where a wall would go up in 1961 (why the Wall was built). At Tempelhof, closed as an airport in 2008 and now a public park, a memorial of 1951 honors the airlift’s dead.