On 24 June 1948 the Soviet Union switched off West Berlin. Road, rail and canal links across the Soviet zone were severed, ostensibly for "technical difficulties"; electricity from plants in the eastern sector followed. The trigger was the Western powers' introduction of a new currency, the Deutsche Mark, a decisive step towards a separate West German state that Stalin was determined to strangle. Two million West Berliners sat 100 miles inside the Soviet zone with roughly a month's food and six weeks' coal. The Western garrisons could not fight a war for the city; the American military governor, General Lucius Clay, wanted to push an armed convoy up the autobahn, which Washington vetoed as a shortcut to one. What remained was a technicality: a 1945 agreement guaranteed three air corridors, each twenty miles wide, from the western zones into Berlin. Nobody had ever supplied a city by air. The RAF and US Air Force decided to try.
The Americans called it Operation Vittles, the British Operation Plainfare, and the first months were improvised chaos — C-47s and Dakotas shuttling a few hundred tons a day against a minimum estimate of well over 4,000 tons needed. The turning point wore a general's stars: Major General William Tunner, who had run the wartime "Hump" airlift over the Himalayas, took command and turned romance into conveyor belt. After "Black Friday", 13 August 1948, when stacked aircraft and crashes paralysed Tempelhof, Tunner imposed factory rules: every flight on instruments regardless of weather, one landing attempt only — miss it and you flew the cargo home — and pilots stayed by their aircraft while jeeps brought them coffee and weather briefings. At its peak the system put an aircraft on the ground in Berlin roughly every ninety seconds, with turnarounds of under half an hour.
Candy and coal
The cargo told its own story: coal, not food, was the biggest single commodity — about two-thirds of tonnage — hauled in soot-caked bombers-turned-freighters, alongside sacks of dehydrated potato, flour and dried milk. The city pitched in: some 19,000 Berliners, many of them women clearing rubble, built the entirely new airport at Tegel in the French sector in under 90 days. When a Soviet radio transmitter tower obstructed its approach, the French commandant General Jean Ganeval simply dynamited it, telling protesting Soviet officers he'd been waiting for the chance. And one pilot became the airlift's face: Gail Halvorsen, who met children at the Tempelhof fence and promised to drop sweets, wiggling his wings so they would know his aircraft. "Operation Little Vittles" grew from two candy bars to tons of chocolate and gum on handkerchief parachutes, and "Uncle Wiggly Wings", the Candy Bomber, did as much for German-American relations as any treaty.
The Soviets harassed the corridors with searchlights and buzzing fighters but never dared shoot; the airlift's answer was volume. On 15–16 April 1949, the "Easter Parade", crews delivered 12,941 tons of coal in 24 hours — nearly 1,400 flights, a plane a minute at peak. The message landed: the blockade was achieving nothing except the moral rearmament of the West. On 12 May 1949 the Soviets reopened the land routes. The airlift flew on until 30 September to build a reserve, having delivered around 2.3 million tons in some 278,000 flights. The price was 79 lives, including 39 British and 31 American airmen, names carved on the Luftbrücke memorial at Tempelhof — the "hunger rake" whose three prongs represent the corridors.
What it decided
The blockade backfired comprehensively. It midwifed the very state it was meant to prevent — the Federal Republic was founded in May 1949, the German Democratic Republic in October — and in April 1949, with the airlift still flying, the Western allies signed the North Atlantic Treaty. Berliners who three years earlier had been bombed by the RAF and USAAF now cheered their aircraft in; the airlift converted occupiers into protectors in the world's imagination. Stalin had bet that the West would not pay the cost of two million people's groceries. The candy on little parachutes was the receipt.
Quiz nuggets
- The Soviet blockade of West Berlin ran from 24 June 1948 to 12 May 1949; the airlift continued until 30 September 1949.
- The airlift delivered roughly 2.3 million tons of supplies in about 278,000 flights, and coal made up around two-thirds of the tonnage.
- Gail Halvorsen, the "Candy Bomber", dropped sweets on handkerchief parachutes and wiggled his wings to signal children.
- Tegel airport was built in under 90 days, largely by hand, by around 19,000 Berliners.
- The "Easter Parade" of 15–16 April 1949 landed 12,941 tons of coal in 24 hours.