Berlin Airlift: West Defies Soviet Siege

Every road, rail line, and canal into West Berlin went dark overnight. On June 24, 1948, the Soviet Union imposed a total blockade on the western sectors of the city, cutting off food, fuel, and supplies to 2.5 million civilians in an attempt to force the United States, Britain, and France to abandon their post-war occupation zones. The blockade was Stalin’s response to the Western Allies’ introduction of a new currency, the Deutsche Mark, in their zones of occupied Germany, which threatened Soviet economic control. West Berlin had roughly 36 days of food and 45 days of coal when the blockade began. The conventional military response was obvious: send an armed convoy down the autobahn and dare the Soviets to fire the first shot of World War III. General Lucius Clay, the American military governor, advocated this approach. Instead, President Truman authorized an operation that most military planners considered physically impossible: supplying an entire city of 2.5 million people by air. The Berlin Airlift began on June 26 with C-47 cargo planes carrying 80 tons of supplies. Within months, the operation scaled to an extraordinary logistical achievement. At its peak, Allied planes landed at Tempelhof and Gatow airports every 90 seconds, around the clock, delivering an average of 8,000 tons of cargo daily. American and British pilots flew more than 278,000 flights over the course of the operation, delivering 2.3 million tons of food, coal, medicine, and raw materials. Stalin lifted the blockade on May 12, 1949, after 318 days, having achieved none of his objectives. The airlift continued until September to build up reserves. The crisis accelerated the creation of NATO, formalized the division of Germany into East and West, and demonstrated that the Western Allies would defend Berlin at nearly any cost. Tempelhof Airport, once a symbol of Nazi ambition, became a monument to the Cold War’s first major confrontation.