A Herculean effort

After the Soviets blockaded Berlin in 1948, a divided city that was then hundreds of kilometres inside the DDR, the only alternative available to the West to avoid capitulation, or a full scale war, was a seemingly impossible one – to fly supplies in. Not just beer and sausages, but petrol, milk, consumer goods and even the huge amounts of coal necessary to keep the power stations running. With a population of two million trapped that would mean a minimum of around 3500 tons of supplies would have to be ferried in by air every day. A ludicrous amount: during the war the best efforts of the Luftwaffe had failed to deliver even 300 tons a day to the besieged forces at Stalingrad.