How the ‘bonkers’ Berlin Airlift beat Stalin
BeRLIn at the end of World War II was a divided city in a divided country stuck in the middle of a divided continent.
At the Yalta conference in 1945 the Allies — principally Britain, the U.S. and Russia — came up with a plan to put the city under joint administration. But this quickly proved to be a logistical minefield. As the Allies squabbled and wrung their hands, Berliners began to starve.
Stalin, infuriated by what he saw as a Western attempt to preserve a toehold in germany, blocked all access to those parts of the city controlled by the U.S. and the UK.
gas and electricity were turned off, the gutters became open sewers, trees were chopped down for firewood, dogs were sold for meat and cats for fur.
It was estimated that more than 50,000 orphans were effectively living in holes in the ground. To complicate matters further, the reichsmark ceased to be legal tender in June 1948 and was replaced by the deutschmark.
Desperate Berliners who managed to get hold of the new 50 mark note — not that there was anything to buy with it — gazed bemusedly at the buxom girl clutching a basket of oranges and tropical fruit, whose portrait adorned the note. It had been years since anyone in Berlin had seen an orange, let alone tropical fruit. By the end of June the power stations had enough supplies for only another 45 days. As for food, they would run out altogether in 36 days.
It was at this point that a few bold, even mildly deranged, U.S. and British hotheads proposed doing something that had never been tried before: supplying Berlin with food and fuel by air.
It was a completely mad idea. The city needed over 4,500 tons of supplies a day to survive, yet the carrying capacity of a Skytrain plane — the largest plane possessed by either the U.S. or British airforce — was just three tons.
nonetheless, on June 26, 1948, the first flight in operation vittles took off from a U.S. air base in germany.
over the next 11 months, this first flight was succeeded by more than 250,000 more — on one day alone nearly 1,400 aircraft landed in Berlin.
Average daily deliveries included
4,000 tons of coal along with sacks of dehydrated potato — lighter than the real thing — and carcasses of meat, de-boned to save weight.
Entertainment was even laid on to buoy Berliners’ spirits. The Cambridge University Madrigal Society was flown in to perform a selection of ‘Elizabethan water music’. Unfortunately, the venue chosen for their concert was next to the airfield, and their efforts were drowned out by a constant stream of planes landing and taking off overhead.
At first, Stalin poured scorn on the Allies’ attempts to keep Berlin afloat. As the weeks went by and the planes kept coming, he grew increasingly angry. Yet short of shooting them out of the sky and risking another World War, there was next to nothing he could do.
By May 1949, Stalin had effectively thrown in the towel and the blockade was lifted.
Allied-occupied Berlin — later to become West Berlin when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961 — was to remain a bulwark against Communism until 1989 when the Wall, and Communism, finally fell.
Amid all the studies of World War II and its aftermath, the story of the Berlin airlift has tended to be overlooked by historians.
But as Barry Turner makes plain in this crisply written, suitably dramatic and ultimately heartening book, it was one of the rare occasions in recent history when a few brave, bold, possibly bonkers people attempted the impossible — and pulled it off.