Posted on 06/23/2008 6:10:09 PM PDT by canuck_conservative
It was one of the most-amazing sights of the Cold War. By the hundreds, plane after plane thundered into the Berlin airports of Gatow, Tempelhof and Tegel, often arriving at the rate of one every three minutes. The supplies they delivered during the course of about a year sustained over 22,000 Western troops and over two million German civilians huddled in the ruins of the war-ravaged city. That the chief metropolis of a former, enemy nation could suddenly become a symbol of freedom revealed much about the strange, new era the world was entering. It also said much about the brutal foolishness of the Soviet Union, which started the crisis on June 24, 1948 — sixty years ago tomorrow — by initiating a blockade of the Western-controlled sectors of Berlin.
The story of how Berlin came to be blockaded is also the tale of the unravelling of the Allied occupation of Germany after the Second World War. The so-called Potsdam Conference — held by the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union during July-August, 1945 — mapped out the nature of that occupation. Each of the three victors would assume command of a zone in Germany. (France, although not a Potsdam participant, would eventually get a zone, too.) Despite this division, Germany would continue to be treated as a single entity. Berlin wound up as a microcosm of all this, similarly split up but supposedly kept whole. Under Potsdam, Germany was to make good the wrongs it had committed through reparations. These were to be achieved by outright seizure of removable property. Moscow was so insistent on this point that it even got such seizures carried out on its behalf in the Western zones. In return for that, the Soviets pledged to use the agricultural resources of their zone, eastern Germany, to help feed the populaces of the other zones.
From the beginning, the Potsdam regime was a farce. The Soviets may never have merited reparations at all, since they had paved the way for the war and had worsened the conflict on several occasions. As detailed by British writers Anthony Read and David Fisher in a 1988 volume, the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact signed in August, 1939, gave Hitler the freedom to invade Poland a month later. Moscow even joined that invasion in its final stages. Later in the war, the Soviets overran the Baltic states, intimidated Romania into surrendering territory and attacked Finland. Only the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union itself in 1941 — a falling-out among thieves — turned that country into a “good guy” and one of the Allies.
Even without the hypocrisy, Soviet behavior in Germany was abominable. Roger G. Miller, whose 2000 book on the Berlin blockade is one of the best accounts, notes that Russian soldiers raped up to a million German women in the first weeks of occupation. Next, the Soviets put two million eastern Germans out of work by dismantling and removing some 3,500 industrial facilities. Much of the farmland in the Soviet zone was stripped clean and the food likewise shipped off, which produced famine and caused a wave of refugees to flee into the U.S. and British zones. On top of all that, the Soviets tore up the map of Germany without consulting the other Allies. Alan Bullock, the biographer of Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary during this period, has observed that the unilateral annexation of East Prussia, plus the shifting of the region of Silesia to Poland, disposed of a quarter of Germany’s pre-war territory.
Further complicating matters were the French. Although not as punitive as the Soviets, France still seized enormous amounts of German property and regularly advocated the break-up of Germany. Robert Murphy, an American diplomat stationed in Germany at the time, later wrote that French actions sometimes diverted attention from the Soviets, helping the latter get away with their enormities.
And so the occupation became a fiasco. According to British author Douglas Botting, US$14-billion in goods had been dutifully transferred as reparations from the Western zones to the Soviet one by the spring of 1946. In exchange for the impoverishment of those zones, the Soviets turned over no agricultural produce and thus violated Potsdam. Just to prevent mass starvation during 1945-1946, the U.S. and U.K. had to spend half a billion dollars in their zones. Disgusted, the U.S. terminated further transfers of reparations in May, 1946.
Alarmed that the occupation was turning into a financial disaster for them, Washington and London increasingly took the view that reconstruction and democratization, not simple vengeance, constituted the better course. During 1946-1947, they pursued the economic reform and integration of their two zones and had achieved such progress that even the French reluctantly came on board in 1948. In effect, Potsdam was abandoned, and Germany was partitioned into a Communist area and a non-Communist one.
The prospect of a new Germany emerging outside of Soviet influence was abhorrent to Moscow, which lashed out at the most-vulnerable Western holding it could find — Berlin. Nestled deep within the Soviet zone, the U.S., British and French sectors of Berlin were dependent on Soviet goodwill for their existence. Although a signed agreement had established three air corridors from western Germany to the city, there was only an imprecise, verbal understanding about road and rail access, and Moscow exploited that. Throughout much of the first half of 1948, the Soviets meddled with ground routes, sometimes forcing the Western Allies to resupply their Berlin garrisons by air. The climax came on June 18, when the announcement of a single, new currency for the U.S., British and French zones of Germany sent Moscow into a frenzy. Six days later, the Western-controlled sectors of Berlin were blockaded on the ground.
It should be emphasized that the blockade was never total. Roger G. Miller, Robert Murphy and others have all stressed that smuggling helped civilians get through the crisis. (The infamous Berlin Wall was still over a decade away, so people from both sides were able to mingle.) Likewise, Miller has pointed out that the Soviets never seemed to seek full, military confrontation during the crisis. That they did not yet have an atomic bomb as of 1948 may have played a role (although nuclear historian David Holloway is uncertain).
On the Western side, some American commanders wanted to call the Soviet bluff and send an armed convoy by road to Berlin, but this was soon rejected as too risky. After that, an airlift was the only alternative to abandoning the city, but the scale of the challenge was awesome. Planners figured that the Western garrisons and the surrounding civilians needed at least 4,500 short tons (almost 4,100 metric tons) of supplies every day.
Amazingly, the U.S. Air Force and the Royal Air Force got the job done, despite poor flying conditions during the winter of 1948-1949. The USAF ultimately committed over 300 C-54 transport planes to the task, while the RAF had about half as many machines in action, including Yorks, Lincolns, Lancastrians, Tudors and Haltons (some of them civilian aircraft under contract). From a low point of over 3,000 tons of cargo delivered daily during July, 1948, the score hit 6,300 by the following March.
Some relief for the strained USAF and RAF came in the form of a small, French contingent. Also, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa contributed air crew, while Belgium (as well as France) provided secret access to airfields. Canada, for its part, had no official involvement. The diaries of prime minister William Mackenzie King show that he feared the possibility of war (even using the word “terrified” at one point). Canadian external-affairs documents for 1948-1949 are a litany of excuses — up to ten of them, including contradictory ones — for not joining in. Unofficially, some Canadians may have taken part.
In April, 1949, the West showed its continuing resolve by creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In May, the U.S., U.K. and France formally converted their occupation zones into the Federal Republic of Germany (or West Germany). That same month, a humiliated Moscow ended the blockade. The Cold War would grind on for another half-century, but what happened at Berlin determined much of the rest of the story.
— Scott Van Wynsberghe lives in Winnipeg, which has yet to be blockaded.
It’s been reported that even today there are some C-47’s that have coal dust in their scuppers (for you seafaring folks) ...
As a navy friend said: “There are more planes at the bottom of the ocean than there are subs in the air”
But was Michelle proud of us standing up to the bully? Or should we have talked while people and babies stared?
stared = starved
The Berlin airlift was a sign of weakness not strength.
A Great Book about all the behind the scenes happening Armegeddon.. I rememeber they were getting more than one Plane taking off and Landing evry Minute or less it was the Birth of the USA superior advantage in Militay Logistics!
I liked the account of blowing up that radio tower that was sticking up in the flight path of the one of the air strips.
But I read a liberal’s comments the other day that we only fed our soldiers and that the airlift was all propaganda.
I hate liberals.
The Food kept Berlin alive... The Candy Drops for the Kids were the Pyschological breakthrough to The German Hearts! Even Pope Benedict Mentioned it.. how amazed that the USA Vangushed Germany put Came Back to resurect it!
The airlift actually owes much of its success to the folks who designed and ran the air supply route from India to China.
Not Canada’s finest moment, though. Terrified? Bah!
The French did that when they constructed the airstrip in their zone.
Didn’t see that Part of it in the Book..Thanks
Here:
http://www.spiritoffreedom.org/airlift.html
“There was an obstacle in the way on the approach to Tegel, however. A Soviet controlled radio tower caused problems with its proximity to the airfield. Pleas to remove it went unheard. Finally, on November 20, French General Jean Ganeval made a decision. If they would not take it down, he would simply blow it up. So, on December 16, the dynamite was used. The tower fell, and the obstacle was gone.”
It’s my recollection that the studios were in the Russian zone and under Russian control, but that the towers were in the French zone. Since the American and British zones already had airports (as did the Soviet) the new airport was built in the French zone, leading to the tower issue.
Awesome..
Wait, that was three years after we got rid of Hitler. I thought it was “Mission Accomplished” in 1945, what were we still doing in Germany. QUAGMIRE!!!!
Well, that “occupied” country had the same religion, educational level, culture, amd heritage as its “occupiers”.
Can you say the same about Iraq?
Not the same then, is it?
A lot of the success has to do with how the airspace to Berlin was organized. I was an air traffic controller in Berlin from ‘84-’88. There were 3 corridors into Berlin. During the Airlift all inbound aircraft used the southern and northern corridors. All outbound aircraft used the center corridor. Any aircraft that could not land because of mechanical problems or weather would execute a missed approach and fly out the center corridor. These aircraft would not land in Berlin but would divert back to Germany to be sent again at a later time.
Did Japan have the same culture? Their religion was just as nutty as Islam. They worshipped an ordinary man as God. We managed to turn them around.
Germany and Japan also consisted, mostly, of a single ethnic group.
Contrast that with Iraq, which is a shotgun marriage of three hostile, incompatible groups - hardly the same.
Post WWII, Japan also enthusiastically adopted Western culture, values, even our legal system. Again, can you say the same about Iraq?
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