The Blockade That Was Beaten by Airplanes

On June 24, 1948, the trains stopped coming. Overnight, the Soviet Union had cut every road, railway, and canal into West Berlin — a city of about two million people, sitting some 100 miles deep inside Soviet-controlled Germany. The message was clear: the West could abandon Berlin, or watch it starve.

The trigger was money. The Western Allies had just introduced a new currency, the Deutsche Mark, in their zones of Germany — a step toward rebuilding the shattered country. The Soviets, furious, answered by sealing off West Berlin entirely. Their gamble was simple: surely the Americans, British, and French would give up the isolated city rather than risk a war. The American military governor in Germany, General Lucius D. Clay, urged a firm stand, and President Harry Truman backed him. But nobody wanted tanks rolling down the autobahn — that could mean World War III. So the Allies chose a third option, one made possible only by airplanes.

Two days after the blockade began, on June 26, the first 32 American C-47 cargo planes landed in West Berlin carrying 80 tons of milk, flour, and medicine. It was the start of Operation Vittles — the Berlin Airlift. What began as a stopgap became one of the great logistical feats of history. Over the next fifteen months, Allied aircraft landed in Berlin more than 200,000 times — 278,228 flights in all — delivering over 2.3 million tons of food, coal, and supplies. At the peak, a plane touched down every thirty seconds, day and night. The aircrews flew nearly 92 million miles, almost the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

The airlift had its heroes and its legends. Lieutenant Gail Halvorsen, an American pilot, started dropping candy on tiny parachutes to the children who gathered at the end of the Tempelhof runway to watch the planes. His "Operation Little Vittles" grew until whole crews were dropping sweets across the city, and Berlin's children nicknamed the cargo planes "raisin bombers." Three years earlier, Allied planes had dropped bombs on Berlin; now Berliners joked they were dropping potatoes.

The Soviets had bet the airlift would fail. It didn't. By the spring of 1949, the airlift was delivering more cargo by air than had ever arrived by rail. On May 12, 1949, the Soviet Union lifted the blockade, defeated. The airlift officially ended on September 30, 1949.

The Berlin Blockade was the first great crisis of the Cold War — and the West won it without firing a shot. It proved that determination and ingenuity could beat intimidation, and it forged a bond between former enemies: the Americans and British who had once bombed Berlin became the city's lifeline, remembered with gratitude to this day.

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