Germany yesterday marked the 60th anniversary of the start of the Berlin airlift, an unprecedented undertaking that likely saved the city from falling to the Soviets and that helped mend the wounds of World War II.
Often called the first battle of the Cold War, the airlift pitted the US and the Soviets against one another for the first time and set the tone for decades to come.
Its significance wasn’t immediately apparent, however, when the operation began on June 26, 1948.
The future looked “bleak” to Berliners at the time, said Helmut Trotnow, director of Berlin’s Allied Museum.
“There was no light at the end of the tunnel, but the airlift brought this light,” Trotnow said.
“If it hadn’t been for the success of the airlift, history would have looked very different,” he said. “It really is a turning point.”
After the war, zones of western Germany were handed to Britain, France and the US to administer, while the Soviet Union was handed the east. Berlin was inside the Soviet sector, but also divided among the four powers.
In an effort to squeeze the Western powers out of Berlin, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in June 1948 blockaded all rail, road and ship traffic into the city.
On June 26, the US and Britain launched Operation Vittles — an unprecedented airlift that would supply some 2 million West Berliners with food and fuel for 11 months until the Soviets lifted the blockade; and several months after that in case Stalin decided to change his mind.
Neither side resorted to force — setting the tone for the Cold War — though 39 Britons, 31 Americans and at least five Germans were killed in accidents.
During the airlift, US, UK, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and South African pilots flew some 278,000 flights to Berlin, carrying an estimated 2.3 million tonnes of food, coal, medicine and other supplies.
In one day, April 16, 1949, some 1,400 planes carried in nearly 13,000 tonnes over a 24-hour period — an average of one plane landing every 62 seconds.
In Berlin, former Luftwaffe mechanics were enlisted to help maintain aircraft, and some 19,000 Berliners — almost half women — worked around the clock for three months to build Tegel Airport, providing crucial relief for the UK Gatow and US Tempelhof airfields.
US airlift pilot Bill Voigt remembers that seeing the suffering — and determination — of the Berliners quickly erased any resentment lingering from the war.
“Regardless of how you felt about the Germans, you had to pay due homage to them for their determination to go through this one,” Voigt, now 87, said on a recent trip to Berlin.
“Most of the people in my squadron and the people I knew felt the same way — that they were putting up a gutsy fight to keep out of the hands of the Russians,” Voigt said.
On the other side, Germans — especially Berliners — were shown the human face of their former enemies, working with the occupying Western forces on a large scale for the first time against the Russians.
US airlift veteran pilot Gail Halvorsen said it was too often forgotten that the Soviets offered better rations to West Berliners willing to register with communist authorities — an offer only 20,000 took.
“If they had said ‘we can’t stand your dried eggs, we can’t eat your dried potatoes, we can’t eat your dried carrots, your dried milk’ — if they had said that, they would have been Russian and West Germany would have been Russian,” he said.
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