Life lines

Sixty years ago, the western allies—the US, Britain and France—faced their worst challenge since the second world war ended three years earlier. In May 1948, their erstwhile ally, Russia, blocked all road and rail traffic from what would later be called West Germany into Berlin in a determined effort to drive the allies out of the four-power-administered city. In response, for more than a year, the allies ran the Berlin Airlift, flying everything from coal to chewing gum into the besieged city.

That the Russians could besiege Berlin stemmed from the position of the allied armies when the Nazis surrendered on May 8, 1945. Germany was split into four administrative zones, to be run by the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. The Soviets under Stalin had the lion’s share of German territory and it included the capital, Berlin. But it had been agreed that Berlin would be a four-power island in the midst of what was later called East Germany.

Very quickly the western allies discovered Stalin was a rogue and a cheat who reneged, partly or fully, on everything agreed between him and the western allies at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam. Far from allowing free democratic elections in eastern Europe, as agreed, he stifled or murdered any democratic leaders and installed communist puppet regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and other “liberated” countries. Churchill coined the prophetic phrase of the “iron curtain” coming down across Europe and the Cold War began between the west and the Soviet Union.

In March 1948 Stalin accused the western allies of making policy decisions on Germany among themselves and leaving him out of the loop. They tartly replied that they were forced to do so as Stalin had signally failed to honour earlier commitments. The west suspected Stalin would move against Berlin as his next step and, on cue, he did so on April 1. At first the Soviets held up lorries and rail wagons with endless, frustrating inspections but that soon hardened into a full blockade.

Determined not to be forced out, the allies—essentially the US and Britain—marshalled every aircraft they could find and began flying in supplies to the Berlin airports in their sectors of the city. The biggest and most crucial was Tempelhof, built by Hitler to be the flagship airport of his German Reich but in 2008 facing imminent closure, although the terminal will be preserved.

The allies expected trouble—and on the very first day of the full blockade a Soviet fighter plane collided with a British airliner over Berlin, killing everyone on board. But despite that, the airlift grew and by mid-September, 900 planes a day were flying into Berlin loaded with 7000 tons of vital supplies.

Backbone of the US air fleet was the dear old C-47 Dakota, which compensated for its small payload and sloping load floor with its reliability and ability to land and take off on short runways. But in cargo terms, the most valuable plane was the round-nosed Globemaster, which carried a far bigger payload. The main British plane used was the Avro York, a freighter that bore a strong family resemblance to the Lancaster bomber.

These and many others plied the skies round the clock for more than a year, with sweating ground crews at Berlin’s airports unloading them as fast as possible so they could get airborne again for the flight west. There was scant or no refuelling in Berlin and any plane that broke down on taxiways or the runway was remorselessly pushed aside so the conveyor belt didn’t stop rolling.

Several US diplomatic efforts to stop the blockade proved fruitless, and Russia meanwhile tightened its grip on Eastern Germany, creating a soviet-style police force, the Volkspolizei (People’s Police), in October and establishing a communist government on November 30, ironically Churchill’s 74th birthday. This prompted the western allies to create West Germany, with its capital in Bonn, on April 8, 1949.

Eventually the Soviets realised the allies were prepared to continue the airlift indefinitely, whatever the cost, and agreed to talks that led to their lifting the blockade on May 12, 1949, after nearly 14 painful months. Rail and road traffic to the city was reinstated.

In a way, there was an incredible irony to the Berlin airlift. It saw US Air Force and RAF planes, that only three years earlier flew over Germany dropping nothing but bombs, suddenly becoming the air lifeline that kept Hitler’s former capital alive.

It was also the event that drove the final nail into the coffin of post-war goodwill towards the Soviet Union. From that point on, Stalin and the Soviets were the new enemy, a state of affairs that existed until the Soviet Union finally collapsed 40 years later in l989.

The most visible sign of that collapse was the demolition of the Berlin Wall, built in 1961. In that respect, the airlift and demolition of the wall were the overture and finale of the Cold War, with Berlin the unwilling stage on which both were played.