The Berlin Airlift Fed a City by Air for Eleven Months Without Firing a Shot

Joseph Stalin had a plan to starve two million people into surrendering a city. He had not planned for a pilot with a pocketful of candy. That is not the whole story of the Berlin Airlift, but it is a fair summary of how a regime built on force was beaten by an operation built on logistics, nerve and decency.

Here is my thesis, and I will state it before I argue it. In 1948 the United States faced a crisis in which the two obvious responses were both bad. Giving in would have handed Berlin, and the credibility of every Western commitment, to the Soviets. Fighting would have started a war with a power that had armies in the middle of Europe. The airlift was a third answer, one that required imagination and discipline. It shows that deterrence is not a choice between surrender and war, and that firm, creative resolve can win without firing a shot.

The setting

Start with the facts, in order.

At the end of the Second World War, Germany was divided into four occupation zones, held by the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. Berlin, the former capital, lay deep inside the Soviet zone, a hundred miles or more from the western zones, and it was divided into four sectors in the same way. The three western sectors together are usually called West Berlin. They were an island of the Western powers inside Soviet-controlled territory, with roughly two million inhabitants.

By 1948 the wartime alliance had broken down. The Soviets had imposed Communist governments across Eastern Europe, and the West, led by the United States, was putting together a program of recovery, the Marshall Plan, for the western part of the continent. The western powers also decided to merge their zones economically and to reform the German currency, which had been wrecked by inflation and was useless for ordinary trade. Anyone who has seen an economy run on cigarettes will understand why.

The trigger

The currency reform was the spark. In June 1948 the Western powers announced a new currency, the Deutsche mark, and put it into use in their zones within days. The Soviets objected. A sound currency in the western zones meant a successful economy there, and it threatened the Soviet plan for a Germany that would be weak, divided and easy to dominate. They issued their own currency in their zone and tried to extend it to all of Berlin.

On June 24, 1948, they cut the land and water routes into West Berlin. Rail traffic stopped, the roads were closed, and barge traffic was halted. The Soviets said it was for technical reasons. Nobody believed it. The aim was plain: to make the Western position in Berlin so costly that the Western powers would withdraw or agree to terms.

Think about the arithmetic they were counting on. West Berlin's population needed food, fuel and the other necessities of life every day, and they had stocks for weeks, not months. If the Western powers could not supply the city, the city would have to turn to the Soviets for rations, and the Western position would collapse of its own weight.

The three options

Now I will do something I recommend for any foreign-policy decision, which is to lay out the options and take each seriously.

1. Withdraw. Pull the Western forces and officials out of Berlin and let the city fall. The case for it is that Berlin was indefensible on the ground, a political liability and not worth a war. The case against it is decisive. It would have handed two million people to a Communist dictatorship, destroyed the credibility of every Western guarantee in Europe and signaled that pressure works.
2. Force the road. Send an armed convoy down the highway from the western zones and see whether the Soviets would fire. This was seriously proposed. General Lucius Clay, the American military governor in Germany, was inclined to it at first. The case for it is that it called the bluff. The case against it is that it risked war. The Soviets had large forces in the area and the West had little ground force to match them, and a war begun by an incident on a road would have been fought on the other side's terms.
3. Supply the city by air. The three western zones had air corridors to Berlin, guaranteed by agreement, and the Soviets had not closed them. An airlift would keep the city alive without using force, and it would put the burden of escalation on the other side. If the Soviets shot down a transport, they would be the ones who started a war.

President Truman chose the third. His decision, which I paraphrase from the record, was that the United States would stay in Berlin. That was the policy. How to do it was the work of the men on the ground.

Clay and Tunner

Two men made it happen.

General Lucius Clay, the military governor, was the man in Berlin who refused to leave. He argued for firmness and for keeping the city supplied, and he pressed for the airlift to be tried in earnest. The airlift began on June 26, 1948, almost at once, with the Air Force's C-47 transports, which carry only three or four tons apiece. At that rate it could not have worked. The city needed something on the order of four thousand tons a day or more. The first days brought in a small fraction.

General William Tunner supplied the answer. Tunner was an Air Force officer who had run the great airlift of supplies over the Himalayas from India to China during the war, the one the pilots called the Hump. He arrived in Germany on July 28, 1948, appointed to run the airlift, and he treated it as what it was, a logistics problem, to be solved by system.

Here is what he did, and it reads like a lesson in management.

• A fixed schedule. Aircraft flew in a strict rotation, landing and taking off at set intervals, a few minutes apart, in a continuous stream. No improvisation, no waiting.
• Standard procedures. Each flight followed the same pattern. Crews did not wander off in Berlin, and the German ground crews unloaded each plane quickly, in a matter of minutes.
• Better aircraft. Larger transports, the four-engine C-54, carried about ten tons each, nearly three times what a C-47 carried. Do the arithmetic as a rough guide. To carry 4,500 tons a day with ten-ton aircraft requires about 450 landings a day. Divide those across the hours of a day and you get one every three minutes or so. That is the rhythm Tunner built.
• Weather and instruments. The corridors were narrow, the weather in Europe in winter is poor, and the planes flew by instruments, stacked at different altitudes. The system ran on discipline, and it worked.

The principal airfields in West Berlin were Tempelhof, in the American sector, and Gatow, in the British, and a third, Tegel, was built in the French sector in under ninety days by French engineers using German labor, in the late autumn of 1948. A fair account would stress that last fact. Berliners who were being blockaded built the airfield that kept them alive.

The candy bomber

The best-known story of the airlift is a small one, and it deserves its place.

Lieutenant Gail Halvorsen, an American pilot flying the supply run, met a group of Berlin children at the edge of the airfield in the summer of 1948. He had a couple of sticks of gum, and he promised to drop more. He said that he would wiggle his wings so they could tell which plane was his. He tied candy to small handkerchief parachutes and dropped them over the approach to the field. The idea caught on, other pilots joined, and American schoolchildren sent candy and handkerchiefs by the ton. The Berliners called the American planes "Rosinenbomber," raisin bombers, a name the whole airlift later took.

It is a sweet story, and I would not insist on its importance as military history. But it points to something that strategists forget. The airlift was a political contest for the loyalty of a people. The Soviets could threaten and starve, and the Western powers could deliver food and also show that they cared. Berliners, who had been bombed by Americans three years before, watched American planes come over every few minutes with coal and flour. That mattered more than a hundred speeches.

The Easter Parade

By the spring of 1949 the airlift had grown beyond what the Soviets had expected, and Tunner decided to prove it. In the middle of April, over a day and a night, a surge of flights brought in an enormous tonnage in twenty-four hours, about thirteen thousand tons in roughly fourteen hundred flights. It was called the Easter Parade because it took place at Easter. A plane landed in Berlin about every minute. The point was not the tonnage. It was the message: the blockade could not win. The West could do this for as long as it took.

I give the numbers as approximate, since sources differ by a few flights and a few tons, and I would ask you to check them in the Air Force's official history of the airlift before you quote them.

The end of the blockade

The Soviets saw it. The blockade was not producing a Western surrender, it was making the Soviet Union look like a bully in the eyes of the world, and it was strengthening the Western alliance instead of splitting it. In April 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington, the beginning of NATO. The blockade was lifted on May 12, 1949, after about eleven months. The airlift itself continued for a few more months, until the end of September, to build up stocks in case the blockade resumed. Over the whole operation the Western air forces delivered something over two million tons of supplies, mostly food and coal, in several hundred thousand flights. About a hundred men died in accidents.

That is a cost, and I will not skip it. The airlift was not free. It was a safe and bloodless operation only by comparison with the alternative, and the men who died in crashes during it deserve remembering with the others.

The strongest objection

The strongest objection comes from two directions.

From the left, the critic says that the airlift was an act of Cold War escalation. The currency reform that triggered the blockade was a unilateral Western act, he says, and the West, by dividing Germany, helped create the division that followed. The Soviets had reasons to be afraid of a revived Germany, and the story that the Soviets were the aggressors is incomplete.

From the right, a different critic says that the airlift was a half measure. A real show of strength would have been to force the roads, call the bluff and settle the matter. Letting the Soviets set the terms of the contest, by accepting a blockade and meeting it with a supply bridge, rewarded their pressure.

I will answer both.

1. The Soviets chose the blockade. The Western powers introduced a currency to stabilize their zones, a normal act of economic management. The Soviets answered by cutting off food from two million civilians. One of those actions is a policy dispute. The other is a siege of a civilian population. There is no moral equivalence between them.
2. The airlift did not reward the pressure. It defeated it. The Soviets did not get anything by blockading. They ended the blockade having gained nothing and lost the argument. And the alternative of forcing the road risked a war that the West was not prepared to fight in 1948. A man who wins without shooting has not made a half measure. He has found the cheaper victory.
3. Resolve is a combination. The airlift worked because it combined firmness, the refusal to leave, with restraint, the refusal to start the shooting. That is what deterrence looks like when it is done well. The other side must be convinced that you will not give in and that you will not blink first, and also that you will not be the one to escalate.

What it teaches about deterrence

Deterrence is the art of persuading an adversary that the cost of aggression exceeds the gain. It requires capability, will and credibility. The airlift showed all three. For a broader discussion of how the idea works, see Deterrence Fails When an Enemy Thinks You Will Not Pay the Price, and for the naval and nuclear side of it, Admiral Rickover Built the Navy That Made Nuclear Deterrence Survivable.

The lessons I draw are these.

• Credibility is built by action. America had said it would not leave Berlin. The airlift proved it. A promise that is never tested is a promise nobody is sure of.
• Logistics is strategy. The airlift was won by a schedule, a system and the ability to move ten tons at a time on the minute. The Soviets could not match it. Wars and crises are won, to an extent that romantics dislike, by people who are good at moving things.
• Allies matter. The airlift was a joint effort of Americans and British, with substantial help from others, and the Berliners themselves were partners, not wards. The NATO alliance that was signed during it was the long-term result.
• Refusing to be bullied does not require starting a war. It requires seeing the third option, and having the will to pay for it.

The Berlin story did not end in 1949. It resumed in 1961 with the Wall, and ended, for the time being, in 1989, which is told in The Night the Berlin Wall Fell and the Press Conference Slip That Opened It, with the speech of 1987 covered in Tear Down This Wall Read Closely as the Speech Diplomats Tried to Soften. The question of how firm to be with a power that tests Western resolve has not gone away either, and Should Conservatives Back Ukraine? Two Honest Answers, Weighed Fairly takes up its modern form.

The case in brief

1. After the Western currency reform of June 1948, the Soviets blockaded West Berlin on June 24, trying to starve two million people into submission.
2. The West had three options, withdrawal, forcing the road, and supplying the city by air, and the airlift avoided both surrender and war.
3. Under General Clay's resolve and General Tunner's system of fixed schedules, standard procedures and larger aircraft, the airlift grew to meet the city's needs, with the Easter Parade of April 1949 proving the point.
4. The Soviets lifted the blockade on May 12, 1949, having gained nothing, and the NATO alliance was strengthened.
5. The lesson is that deterrence is not a choice between surrender and war: firm, creative, disciplined resolve can win without firing a shot.

What you can do: ask your local library or historical society whether it holds an airlift veterans' oral history, and read one account in a veteran's own words.