Tempelhof Airport, West Berlin

Two and a half million people, one runway

The Berlin Blockade of 1948–49 was the first major confrontation of the Cold War.

In June 1948, in response to the Western Allies' introduction of a new currency — the Deutsche Mark — in their occupation zones of Germany, the Soviet Union closed all road, rail and canal access to the three Western-occupied sectors of Berlin (the British, French and American zones, which together formed West Berlin). The city's 2.5 million inhabitants in the Western sectors lived 160 kilometres inside the Soviet occupation zone. They could be supplied only by air.

This is the part of the story that everyone gets wrong.

There was no formal Allied right to airspace access into Berlin either. The Allied Control Council agreement of 30 November 1945 had specified three airline corridors (north, south, central) of 32 kilometres width from the Western occupation zones into Berlin — but the agreement had been signed informally by the four occupation commanders, not ratified by their governments. The Soviets could plausibly argue that air access was as negotiable as land access.

They chose not to challenge it.

The reasons are still argued. The most likely explanation is that Stalin did not believe the Western Allies could supply a city of 2.5 million by air at the scale required, and so saw no need to escalate to the gravely dangerous step of shooting down Allied transport aircraft. He was wrong about the logistics.

Five thousand tonnes a day

The minimum daily tonnage needed to keep West Berlin alive was about 4 500 tonnes of food, fuel and coal. By the operational peak of the airlift in April 1949 — Easter Parade, the demonstration day — Allied aircraft were landing one plane at Tempelhof every 62 seconds around the clock, delivering 12 941 tonnes in 1 398 sorties in a single 24-hour period.

The aircraft used were primarily American Douglas C-54 Skymasters (four-engine military variants of the DC-4 airliner) and British Avro Yorks. Smaller numbers of British Short Sunderland flying boats landed on the Havel river to deliver salt — a corrosive cargo the metal-skinned land planes could not safely carry.

Pilots flew with stripped-down crews and minimum loading and unloading times. The standard sequence on the ground at Tempelhof was 7 minutes 30 seconds — the aircraft would taxi to a hardstand, shut down two engines, be unloaded by a German Trümmerfrauen (rubble-women) crew while the pilots stayed in the cockpit, then restart and taxi back to the runway.

About 78 American and British airmen died in crashes during the airlift, mainly from approach accidents in bad weather. A memorial plaque listing their names stands at the entrance to Tempelhof airfield.

Uncle Wiggle-wings

The most iconic individual story of the airlift is Lieutenant Gail Halvorsen, a young US Air Force C-54 pilot.

On a free afternoon at Tempelhof in July 1948, Halvorsen — age 27 — walked over to the perimeter fence and gave a small handful of his own chewing gum to the Trümmerkinder who stood watching the aircraft. He noticed they distributed the gum among themselves in careful equal shares rather than fighting over it. He told them that on his next flight he would drop more sweets from the cockpit — and would identify himself by rocking his aircraft's wings on approach.

Halvorsen began making the candy drops the following week. He fashioned small parachutes from his own handkerchiefs, tied to small bundles of Wrigley's gum and Hershey's chocolate. His co-pilots joined in. The children below called him Onkel Wackelflügel — Uncle Wiggle-wings — and named the operation Rosinenbomber — Raisin Bombers, after the dried fruit they imagined was in the parachute packages.

When Halvorsen's superior officers discovered what he was doing, he expected to be disciplined. Instead — once the public-relations value of the story became obvious — the operation was formalised as Operation Little Vittles. American children sent thousands of handkerchief-parachutes and donations of sweets to Tempelhof. By the end of the airlift, Little Vittles had dropped about 23 tonnes of candy across West Berlin.

Halvorsen returned to Berlin in 2008 to attend the closing ceremony of Tempelhof Airport, age 88. He died on 16 February 2022, age 101.

The Cold War's first defeat

The Soviet Union ended the blockade at midnight on 12 May 1949 — 462 days after it began.

The airlift continued for another four months beyond the lifting of the blockade, to build up stockpiles in West Berlin against any future Soviet threat. The total cargo delivered by air across the full operation was 2.3 million tonnes in 277 569 sorties. It was the largest sustained military logistics operation in history to that date.

The political consequences were enormous. The blockade convinced Western European governments that the Soviet threat was real and direct, and accelerated the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation — NATO — which was signed on 4 April 1949 (during the blockade itself). The two German states — the Federal Republic of Germany (West) and the German Democratic Republic (East) — were established within four months of the blockade's end.

The Cold War, formally, had begun.