Berlin Blockade and Airlift
The Soviet Union closed the land routes into West Berlin in June 1948 and the western powers supplied the city by air for eleven months. The occasion was currency. The three western zones of Germany introduced a new Deutsche Mark in June to end the black-market economy that the worthless old currency had produced, and extended it to their sectors of Berlin — a city 160 kilometres inside the Soviet zone, occupied jointly under an agreement that had never specified land access in writing. Moscow answered by cutting road, rail and canal links and the electricity. Some two million people had about thirty-six days of food and forty-five of coal. The military options were both bad: an armoured column up the autobahn risked a war, and abandoning the city would have ended western credibility in Germany. The air corridors, unlike the roads, had been agreed in writing. The airlift that followed delivered some 2.3 million tonnes on 278,000 flights, at its peak an aircraft landing at Tempelhof every ninety seconds, with crews flying to a strict pattern and getting one attempt at the approach before returning with the load. Coal was the bulk of it, and the operation was flying in enough to keep power stations running through a winter. Stalin lifted the blockade in May 1949. The Federal Republic was founded that month, the German Democratic Republic in October, and NATO in April. The airlift also converted German opinion. A population that had been bombed by the same air forces three years earlier watched them fly coal in for a year, and the pilot who dropped sweets on handkerchief parachutes became the best-known American in the city.
- Year: 1948 CE
- Category: Military
