Airlift saved Berlin from Soviet stranglehold

Jun 24, 2008, 6:00 GMT

Berlin - It was 6 am on the morning of June 24, 1948 when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin closed all land routes and waterways leading to Berlin.

'Technical reasons,' was the official reason given for the move, the latest in a series of pinpricks designed to test Western resolve in helping Germany in the aftermath of World War II.

In what was the first major crisis of the Cold War, the Soviets sealed off the western part of Berlin, situated in the middle of the Soviet-controlled eastern part of Germany.

Their aim was to force the allies to abandon West Berlin by ensuring that no supplies got through to the war-weary population.

Two days later, the allies responded to the blockade by organizing the Berlin Airlift, the biggest and most important humanitarian operation of its kind ever to be undertaken.

Between June 26 and August 27, 1949 the airlift saw a total of 2,343,301 tons of food and coal supplies flown into Berlin in 277,264 flights.

It amounted to one ton of food for each of West Berlin's 2.2 million residents, much of it in so-called CARE packets delivered in privately chartered planes.

Shortly before midnight on June 23, 1948, the Soviet occupation forces cut off electricity supplies to the western sector of Berlin. The next day they sealed the autobahns, rail links and waterways linking Berlin to West Germany.

Today, united Berlin has become one of the most attractive and vibrant capitals in Europe, a fact no one would have dreamed of when the crisis erupted 60 years ago.

General Lucius D Clay, commander of the US occupation zone, considered sending armed convoys through Soviet-controlled Germany but dropped this idea in favour of the airlift, initially called Operation Vittles.

Jack O Bennett, the first and most famous American pilot during the Berlin Airlift, risked his life to fly 1,000 missions to West Berlin in 1948-49.

In defiance of Soviet threats, an Allied plane with Bennett at the controls flew into West Berlin at the outset of the 1948 blockade, loaded with a cargo of food and relief supplies.

As the world held its breath, Bennett took off from a base in the American sector of Germany and crossed into the Soviet sector, flying at high altitude along the air transit corridor to the divided city.

Then, in the most dangerous part of the flight, he had to bring the heavily-loaded plane down steeply, once he had crossed into West Berlin's airspace.

Making a rapid descent, the converted bomber's engines reverberated only metres over the rooftops of apartment buildings as Bennett dropped to a safe landing at Tempelhof Airport.

The Soviets had not threatened Bennett's plane in any way. Bennett was immediately followed by thousands of pilots making flights round-the-clock to Berlin. Bennett alone logged 40,000 hours in the air during the 14-month blockade.

Within the space of a few weeks some 224 Douglas DC-3 and DC-4 Skymasters were made ready for the airlift. Unnecessary cladding and partition walls were removed so that the aircraft could be packed tight with meat, flour and coal.

By spring, 1949, an average of 8,000 tons was being flown in daily, many flights landing at just three-minute intervals.

Pilots who missed their landing had to turn back to Frankfurt because there was no time for a second attempt - so tight was the schedule for planes flying along the Berlin corridor.

'When you looked at the radar screens on the ground the planes appeared as little green dots lined up in a necklace,' wrote Bennett in his memoirs, Forty Thousand Hours Over Berlin, published in 1982.

On a single day, April 16, 1949, some 12,940 tons of heating fuel and food were flown to Tempelhof and West Berlin's two other airports, Tegel and Gatow, an achievement that made it into the Guinness Book of Records.

Another notable achievement was the work of 19,000 Berliners, many of them women, who worked day and night for 85 days to build the 2,400-metre runway at Tegel - the longest in Europe at the time.

But there were also victims. Some 78 people lost their lives during the airlift - 31 Americans, 39 Britons and eight Germans. A memorial to them was erected at the entrance to Tempelhof in 1951.

The Soviets gave up on May 12, 1949 and ended the blockade, but it was decided to carry on with the airlift for another three months in order to build up a sufficient supply of goods.