The Berlin Blockade and Airlift

JUN 24 1948 · 12:00

Berliners watch a US Air Force C-54 Skymaster descend toward Tempelhof Airport during the airlift, 1948. Place: West Berlin and the Berlin air corridors Figures: Lucius D. Clay, US military governor in Germany · Ernst Reuter, Lord Mayor-elect of West Berlin · Curtis LeMay and William Tunner, commanders of the airlift · Vasily Sokolovsky, Soviet military governor The Currency Trigger The Western occupation zones introduce the Deutsche Mark on 20 June 1948 to replace the discredited Reichsmark. The new currency is extended to the Western sectors of Berlin (an island 100 miles inside the Soviet zone) on 23 June. The Soviets respond on 24 June by closing all road, rail, and canal access to the Western sectors and cutting electricity. The legal status of the Western presence in Berlin rests on inter-Allied agreements of 1944–45; the Soviets do not formally repudiate those agreements but argue that the ground corridors are matters of bilateral courtesy. The Western sectors hold roughly 2.4 million people with stocks for thirty-six days of food and forty-five of coal. Clay proposes an armored convoy to force the autobahn; Truman vetoes the option. The remaining instrument is the air corridor, which the 1945 agreements specify by treaty. The first C-47 lands at Tempelhof on 26 June 1948 with 80 tons of cargo. Two-Point-Three Million Tons Operation Vittles (American) and Operation Plainfare (British) deliver 2.3 million tons of supplies on 277,728 flights over 324 days. At peak (Easter Sunday 1949) a plane lands at one of the three West Berlin airfields every 62 seconds. RAF Sunderland flying boats land on the Havel; coal accounts for two-thirds of tonnage; the entire operation is run on a tighter schedule than the prewar German rail system had managed. The Soviets lift the blockade on 12 May 1949 without securing any of their objectives. The episode is the template for the rest of the Cold War. Both sides assert sovereign rights to the same physical space (Berlin, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan), and the contest is conducted through credible non-military pressure rather than through the inter-state war the Westphalian system had treated as the normal sovereign instrument. The Federal Republic of Germany is proclaimed on 23 May 1949 (eleven days after the blockade ends); the German Democratic Republic on 7 October 1949. Two German sovereignties from one, with Berlin as the wound that will reopen at the Wall (1961) and close again in 1989 (see [[fall-of-the-berlin-wall-1989]]). Video: British Pathé footage of the Anglo-American airlift sustaining West Berlin during the Soviet blockade. C-54s and Dakotas land at Tempelhof and Gatow with food, coal and flour.