The heroism and Triumph of the Berlin Airlift June of 1948 to May of 1949

The heroism and Triumph of the Berlin Airlift June of 1948 to May of 1949

By Richard Reeves
Mention the Berlin Airlift today and chances are you will get a blank look. Those who took part in that amazing achievement deserve better.
Reeves, writing with passion, reverence and humor, wants to make sure they will be remembered. Drawing on interviews, diaries, newspapers, biographies and government documents, he tells the story of the sixty thousand men and women who kept a ravaged city alive for more than a year; and the extraordinary leaders who made the Berlin Airlift possible: President Harry Truman, Generals Lucius Clay and Curtis LeMay, Colonel Frank Howley, and Major General William Tunner, who made it work, to mention a few. The book includes 6 pages of rarely seen photographs and, at the beginning of each chapter, a wonderful Jake Schuffert cartoon from the Task Force Times, a newspaper for airlift personnel.
A brief historical recap may be helpful. At the end of WW11, Berlin was divided into four occupation sectors: Soviets in the eastern sector, Americans, British and French in western neighborhoods.
Allied bombers, artillery fire and Hitler’s order to “fight to the last man” had destroyed Berlin. The Soviets captured the city in 1945 and pillaged what was left. They sent whole factories and hundreds of thousands of pieces of industrial equipment to the Soviet Union, along with German technicians and managers. There were an estimated one million rapes during the 62 hellish days prior to the arrival of American troops.
Fast forward to three years later. The civilian population, mostly women, children, and old people, were still living in basements or in caves dug into the rubble and, according to a 1947 estimate by Clay’s staff, living on about 900 calories a day.
Hitler’s Reichsmark was nearly worthless making the black market the real economy of Berlin and American cigarettes the preferred currency,
Clay, Commander of all American troops in Europe, saw currency reform as the only way to return to some semblance of normality. Not everyone agreed. The Soviets hoped economic chaos would drive the city, and perhaps all of Germany, into their waiting arms. The French, having fought the Germans twice in 26 years, wanted Germany to be a poor agrarian nation.
On June 23, 1948, the western powers announced a new West German currency. Within hours of the announcement the Soviets closed railway traffic on the line between Berlin and Helmstedt and roads connecting the Western sector to the rest of Germany. Except for air traffic, the Allied zones were cut off from all deliveries of food and fuel.

Curtis LeMay, Commander of United States Air Force Europe, viewed the Berlin crisis as “a logical outgrowth of the God-bless-our buddy-buddy-Russians-we-sure-can-trust-forever-and-ever-philosophy that flowered way back in the Roosevelt Administration.’ What he didn’t say was that the root of the Berlin problem

was the political decision (apparently made at Yalta), to allow the Soviets to take Berlin.
Reeves writes that the American position was perilous.

There were hundreds of thousands of Red Army Troops…in and near East Germany. The Soviets also had more than 2.500 combat aircraft, fighters and light bombers in East Germany and another 1,500 or so in Eastern European countries. That compared with 16,000Allied troops, most of them military police and engineers, fewer than 300 combat aircraft and perhaps 100 British fighters and bombers. There were another million or so Soviet troops in the rest of Eastern Europe, surrounding East Germany. Allied troop strength in all of western Germany was 290,000 men but only one or two combat ready brigades.
As Clay commented years later,
Remember this when the war ended we were sitting over there with the greatest army that had ever been seen, nobody was ever concerned about anybody blocking us on roads and railroads… The Japs surrendered and then the demand for bringing the troops home was great. With a relatively short period of time our military forces had deteriorated until they were nothing but young high school boys not wanting to be there.
It is no wonder that the Russians thought they could push us out of Europe. It did not appear that we were serious about staying.
Let’s make a joint effort, perhaps we can kick them out.” Stalin said to William Pieck, Communist Party Leader of East Germany, March 19, 1948.
The reaction of Colonel Frank Howley, Commander of Civil Government in the American sector of Berlin, was to announce: “We are not getting out of Berlin. We are going to stay. I don’t know the answer to the current problem –not yet—but this much I do know: The American people will not allow the German people to starve.”
That’s the back-story of the airlift. Reeves explains what happened next.
‘We stay in Berlin. Period.’ Truman said on June 29, 1948, after his military and diplomatic advisors told him there was no way for a few thousand allied soldiers to stand up to hundreds of thousands of Red Army Troops blockading the city.

The airlift began with 10-year old American C-47s left over from the war. The planes a British pilot had described in 1945 as, “A collection of parts flying in loose formation” were resurrected from abandoned British airfields and flown by any pilots who could be found.

"This time [the soldiers] were supposed to free the people they had been trying to kill, and who had been trying to kill them, only three years earlier."

Thompson was shocked when he saw the proximity of apartment buildings and the short, 6,100 ft of perforated steel planking laid on top of grass that was the single runway at Tempelhof. “Pilots coming into Tempelhof did not exactly ’land,’ they dived for the ground.” He saw Germans, mostly women, using wheelbarrows and shovels to fill holes, all the heavy equipment having been appropriated by the Soviets. Then women ran to get out of his way but when Thompson looked back they were running behind him to continue working.

Newer DC-4s were stripped of seats and bathrooms to be turned into air transports. “The airplane I had was the city of Denver, an American Airlines flagship,” said Corporal James Spatafora, who was in charge of rebuilding hydraulic systems at Rhein-Main.”

Everyone worked around the clock and it wasn’t enough. By July 23, there were only 2,500 tons of food and fuel flown into Berlin by British and American planes. Flying two round trips per 24-hour days both planes and men were breaking down. The conventional wisdom in America and Britain was the airlift was "doomed to failure.” Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, advised Truman to get out before the Soviets drove us out.

Winter fog and frost made the airlift more difficult and more dangerous. Yet, on January 31, Tunner announced that “General winter be damned” the Americans and British had flown 171,960 tons of cargo into Berlin that month. The cost was high, before the airlift ended, weather, pilot fatigue and inadequate maintenance would kill 73 western airmen.

The Soviets realized they had lost. A fact either ignored or not communicated to Stalin was that East Berlin depended upon the western sectors for raw materials. When the Allies retaliated with their own blockade, factories shut down and East Germans lost their jobs. On May 12, 1949, all road and rail routes from the West were reopened. It was a huge propaganda and political defeat for Stalin. Shortly afterward the West German Federal Republic and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization were formed.