77 YEARS AGO WHEN WE BECAME THE GOOD GUYS

Seventy-seven years ago, summer in Berlin was as tolerable as life in a city that had been 75% totally destroyed by Allied bombers and the street-to-street fighting that followed the arrival of the Red Army during the war that had ended three years ago could be. About 2.5 million Berliners were still living in the war-ravaged city, but food was scarce and shelter was hard to find amid all the rubble. The economy was mostly black market goods. There had not been any significant rebuilding of the city since the end of that war, since Britain and France were nearly as prostrate as Germany after nearly six years of the most terrible war in history. The rest of Europe outside of Sweden and Switzerland was equally in ruins.

Other than the American troops that could be seen in west German cities that were in the “American Zone” of occupation and the equipment necessary to support those troops, the influence of the United States nowhere to be seen as the country had again retreated behind the oceans that separated it from the rest of the world. The only undamaged major country on the planet, the Americans controlled 72% of Planetary Gross Product and were spending it on themselves as they looked across a ruined planet they controlled as the sole owners of atomic bombs.

The four Allied powers that occupied the German capitol had met regularly in the years following the war, though tensions between the USSR and the western Allies began building in 1947. When Soviet intelligence learned in January 1948 that the western Allies were considering forming their three West German zones into the new state of West Germany, the Soviets ended cooperation. The most important administrative reform the Americans planned to institute with British and French support was the replacement of the Nazi Reichsmark with a new currency, the Deutschmark. In June 1948, the U.S. and U.K. introduced the Deutschmark in their zones, including West Berlin. The new currency was kept from the Soviets because they wanted to quell the black market that was running rampant and to which the Soviets were contributing in an attempt to keep the western zones in a weakened state.

None of the Americans involved paid much attention to rumbled threats from the other occupier of Germany, the Soviet Union, about their opposition to such a move. After all, even the stupid commies were smart enough to know they couldn’t stand against the newly-independent U.S. Air Force, which was armed with atomic bombs and capable of destroying what was left of the Soviet cities that had been wrecked during the war.

On the morning of June 24, 1948,, 1948, Berlin was getting on with its day as the city came to life again. At 10:04 a.m., the lights across the city flickered once.

Then they died.

Streetcars rolled to a stop. The ovens the bakeries went cold. There was radio silence. Suddenly, without warning, nothing worked. On the streets that made paths through the mountains of rubble, the sounds of a living city were silenced.

Whispers turned to panic.

Stalin had made good on his threat to seal the border. The sectors of the city controlled by the Western Allies were cut off from the rest of western Germany, now 100 miles distant. The autoban was closed. The rail lines were cut. The barges on the Elbe were stopped.

The Soviet occupation authorities announced that nothing and no one would be allowed to enter West Berlin: no potatoes, no coal, not one flour sack. The Soviets were playing a game of chicken. Stalin didn’t need tanks. He had the cold. He had hunger. The West, he thought, would quickly fold.

The siege of Berlin - the first event of the war between the communist East and the democratic West - had begun.

General Lucius D. Clay

The American commander in German was Air Force General Lucius D. Clay. His staff quickly determened that the only way left into Berlin was the air, using the three defined air corridors from the three zones in West Germany. London agreed and the RAF was committed. Those in Washington hesitated. But the city needed 5,000 tons of food, fuel, medicine, and coal every single day to survive.

On June 26, the first cargo planes - Air Force C-47s that had survived the war and were based in Germany - arrived with supplies. It quickly became chaos with outdated planes and inexperienced pilots and crews. Within days, it was obvious these aircraft could not provide the necessary support because they did not have the capacity. In addition, the central European weather managed to close operations 45% of the time and the situation would grow worse as Fall and Winter came.

C-47s at Tempelhof summer 1948

The American military was at its weakest point, having been cut to the bone by the Truman Administration in the years following the war in the belief that all that was needed to enforce American control was the newly-created Strategic Air Command and the A-bomb. It would take everything the USAF had to make Operation Vittles work.

President Truman made his decision on June 28 that the U.S. would commit to the operation. Lieutenant General William H. Tunner, the man responsible for logistics during the war, was assigned to run the operation.

On July 14, the entire U.S. Air Force Military Air Transport Command was activated to support Operation Vittles. Crews would be taken from other commands to provide sufficient personnel to man the planes, and radar-controlled Ground Control Approach (GCA) equipment was moved to Tempelhof airport in Berlin to provide all-weather operational capacity.

C-54 approaching Berlin

Productivity began to rise. And rise. And rise. The skies over Germany became filled with American and British C-47s. Newly-arrived C-54s roared over the forests. British Yorks flow over farmlands. Flights landed at Tempelhof Airport every four minutes, then every three, then every two. In the U.S., crews were put through intensive training to enable them to fly on instruments successfully.

The airlift was a daunting task. More than 2 million Berliners relied on the aid.

US Navy crews joined the operation that fall. By the time Winter arrived, the air control system was able to control aircraft from the time they took off in West Germany to their landing in Berlin. Every four-engine C-54 transport (R6D to the Navy) in the US inventory was committed. By the end of November, airplanes were landing at Tempelhof every 45 seconds regardless of the weather.

C-54 on final approach over Berlin to Termpelhof Airport

Final approach had the planes flying down a lane cleared of buildings with apartment buildings rising to either side. Berliners stood on rooftops, counting the silver birds. Hope now had wings.

That winter of 1948-49 was one of the coldest on record. The hours were long. The crash tally rose. One plane clipped a tree in heavy fog; its cargo exploded like a fireball across a Berlin suburb. Others vanished into snow squalls. Despite the electronic navigation, vertigo took its toll.

But the airlift did not stop.

C-47 on approach

Crews worked around the clock. Mechanics slept under wings. German volunteers shoveled coal in shifts. Soldiers became flight crews.

Supplies delivered

The new airport at Tegel rose from the rubble in just 88 days, a miracle of speed and desperation.

Children watch a “Candy Bomber”

And in the midst of all this, something unexpected happened.

In the four years since the war, the western Allies had been seen as occupiers. The individual soldiers and airmen saw the Germans as a defeated people. Men and women remembered the losses they had suffered from the other side.

Now American veterans of the war were working with German veterans to clear rubble for more space, to organize coal storage with Germans clearing the coal from the aircraft that brought it in, human contact grew. The veterans of both sides began to share their experiences with each other, and out of that there was recognition that those who had fought were more like each other than they differed.

A system was designed, using IBM punch cards, to track every package from its arrival in Europe to being loaded into an airplane, delivered in Berlin, and its contents distributed to the people.

On Easter Sunday, April 17, 1949, the air bridge delivered 13,000 tons of cargo, including the equivalent of 600 railroad cars of coal. In one day!

One pilot, Gail Halvorsen, noticed a group of hungry children watching the sky. He handed out gum to them through the fence. “How will we know which plane is yours?” one asked. He saw how the children responded to the gum and determined he would bring more candy to them. He founded "Operation Little Vittles", to raise morale in Berlin by dropping candy using miniature parachutes.

Gail Halvorsen with a “candy bomb”

Halvorsen began "Little Vittles" with no authorization from his superiors but over the next year, he became a national hero with support from all over the United States. American donated to the charity and the operation dropped over 23 tons of candy to the residents of Berlin. Children who had never seen chocolate associated the delicacy with the American fliers. Halvorsen became known as the "Berlin Candy Bomber", "Uncle Wiggly Wings", and "The Chocolate Flier".

In America, the film “the Big Lft” opened in spring of 1949, starring a then-unknown Montgomery Clift and Paul Douglas as a two American sergeants involved in the airlift; in the beginning Douglas dislikes the Germans from his wartime experience - by the end of the movie he has fallen in love with a German woman. The movie company had come to Germany in the summer of 1948 to film another project, since Writer-director George Seaton realized the German ruins were a “set” that could never be recreated. As the airlift began, Seaton saw a story he could turn into a movie as he read the reports by Berlin-based INS correspondent Margueritte Higgins about what was happening. The cast was composed of Germans and Americans, with almost all the American roles filled by men actually doing the job. It brought the story of Berlin to Main Street USA and popular support for rebuilding Europe grew.

By the Spring of 1949, things weren't going well for the Soviets. The western Allies had proven they could keep up the airlift indefinitely. The Russians had gained a reputation as bullies because of the blockade. An Allied counter-blockade was causing severe shortages in the Russian sector, leading to fears of an uprising.

On May 12, 1949, Stalin blinked.

The barricades came down. Suddenly the railways were no longer “under repair” and trains began showing up in Berlin. Trucks rolled across bridges that were suddenly miraculously reported as being “repaired.”

The siege of Berlin was lifted.

The West had stood its ground, but not with tanks or bombs. But with food and coal and chocolte candy. And courage by all. Americans and Germans who had worked together now saw each other as friends. “Soft power” combined with technological superiority had won the day.

In eleven months, the western Allies had delivered 2.3 million tons of supplies on 277,000 flights. They had accomplished what no one at the outset had believed was possible. On September 30, 1949, the airlift was declared over.

Last flight of the Berlin Airlift

With popular political support at home, the Marshall Plan - the greatest expression of American “soft power” - rebuilt Europe.

America was The Good Guys, the guarantors that another Second World War wouldn’t happen.

Today we experience a world that was forever changed by the Berlin Airlift.

Air travel operates regardless of the weather and has become the dominant form of long distance transportation as a result.

Every time you input a tracking number to trace the progress of what you ordered online to its arrival on your front porch, you are using the system first created to keep track of the supplies sent to the people of Berlin.

The European Union exists, built on the foundation first set down in Berlin.

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