Let’s finally take a moment (a long moment, because this important, and also an excited moment, because this is so awesome) to discuss my favorite historical event.
The Berlin Airlift.
It is 1945. The Nazis have been defeated, Germany partitioned because the memory of the aftermath of the treaty of Versailles bites too deep, too many graves were dug to hold brothers and fathers and sons to ignore the past. In Potsdam, meanwhile, the leaders of the free world met Stalin, who was quickly revealing himself to be not an ally, but the next enemy.
The next enemy in a war that could not be fought with soldiers, because even as Truman was sitting with Stalin the bomb at Trinity was turning the night into dawn, a new era raining down with the fallout.
As the world reels from the destruction wrought at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the spies in the Manhattan project worm the secrets out and bring them back home to Mother Russia, building their own weapons of mass destruction.
The next war will be filled with radiation and mass graves and no one want to be the one who throws the first stone.
We head back to Germany. Divided between four— France, Britain, Russia, the US. Berlin, the epicenter of the plague, is again divided into four.
By 1948, it has become clear that Stalin was not the appeasable man Rosevelt had always taken him for. He was ruthless and bloodthirsty, letting easily preventable famines spiral into genocides; more bodies buried because of him than Hitler could have hoped for. France, Britain, and the US consolidated their fragments of Germany back into what would become West Germany, freely elected leaders. They did the same with West Berlin, a crescent-moon of a city sunk deep into the eastern half of Germany like an old bullet.
As east and west diverged and the iron curtain cut across Europe like a jagged sword, West Berlin remained, roads spoking out to connect it to the west, to the allies, to anything but Stalin’s puppet regime.
And then the USSR decided they were done with having the island of West Berlin. They wanted it back. On July 19th, 1948, the Soviets halted all traffic, consumer or passenger or otherwise, into West Berlin, and by June 24th, the cut off all the power and stopped supplying food to the civilians of Western Berlin.
Three options presented themselves for the US, just three years out of a war that had killed too many sons. Fight, back down, or find something else.
To back down was unthinkable. This was the pride of a victorious nation on the line.
To fight— the plans for a war against Russia at that point included fifty atomic bombs, of the same specifications as the one that ushered in the atomic age just three short years ago at Trinity. Has it only been three years? It feels like a decade.
There weren’t enough bombs though, and not enough bombers to drop them, and besides, who wants to be known as the murderers who leveled the Russians over one city; people have gone to war over less but no one wants to try and mirror the sheer pointless slaughter of WWI, seventeen-year-olds dying of trench foot in wars that were not theirs to fight; no one wants to drop the bombs that level cities and vaporize innocent infants.
And so there was only the third option: make another way, cut through the sea as if you are Moses. The ground routes to West Berlin had never been negotiated, so the Soviets could do as they pleased, but there were three air corridors that were free.
And what could the Soviets do if they started flying planes into the city, planes full of coal and food? Shoot down humanitarian aid; following the Geneva Convention was obviously never very high in the list of Stalin’s priorities, but this is a matter of optics. Shoot them down and you are the instigator of the third installment no one wants.
The first plane lifted off on June 28, 1948. The airlift was expected to last three weeks, providing food and fuel to a city of two million people.
Two weeks in. Things are going okay. We meet William H. Turner, the man in charge, a Maj. General who had organized what was perviously the largest airlift. He flies into Berlin in horrific wether; a plane crashes and burns on the runway and due to the tight schedule for flights, others stack up in the sky, including the one with him on it. Things must be better, he decides, standing on the tarmac with men dead and the rain slopping down.
And things do get better. Tonnage is increased from 1,000 to 5,000 per day; they employed locals to deplane cargo (whole planes full of coal offloaded in five minutes).
You have of course heard the stories of the candy bombers, dropping the candy to children; you have not heard the stories of the winter, of extra runways paved in weeks.
To survive winter, an additional 6,000 tons of coal per day would be needed. And the runways would need to be paved to support the impact that the C-57s were putting on them. Huge earth moving machines were disassembled, slotted into the C-82 Packets (the largest cargo planes at the time), and then landing and reassembling them. Just six weeks after groundbreaking, the first plane landed at what would become the Berlin-Tegel airport.
The planes continued. At last, on May 12th, the Soviets relented, tired of the endless buzz and drone of aircraft and probably well aware that Turner would have kept it up forever. They lifted the blockade. Even then allies did not stop, building up enough coal reserves to last three months.
By the time the last set of wheels left the ground, the stats were staggering. One of the pilots flew 404 trips; they had hauled as many tons of goods as residents. Most of that tonnage was coal, shiny and black.
At the height of the Berlin Airlift, they were landing a plane in Berlin every 30 seconds, 24/7.
Why is this important? Why spend so long on something that happened 70 years ago? If you follow me on Instagram, and go full stalker, you will see that on the 28th of June this year I happened to post a picture celebrating the 70th anniversary. Why do I care so much?
Because think of it.
Because think of starting with only a starving city and two millions tons of coal and some almost-decommissioned warplanes and think of a war-weary populace, think of these people with Trinity and Hiroshima and Nagasaki blossoming in their heads, think of these people already sans brothers and sons and fathers, who did not want another war and yet did not want to let these people suffer.
Because it was before Korea and Vietnam; before tearing up other countries in the attempt to halt the spread of ideas we did not agree with. Because just three years earlier these people, these West Berliners had been enemies, had been the people we shot with no remorse and now we were flying our planes to them.
You can beat evil without guns; of course there is a time to pick up swords and fight but there is also a time to seamlessly fly your C-47s and land in Berlin as the rain pours, unload coal on a runway and help the people who quite possibly killed your fathers, and your brothers, and your sons.
And what could Stalin do?
That is the funniest part of all of it, to think of Stalin sitting in Moscow scowling at his plans gone south simply because of negotiated airspace and the tenacity of aviators.
What do we take from the Berlin Airlift?
War is not always the answer; you can beat swords into plowshares and cultivate enough fields to drive the enemies to their knees. It speaks volumes that the Berlin Airlift can be considered the most successful conflict of the Cold War, when it was only a “conflict”. Vietnam, Korea, all ended with standoffs and DMZs and abandoning the embassy and the Berlin Airlift resulted in a partitioned, but thriving city.
And with enough planes and enough men and enough vision and perhaps most importantly, enough faith, you can do anything. For William Turner, nothing proved impossible.
Thirty-nine years later, those same West Berliners stood as Reagan yelled to Gorbachev to tear down the wall; before then it had been Kennedy declaring that we were all Berliners and after that it was the fall of that which had torn the city in two.
But without the Berlin Airlift, there would have been no speeches no wall, and no one to tell the tale.
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Yay! You made it to the end! Let me add this, simply to convince you of my excitement, because you didn’t get to hear me read this entire post in a break-neck voice full of sheer delight:
