The Berlin Airlift

The Relief Operation that Defined the Cold War

Barry Turner

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781785782558
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Acclaimed historian Barry Turner presents a new history of
the Cold War's defining episode.Berlin, 1948 – a divided city in a divided country in a
divided Europe. The ruined German capital lay 120 miles inside
Soviet-controlled eastern Germany. Stalin wanted the Allies out; the Allies
were determined to stay, but had only three narrow air corridors linking the
city to the West. Stalin was confident he could crush Berlin's resolve by
cutting off food and fuel.In the USA, despite some voices still urging 'America
first', it was believed that a rebuilt Germany was the best insurance against
the spread of communism across Europe.And so over eleven months from June 1948 to May 1949,
British and American aircraft carried out the most ambitious airborne relief
operation ever mounted, flying over 2 million tons of supplies on almost
300, 000 flights to save a beleaguered Berlin.With new material from American, British and German archives
and original interviews with veterans, Turner paints a fresh, vivid picture the
airlift, whose repercussions – the role of the USA as global leader, German
ascendancy, Russian threat – we are still living with today.

CHAPTER ONE

For Pilot Officer John Curtiss, it was his second flight to Berlin. The first, in January 1945, had been a mission of destruction. As a Bomber Command navigator he had guided his Halifax through the waving crisscross of blinding searchlights to that night’s target, an oil refinery on the edge of the city. He had heard the order for the bomb doors to be opened, seen the orange flashes far below and tried not to think of the devastation and sacrifice. Now, in July 1948, just three years after the end of the war, John Curtiss was flying not over but into Berlin and his aircraft was carrying not bombs but food and fuel for a city under siege. He was just one of thousands of American and British servicemen taking part in the Berlin Airlift, the most ambitious relief operation of its kind ever mounted.

Over eleven months, from June 1948 to May 1949, 2.3 million tons of supplies were shifted on 277,500 flights. Average daily deliveries included 4,000 tons of coal, a bulk cargo never before associated with air carriers. A record day had nearly 1,400 aircraft, close on one a minute, landing and taking off in West Berlin, creating a traffic controller’s nightmare at a time when computer technology was still in its infancy. But just about every statistic of the Airlift broke a record of some sort. For those who took part, the sense of achieving something remarkable was to stay with them for the rest of their lives.

John Higgins was an eighteen-year-old dispatch rider when the Airlift was mounted.

Of my 22 years of service – I was in Cyprus, Kenya and other trouble spots – it was Berlin where I grew up. In eighteen months I changed from a young English hooligan. For the first time I saw the world as a decent human being should see the world.

Fifty years on, John took part in an anniversary veterans’ march in Berlin.

All the schoolchildren were giving us flowers. Then we went up the steps to take our seats and there was an old lady with tears running down her face, just saying ‘Danke, danke’. I gave her my flower. And I couldn’t talk.

John Curtiss, by then a retired air vice marshal, was also at the veterans’ reunion. He was approached by a middle-aged man who was eager to show his gratitude. ‘If it wasn’t for you and those like you, I wouldn’t be here. My parents swore that if the communists took over, they would never have children.’

*

Berlin was a divided city in a divided country in a divided continent. It was not supposed to be like that. Victory over Germany promised a fresh start, a concerted Allied effort to secure a lasting peace in Europe. But it was soon clear that the much-vaunted unity of America, Britain and Russia was based on little more than a joint interest in defeating Nazism. Once the enemy was vanquished, the thin veneer of military and political camaraderie peeled away.

For the more sceptical or more clear-sighted observers, the fragility of the alliance was apparent even while the war was raging. An inter-Allied dialogue on post-war Germany started in mid-1943 when the defeat of the Third Reich, though some time in the hazy future, was judged to be inevitable. In October, a deceptively constructive meeting of Allied foreign ministers in Moscow (Cordell Hull for the United States, Anthony Eden for Britain and Vyacheslav Molotov for the Soviet Union) led to the creation of a three-power European Advisory Commission (EAC) to be based in London. America and Russia were represented on the Commission by their respective ambassadors, John Winant and Fedor Gusev, while the British case was put by Sir William Strang, a long-time government adviser on international affairs.

Their brief was prescribed by decisions already made at top level. That Germany should submit to ‘unconditional surrender’, affirmed by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill in January 1943 at their Casablanca conference and subsequently endorsed by Joseph Stalin, was justified as a means of forestalling any inclination, east or west, to negotiate a separate peace. The absence of any flexibility in bringing the war to an end carried with it the message that a defeated Germany would have no say in managing its internal affairs. Unconditional surrender equated with the surrender of sovereignty. It would be up to the Allies to tell the Germans how to run their lives.

But this was to assume that the Big Three could agree on what they wanted for Germany. At no point was this seriously in prospect. The best that the EAC could come up with was a formula for partitioning of Germany into occupation zones under military government with no conditions on the length or terms of occupation. Matters of joint interest were to be settled by an Allied Control Council comprising the commanders-in-chief with their deputies. Berlin was to have its own Interallied Governing Authority (Kommandatura).

These arrangements, so neat and tidy on paper, came with a list of open-ended questions, not least the fixing of the lines of demarcation for the occupation and access to Berlin, which was likely to be in the Soviet zone. The assumption by the western Allies was of free and open transit to the German capital. But the Russians refused to be tied down. Strang noted a disturbing tendency for his EAC Soviet counterpart, ‘a grim and rather wooden person’1 to haggle over insignificant details. In putting this down to bloody-mindedness he failed to recognise the Soviet tactic of playing for time while the advancing Red Army tightened its grip on the territories it occupied.

With his innate distrust of communism in general and of Stalin in particular, Churchill had a clearer idea of what was going on. But priding himself as a realist, he acknowledged Stalin’s obsession with security, his own and that of his country. The Soviet leader’s resolve to surround Russia with states directly controlled by or submissive to the Kremlin was on a par with his need to be surrounded by underlings of unquestionable loyalty. Given Russia’s sacrifice in defeating Nazism, with close on 9 million military and 17 million civilian deaths, Stalin expected more than a share of Germany and was in prime position to get it. Hence Churchill’s infamous ‘percentages’ offer to Stalin exchanging Russian control of Rumania and Bulgaria for British ascendancy in Greece, leaving Hungary and Yugoslavia to be split evenly.

This did not go down well in Washington where President Roosevelt, ‘my very good friend’ as Churchill liked to call him, was of another school of diplomacy. Having served his political apprenticeship in the Great War, he was imbued with the idealism of Woodrow Wilson. The failure of the League of Nations, Wilson’s brainchild, only made Roosevelt more determined to create a new world order based on mutual trust. This was far distant from Churchill’s credo, practical or cynical according to taste, that the only way to keep the peace was to engineer a balance of power between leading nations, enabling each to satisfy its territorial ambitions without any one country becoming strong enough to overwhelm the others.

The cracks in the western alliance began to show at the Big Three conference held at Yalta on the Black Sea in February 1945. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill was at their combative best. The president, an invalid for much of his political career, was in terminal decline, capable, it was said, of little more than ‘talking situations through to a superficial conclusion’. Churchill was in better shape but after an arduous journey, he too was often compelled to rest. Stalin alone was buoyant, taking pleasure in the certainty that the Red Army was bulldozing German forces in the east.

Three weeks after launching their winter offensive, Russian spearheads were 300 miles west of their starting point. The Germans had been swept from Poland, except for the neck of the corridor leading to Danzig. There was no prospect of a German counter-offensive. By the end of January, the great industrial region of Silesia, with its tank and aircraft factories little touched by Allied bombing, was in Russian hands. But all this paled against a single, awe-inspiring reality: that from the bridgehead on the Oder river near Kuestrin, Berlin was little more than 60 miles away.

Meanwhile, to the embarrassment of the western commanders, the deep defences of the Siegfried Line were still intact while the Rhine, the prime objective of the D-Day invasion, was no closer to Allied forces than Berlin from the Russians. With Stalin already wielding power over large parts of eastern Europe there was little that Roosevelt and Churchill could say or do to dent his resolve.

The chief bone of contention was Poland. Britain was pledged to secure independence and free elections for Poland; it was, after all, to defend Polish liberty that Britain had gone to war in the first place. But Russia too had legitimate or, at least, irresistible claims to be part of any Polish settlement. Never again must that country’s wide open spaces tempt an invader. Stalin wanted the Russian frontier to be moved further to the west, while compensating Poland for loss of territory by allowing it to encroach on Germany. Stalin also demanded a government in Warsaw sensitive to Moscow’s wishes. This had no support at all in London where there was a Polish government-in-waiting. Churchill protested vigorously but had no choice but to accept Stalin’s handpicked nominees as the core of the new regime. The Soviet leader promised ‘free and unfettered elections’ at a still to be determined date. Churchill was not taken in but Roosevelt chose to be accommodating.

In late March 1945, fifteen Polish resistance leaders, who might reasonably have expected to be part of the new administration, were arrested and taken to Moscow where they were forced to confess to fabricated charges, including Poland’s participation in a British-organised anti-Soviet bloc. A reconstructed government had communists holding all important offices including justice and security. Wounded feelings in Washington that Stalin could act so blatantly against the spirit of Yalta were aggravated by news that a puppet government had been set up in Soviet-occupied Rumania.

Still confident that Stalin was ‘gettable’, Roosevelt looked to the newly created United Nations to provide the framework for the two superpowers, plus Britain, China and, more problematically, France, to sort out their problems and those of the rest of the world in an atmosphere of mutual regard. But even Roosevelt must have taken a deep breath when at Yalta he put his name to the Declaration on Liberated Europe, a commitment by the Big Three to help freed nations ‘to destroy the last vestiges of Nazism and Fascism and to create democratic conditions of their own choice’. The president lived just long enough to recognise the depth of cynicism measured by these words. For the rest, Russia joined the war against Japan in return for territorial and other concessions that, for the time being, were kept under wraps.

On the vexed question of reparations, the general principles were laid down that removals were to take place from the national wealth of Germany within two years of the end of the war so as to destroy its military potential; that there should be annual deliveries of goods from Germany ‘for a period to be fixed’; and that German labour should be used in the reconstruction of war-devastated lands. A detailed plan was to be drawn up by a three-power Allied Reparations Commission sitting in Moscow. In the teeth of British resistance, Stalin secured a basis for reparations of a total sum of $20 billion with 50 per cent going to the USSR. Was this a definite commitment? Russia later said it was. Britain and America denied it.

Churchill had his successes. Without too much trouble he saw off Roosevelt’s renewed attempt to incorporate the British Empire into the 1941 Atlantic Charter, a high-flown document promising global cooperation and freedom from political repression. It had taken some time for him to realise that when Roosevelt talked of nations having the right to choose their own government, he was including countries under British rule. There was a sharp reaction when Washington mooted the desirability of handing Hong Kong back to the Chinese. At Yalta, Churchill was able to take strength from Stalin’s interpretation of the Atlantic Charter that did not preclude Stalin’s own territorial demands. The breathtaking effrontery of Stalin speaking in support of an American proposal that all British dependent territories be placed under international trusteeship provoked Churchill to righteous indignation.

Churchill was on a hiding to nothing in standing up for French demands. As the leader of Free France and head of the Provisional Government, General Charles de Gaulle had expected to use Yalta as a platform for national rehabilitation. But neither Roosevelt nor Stalin was ready for that. Both were dismissive of French claims to big power status and Roosevelt had a strong antipathy to de Gaulle as a devious and ungrateful ally. Churchill too was liable to lose patience with the assertive French leader (‘Really, France has enough to do this winter and spring in trying to keep body and soul together, and cannot masquerade as a Great Power for the purpose of war’), but stood by his belief in a European future where a strong France balanced a German revival. Attracted to any idea that reduced the pressure on America to take care of postwar Europe, Roosevelt agreed to France having its own German occupation zone and to it becoming the fourth member of the Allied Control Council for Germany. Stalin reluctantly went along on condition that the French zone was carved out of territory designated for Britain and America.

*

As for Berlin, the Big Three approved a broad plan for putting the city under joint administration. By early 1945, the western Allies had accelerated their advance to a point where it was uncertain who would get to Berlin first. It was a prize dear to the heart of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Following the Rhine crossing, he assumed that his 21st Army Group would lead the race to Berlin. But as supreme commander of western Allied forces, General Dwight Eisenhower was acutely sensitive to the rivalry between American and British commanders. Anticipating repercussions in Washington, not to mention threats of resignation from senior of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations and maps
• Maps
• Epigraph
• CHAPTER ONE
• CHAPTER TWO
• CHAPTER THREE
• CHAPTER FOUR
• CHAPTER FIVE
• CHAPTER SIX
• CHAPTER SEVEN
• CHAPTER EIGHT
• CHAPTER NINE
• CHAPTER TEN
• CHAPTER ELEVEN
• CHAPTER TWELVE
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN
• POSTSCRIPT
• THE FINAL TALLY
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Plates
• About the Author
• Copyright