Miracle in Berlin

By David Von Drehle
Washington Post deputy opinion editor and columnist 

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989 marked an epoch in world history. It signaled the end of the Cold War and a victory of free societies over totalitarianism. But that day would never have come without the resolute decision of Harry S. Truman to save an outpost of freedom in Berlin four decades earlier. And Truman’s decision would not have been possible without the strength of the U.S. aircraft industry to deliver on his promise. This partnership produced a transformative event in aviation history, when, against all odds, a major city was entirely supplied by air for more than a year. 

This inspiring story of the Berlin Airlift begins with the Allied victory over Germany in World War II. The conquered nation was divided into four occupied zones. Berlin, the former capital, was also divided, though it lay deep in the heart of the Soviet-occupied zone, linked to the West only by narrow corridors. And without the common Nazi enemy to unite the former Allies, tensions rose quickly between the Soviet Union and the West.

President Truman realized that only the United States had sufficient strength in the wake of that catastrophic war to face down communist expansion in Europe and Asia. And so, despite war weariness at home, Truman pledged to defend free peoples around the world. No single flashpoint in this confrontation was more dangerous than Berlin, that island of Western influence inside Soviet-occupied Eastern Germany.

In 1947 and 1948, the Truman administration moved to reunite the Western-occupied zones and rebuild the shattered German economy through the Marshall Plan. Soviet leader Josef Stalin retaliated. In June of 1948, the Soviets cut the corridors of supply—the highways, railroads and canals—connecting free Berlin with the West. He intended to push the Western powers out of Berlin by starving the city’s residents and thus demonstrating the weakness of the American will.

For the Soviets, domination of Berlin was the necessary next step to domination of Europe.

As Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov explained, “What happens to Berlin, happens to Germany; what happens to Germany, happens to Europe.” With more than 250,000 war-hardened troops deployed in the region, Soviet forces greatly outnumbered Western garrisons. But the U.S. Commander in occupied Germany, Gen. Lucius D. Clay, agreed with Molotov as to the stakes involved. “If we mean that we are to hold Europe against communism, we must not budge,” Clay said. “I believe the future of democracy requires us to stay here until forced out.”

Many feared a misstep that would lead to American humiliation, or even nuclear war. The next step came down to Truman, as so many difficult decisions did. He was in the midst of an election campaign everyone expected him to lose. Only weeks earlier, he had issued executive orders desegregating the military and the federal workforce, steps that sparked a revolt by his Democratic base in the South. His recent decision to recognize the State of Israel had driven a wedge through his State Department. Now he was faced with the risk of failure—or another war—for the sake of the same German people that had been killing Americans three short years earlier.

The sign on his desk said it all: “The Buck Stops Here.” In his plainspoken way, Truman seconded Gen. Clay. “We are going to stay—period,” he declared.

But how? The only remaining supply lines, protected by a tenuous treaty, were the air routes over Soviet-occupied territory into two small airfields in Western Berlin. Logistics officers quickly calculated that, with severe rationing of food and coal, the roughly 2 million free people of Berlin could survive on 3,500 tons of supplies per day. However, the maximum airlift capacity of the newly formed U.S. Air Force in Europe was perhaps 300 tons per day. Even with support from the British Royal Air Force, the Americans could muster less than one-tenth of the needed capacity.

Or so it seemed on paper, and so it seemed to the Soviet leadership.

What followed over the next year was, in many ways, the birth of modern aviation.

World War II had proved, in the rubble of Europe and Asia, what aircraft could do in wartime. But the Berlin Airlift proved the much greater promise of aviation for peacetime, and for the protection and preservation of peace.

The backbone of the Airlift proved to be a pair of workhorse transports built by the Douglas Aircraft Company. Its founder, Donald Wills Douglas Sr., was the first person to graduate from MIT with an aeronautical engineering degree, having kindled a passion for flight as a boy. Douglas persuaded his mother to take him to witness the first manned flight trials of the U.S. Army at Fort Myer, Virginia, in 1908. Within about 15 years, Douglas was providing the airplanes and planning skills for the Army’s pioneering circumnavigation of the globe by air. He was an evangelist for commercial air travel and in the 1930s produced the DC-3, a sturdy taildragger that would introduce people to the experience of flight in every corner of the world.

When war came, the same aircraft—stripped of passenger comforts and modified for freight—became the tireless transport known as the C-47. (In the RAF, the same plane was called the Douglas Dakota.) Regardless of the name, with Berlin shut off, the Western partners marshaled every available version of the plane to begin ferrying supplies to the trapped Berliners. And weather permitting, each day’s lift grew a little stronger.

Fortunately, weather was one thing the Soviets miscalculated.

Had they cut the supply lines in late autumn or early winter, they might have frozen the Berliners into submission before the U.S. could scale up deliveries. By striking in early summer, they gave the West enough time to increase capacity by an astonishing 1,000 percent, and more. That scale was made possible by the second workhorse of the Airlift: the larger Douglas cargo plane called the C-54. Its maximum load was three times that of the C-47, and it boasted superior configuration for loading and unloading.

Developed in the late 1930s as the DC-4, Douglas Aircraft’s next step in passenger flight, when war came it was dubbed “Skymaster” and quickly pressed into military service. In an example of the American industrial muscle that tipped the scales of World War II, Douglas factories churned out more than 1,200 Skymaster transport planes between 1942 and 1945. One of them even served as the first presidential aircraft.

Sturdy C-54s (and their Naval counterparts) logged a million miles per month over the North Atlantic at the height of the war, hauling the materiel that doomed Hitler. By 1948, however, much of the fleet had been converted for commercial use, and the rest was dispersed around the world.

Upon Truman’s promise to save Berlin, emergency orders went out to far-flung airfields for as many C-54s as possible, along with crews to fly them. Soon the 4-engine propeller craft were converging on Germany by the dozen.

At the same time, Maj. Gen. William Tunner took charge of the airlift. The veteran commander of the famous Himalayan “Hump” missions to supply Chinese fighters against Imperial Japan, Tunner was the most experienced member of the American armed forces in difficult airlift logistics.

On his first flight to Berlin, bad weather stirred a nightmare at the Templehof airfield. One C-47 crashed in low visibility. The next plane down blew out its tires avoiding the wreck. Within minutes, aircraft were stacked up over the field, circling blindly, until Tunner issued an order: every plane would return to home base. From that point on, each flight in the airlift would get one shot only at making a landing before returning to refuel and rejoin the line. Tunner saw clearly that this rule would make for the safest and most efficient conveyor belt.

And efficiency was Tunner’s obsession. He ordered crews not to leave their planes while they were being unloaded. Pilots had a way of lingering inside the terminal. Instead, rolling snack bars, operated by attractive young volunteers, carried coffee and sandwiches to the men. This cut time on the ground in half. Tunner’s efficiency obsession carried over to the packing of cargo. Planes could carry more volume if they balanced light commodities, like dehydrated vegetables, with dense commodities like sugar. Similarly, more bread could be shipped if it traveled as flour and yeast and was baked in ovens after arriving in Berlin.

With each flight, the risk of Soviet escalation hung in the air.

Lacking sufficient troops on the ground for deterrence, Truman made the hard decision to deploy B-29 bombers within range of East Berlin, raising the threat of nuclear retaliation.

Though this staved off direct attacks on the Airlift, enemy forces did their best to disrupt the flights and rattle their pilots. Soviet fighter planes harried the transports. Soviet artillery “practiced” firing anti-aircraft rounds into the protected space.

Yet the planes kept coming. As winter approached, Tunner’s flights were landing at 90-second intervals, day and night. The pounding of the heavy planes tore the two available airfields to pieces, but teams of German volunteers raced onto the runways between landings to make frantic repairs. Other volunteers—some 17,000 of them—labored in the French sector to build a third airfield, making up for scarce concrete by harvesting ten million bricks from the rubble of their city. Working tirelessly, they finished the Tegel field ahead of schedule, and with this landing capacity the average daily payload spiked again.

It came not a moment too soon. Winter cold added to demand for supplies, for now the Berliners required tons of coal daily for heat.

But the Airlift kept pace, and the same German people who lived in fear of the sound of engines overhead during the relentless bombing of 1945 now came to love the endless drone of American-made engines. Former mechanics of the Luftwaffe worked loyally alongside U.S. personnel to repair the indomitable Douglas transports. And thousands of children in Berlin learned to look skyward when Lt. Gail Halvorsen’s plane was nearing a landing field. Touched by his meetings with local children, Halvorsen drafted his comrades to donate their candy rations and attach them to tiny homemade parachutes. Tossing these treasures from his plane as he landed, Halvorsen was the first “Candy Bomber”—one of America’s greatest Cold War ambassadors.

When the worst of winter passed and Western Berlin was more firmly tied to the U.S. than ever, the Soviets realized their gambit had failed.

Tunner only stepped on the gas. In honor of Easter 1949, the Berlin Airlift delivered a record 20 million pounds of coal in 24 hours to power new German factories. In the span of a single day, 1,398 airplanes landed at three airfields: an average of one every 63 seconds. “You know,” said Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, “I think we licked them.”

Near the end of the Airlift, a new asset joined the fleet: the Boeing YC-97A Stratofreighter. With cutting-edge engineering for heavy lift, high speed and long range, the C-97 was destined to become a key weapon in the arsenal of the Strategic Air Command, capable of refueling bombers as they patrolled the globe with their deterrent nuclear payloads. The Berlin Airlift was to be its first challenge.

But before the new plane could enter regular service, the Soviets capitulated and reopened the ground corridors. The final accounting for the Berlin Airlift was monumental. In just over a year, U.S. and British crews had flown their planes nine million miles to make 277,569 deliveries totaling 2.3 million tons of supplies. To manage this incredible feat, the groundwork was laid for modern air traffic control systems. Lessons learned in the Airlift would spawn the modern air freight industry.

This triumph of industrial prowess and political courage produced a diplomatic and strategic victory of inestimable importance.

Western Europe was saved for democracy and prosperity, while a tense but stable Cold War took hold in place of an unimaginable third world war.

Berlin would remain a flashpoint—indeed, another Soviet-induced crisis in 1961 would prove the mettle of the young President John F. Kennedy. As before, the West stayed. Period.

The Berlin Airlift is the story of a courageous and decisive leader, Harry S. Truman, and of the strong and resourceful industries that gave him the tools he needed, and of the brave men and women who kept those aircraft loaded and flying in good repair.

 

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