BERLIN
AIRLIFT
Thousands
of tiny parachutes bloomed in the Berlin night sky in December,
1948. They did not herald an invasion, or another one of the incendiary
bombing raids that had ravaged the city during World War II. They
were, instead, part of "Operation Santa Claus." Each little chute
held a doll or a toy or a piece of candy, floating down to Berlin
children waiting eagerly below on hills of rubble.
Operation
Santa Claus was the brainchild of one Lt. Carl S. Halverson, U.S.
Air Force. Halverson was one of fliers keeping the city alive
during the Berlin Airlift, and on his constant flights in and
out of Tempelhof airfield he had begun parachuting down little
bags of candy. Like all the later toys and treats dropped by his
companions, they were paid for completely out of his own pocket.
The
charming story was a sideshow to a larger drama of international
generosity-and determination. Outthought and outmaneuvered by
America's strategic planners throughout the past year, Stalin
had decided to cut Western access to Berlin on June 24, 1948.
In the preceding months, the United States, Britain, France had
launched the Marshall Plan in Western Europe, condemned his coup
in Czechoslovakia, and rejected his plan for a Germany reunified
on Soviet terms. Western Europe-including a West Germany with
a new constitution and a new currency-was being reinvigorated
as a bulwark against Soviet expanisonism, while the U.S.S.R. controlled
only the devastated East.
Stalin
decided that attention had to be paid. Soviet troops stopped all
rail and auto traffic on the slender corridor from West Berlin
to West Germany proper. The U.S. and its allies would have to
either give up their foothold in Prussia, or beg the Soviets for
new negotiations.
General
Lucius Clay, military governor of West Germany, wanted to challenge
the blockade with a military convoy, certain that the Russians
were bluffing. President Harry Truman decided that the Allies
would neither challenge it, nor negotiate, nor surrender. Instead,
he ordered an airlift. West Berlin would be supplied by the air,
through Tempelhof and the British sector's Gatow fields. It would
be up to the Soviets to escalate things further by cutting off
air traffic.
Instead,
the Soviets mostly sneered. West Berlin at the time contained
2.5 million people-more than in any American city but New York
and Chicago. Even with all industry shut down and no heat, supplying
West Berlin with enough materiel to keep its people fed and its
lights on would require 4,000 tons a day. That meant the takeoff
or landing of a C-47 cargo plane every three-minutes-and-thirty-six
seconds, 24 hours a day. That also meant planes dangerously overloaded,
at ten tons a flight; pilots dangerously overburdened with fatigue.
Through
July of 1948, the airlift seemed to be a failure. It was averaging
only 1,147 tons a day. Nonetheless, the Allies persisted. British,
Canadian, and French fliers joined the effort. American pilots
practiced the narrow run along Berlin's air corridor along a mocked-up
route in Montana. There they practiced blindfolded, flying four-engine
transports by radar, in all kinds of weather conditions.
The
lack of sleep, and the constant traffic, took its toll. Some 55
Allied pilots died, including 28 Americans. Crews washing fuselages
free of coal dust developed skin diseases usually limited to miners.
Yet
the lift began to work. The U.S. brought in bigger, C-54 planes
before the summer was out, 224 of them in all. The Berliners themselves
helped, 20,000 of them, men and women, volunteering for some measure
of redemption by laying down a third airfield in the French zone.
When the Soviets refused to remove a blocking radio tower, a French
demolition team simply blew it up.
The
cargo total soared, to 4,500 tons a day by December, 1948; 5,500
by February, 1949. By early spring the figures were up to 8,050
tons a day, and the record for a single 24-hour span reached 13,000
tons. Far from being beaten, Berlin was rapidly becoming one of
the most prosperous cities in a Europe still recovering from the
war.
On
May 12, 1949, the Soviets acknowledged the futility of the blockade
by ending it. By that time the Allies had made 277,264 flights
into the besieged city, carrying 2,343,315 tons of supplies—or
almost one ton for every man, woman, and child in Berlin.
American
Greats Edited by Robert A. Wilson & Stanley Marcus
Public Affairs Press, a member of the Perseus Group
