Berlin children play “airlift”
There was another danger as well. Irritated by the airlift’s successes, the Russians were starting to send signals that they might not continue to tolerate this Allied experiment. Soviet planes began staging mock air battles over Berlin, while ground batteries practiced antiaircraft drills in the northern corridor. Red fighters buzzed Allied cargo and passenger planes. In one instance, a Soviet fighter even caused a British transport plane to crash. If these sorties escalated from harassment to actual shooting, the airlift might lead to war after all. As it turned out, however, the Soviet interference, while very dangerous and provocative, did not become more extensive; indeed, it abated somewhat with the onset of winter. As so often in the past, the Russians seemed to be counting on nasty weather to come to their aid.
The Western Allies confronted the approach of winter with a new display of commitment to Berlin. On October 22 President Truman authorized the dispatch of sixty-six more C-54s to Germany, raising the total to 225. In November, the new airport at Tegel became operational, greatly increasing the city’s receiving capacity. Meanwhile, advanced radar and improved cockpit instrumentation were making it possible for planes to fly “when birds walked,” as the pilots put it. After returning from a trip to Washington, Clay announced: “The airlift will be continued until the blockade is ended.”
While the strength of the Western commitment, both material and moral, should not be doubted, the subsequent months turned out to be not quite the white-knuckle experience that everyone had feared. The primary reason is that old General Winter sided this time with Russia’s adversaries. January 1949 was a meteorological miracle, with clear skies and no hard frost. During that month the airlift managed an amazing 5,560 tons a day. With relatively mild conditions continuing through March, and daily deliveries sometimes exceeding 6,000 tons, many Berliners in the western sectors found themselves actually gaining weight.
At the peak of the Berlin Airlift, in spring 1949, planes were landing every ninety seconds and turning around within six minutes. Many of the planes did not return empty, but “backlifted” goods or ferried out passengers, mainly sick children. It should be noted, however, that the airlift, even with such impressive statistics, never delivered all the imports the West Berliners needed. Much of that continued to come through legal East-West trade or through black markets in the eastern sector, which were condoned and even encouraged by the Soviets. The airlift alone might have been able to provide food and fuel for the western-sector population, but it could never have done all that and sustained the area’s industry, which was heavily dependent on eastern markets and raw materials.
Berliners themselves contributed significantly to the operations of the airlift. Residents of the western zones helped unload planes, worked as ground mechanics, and drove the trucks that distributed food and coal. Young women kept the ground crews supplied with hot coffee as they worked. Perhaps most importantly, Berliners maintained morale by regularly displaying their famous Schnauze (irreverent wit). “Aren’t we lucky,” they joked. “Just think what it would be like if the Americans were running the blockade and the Russians the airlift.” A radio program called Die Insulaner (The Islanders), beamed by RIAS, featured easily identifiable Berlin types offering a running commentary on life in the beleaguered city. Older Berliners still remember the Insulaner theme song, with its description of aircraft noise as “music to the ear” and its longing for the day “when the lights are on and the trains are moving.”
All of which is not to say that there was no self-pity or resentment, even toward the Western Allies. Some Berliners claimed that their city would not have fallen into such a fix if the West had not “given” a third of Germany to the Soviets. Others complained about having to pay high prices for dehydrated foods that they didn’t like anyway. Yet on the whole, the Berliners were deeply appreciative of the effort being made on their behalf, and they relished the chance to work side by side with the Western powers against the Russians. Perhaps most of all, they delighted in the breathtakingly rapid transformation of their city from “lair of the fascist beast” to the Western world’s favorite new symbol of pluck, determination, and hunger for freedom.
The struggle to keep Berlin free received some support from western Germany, including the revenues from a special two-pfennig “Emergency Berlin” stamp and a “Berlin tax” imposed by the new German Economic Council in Frankfurt. Hamburg sent medical supplies, Westphalia candles, and Schleswig-Holstein tree seedlings. But the support was tempered by concern that isolated West Berlin would became a burden on the new West German state. Thus Ludwig Erhard, then an economic administrator in the Bizone, tried to dissuade the Western powers from introducing the Deutsche mark in Berlin, fearing this might weaken the currency, while Ernst Hilpert, a finance expert from Hesse, argued that the Germans should not become too involved in the airlift since this was “a political action of the Americans against the Russians.” The Berlin tax, moreover, occasioned howls of protest across the western zones. Exasperated by these signs of ambivalence and even hostility toward the embattled German capital, General Clay asked Max Brauer, the mayor of Hamburg, if he and his colleagues really wanted the Western Allies to stay in Berlin after all.
Western German reservations about Berlin notwithstanding, by spring 1949 the Allied airlift had become so successful that it seemed capable of going on forever. The preparations for a West German state were also proceeding apace, with the drafting of a Basic Law, or constitution, in May. Another epochal creation, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), was formalized in April. Short of going to war, there was little that the Soviets could do to impede these developments. They had blockaded Berlin partly to strengthen their hand in the tough poker contest over Germany that they were playing with their former partners; now they were dealing themselves out of the game.
“Hurrah, we’re still alive!” proclaims this sign on the first bus to resume the interzonal route between West Berlin and Hanover following the lifting of the Berlin Blockade, May 12, 1949
The Western powers, moreover, were putting pressure on the Russians through a painful counterblockade of their own. They blocked shipments of crucial raw materials and manufactured goods from the western zones to the east. In addition to hard coal from the Ruhr, they prevented the Soviet zone from receiving key items like electrical motors, diamond drills, and optical equipment. The losses were all the more grievous because the economy in the Russian zone was in terrible shape due to the earlier pillaging and ongoing mismanagement by Sowjetische Aktiengesellschaften—Soviet-controlled companies known by their apt acronym, SAGS.