Berlin Blockade: Soviet Chokehold and the Great Allied Airlift 1948-1949

By Gerry van Tonder

When the world held its breath It is 25 years since the end of the Cold War, now a generation old. It began over 75 years ago, in 1944long before the last shots of the Second World War had echoed across the wastelands of Eastern Europewith the brutal Greek Civil War. The battle lines are no longer drawn, but they linger on, unwittingly or not, in conflict zones such as Iraq, Somalia and Ukraine. In an era of mass-produced AK-47s and ICBMs, one such flashpoint was Berlin.Allied agreements entered into at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam for the carving up of postwar Berlin now meant nothing to the Soviet conquerors. Their victory had cost millions of Russian lives troops and civilians so the hammer and sickle hoisted atop the Reichstag was more a claim to ownership than success. Moscows agenda was clear and simple: the Western Allies had to leave Berlin. The blockade ensued as the Soviets orchestrated a determined program of harassment, intimidation, flexing of muscle, and Socialist propaganda to force the Allies out. Truman had already used the atomic bomb: Britain and America would not be cowed. Historys largest airborne relief program was introduced to save the beleaguered city. In a war of attrition, diplomatic bluff and backstabbing, and mobilizing of forces, the West braced itself for a third world war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781526708281

Gerry van Tonder

Born in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, historian and author Gerry van Tonder came to Britain in 1999. Specializing in military history, Gerry has authored multiple books on Rhodesia and the co-authored definitive Rhodesia Regiment 1899–1981. Gerry presented a copy to the regiment’s former colonel-in-chief, Her Majesty the Queen.

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INTRODUCTION

‘Sir, I am unable to accept the view that the Berlin airlift is a magnificent expedient. Our position resembles that of a house owner prevented from entering through his front door by a bully, and content to climb in and out by the window. The bully cannot put the matter right by offering to allow the use of the door after the house is handed over to him.’

P. H. Campbell, Exmouth, the Western Morning News, Tuesday 28 September 1948

In his seminal autobiography, Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler leaves the reader in no doubt whatsoever that his two greatest hates in life, and therefore to be seen as obstructive threats to his vision of a Third Reich New Order, were Communism and Semitism. Equally, Hitler viewed the parliamentary system with abject disdain. He would ruthlessly dismantle the Weimar parliament, a viper pit of Jews, Social Democrats and Marxists.

The mantra of the future Fuhrer’s foreign policy dovetailed perfectly with his desire to wipe Jews and communists from the face of the planet. For the Nazi dictator, adequate lebensraum – ‘living room’ – was the inalienable birthright of the German race, and Hitler insisted that ‘Germany must find the courage to gather our people, and their strength, for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present, restricted living-space to new land and soil’.

And there could only be one way to satisfy the imperative that was lebensraum: ‘We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the East. At long last, we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-war period and shift to the soil policy of the future. If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.’

RUSSIA MAY BE HITLER’S BIGGEST PROBLEM

Mysterious Russia may yet present Hitler with his biggest problem. In the isolation of the Kremlin, Joseph Stalin is said to be ‘thinking things over’, wondering if the time has not come for a gesture to the Allies.

If it is true that Sir William Seeds may return shortly to his ambassadorial post in Moscow, events must be taking a new turn. Diplomatic activity has been resumed in London between the Soviet and the British governments, and it is not our policy to drive the Soviet into still closer alliance with Germany, despite our natural abhorrence of Russia’s ruthlessness.

There is no time for amour propre. At the same time, it is necessary to leave the Soviet under no illusion about the danger, indeed, the inevitably, of her being involved in European war if she moves her troops to Bessarabia [historic region in Moldova and the Ukraine] or commits any other acts of aggression. The impression given in the diplomatic reports to many Chancelleries is that Stalin is not disposed to embark on further hazardous enterprises after the shock the Finns gave him and his armies. Soviet aloofness from Germany gives definite encouragement to that belief.

Western Mail, Saturday, 30 March 1940

A contemporary map showing the Red Army enveloping Berlin by the end of April 1945.

Europe, however, was not ready for Hitler. In September 1938, British premier Neville Chamberlain returned home from a meeting with Hitler in Munich, clutching a sheet of paper signed by Herr Hitler guaranteeing ‘peace for our time’. Six months later, Hitler reneged on the agreement.

Meanwhile, Russian head of state, Joseph Stalin, was negotiating for a treaty with Britain and France. The wily Georgian-born communist, his designs on the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, needed Hitler to look the other way while he claimed these territories.

On 23 August 1939, in a move that would be construed farcical had it not been for the tragic outcome, Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, visited Moscow to sign a German–Soviet non-aggression pact with his Soviet equivalent, Vyacheslav Molotov. A week later, Hitler’s armies steamrolled their way into Poland.

Hitler’s unfettered loathing of the Bolsheviks to the east, however, could only be sated with the completion of his Blitzkrieg subjugation of Western Europe. At a meeting with his military chiefs on 31 July 1940, Hitler aired his single-minded desire: ‘Wiping out the very power to exist of Russia. That is the goal!’

In the autumn of 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, thrusting 3,400,000 troops, 1,945 aircraft and 3,000 tanks into the Soviet Union, along a massive front extending from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south.

The mutual hatred between aggressor and defender manifested itself on both sides in the form of a total disregard for the cost in human lives – numbers soared into millions within weeks. Russia’s civilian population suffered death and degradation at the hands of German troops loyally following their Fuhrer’s instruction to regard the Soviet population as subhuman and unfit to live. By the end of 1941, Hitler’s death squads – Einsatzgruppen – had conducted more than sixty pogroms of genocide against Soviet Jews.

Understandably, the exact number of Soviets who lost their lives from 1941 to 1945 is still a subject of debate, but it is reckoned that Stalin’s ‘Great Patriotic War’ to defend Russia claimed the lives of 15 million civilians and 10 million soldiers.

Retribution would be Stalin’s.

The price of Hitler’s transgressions in Russia would be extracted from the German people. Hate propaganda and a burning desire – frequently alcohol-induced – to avenge German atrocities in Russia resulted in the conquering Red Army conducting widespread mass rapes of German girls and women – estimates range up to 2 million.

Some historians argue that Stalin did not order, let alone condone, the violent behaviour of his troops in Germany. The Soviet dictator, however, certainly did not appear to discourage the Red Army’s excesses – his attentions were fixed on claiming the spoils of war as agreed to at various Allied conferences. He would indelibly imprint Socialism on his territorial prizes, including his share of Hitler’s citadel. He was the liberator who rid the world of Nazi fascism, the winner of the race to Berlin.

The signing of the German instrument of surrender in Reims on 7 May 1945, therefore, irked Stalin. His forces had captured Germany as far west as the River Elbe, including the whole of the city of Berlin. In his memoirs, Marshal Zhukov quotes Stalin:

Today, in Reims, Germans signed the preliminary act on an unconditional surrender. The main contribution, however, was done by Soviet people and not by the Allies, therefore the capitulation must be signed in front of the Supreme Command of all countries of the anti-Hitler coalition, and not only in front of the Supreme Command of Allied Forces. Moreover, I disagree that the surrender was not signed in Berlin, which was the centre of Nazi aggression. We agree with the Allies to consider the Reims protocol as preliminary.

The following day, in Berlin, Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel signed and handed to Marshal Zhukov the terms for the surrender of the German military. Moscow was in a different time zone and the day was 9 May, a day that became, and still is, a national victory day celebration in Russia.

In those first uneasy days in May, an East–West rift had already developed between the erstwhile victors. Accusations of reneging on the Potsdam Agreement were levelled at each other by both political and ideological camps. Interpretations of the fundamental clauses of the tripartite agreement became imbedded in the divided Four-Power government and economy of Berlin.

A German media map of Berlin in the late 1930s.

Positions hardened and any thoughts of compromise dissipated. Moscow was adamant that the Soviet Union legitimately won ownership of Berlin, and would therefore not accept a currency and local authority put in place by the Western