The Berlin Airlift: The World's Largest Ever Air Supply Operation

By John Grehan

“Stuffed with great images . . . and perfectly detailed information, superbly illustrating one of the first major international crises of the Cold War.” —Vintage Airfix
 
During the multinational occupation of post-World War II Germany, Stalin decided to make the Allied hold on West Berlin untenable by shutting down all the overland routes used to keep the city supplied. The choice faced by the Allies was a stark one—let Berlin fall, or risk war with the Soviets by breaking the Soviet stranglehold. In a remarkably visionary move, the Allies decided that they could keep Berlin supplied by flying over the Soviet blockade, thus avoiding armed conflict with the USSR.
 
On 26 June 1948, the Berlin Airlift began. Throughout the following thirteen months, more than 266,600 flights were undertaken by the men and aircraft from the US, France, Britain and across the Commonwealth, which delivered in excess of 2,223,000 tons of food, fuel and supplies in the greatest airlift in history.
 
The air-bridge eventually became so effective that more supplies were delivered to Berlin than had previously been shipped overland and Stalin saw that his bid to seize control of the German capital could never succeed. At one minute after midnight on 12 May 1949, the Soviet blockade was lifted, and the Soviet advance into Western Europe was brought to a shuddering halt.
 
“The book is packed full of fascinating photographs detailing the huge variety of aircraft involved in the airlift, each accompanied by detailed explanations and text. The book is a fitting tribute to the aircrew who lost their lives in this incredible operation.” —Army Rumour Service (ARRSE)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526758279

John Grehan

JOHN GREHAN has written, edited or contributed to more than 300 books and magazine articles covering a wide span of military history from the Iron Age to the recent conflict in Afghanistan. John has also appeared on local and national radio and television to advise on military history topics. He was employed as the Assistant Editor of Britain at War Magazine from its inception until 2014. John now devotes his time to writing and editing books.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Curtain of Iron

On 8 May 1945, celebrations reverberated around the towns and cities of the Allied nations. German leaders had capitulated unconditionally and the war in Europe was finally over. There was, however, no claim, as there had been at the end of the First World War, that the second global conflict was the ‘war to end war’, for a new enemy was stirring. The might of the largest country on the planet had been unleashed during the Second World War and its ambition admitted of no limit. The armies of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had pushed deep into Eastern Europe and swallowed up the Baltic states, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Austria and much of Germany, including the territory around Berlin.

As Winston Churchill was to declare less than a year from the end of the war, an ‘iron curtain’ had descended across Europe, separating the Soviet controlled states from those of the democratic west. The heavily-armed forces of the western countries and those of the communist east faced each other across that iron curtain and an uneasy stand-off developed. The Cold War had begun.

The situation of Berlin in all of this was extremely precarious. It had been agreed during the war by the British, United States and Soviet Advisory Commission that after the German capitulation, Berlin would be occupied by all three powers. This was later modified to include the French. This arrangement was confirmed by Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at the renowned Yalta Conference and by the British, Soviet and US leaders with the Potsdam Agreement in August 1945 (by the time of which, Roosevelt had died, and Churchill had been replaced by his political opponent, Clement Attlee). Berlin, though, was 100 miles deep inside the Soviet-controlled parts of the country, and all supplies from the West to the German capital had to pass through what was communist-held territory.

The West Berliners desperately needed those supplies. The city had been laid to waste by British and American bombers and Red Army artillery. By the late spring of 1945, almost nothing remained of its industry and its infrastructure had been blasted into rubble. One-and-a-half-million Berliners were homeless, public transport was virtually at a standstill with just forty buses still serviceable, and there was precious little fuel for any motor vehicle, public or private. Most of the city’s bridges were lying in the rivers and canals they once spanned, few street lights still stood, the telephone system had collapsed, and the Soviets had taken as much of the city’s industrial machinery as they could move as ‘reparations’.

Slowly, as the months passed after the end of the fighting, West Berlin began to recover. A newly-elected city government was installed and began to function effectively, and the utilities were gradually brought back on-line. The naturally industrious Germans, embracing the freedom of the capitalist market, were working hard to develop new businesses out of the ruins of the old.

The necessary supplies came in the form of food from the agricultural regions of Lower Saxony, whilst the coal to power its burgeoning industry came from mines in the US-occupied areas. Electricity, however, came predominantly from Soviet-controlled areas. Many of the raw materials needed in West Berlin came from the East, and many of its finished goods travelled in the opposite direction.

Total imports to the 2,100,000 West Berliners amounted to 13,500 tons per day, reaching the German capital by road, rail, air and water – all of which depended on Soviet cooperation, as there had never been any formal arrangement permitting the Western Powers to use the roads, bridges, tunnels or canals in the Soviet Zone – and in the early days of 1948 that goodwill began to evaporate rapidly.

Stalin had long wished to drive the Western Powers out of Berlin as a prelude to taking control of all of Germany. Britain and America (and later France), by contrast, sought to establish a democratic state of West Germany by amalgamating their sectors to form a single entity. To help the Western Germans achieve this, the Allies cancelled a large portion of Germany’s war debt to enable its economy to develop and thrive. This was potentially disastrous to Stalin’s plans. It was one thing for him to amalgamate one part of Germany with another, but it was quite another matter for him to invade a sovereign West German state. The Soviet leader saw that he had to act to stop the Allied plan.

At a meeting of the Allied Control Council of the Soviet, American, British and French governments in March 1948, which had been set up as early as 1944 to control occupied Germany, the Soviet representative, Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky, the head of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, walked out, never to return. As the council could only work if agreement was met by all four parties, the absence of Marshal Sokolovsky meant the end of cooperation between East and West. A crisis point had been reached. No one knew what would happen next.

Five days after Marshal Sokolovsky’s abrupt departure, the Soviet authorities announced on 25 March 1948, that from 1 April restrictions would be imposed on all military and civilian passenger traffic between the American, British and French occupation zones and Berlin. Along with these measures, it was declared that no goods could leave Berlin by train without the permission of the Soviet commander.

The Allies’ first concern was with supplying their own forces in Berlin, so the following day, 2 April, the US commander, General Lucius D. Clay, ordered all military supplies to be transported by air. The pugnacious Clay wanted to take the Soviets on by driving a powerfully-armed Anglo-American convoy through Soviet territory to break the blockade, but his junior officers managed to persuade him that such a move might not end well. ‘The Russians could stop an armed convoy without opening fire on it,’ argued General Omar Bradley. ‘Roads could be closed for repair or a bridge could go up just ahead of you and then another bridge behind and you’d be in a hell of a fix.’¹

The Soviet action was clearly a case of testing the water to gauge the Allied response and the land blockade was relaxed on 10 May, though the Soviets continued to demonstrate their capability of resuming the blockade at any time they chose by intermittently interrupting road and rail traffic. They also adopted underhand tactics to render inter-zonal movement a hazardous undertaking. Russian soldiers dressed as civilians would rob passengers arriving at train stations. There were also frequent instances where Red Army troops, not bothering to disguise their uniforms, would hold up buses and remove anything they pleased from the passengers.

This difficult and uncertain period lasted throughout the rest of May and into June. But the three Western Powers had been warned by the Soviet action and feared a resumption of the land blockade. General Clay, consequently, ordered the Berlin garrison to continue to be supplied by air. Using civilian cargo aircraft, the US flew twenty flights a day into Berlin, building up stocks of all kinds in expectations of further trouble from the Soviets.

As per an arrangement with the Soviets, there were three air routes into Berlin. The northern corridor led from Hamburg, the central one from Hanover, both of which were in the British Zone. The southern, and the longest of the air corridors, was from Frankfurt in the American Zone. Though each of these were twenty miles apart, they funnelled into two airfields in West Berlin – one was Tempelhof, Berlin’s main airport, which was in the American sector, the other was the former Luftwaffe training college on the south-western edge of Berlin at Gatow, which was in the British sector and was some fifteen miles from the city centre.

The three air corridors used in the Airlift had long been agreed with the Soviet authorities for flying between the Western zones and Berlin. The Airlift itself started from Wunstorf, Wiesbaden and Rhein-Main (Frankfurt) airfields, with Gatow and Tempelhof being the destinations. New British dispatching centres were quickly opened, and a new airfield constructed at Tegel. The British part of the operation was controlled from Bückeburg, where the headquarters of No.46 Group of RAF Transport Command was established near that of the British Air Forces of Occupation (which subsequently moved to Lüneburg). When the Combined Air Lift Task Force was formed in October 1948, Wiesbaden became the headquarters of the USAF General commanding it, as well as of the American part of the Airlift.

The southern, and the longest of the air corridors, was from Frankfurt in the American Zone. Though each of these were twenty miles apart, they funnelled into two airfields in West Berlin – one was Tempelhof, Berlin’s main airport, which was in the American sector, the other was the former Luftwaffe training college on the south-western edge of Berlin at Gatow, which was in the British sector and was some fifteen miles from the city centre

These routes were, of course, known to the Soviet air force and its fighters frequently ‘buzzed’ the British and American planes. It was perhaps inevitable that such a confrontational stance would end badly – and that is exactly what happened on 5 April 1948.

That afternoon a Vickers 610 Viking 1B, with the registration G-AIVP, was on its approach to Gatow at the end of a scheduled flight from London via Hamburg. The British European Airways flight was in Gatow’s safety area, levelling off to land, when a Soviet Yak-3 approached from behind at about 14.30 hours.

Witnesses on the ground described seeing the passenger aircraft complete a left-hand turn prior to its final approach, at which point the Russian fighter dived beneath it, climbed sharply, and clipped the port wing of the airliner with its starboard wing. The Viking’s wing was torn off – as was the Yak’s.

The Viking slammed into the ground at Hahneberg, some two-and-a-half miles north of Gatow and inside the Soviet Zone. Also unable to recover, the Yak-3 crashed beside a farmhouse on Heerstrasse, just inside the British sector. All fourteen people in the Viking – four crew and ten passengers – were killed, as was the Russian pilot.

The following day it was reported that ‘General Sir Brian Robertson, the Military Governor, saw Marshal Sokolovsky to protest against the incident. To mark his sense of the importance of the occasion, and also as a token of his sorrow, Marshal Sokolovsky sent an escort from Karlsborst to Lancaster House to accompany General Robertson to Babelsberg.

‘General Robertson … told Marshal Sokolovsky that he had no wish to pre-judge the facts of what had happened – certainly not before the inquiry which obviously must be made. All he sought was assurances from the Soviet military authorities. Marshal Sokolovsky replied that he regretted as much as he (General Robertson) did the catastrophe which had caused the death of the victims. He assured General Robertson that there was no intention to interfere with any aircraft using the corridor in accordance with our mutual agreement, and he added, nor is this intended. In the light of this assurance General Robertson has cancelled orders he had issued in the afternoon for the provision of fighter protection for British transport.’²

Allied investigators later concluded that the ‘collision was caused by the action of the Yak fighter, which was in disregard of the accepted rules of flying and, in particular, of the quadripartite flying rules to which Soviet authorities were parties’. Though it was undoubtedly an accident, what has come to be referred to as the Gatow Air Disaster undoubtedly led to