TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century

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<text> <title> (1940s) Berlin Airlift </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1940s Highlights </history> <link 07789> <link 00105><article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Berlin Airlift </hdr> <body> [Surprisingly, the French and Italian governments easily withstood the efforts of the Communists at national paralysis; popular support of both regimes indicated how much Frenchmen and Italians resented Communist opposition to the Marshall Plan. De Gasperi's Christian Democratic Party received its largest plurality before or since in the May 1948 elections. Ominously, the Soviets in the spring of 1948 began to step up pressure on an especially vulnerable spot: Berlin. They started interrupting the flow of food, coal and other goods into the city through Soviet-occupied Germany.] (July 6, 1948) The Russians last week threw practically everything they had against besieged Berlin--everything except five well-equipped Red Army divisions hovering under the chestnuts of Potsdam ten miles away. Never before had a city of three million people, in time of "peace," been summoned to surrender before the threat of starvation, civil war within, or a bigger war without. It seemed clear by last week that, in the Communist Baedeker, Berlin was listed right after Prague. As "economic and administrative sanctions" against the Western powers, the Russians last week stopped all food trains from the Western zones on which Berlin depends for survival; cut the Western sectors' electricity in half (by halting their own contribution to it); blocked all coal shipments for Berlin industries; forbade the city government to distribute any food outside the Soviet sector; cut off all milk supplies from the Soviet zone. They even cut medicine supplies, but yielded under an American threat to withhold penicillin. (July 12, 1948) "The Risk of War." Besieged Berlin was tense and tired. A chilly rain fell. U.S. and British armored cars prowled sluggishly through streets that breathed the smells peculiar to ruins in the rain--smells of wet bricks, damp dust and scorched wood. The crucial battle for Berlin was being fought in the hearts and minds of Berliners--but first & foremost in their bellies. The Russians were attempting to starve into submission 2 1/2 million people in the city's Western sectors. They had been driven to employ a weapon which disgraced them before the civilized world. The Americans and the British were trying to feed the two million Berliners--by air. The G.I.s called it "Operation Vittles." The incessant roar of the planes--that typical and terrible 20th Century sound, a voice of cold mechanized anger--filled every ear in the city. It reverberated in the bizarre stone ears of the hollow, broken houses; it throbbed in the weary ears of Berlin's people who were bitter, afraid, but far from broken; it echoed in the intently listening ear of history. The sound meant one thing: the West was standing its ground and fighting back. At Tempelhof Airport the occasional shiny C-54s and many battered C-47s landed at the daylight rate of one every three minutes. Scores of ten-ton trucks rolled out to meet them. One hundred and fifty G.I.s and German workers labored 24 hours a day to get them unloaded. In the orange and white control tower, 13 G.I.s worked around the clock, surrounded by Coke bottles, cigarette smoke, and the brassy chattering of radios. How had the U.S. got itself into a fix where one general and 4,000 G.I.s were supposed to hole an outpost deep inside a Red sea of Russian power? The story goes back to the era when the U.S. felt that, in dealing with Russian Communists, it might be dealing with friends. In the war, Olympian mists of Teheran and Yalta, the Big Three decided: 1) to split Germany into four zones under an Allied Control Council, rather than run it as a single occupation; 2) similarly to divide the rule of Berlin. In one way, the arrangement worked to the West's advantage--it kept the Russians out of the Ruhr. But it made Berlin into a potential time bomb. It might have been smarter for the U.S. not to have gone to Berlin in the first place, or to have withdrawn two years ago when Berlin had not become a spectacular issue testing the West's firmness. Today those are academic questions, for the U.S. stands committed. The U.S. stake in Berlin is faith. Withdrawal would leave to despair--and to Soviet persecution--tens of thousands of anti-Communists whom the U.S. encouraged to speak their minds against the Reds. It would mean the retreat of an army which, however small, is the symbol of America's commitment to Western European safety. It would give the Russians a chance to rally all Germans around their old capital; that might wreck America's plans for a Western German state and a healthy Ruhr, on which the Marshall Plan depends. Last week's ruthless siege of Berlin was a siege of all of Germany and Europe as well. (July 19, 1948) The Russians were making "Operation Vittles" as difficult as they could. The Russians announced that their aircraft were about to begin instrument flying maneuvers in the area including the air corridor between Berlin and the Western zones. U.S. officers snapped back that the Russians would do so "at their own risk." To date, the U.S. and Britain had carried some 20,000 tons of supplies to Berlin. Last Sunday, the first sunny day in weeks, Berliners forgot about their usual meager pleasures and instead went out to Tempelhof Airport. Sitting amid the ruins surrounding the field, perched on trees and fences, they watched the steady, reassuring stream of planes roaring out of the skies. [The Berlin Airlift was a resounding triumph (and also an enormous Allied expense). The Communists in Berlin's Soviet zone responded with the usual strikes, demonstrations and riots. Finally, realizing the bankruptcy of their policy and the erosion of the already low level of their popular support in the city (they had received 20% of the vote in the 1946 municipal elections), the Communists boycotted the elections set for December 1948, effectively completing the division of the once-great capital. In an exceptionally large turnout (86.2%), the rest of the population elected a socialist mayor, Ernst Reuter. The blockade was not lifted until May 1949.] (May 16, 1949) Sound trucks rolled through the streets, blaring out the news; the city's great ordeal was drawing to an end. Berlin's early skepticism thawed. The people finally realized that a victory had been won. Last week General V.I. Chuikov, Soviet commander in Germany, ordered restoration of "transport, trade and communications services" at 12:01 on Thursday morning of this week. At the same moment, the Western counter-blockade would end. At Helmstedt, main crossing point on the Soviet-British frontier, workmen and soldiers had hurriedly installed radio and telephone equipment, repainted border signs, clipped weeds at the sides of the long unused highway. Berlin's people had been living mainly on the airlift's dehydrated potatoes, powdered eggs, powdered milk, dried vegetables and occasional cans of meat; this week they would get better food, and more of it. The blockade had shut down much of Berlin's industry, thrown 125,000 out of work. There had been only four hours of electricity a day; Berliners had lighted their homes with candles or gone to bed at sunset. The siege's end meant not only more food, more jobs and more light, but a relatively comfortable winter ahead. "Even the ruins of Berlin," TIME Correspondent Dave Richardson cabled this week, "are marked by the East-West conflict of the past eleven months. In past springs, stately chestnut and linden trees had spread a canopy of pink and white over the ruins. This year, street after street in Berlin is bare of trees. In the long hard winter of the blockade, Berlin's people had to decide whether to accept Soviet Russia's offer of coal or cut down their trees. They chose to give up the trees." [The split in Berlin reflected the de facto division of Germany as a whole. In 1949, the Western Zone was given many of the appurtenances of self-government by its occupiers, under a statue that served as a sort of interim peace treaty in the face of Soviet intransigence. Western Germany adopted a constitution, elected a government headed by Christian Democrat Konrad Adenauer, and proceeded with a vigorous recovery that would soon give the non-country one of the world's most powerful economies.] </body> </article> </text>