The Dramatic Story of the Berlin Airlift -- The Subject of my "Bridge to Tomorrow Series."

  81 Years ago today the Russians fired the first shots in the Cold War.

They sought to expel the Western Powers from Berlin, but the brutal tactic of cutting off the civilian population from food, power, light, fuel, medicine and other other necessities.

The Bridge to Tomorrow trilogy shows how the West stopped this Russian aggression. This bloodless victory of democracy over tyranny has many lessons for the present day, which I first examined and described in an acclaimed non-fiction book about the Berlin Airlift,      The Blockade Breakers.

 The novel trilogy goes beyond the logistical achievements and the political chess game depicted in the non-fiction book to explore the social and psychological impact of this pivotal historical event. I consciously employ a diverse cast of characters -- women and men, British, American, German and Ukrainian -- to enable the reader to see the unfolding events through different, even conflicting, perspectives.

In the coming weeks, I will discuss the novel's structure and the characters employed. Today, I wanted to set the stage by providing the historical background.

The confrontation started on 24 June 1948, when the Soviet Union abruptly stopped all road, rail and canal traffic to the Western Sectors of Berlin and simultaneously cut off electric power. The impacted districts of the former German capital were located more than one hundred miles inside the Soviet Zone of occupation and were dependent on imports of food, power, medicine and all other necessities of life. The Soviet interdiction of access routes and power supply therefore put the 2.2. million civilian residents of the Western Sectors of Berlin under siege.

The target of the Soviet blockade was not, however, those 2.2 million German residents, but rather the 8,500 French, British and American troops representing the Western Allies. The Western garrisons were there in accordance with wartime agreements about the occupation and control of defeated Germany. The Americans and British had turned over German territory conquered by their troops to Soviet Control in exchange for the right to station garrisons in the former German capital. Months before German surrender in May 1945, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed that each of the victorious powers would control a "sector" of Berlin and station their troops there. (Below showing Berlin's four Sectors of Occupation)

By 1948, however, times were changing. Stalin didn't really care about the promises he had made when the Soviet Union was still fighting Nazi Germany and dependent on Western aid. He believed it was time to continue the "march of History" toward world communism. A Communist Germany was high on his priority list (following the absorption of the Baltic States into the Soviet Union and the on-going installation of Communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia and Greece).  

Western presence in Germany was an obstacle to Communist control, and Western troops in Berlin, more than 100 miles inside the Soviet Zone of Occupation, were a particular irritant. Stalin wanted the Western powers out of Berlin sooner rather than later. However, he didn't want to provoke war with the sole nuclear power of the age, the United States of America. (Below images of U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

The blockade of the Western Sectors of Berlin appeared to offer a brilliant -- and non-violent! -- means of forcing the Western powers to withdraw their troops. This tactic exploited two facts. First, the lack of written agreements guaranteeing the Western powers use of the roads, rails and canals, all of which crossed the Soviet Zone. Second the heavy dependence of the Western Sectors of Berlin on goods transported overland from the Western Zones. Just as in a medieval siege, by cutting the Western Sectors off from supplies of food, medicine, and raw materials the inhabitants of these Sectors faced slow starvation and increasing disease the longer the siege lasted. 

Unlike a medieval siege, however, the Western Sectors of Berlin were made more vulnerable by dependence on electricity and/or gas and oil to power the water and sewage systems, to run public transport, provide lighting, heat homes and offices, and to keep factories running. Although the Western Sectors of Berlin had a few out-dated power plants, the bulk of Berlin's electric power was produced in the Eastern Sector. Furthermore, even the inadequate power plants in the Western Sectors were coal fired, and the blockade had cut them off from sources of coal. In short, Berlin's lights would go out, its public transport and factories close, and the sewage and water systems stop functioning as soon as the coal reserves stored in the city were exhausted. (Image of Post-War Germany - a grim place to live even without a blockade.)

The Soviets (not unreasonably) believed that the residents of the Western Sectors of Berlin would rise up in rebellion against the Western powers. They expected the German population to riot and demand the withdrawal of Western troops as soon as all public utilities broke down -- if not before. From the Soviet point of view, it was a perfect plan in which, without firing a gun, they could turn German public opinion against the West and force the Western powers to retreat from Berlin with their tails between their legs in shame.

To be sure, there was one loophole in the plan. There were written agreements guaranteeing the Western Power access to Berlin via three very specifically delineated "air corridors." These were each 20 miles wide and 10,000 feet high and all Allied air traffic was confined to these corridors and the airspace inside a twenty-mile radius of Berlin's center. (Below a map showing the air corridors.)

When the Soviet Blockade was imposed on 24 June 1948, it initially looked as if the Western Allies had only two choices: to withdraw their troops to avoid causing unnecessary suffering to the inhabitants of Berlin, or to try to fight their way through with convoys of goods protected by armed troops. Unsurprisingly, the Western political leadership shied away from sending troops into the Soviet Zone -- even as escorts for convoys of food, medicine and coal -- for fear they might provoke a shooting war. 

 

Yet it was also less than ten years since Neville Chamberlain had flown to Munich to make territorial concessions to another dictator, Adolf Hitler. The result of his policy of appeasement had been a bitter and costly world war. No one in London or Washington was inclined to follow in Chamberlain's footsteps and appease Stalin. (Below the famous photo of Neville Chamberlain declaring his Munich Agreement with Hitler had brought "Peace in Our Time.")

It was at this juncture that a relatively junior RAF officer, Air Commodore Waite, suggested it might be possible to supply the Western Sectors of Berlin by air -- as a stop-gap measure. At the time, the task seemed quite hopeless. Nothing even remotely similar had ever been tried before. Contemporary aircraft had very small cargo capacity (between 3 and 10 tons except for the very largest aircraft, the latter of which were few in number). The Western Sectors of Berlin, on the other hand, consumed roughly 14,000 tons of goods on a daily basis in the period just before the imposition of the Blockade. Furthermore, similar attempts -- like the Luftwaffe effort to supply the Sixth Army at Stalingrad by air -- had all failed. (Below an photo of Air Commodore Waite)

More by default than from conviction, the Western leadership decided to start a airlift. The decision was undertaken not in expectation of victory, but in the hope that it would buy the West time to negotiate a satisfactory settlement with Stalin. The instructions to both air forces boiled down nothing more than: "Do the best you can as fast as you can." 

In short, the Berlin Airlift began without the West really knowing how much of what the Berliners needed to survive -- much less how much those things weighed. It was launched despite an almost complete absence of cargo aircraft and aircrew in Germany and despite serious inadequacies in airfield capacity and air traffic control. It started without airlift expertise in theater and without a unified command structure. Furthermore, the Airlift faced severe challenges and often faltered. By the end of 1948, fog and then snow almost chocked off the Airlift.  It stood on the brink of failure. 

Yet the setbacks were overcome, the Airlift took wing again. By the end of April 1949, the Soviets knew they had been defeated and on May 12, 1949 the Russians ended their blockade of the Western Sectors of Berlin, allowing convoys of trucks and trains to transit the Soviet Zone of Occupation to bring food, fuel and other goods to Berlin. This represented a dramatic Western victory and a humiliation for Stalin.  West had made no concessions to the Soviet Union. They had defeated the crude attempt to force the Berliners to surrender their freedom not with guns and bombs but with butter, bread and candy.

Stalin's attempt to swallow West Berlin into his Zone, to humiliate the Western powers and to disrupt the establishment of a free and democratic German government in the Western Zones had failed. Not only was the Federal Republic of Germany established, so was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the foundations of the European Union. All these institutions were instrumental in defending Western Europe from further Soviet -- and now Russian -- aggression. Meanwhile, the Western Allies remained in Berlin until German reunification, and West Berlin became a beacon of freedom deep inside the Soviet sea of authoritarianism. All that is due to the Berlin Airlift.

The first two volumes of the Bridge to Tomorrow Trilogy are now available. 

The first battle of the Cold War is about to begin....

Berlin 1948.  In the ruins of Hitler’s capital, former RAF officers, a woman pilot, and the victim of Russian brutality form an air ambulance company. But the West is on a collision course with Stalin’s aggression and Berlin is about to become a flashpoint. World War Three is only a misstep away. Buy Now

Berlin is under siege. More than two million civilians must be supplied by air -- or surrender to Stalin's oppression.

USAF Captain J.B. Baronowsky and RAF Flight Lieutenant Kit Moran once risked their lives to drop high explosives on Berlin. They are about to deliver milk, flour and children’s shoes instead. Meanwhile, two women pilots are flying an air ambulance that carries malnourished and abandoned children to freedom in the West. Until General Winter deploys on the side of Russia. Buy now!

 Based on historical events, award-winning and best-selling novelist Helena P. Schrader delivers an insightful, exciting and moving tale about how former enemies became friends in the face of Russian aggression — and how close the Berlin Airlift came to failing. 

 Watch a Video Teaser Here!

 Winning a war with milk, coal and candy!