The City Fed from the Air: Berlin's Four Hundred Sixty-Two Days

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You do not need to fire a single shot to starve a city; you only need to close the roads. When every gate into Berlin was shut in the summer of nineteen forty-eight, what was left were three thin corridors in the sky. There were sixty-two seconds until the next aircraft could land — and that lasted fifteen months.

In the summer of nineteen forty-eight, Berlin was a strange thing for anyone looking at a map. The four powers that had won the war had divided the city into four parts among themselves, but the city itself sat right in the belly of the Soviet occupation zone, more than a hundred and sixty kilometres inside the nearest occupation boundary to the west. So the American, British and French sectors were not on the edge of a country; they were in the middle of a sea. Every sack of flour, every ton of coal, every barrel of petrol that entered those sectors had to travel over railways, roads and canals under Soviet control. When this arrangement was set up at Potsdam in nineteen forty-five, nobody counted it as a danger; the Allies were still in the mood of the war they had won together, and they intended to govern Germany together.

Three years later, nothing of that intention was left. The Allied Control Council, which was supposed to govern the city and the country jointly, broke apart in practice in March nineteen forty-eight; the Soviet representative walked out of a meeting and never returned. But what really accelerated the rupture was not politics. It was money. The Reichsmark left over from the war, the old German mark, meant nothing. Because prices were frozen on paper, the shops were empty, real trade was done on the black market, and the real currency was the American cigarette. To get out of this dead end, the Western powers decided to tie their zones into a single economy and issue a new currency. They announced it on the eighteenth of June, nineteen forty-eight, and put it into force on the twenty-first of June: the Deutsche Mark. Two hundred and fifty million new marks, printed in America and carried secretly into Germany, changed prices, shop windows and expectations across the western half of the country overnight.

The Soviets issued a separate currency for their own zone and treated the whole of Berlin as that currency's territory. On the twenty-third of June the Western powers brought the new mark into the western sectors. The answer came the next morning. On the twenty-fourth of June, nineteen forty-eight, all passenger and freight traffic to the western sectors stopped, for "technical reasons." A bridge on the motorway went in for repairs, a fault appeared on the railway, maintenance began on the canal. The electricity supplied to the western sectors from power stations in East Berlin was cut off. The potatoes, milk and vegetables that came in from the surrounding villages stopped as well. The western sectors had thirty-six days of food and forty-five days of coal in their stores, and more than two million people were living off those stores.

In the Western capitals, three courses of action were discussed that week. The first was to drive an armoured convoy up the motorway and force the barriers open; the American military governor, General Lucius Clay, argued for this, while Washington thought it might end in war. The second was to evacuate the city; to Clay, that would be a letter of surrender handed to the rest of Europe. The third was the option nobody regarded as a serious solution: the air.

Here, a small piece of paper written at the end of the war turned out to be decisive. In November nineteen forty-five, the four powers had agreed in writing on three air corridors running from western Germany to Berlin: three lanes approaching from the direction of Hamburg, Hanover and Frankfurt, each of them thirty-two kilometres wide. Rights of passage on the ground had never been tied to any such document; rights of passage in the air had been. Throughout the blockade the Soviets left those corridors alone; to touch them would have meant disregarding their own signatures and accepting the risk of direct conflict.

Clay telephoned Curtis LeMay, the commander of the American air forces at Wiesbaden, and asked whether his aircraft could carry coal. As the exchange has come down to us, LeMay's answer was that they could carry anything. On the twenty-sixth of June, nineteen forty-eight, the American transport aircraft in Europe, twin-engined C forty-seven Dakotas, took off for Berlin. Eighty tons of cargo were set down in the city that day. Two days later the British opened their own route; Berliners called the whole business the Luftbrücke, the air bridge, and the name stuck. But the gulf between the eighty tons of that first day and what the city actually needed was itself the real problem that the coming months would have to solve.

Because "feeding a city from the air" is a romantic sentence, but a concrete calculation. The planners sat down and did the arithmetic. Keeping Berliners from starving meant something like fifteen hundred tons of food a day: flour and grain, dried potato, powdered milk, fat, meat, sugar, salt, and a little coffee. On top of that, heating, electricity generation and keeping the factories turning required some three and a half thousand tons of coal and liquid fuel. The total came to a figure close to five thousand tons a day. The aircraft on hand was the C forty-seven, which carried three tons per flight. That meant well over a thousand flights a day, and it was not possible. So the first piece of the solution was technical: four-engined C fifty-four Skymasters, which carried ten tons and were easier to unload, were pulled into Germany from American bases all over the world. The British thickened the route too, with York transports and with aircraft from the civilian companies they chartered.

The second piece was the airfields, and that was where matters turned ugly. Tempelhof airport, in the American sector, was right inside the city. There were apartment blocks seven storeys high on the approach line; aircraft passed over the rooftops and came down at a steep angle, and at the end of the runway stood a cemetery wall. The runway surface had not been built for this work either: thin asphalt laid over rubble fill cracked under ten-ton aircraft landing one after another. German work crews would run onto the runway in the minutes between landings, fill the holes with sand and asphalt, and then pull back to the edge. Gatow airport, in the British sector, was in better shape, but its capacity was limited.

On the twenty-eighth of July, nineteen forty-eight, General William Tunner arrived in Berlin. Tunner had run the supply route flown over the Himalayas to China in the Second World War; that route had been won not with heroics but with a timetable, an industrial process in which every lost aircraft was entered as a line in a ledger. Tunner saw air supply not as an adventure but as a factory. In his own words, a successful air bridge in operation was about as exciting as water dripping onto stone.

The day that proved how right he was came on Friday, the thirteenth of August, nineteen forty-eight. The weather was foul: low cloud had settled over Berlin, it was raining, visibility kept dropping. Tunner had set out that day for a ceremony in the city, and his aircraft joined the queue above Tempelhof. First, at the end of the runway, a C fifty-four came down faster than it should have, went out of control and caught fire. The pilot behind him, dropping out of the cloud and seeing an aircraft burning on the runway, braked hard; his tyres blew and he closed the runway. The third aircraft turned for the auxiliary dirt strip and skidded off it. Three minutes of confusion turned into a disaster that would last an hour. Above Berlin, aircraft were stacked in layers up to three thousand metres, circling inside the cloud. The tower was wrestling with several voices on the radio at once. And from the bases in the west, a new aircraft was taking off every three minutes and entering the same cloud, because nobody had told them to stop.

Tunner switched on the radio, identified himself and silenced the tower. Then he took that stack apart one aircraft at a time: everyone would return to their departure base with their cargo. For an hour, Berlin received nothing. Luck helped that day and nobody was killed, but as he circled overhead Tunner saw one thing with complete clarity. The problem was neither the courage of the pilots nor the number of aircraft. The problem was that each of two hundred aircraft was making its own decisions. Every pilot flew at his own speed, judged the weather with his own eyes, attempted the approach according to his own experience. In good weather this worked; in bad weather the entire system jammed at the same moment. What would feed Berlin was not more aircraft, but fewer decisions.

What Tunner built after Black Friday was a structure that had never been attempted in the history of aviation: turning the sky into an assembly line. The logic was simple. If every aircraft does the same thing, none of them has to think.

First he removed the weather from the realm of debate. Whether the sky was overcast or brilliantly clear, every flight would be flown under instrument rules; under no circumstances would a pilot decide by eye. Then he made the speed uniform: in the corridor everyone would fly at the same speed, around two hundred and seventy kilometres an hour. There was no place for a slow aircraft or a fast one; this was one of the reasons the C forty-sevens were withdrawn from the route. The corridors were divided into five layers a hundred and fifty metres apart, and each aircraft moved in its own layer, in its own minute. Aircraft were lined up nose to tail, three minutes apart. And the hardest rule of all: every aircraft had a single right of approach. A pilot who missed the runway would not try again; he would turn back to his base with his cargo. One aircraft's second attempt disrupted the sequence of dozens behind it; one flight was sacrificed and the line was preserved. Waiting over Berlin, stacking up, was forbidden outright.

The ground section of the line was even more exacting. The target was for an aircraft to spend no more than half an hour between landing and taking off again. The crews did not get out; fuel, the weather report, the signatures, all of it came to the aircraft. Tunner had mobile snack bars selling coffee and sandwiches loaded onto jeeps and sent to the edge of the runway, right up to the nose of the aircraft, and these snack bars were run by young women from Berlin; what eliminated a crew's wish to walk to the canteen was the canteen coming to them. The unloading was done by German teams of twelve, working for money and for meals; a competition for records broke out among them, and the ten-ton load of a C fifty-four came to be taken off in under ten minutes. Maintenance fell into the same discipline: an inspection every fifty flying hours, and heavy maintenance every two hundred hours at the Burtonwood base in England. Aircraft now went into the workshop not when they broke down, but when the schedule said so.

The cargo itself was redesigned too, because every kilogram meant a kilogram of fuel. Instead of potatoes they carried dried potato; Berlin had water. Instead of milk, powdered milk went. The bone was stripped out of the meat. Coal was loaded in army duffel bags made from surplus military cloth; the dust of that coal got into everything, into the aircraft's radios, into their wiring, into the crews' lungs. Salt was a harder cargo, because it ate metal. For that reason the British carried salt in Sunderland flying boats taking off from the Elbe; those aircraft, with hulls built to withstand sea water, landed on Lake Havel in the west of the city. When the lake froze over in winter, the salt was loaded into containers slung under the bellies of bombers.

To understand what this machine was capable of, one had to wait for the spring of nineteen forty-nine. In mid-April, for the sake of morale and competition, Tunner staged a planned maximum-effort trial; for twenty-four hours, from the fifteenth to the sixteenth of April, the whole route carried nothing but coal. The number of flights reached one thousand three hundred and eighty-three, twelve thousand nine hundred and forty-one tons of coal came down in Berlin, and there was not a single accident. That worked out to one landing, across all the airfields, every sixty-two seconds on average. A city's sky had become a shift line running at intervals of less than a minute. After that day the daily average never fell back to its old figures; nine thousand tons was now what an ordinary working day was worth.

But a landing every sixty-two seconds was not possible with two airfields. Underneath that record lay a third runway, dug largely by hand in the autumn of nineteen forty-eight.

Tempelhof and Gatow had hit their ceiling by the autumn. The only place to look for a third airfield was the French sector, and there, in the north-west of the city, stood an old artillery training ground: Tegel. The first pick struck the ground on the fifth of August, nineteen forty-eight.

There were no machines on that site; there were people. Over the following months nineteen thousand Berliners worked on the job, women and men, three shifts, day and night. Most of the workers were women, because they had already been clearing the city's rubble for years. The wage was a few western marks a week and one hot meal a day; in the winter of the blockade, everyone knew that the second item was worth more than the first. The fill for the runway came out of the city itself: the bricks of bombed houses were broken up, sieved, and poured under a runway of roughly seventeen hundred metres. Berlin built the ground that aircraft would land on out of its own ruins.

The one thing that could not be solved was heavy machinery; there were no graders, rollers or asphalt pavers in the city, and none of them would fit through the door of any transport aircraft. In workshops in western Germany the machines were cut into pieces with welding torches, carried into Berlin piece by piece in wide-bodied C eighty-twos, and welded back together at the edge of Tegel. On the fifth of November, nineteen forty-eight, the first C fifty-four landed on that runway. Ninety days had passed between the first pick striking the ground and the landing gear touching it.

One problem remained with the new runway. Two tall radio masts stood directly above the approach line. The masts were inside the French sector, but they belonged to Berliner Rundfunk, Berlin Radio, which was under Soviet administration, and the broadcasts went out from there. The French commander, General Jean Ganeval, asked for the masts to be moved, offering to have the Allies cover the cost; his request was refused. On the morning of the sixteenth of December, nineteen forty-eight, French engineers blew the masts up. When the Soviet officer who learned of it asked how he could possibly have done such a thing, Ganeval's answer was short: with dynamite.

Even so, the real surprise of these four hundred and sixty-two days was not in the aircraft. The Soviet plan rested on the assumption that a city under pressure would side with its own stomach rather than with the Western powers; in the eastern sector, food distribution open to residents of the western sectors was even announced. What was expected did not happen. On the ninth of September, nineteen forty-eight, three hundred thousand people gathered in front of the ruins of the Reichstag, the old German parliament building burnt out in the war. Berlin's elected mayor, Ernst Reuter, addressed not the crowd but the world: the peoples of America, of Britain, of France, of Italy should look at this city and see that they could not abandon it, or these people.

The same shift happened on a smaller scale at the fence around Tempelhof. In July nineteen forty-eight an American pilot, Gail Halvorsen, shared two packets of gum among the children pressed against the fence watching the aircraft, and told them he would be passing again the next day; so that they would recognise him, he would rock his wings on the approach. He made little parachutes out of handkerchiefs, tied sweets and gum to them, and dropped them out of the window on the landing run. Word spread both in Berlin and in America; boxes of sweets and handkerchiefs began arriving from schools and factories, and the thing turned into an official relief operation. The children of Berlin named those aircraft the Rosinenbomber, the raisin bombers, and Halvorsen's own name became Uncle Wiggly Wings.

These look like charming details, but the rest of that winter was not charming at all. In November and December nineteen forty-eight the fog that settled over Berlin very nearly stopped the air bridge; on some days the number of aircraft able to land in the city was limited to a handful, the coal ration was cut, and people burnt their furniture and the trees in the parks. Electricity was supplied for only a few hours a day, and a household's turn often fell after midnight; Berliners set their alarms for two in the morning and got up to cook, to iron and to heat water. Three and a half years earlier, aircraft of the same types had dropped bombs on this city. Now a city that listened to that same sky counted the days on which it did not hear engines.

The calculation that had started the blockade cracked in two places at once in the spring of nineteen forty-nine. The first was economics. Against the blockade imposed on them, the Western powers had built a quiet counter-blockade: shipments of steel, machine parts, timber and chemicals from the eastern zone to the west came to a halt. East German industry depended on those parts from the west, and the longer the blockade lasted, the more the side under real pressure began to change. The second was the winter. The expectation in Moscow had been that the air bridge would collapse of its own accord in the autumn fog and the winter cold. The fog did indeed strike, but the line did not break; after the winter, the daily tonnage multiplied instead of falling. Berlin was now better fed than it had been at the start of the blockade.

The first sign came in January nineteen forty-nine. In written answers to the questions of an American news agency, Stalin made no mention at all of the currency question he had until then set as the condition for lifting the blockade. Washington noticed that silence and probed it. In New York, in a corridor of the United Nations building, a brief conversation that began between the American representative Philip Jessup and the Soviet representative Yakov Malik turned into months of secret bargaining. The result came into force one minute after midnight on the clock showing the twelfth of May, nineteen forty-nine: the roadblocks came away, the barriers lifted, and at the Helmstedt crossing a convoy of lorries that had been waiting for days switched on its headlights and turned east, towards Berlin. The moment the street lamps in the city came back on, people poured out into the streets.

But the aircraft did not stop. The Western commanders knew that the blockade could be reimposed one morning on the same grounds, and they wanted a safety stock to build up in the city. The air bridge continued until the thirtieth of September, nineteen forty-nine; from beginning to end it lasted four hundred and sixty-two days. In that time two hundred seventy-eight thousand two hundred and twenty-eight flights were made to Berlin and two million three hundred and thirty-four thousand tons of cargo were set down; roughly three quarters of it was carried by American aircraft, the remainder by the British and the civilian companies they chartered. More than two thirds of the cargo carried was coal. The cost was recorded as well: a hundred and one people died, most of them in accidents; forty British, thirty-one Americans, one Australian and fifteen German civilians.

The blockade's real legacy, though, took shape outside Berlin. While the blockade was still running, the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington on the fourth of April, nineteen forty-nine; what lifted the idea of a permanent military alliance, debated for years in western Europe, out of hesitation was in large part what had happened in Berlin. On the twenty-third of May, nineteen forty-nine, the Basic Law came into force and the Federal Republic of Germany was founded; on the seventh of October, nineteen forty-nine, the German Democratic Republic was proclaimed in the east. The move launched in order to push the Western powers out of Berlin made the division of Germany permanent, turned the western sectors into the emblem of an alliance, and, in the eyes of Berliners, transformed the occupying armies that had won the war into protectors within three and a half years.

The city drew its own lesson as well: never again would it depend on somebody else's power station for electricity. In a separate series of flights that began on the sixth of April, nineteen forty-nine, the steel and turbine parts of a power station in Spandau were cut down into sizes that could be carried, flown in across five hundred and eighty flights as one thousand four hundred and sixteen tons of cargo, and reassembled on site. The station came on line on the first of December, nineteen forty-nine, with sixty megawatts of output; it was Reuter who pressed the switch, and after his death in nineteen fifty-three the plant took his name. The runway dug by hand proved long-lived too: Tegel served as Berlin's main airport until twenty twenty.

In front of Tempelhof today stands a three-pronged concrete monument reaching into the sky. Berliners call it the Hungerkralle, the hunger claw; the three prongs represent the three air corridors, the only legal route into the city, and the names of those who lost their lives are inscribed on its base. What that monument records is the proof that a city can be fed not by roads but by a timetable. That the answer to a blockade could be given with arithmetic rather than with tanks was noted by both sides; for forty years Berlin remained the most sensitive point of the Cold War, divided, walled in, but never besieged again.

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