Berlin Airlift: The Cold War

Begins - Extra History

This is an auto-generated recap of the
YouTube video with the same title by Extra
History (11:25)

English

Summary After WWII, Berlin faced a

blockade by the Soviets. The US, UK, and
France initiated the Berlin Airlift to supply
the city by air, defying Stalin. The airlift's
success not only saved Berlin from famine
but also marked the beginning of the Cold
War and the formation of NATO.

Main Topics Takeaways

Soviet Blockade of Berlin

Soviets blockade Berlin, leading to a
crisis with limited food and fuel supply
[00:00]

Truman decides to stay in Berlin,

initiating the Berlin Airlift [01:00]
Allies divided over Germany's future,
leading to the blockade [01:28]

Berlin Airlift Operations

Allies start airlifting supplies to Berlin to
counter the blockade [03:55]
General Tunner organizes efficient airlift
operations, achieving daily supply targets
[06:13]

Airlift faces challenges like weather

conditions and plane shortages [07:48]

Impact and Resolution

Airlift boosts morale and international
support, leading to political changes in
Berlin [08:48]
Soviets lift blockade, marking the end of
the crisis and the beginning of NATO
[09:39]

Formation of NATO and division of

Germany shape the Cold War era [10:14]

Full Timeline

00:00

Intro

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Transcripts TLDR

June 1948.The Oval Office. The cabinet

gathers for a conference with President Tran.
Four days prior, the Soviet Union blockaded the
American, British, and French occupied sectors
of Berlin. With the divided city located a
hundred miles inside the Soviet controlled zone
of East Germany, there's no way for American
food and fuel the lifeline of its undernourished
populace - to get through. The city only has 36
days worth of food remaining and only 45 days
of coal.

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Transcripts TLDR

Allied troops are surrounded, outnbered 62 to

1. The cabinet lays out three options: One,
American forces could withdraw. .. But that
would signal that Western democracies are
unable to counter Soviet aggression. Two, they
could stay in Berlin until the starving population
forces them out and accepts Soviet rule out of
desperation. Or 3 they could send an armed
convoy to open the roads, but that would start
another World War. They advise Tran to
withdraw. Tran says, "We stay in Berlin. Period.
" You remember that series on Hiawatha we did
a while back? Those episodes were sponsored
by the folks at DomiNations. And we enjoyed
doing those so much that when they said -
"Hey, we're about to introduce the Cold War
era into our game, you want to do some
episodes about that? " Our answer was "Heck
yeah, we do! " So today, we are gonna talk
about the Berlin Airlift.

01:27

The Four Occupation Zones

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Transcripts TLDR

An event that not only set off the Cold War, but
established how it would be fought. You see,
after Germany's surrender in WWII, the Allies
divided Germany into four occupation zones.
The Soviets in the East, and the Americans,
British, and French in the West. And Berlin,
though it lay in the Soviet zone, was divided as
well. The problem was that the Allies had two
competing irreconcilable visions for Germany.
The Soviets had suffered two German
invasions in the span of 30 years.

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Transcripts TLDR

They wanted this country broken and

subordinate, so it could never threaten Russia
again. They also wanted it to function as a
buffer zone to keep the Western powers at bay.
In the end, Stalin's goal was a communist
puppet state in Germany, and the Allies out of
Berlin. But America and Britain believed that
Nazi extremism had arisen due to the Great
Depression, and that the best chance for a
peaceful Europe was a prosperous, democratic
Germany. They also hoped that it would be a
bulwark against Soviet expansionism. So this
joint occupation effort was doomed to failure
from the outset. But the final showdown came
over currency. Berlin was an economic ruin.

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Transcripts TLDR

Allied bombing had destroyed most of its

industrial foundation, and even three years
after the war most Berliners lived in the
basements of shattered buildings. Some were
living on just nine hundred calories a day. The
biggest problem was the value of German
currency, which was so low that a loaf of bread
often cost an entire paycheck.

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Transcripts TLDR

The city's real currency at this point was

American cigarettes, and most civilians
survived by a combination of black-market,
food aid, and prostitution. The Allies made an
attempt at currency reform, but this attempt
failed when the Soviets sabotaged the effort by
printing billions of extra notes.

03:12

Berlin Airlift

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Transcripts TLDR

By 1948 the frustrated Western powers were

secretly planning to introduce a new currency:
the Deutsche Mark, and met behind Stalin's
back to discuss forming a West German state.
The Soviets found out about this, and in
protest, abandoned the Four Power Council. In
response, the Western Allies released the new
currency. And Stalin had his pretext. On June
23rd, Soviet troops encircled Berlin, blockading
the road and rail line the Allies had been using
to supply the city. The city's power stations,
located in the Soviet sector, cut electricity. The
Berlin Blockade had begun, and Tran had to
choose between retreat or war. But there was
another possibility. The Soviets had interrupted
traffic to Berlin before, months earlier. But the
Allies had continued supplying their troops via
air. Tran wondered whether a similar airlift
could supply all of Berlin. After all, the only way
you can stop a plane is to shoot at it. .. which
would be an act of war. American generals
dismissed this idea as impossible, but the
Royal Air Force thought different. After years of
war shortages, the British were experts in
rationing, and they ran the nbers. They
concluded that it would take 4,000 tons of
food and fuel per day to keep Berlin from
collapsing.

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Transcripts TLDR

But to move that much cargo in C-47

transports would mean over 1,300 flights every
24 hours, and only the Americans had that
capacity. Under pressure from Tran, the U. S.
generals agreed to try. The first flights began
on June 26th. Despite Soviet threats, the anti-
aircraft guns stayed silent. They had called
Stalin's bluff. But the airlift didn't have enough
planes or crews. The Air Force tried bringing in
air wings from as far away as Guam, but it still
wasn't enough. Two weeks in, the airlift was
only delivering 1,000 tons per day - - a quarter
of what they needed - and conditions were
perilous.

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Transcripts TLDR

The American airport at Tempelhof was a grass

field that needed to be patched between
landings. An apartment block stood directly on
the approach path, its roof just 17 feet below
the landing gear. Those C-47s were old
leftovers from the war. Coal and flour dust,
both of which were explosive by the way, filled
the plane's cargo holds. The 24-hour nature of
this operation strained both the airmen and
their antiquated planes, and all the while,
Soviet Yak fighters buzzed the transports,
keeping the pressure on. But despite the
shortfall on the cargo quota, the airlift spurred
a wave of enthusiasm. Across Europe, people
set aside wartime grudges in an effort to keep
Berlin from starving. Blitz survivors in London
sent care packages to Berlin. Many RAF
mechanics didn't even wait to be called up. ..
they just grabbed their tool boxes and hitched
a flight to Hamburg. Germans, previously
hostile to the pilots who had leveled their
cities, instead began plying Allied airmen with
beer. It was a chaotic cowboy operation. So
Washington dispatched a man to tame it.
General William Tunner was a taciturn man who
loved him some charts. During the war, he had
commanded an airlift that flew supplies over
the Himalayas and into occupied China.

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Transcripts TLDR

Now he was given the objective of delivering

4,000 tons per day. First thing first, he created
a tight schedule. Planes would take off and
land at precise 3-minute intervals. The flights
would stack at five altitudes, maximizing the
nber of planes in the air. When the crews
landed, they'd have 30 minutes to unload
before taking off again. Tunner also enforced
maintenance checks, brought in fresh U. S.
Navy pilots, and replaced the C-47s with
larger-capacity C-54s. To make up for the
ground crew shortage, he hired Germans to
unload cargo and patch runways, and after
translating the maintenance manuals, he
assigned former Luftwaffe mechanics to repair
planes. Men who had been shooting at each
other only three years before, now worked
side-by-side.

Transcripts TLDR

Tunner's shakeup worked. On August 12th the

airlift reached its target for the first time. 4,500
tons. Then - Tunner discovered that one of his
pilots, Gail Halvorsen, had been making
unauthorized cargo drops. Every time
Halvorsen came in for a landing, he would drop
off little handkerchief parachutes containing
parcels of candy to the children that gathered
near the runway.

Transcripts TLDR

Berliners loved it, and Tunner saw the PR

potential. He ordered the candy drops
expanded and sent Halvorsen on a press tour
back home. The airlift, a hanitarian effort
without traditional military heroes, finally had a
public face.

Transcripts TLDR

And that PR victory was good news, because

winter was coming. The Soviets had been
stalling diplomatically for exactly this reason.
Surely, deteriorating weather would put a stop
to this airlift for good. Fog came in heavy that
season. At times, it lay so thick on the runways
that ground crews had to crawl, for fear of
walking into an unseen propeller. Aircraft
landed in zero visibility with iced-up engines.
They collided in mid-air, they smashed into
mountain ranges. Exhausted pilots fell asleep
at the stick. Meteorologists, circling in B-29s,
alerted ground control of 15-minute breaks in
the weather that would allow flights to get
through. And somehow they did! On New
Year's Eve, 1948, Allied forces delivered over
6,000 tons a new record.

Transcripts TLDR

And as winter passed and the weather began

to let up, the airlift had began to deliver more
supplies than the city had ever received by rail.
This success emboldened anti-Soviet
politicians within Berlin. In September, Ernst
Reuter, elected mayor in 1947 but blocked from
taking his seat by the Soviets, gave a fiery
speech before a crowd of 300,000 Berliners,
imploring the world not to abandon the city to
totalitarianism. That December, he won the
mayor's office, appearing around the world as
the face of free Berlin. In retaliation, the Soviets
installed their own communist city government
in East Berlin. Stalin's strategy had backfired.
Instead of preventing a West German state, he
had fueled it. Far from revealing Allied
weaknesses, he had allowed them to take the
moral high ground - - demonstrating their
commitment and turning Germans from an
occupied people into comrades. And the
blockade was damaging East Berlin's economy.
Its factories couldn't function without goods
from the Western sector. The Soviets had been
outmaneuvered. On May 12th, 1949, Soviet
soldiers removed the roadblocks, and allowed
the first American supply convoy to pass into
Berlin. That road would never close again. In 15
months of operation the airlift delivered over
2.4 million tons of food and fuel, saving Berlin
from famine.

Transcripts TLDR

79 Allied personnel and German civilians lost

their lives to the effort, and the world would
never be the same. Stalin's willingness to
starve civilians marked a turning point, uniting
Western Europe in a coalition to contain Soviet
influence. A month before the end of the
blockade, this new alliance - the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization, or NATO - was formally
signed into being. And within weeks, West
Germany formally became its own country,
followed by Communist East Germany. Europe
was divided in half, and two months later the
Soviets tested their first atomic bomb.

Transcripts TLDR

It was the beginning of a new kind of war. One

of political influence, fought by great powers
over proxy states. A war of threat and restraint,
where governments tested just how far they
could push the other, without starting a full-
scale conflict. But the Soviets and the
Americans would never again square off as
directly as they did during the airlift. When
nuclear armament is in play, that is just not the
kind of gamble you take. Thanks again to our
friends at DomiNations for sponsoring this
episode. We'll see you soon!

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