After the Soviet Union cut all road, rail, and canal access to West Berlin, the United States and Britain responded with an audacious airlift, flying supplies into Tempelhof and Gatow airports around the clock. Over the next eleven months, aircrews flew more than 200,000 flights, delivering over 2.3 million tons of supplies and forcing Stalin to lift the blockade in May 1949.
West Berlin in the summer of 1948 was an island of 2.2 million people, 100 miles inside Soviet-controlled East Germany, suddenly cut off from every road, rail line, and barge canal by Stalin's blockade. The Soviets calculated that the Western powers would either abandon the city or be forced into a military confrontation to reopen ground access. General Lucius Clay and British officials chose a third option nobody expected: supply an entire city by air.
C-47s and later the larger C-54 Skymasters began landing at Tempelhof airport at a rate of one plane every three minutes at the operation's peak, hauling coal, flour, and dried milk over Soviet airspace corridors that had been guaranteed, almost as an afterthought, in earlier occupation agreements. Pilots like Gail Halvorsen became folk heroes by dropping chocolate bars tied to handkerchief parachutes for Berlin's children, earning the nickname 'Uncle Wiggly Wings' and inspiring 'Operation Little Vittles.'
The airlift cost the lives of 101 airmen in crashes but never let the city starve or freeze. By May 1949, Stalin, humiliated and having gained nothing, lifted the blockade. The episode hardened the division of Germany into two states and became one of the Cold War's defining early demonstrations that the West would resist Soviet pressure without firing a shot.