Berlin Blockade

The Berlin Blockade was the Soviet cutoff of rail, highway, and water traffic into the Allied sectors of Berlin, beginning on June 24, 1948. It placed 2.5 million people at risk of starvation and confronted Harry S. Truman with a choice between yielding the city, forcing access by land, or sustaining it from the air. He chose the airlift and held to the Allies’ position. The blockade ultimately ended after a year and two months, without a direct military confrontation, as the airlift supplied the city and the Soviet attempt to drive the Western Allies out failed.

The blockade and its stakes

The crisis began on the day Thomas E. Dewey was chosen as the Republican presidential nominee. The Soviet action shut down rail, highway, and water traffic in and out of Berlin. The Allied sectors were cut off by every route except air, and the scale of the danger was immediate: food stocks were expected to last no more than a month, while coal supplies would be exhausted in six weeks. Truman’s advisers understood the move as an attempt by Joseph Stalin to compel the Western Allies to abandon their presence in the city.

Berlin was not simply an isolated supply problem. The book presents its future as bound up with the security of Western Europe and the credibility of the Allies’ position. Truman later recalled that the Allies faced the possibility that the Soviet Union would use Berlin as a pretext for war. The imbalance on the ground sharpened that danger: the Allies had 6,500 troops in Berlin—3,000 American, 2,000 British, and 1,500 French—while the Soviet force there numbered 18,000, backed by an estimated 300,000 troops in the eastern zone of Germany. A decision to remain therefore carried real risk, even as withdrawal would concede the pressure the blockade was designed to exert.

Truman chooses resistance without a land attack

Suggestions for breaking the blockade by force included sending an armored convoy overland and retaliating by closing American ports and the Panama Canal to Russian ships. Truman rejected both proposals. When the question of whether American forces would remain in Berlin arose at a meeting with James Forrestal, Robert Lovett, and Secretary of the Army Royall, he made the position plain: “We stay in Berlin, period.” He argued that the United States was there under the terms of the agreement and that the Soviet Union had no right to remove it through direct or indirect pressure. Lovett relayed the commitment to the American ambassador in London that evening: “We stay in Berlin.”

The position was firm, but it did not amount to an immediate decision to fight. Truman later said that he would stand by the commitment while diplomatic means were still being tried to avoid war. In his private notes he insisted that he would not evade responsibility for the choice. He believed the city’s future and the well-being of its 2.5 million residents were at stake, but also understood that a show of strength could prompt a Soviet response leading to war. The blockade thus tested both resolve and restraint: the Allies would remain, yet Truman declined proposals that risked turning the crisis into a direct armed contest.

The airlift becomes a lifeline

Lucius D. Clay had begun sending supplies into Berlin by air on a limited scale, a measure initially regarded as little more than temporary relief. On June 28, Truman ordered a full-scale airlift. That same day, he sent two squadrons of B-29s to Germany. The aircraft were not modified to carry atomic bombs, but the Russians were not meant to know that distinction. The deployment added a signal of American strength to an operation whose central purpose was to keep the city supplied without forcing an overland passage.

By the airlift’s fourth week, American and British transports were arriving hundreds of times a day, in all weather. The volume surpassed Clay’s initial estimate of what a very large effort might deliver: some days, the tonnage was already twice the estimated 700 tons of food. Coal, too, was being flown in. Planes landed as often as every four minutes at times, including British Yorks and Dakotas, American C-47s, and larger C-54s sent to Germany from Panama, Hawaii, and Alaska. Many made three daily round trips between Frankfurt and Berlin’s Gatow or Templehof airfields, a distance of 275 miles. Ground crews worked around the clock. The effort exacted a cost as well: three American crewmen had been killed when a C-47 crashed.

By October, the operation had become more effective as landing facilities improved and air-traffic control grew more efficient. On October 22, Truman authorized another twenty-six C-54 transports for Berlin. The airlift would continue until the blockade ended, and winter supplies were secured. What had once seemed unlikely—a major city supplied entirely by air—was now succeeding against the early forecasts. The result depended not on a single dramatic breakthrough but on an expanding, repeated flow of aircraft and cargo.

End of the blockade and its consequences

The Soviet Union eventually signaled a change in attitude as it became clear that the airlift was established and the blockade had backfired. Secret negotiations followed. On May 12, 1949, the blockade ended, and Berlin’s lights came on again. The airlift had lasted a year and two months, comprising 277,804 flights and delivering 2,325,809 tons of food and supplies.

For Truman, the outcome demonstrated that firmness and patience could prevail without resort to force; war had been averted. The airlift also affected the morale of non-Communist Western Europe and the wider course of the Cold War, and became one of the decisions of which Truman was proudest. Its political significance extended into his effort to win reelection, though its eventual success had not been apparent when the operation began. On the day the blockade ended, the Allied powers also approved the establishment of a new German Federated Republic, with West Germans to govern themselves from Bonn. The blockade’s resolution therefore marked not only the restoration of access to Berlin, but a broader shift in the postwar European situation.