How did the West feed a blockaded Berlin from the air?
In 1948 Stalin cut every road, rail line and canal into West Berlin. The answer was a stream of planes arriving every few minutes, for fifteen months.
▶ Start the storyBy treating the sky like a conveyor belt. When the Soviet Union blocked railway, road and canal access to West Berlin in June 1948, the Western Allies could not drive in. But the only written agreement on access to the city, from 1945, had allowed three 20-mile-wide air corridors, and those stayed open. The airlift was expected to last three weeks. It lasted fifteen months, and in the end delivered 2,334,374 tons of supplies, nearly two-thirds of it coal, on 278,228 flights.
2.3 million t
The first weeks were not smooth. One US official told the National Security Council that the Air Staff was convinced the air operation was doomed to failure. Then Major General William Tunner took command and ran it like a factory: instrument flight rules at all times, one chance to land, no stacking of planes in the sky. In the time it had taken to unstack and land nine aircraft, 30 could now land. By the end of August 1948 the airlift delivered more than 4,500 tons a day, enough to keep West Berlin supplied.
It also had a human side. A pilot, Lieutenant Gail Halvorsen, dropped chocolate bars on handkerchief parachutes to waiting children; in the end over three tons of candy were dropped, and the operation became a major propaganda success.
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Recap
Tunner's rules (no stacking, one landing attempt, bigger planes) let 30 planes land in the time nine had needed.
💡 A trick to remember it · Close the roads, and the sky stays open: three air corridors kept a city alive.
Surprising fact · The airlift expected to last three weeks lasted fifteen months and delivered more than 2.3 million tons.
Sources (1)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (19 claims) cites at least one of these.