The Berlin Airlift and the Birth of the New World Order (Part 2) | HISTORY This Week

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]The History Channel original podcast.

[00:00:05]>> History This week, May 12th, 1949.

[00:00:11]I'm John Earl.

[00:00:16]It's the party of a lifetime. After 11 long months under blockade, the people of West Berlin are finally free to come and go as they please. Train service is restored. The autobond reopens and food, fuel, and supplies flood back into the city and Berliners are celebrating all of it. West Berlin Mayor Anne Stroider has declared today a public holiday.

[00:00:44]Outside town hall, he addresses a cheering crowd of 300,000.

[00:00:50]The blockade is ended, he declares.

[00:00:53]Berlin will always remain Berlin.

[00:00:59]Joining Reutder on the grandstand is an American officer. His jet black hair is combed high in a buff. His ears stick out like sails. The Soviets call him the beast of Berlin. His troops call him Howland Mad Howie. His business card, if he has one, reads Brigadier General Frank Howley. And if anybody asks, he might just be the man who saved the city.

[00:01:27]Today, the Soviet Union cuts off West Berlin. How did the Western Allies managed to supply a major city with the largest sustained airlift in history?

[00:01:38]And how did the Berlin crisis lead to the post-war order as we know it?

[00:01:50]It's June 1945.

[00:01:53]Six long years of war in Europe are finally over. The Western Allies are preparing for the moment they've been fighting for, the arrival in the fallen Nazi capital.

[00:02:04]Sitting behind the wheel of a luxury German convertible, Frank Howley is feeling celebratory. It's just after dawn on a warm spring morning and Howley is headed to Berlin in style. Howie prepared this fabulous flirtilla of cars.

[00:02:23]Giles Milton is the author of Checkmate in Berlin. He got these jeeps and cars and tanks and everything. He was going to lead this triumphant procession. He ordered the soldiers to polish their cars and he got stars and stripes stuck onto all the vehicles and everything.

[00:02:38]Howley's Horch Roadster once belonged to a high-ranking Nazi official. It's got huge headlamps, gleaming chrome, and a hood like a coffin.

[00:02:52]The procession isn't exactly a conquering army. It doesn't have to be because Berlin has already fallen to America's ally, the Soviet Union. Though ideologically opposed, the two countries have become wartime partners. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is rebranded as Uncle Joe to the American public and the allies have collectively decided to divide Berlin into four sectors each administered by a different country. The largest sectors belong to the Americans and the Soviets. Hi has been appointed commandant of the American sector. But at the border between Western and Soviet controlled Eastern Germany, he stopped at a Soviet checkpoint.

[00:03:36]Something is very wrong. The Soviet soldier at the frontier post just denied him access. Said, "You're not going into the city." And Frank Howley said, "There's an agreement. I'm allowed in and this is my fleet of tanks and cars and we're going in." and the Soviets said, "No, you're not."

[00:03:53]>> Howie realizes that running Berlin in cooperation with the Soviets is going to be much harder than he expected.

[00:04:01]Already, just weeks after the Nazi surrender, the buddy buddy wartime alliance is fraying. The chill of the Cold War is setting in. By the time the Soviets let Howley through, there's a sense that he's driving through enemy territory because the Soviets literally surround the city. Berlin sits fairly and squarely inside Soviet occupied East Germany. It was almost like if you imagine a sort of medieval castle surrounded by this sea of red, it could very easily be turned into a siege situation where the city could be blockaded by the Soviets if they fell out in the postwar period. Howie's beginning to think it's not if they fall out, it's when. Berlin's geography is so unfavorable that some in the Allied high command figure the city isn't worth the trouble. Leave it to the Soviets. Howie disagrees and he's determined to play hard ball.

[00:05:00]Within a couple of days of getting into the city, he said there's only one way to deal with gangsters and that's to treat them like gangsters.

[00:05:08]>> They don't call him howling mad for nothing.

[00:05:11]>> It's like dropping a kind of wild west cowboy into Berlin. He was a sort of really gutsy commander who believed in getting things done. He didn't believe in red tape. He didn't believe in bureaucracy. He believed that everyone should do what he said.

[00:05:28]>> The Berlin that Howley eventually does enter is in total ruins. There was no running water. There was no electricity.

[00:05:36]There was no gas. There was no no civil government at all uh whatsoever. And and yeah, no food. It was a desperate situation.

[00:05:46]>> Into the rubble walk the four commonants. One American, that's Howie, one British, one French, and one Soviet.

[00:05:54]These commonants have almost unlimited powers over the Berliners in their sector. They decide who eats and who starves. They can seize property and throw people in jail without trial.

[00:06:06]Berliners are hoping that the commonants will work together to run and rebuild the city. An early test is around food.

[00:06:14]The commonants meet and discuss how to divide the city's limited food supplies.

[00:06:19]Existing rations are as little as 1,200 calories a day. Dark bread, watery potato soup. It's barely enough.

[00:06:28]Starving people wander the streets like zombies. The commonants argue through a haze of cigarette smoke. The chandeliers overhead flicker and dim as Berlin's battered electricity grid strains to keep them lit. So, who should get the most food?

[00:06:45]>> Well, of course, it's the most It's the politicians. It's the journalists. It's the influences. We need to give them the biggest ration so they'll be on our side.

[00:06:54]>> That's Soviet commander General Alexander Kotikov. He's big with combed back white hair and intense blue eyes.

[00:07:02]When he's nervous, he massages his fingers one by one. And he wants to use food as a political tool. And Frank Howley said, "Well, hold on a minute.

[00:07:11]No, surely it's got to be old ladies.

[00:07:13]It's got to be the weak, the sick." He said to uh his Soviet counterpart, "You can't kick an old lady when she's down."

[00:07:20]Cautico's deputy grins and says, "My dear Colonel Howley, that is exactly when you should kick them." Now, it's easy to paint the Soviets as cartoon villains. In his memoir, Howley calls them gangsters, rats, liars, swindlers, and cutthroats. But it's important to keep in mind that the Soviet people suffered unimaginably during the war. A huge swath of their country was destroyed, and an estimated 24 million Soviet citizens were killed. More Soviet soldiers died in one battle at Stalingrad than the United States lost in the entire war. When your country has been through that, using food as a weapon might seem like an acceptable thing to do, especially if you think it could prevent another war. I think for Stalin, he saw capturing Eastern Europe and as much of Central Europe as possible, as an essential buffer zone to stop any enemy, particularly German, in the future, being able to launch another attack on the Soviet Union.

[00:08:24]>> Stalin wants to take control of Berlin and as much of Germany as possible, and he's willing to use coercion and violence to do it. By March 1946, Winston Churchill, Britain's wartime leader, comes to the same conclusion as Howley. The Soviets are not our friends.

[00:08:44]He comes to Missouri, so the home state of President Truman, and he delivers a speech that shocks the world, I should say, where he says from Stetin in the Baltic >> to Triest in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.

[00:09:02]And this is Churchill's way of really saying to the world that his former buddy in the Kremlin, Joseph Stalin, has gone from ally to enemy. So that was one a real shock uh and a real sort of a starting gun for the Cold War, if you like.

[00:09:21]>> As the Iron Curtain descends, Eastern Europe falls under Soviet control.

[00:09:26]Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, they all become Soviet satellite states. And Berlin, located deep in Soviet controlled Eastern Germany, gradually splits in two.

[00:09:40]There's a Soviet half and a western half. The western half is dominated by the United States in cooperation with Britain and France. You had two police forces, one for the east of the city, one for the west. Of course, they didn't agree on anything. You began to have two city governments, one in the east of the city and one in the west of the city, which didn't see eye to eye.

[00:10:03]>> German journalist Ruth Andreas Friedrich documents the breakup of Berlin in her diary.

[00:10:09]>> She'd lived in Berlin throughout the war and had been working quietly and secretly for the resistance inside the city. and she kept this diary which was um really charted the horrors of life in the city at the time.

[00:10:24]>> Andreas Friedrich captures the moment when the city splits for good. It happens over of all things money. By mid 1948, inflation is out of control. The old Reichkes mark is basically worthless. American Chesterfield cigarettes are the deacto currency.

[00:10:44]Berliners race to spend their reich marks on whatever they can. For Andreas Friedrich, it's mostly junk. Knives that don't cut, tin spoons that do, rock hard toothpaste, crumbling tubes of lipstick.

[00:10:58]One man spends 3 years of wages on a few pounds of coffee.

[00:11:06]Meanwhile, in secret, the Western Allies print a new currency and fly it into Berlin. 250 million crisp builds disguised as military cargo. It's called Operation Bird Dog. They hide it from the Soviets, who they know will try to stop them. Cold War competition is setting in, and the Western Allies want their half of the country to thrive. On June 24th, they spring the brand new Deutsch mark on Berlin, and the Soviets are not happy about it.

[00:11:37]The Soviets break all ties with their former partners in the western sectors.

[00:11:42]They can play this economic game, too.

[00:11:45]>> And people like Howling Mad Howie are left scratching their heads, thinking, "What the hell do we do now?

[00:11:52]We're blockaded. We can't get any food.

[00:11:55]The Soviets have cut the railway line from West Germany. They've cut the autoban from West Germany. We're sitting here completely stranded. What do we do?

[00:12:07]It's a blockade now. We're in for it.

[00:12:10]Andreas Friedrich writes in her diary.

[00:12:13]Snap, said the mouse, finding herself trapped. We poor little mice of Berlin.

[00:12:29]There's a familiar kind of story, one where someone does everything right and still hits a wall. In history, that might come from bureaucracy. Today, it might be the health care system. If you've ever tried to deal with it, waiting on hold, getting a claim denied, not fully understanding what a doctor just told you, you know how frustrating that can be. It's complicated, timeconuming, and it can feel like no one's really connecting the dots. That's why I was struck when I came across Solace. And importantly, it's covered by insurance. With Solace, you get a dedicated advocate. Someone who actually steps in and does the hard parts for you. A Solace advocate can help you find the right doctors and schedule appointments, fight denied claims to get your care approved by insurance, and even join your appointments remotely to translate doctor speak into plain language so you actually understand what's going on. They'll also make sure your doctors stay in sync and break down test results and treatment plans so you're not left guessing. These are experienced professionals, registered nurses and healthcare experts who work with you oneon-one. It's the kind of support you don't realize you need until you do. Go to solacealth.com to see if you qualify. It takes about 2 minutes and it's covered by insurance. That's sollessalth.com.

[00:13:44]Must be 18 or older. Advocates do not provide medical or legal advice.

[00:13:54]It's the summer of 1948 and the Soviet Union has begun its blockade of West Berlin. One of the first things they do is cut off electricity. If you've ever lived through a blackout, you know how quickly modern civilization with all its electric underpinnings can fall apart.

[00:14:10]The sewage system couldn't work. The water system couldn't work. The pumps that bring the water from the aqua filters couldn't work. And literally within hours, sewage is pouring into the many lakes and the rivers that run through the western sectors of Berlin.

[00:14:25]>> West Berliners go into survival mode.

[00:14:28]They begin hoarding water in bathtubs and buckets. At night, they grope around in the darkness by candle light. Fresh foods are replaced by dried potatoes, dried carrots, dried eggs, and dried milk. It makes the old rations, that watery potato soup, start to sound pretty good. But their biggest fear isn't starvation. It's the Russians.

[00:14:51]Frank Howley knows that if the Russians invade, the West doesn't stand a chance.

[00:14:56]Soviet soldiers outnumber Western forces 62 to1 in the region. Still, Howley goes on the radio and declares, "We are ready for you."

[00:15:07]Behind the bluster, he's scrambling.

[00:15:10]They've got about probably about 20 days supplies to keep people alive on subsistence. rations. So they have to think pretty quickly. There's no chance of bringing stuff in by rail because the Soviets have cut the rail link. There's no chance of bringing it in by road.

[00:15:26]So that leaves the air as the only possibility.

[00:15:30]The good news is that Howley has planned for this. He knows exactly how much food and supplies he needs to sustain 2 and 12 million West Berliners every day.

[00:15:41]It's 4 12,000 tons.

[00:15:47]But there's a problem.

[00:15:49]>> The only planes he's got are Dakota C47s. A Dakota C47 can carry 2 1/2 tons on any given flight.

[00:16:01]By that math, Howie would need to fly in 1,800 planes a day, every single day, which will be hard given that the Americans have less than 100 of these planes in all of Western Europe. And even if they had enough planes, West Berlin only has two airports. For this to work, he'd have to land a plane at both of them every 96 seconds. And I forgot to mention the weather. Berlin has notoriously bad flying weather.

[00:16:29]Picture fog as thick as pea soup. So he realizes that this is just not going to be possible to keep the city supplied by air. It's just simply humanly impossible. Back in the Kremlin, Joseph Stalin reaches the same conclusion.

[00:16:46]There is no way the Americans and British can sustain West Berlin by air alone. He knows from experience. At Stalingrad, when the Soviets completely surrounded the German army, the Germans failed to supply their forces by air.

[00:17:01]And that was just 200,000 people, not 2 and a half million like in West Berlin.

[00:17:06]>> But one man begs to differ. His name is Reginald Weight, a brilliant British Air Force officer and logistics wiz. He stays up all night with a slide rule running the numbers on weight loads and flight frequencies. And he calculates that resupplying West Berlin by air is technically possible. If you'd had planes flying in at five different levels, if you had it going round the clock with planes landing every 60 seconds or so, you could just about do it. Wait's calculations convinced the Western Allies to try. They cobbled together a smallcale airlift, enough to bring in about half of what West Berlin needs, but it's clearly not sustainable.

[00:17:49]Come winter, Berliners will either freeze or starve. The Allies need bigger planes and way more of them.

[00:18:01]In July 1948, Howley's boss, General Lucius Clay, flies to Washington to pitch America's military leaders and President Truman on an expanded airlift.

[00:18:13]At a meeting in the Oval Office, he makes his case.

[00:18:16]>> I think we got to stick it out. We've got to try and do this. We've got to save West Berlin. His argument was, if we lose West Berlin, we're going to lose West Germany as well. And if we lose West Germany, the whole of Western Europe could go.

[00:18:30]>> During the Cold War, this argument will be known as domino theory and used to justify American intervention worldwide.

[00:18:37]But the military brass in the room that day are not convinced.

[00:18:42]>> They go around the table and they all say, "This can't be done. It's impossible. No, we can't do it. We got to get out. We've got to get out."

[00:18:48]Truman leaves the meeting. He just as he leaves the meeting, he says to Lucius Clay, "Before you go back to Berlin, drop in on me later and I just want to have a final chat with you."

[00:18:57]>> The next morning, Clay arrives at the White House.

[00:19:01]>> He says to Truman, "I'm in complete despair. You heard the joints of chiefs of staff. They said it can't be done."

[00:19:08]Truman turns to Lucius Clay with a big smile and he said, "Don't worry. I've just overruled all of my joint chiefs of staff. The Berlin airlift is going to continue.

[00:19:19]The most ambitious air supply mission in history is about to take off.

[00:19:31]Trapped in a blockaded city, West Berliners face a terrible choice. Risk hunger in the western sectors, hoping against all odds that the airlift will somehow succeed, or head to the Soviet sector toward promises of fresh meat and vegetables. This is before the Berlin Wall. West Berliners could just catch a Yuban train and emerge in East Berlin.

[00:19:54]But trading in your Western ration card for a Soviet one, it's a devil's bargain. If you crossed into East Berlin and signed up for the far more generous portions of rations that were available, essentially you were locked into the Soviet system. You were treated as one of them, and it was extremely hard to go back into the Western sector. The vast majority of West Berliners stay put following Howley's voice on the radio.

[00:20:22]How'sley's a former ad executive and he knows how to sway public opinion. On the air, he declares, "The American people will not allow the German people to starve."

[00:20:34]>> Here's a clip of him from an American propaganda film. He's wearing a shirt and tie under his uniform and standing in front of a huge map of Berlin, pipe in hand. I believe we should bear in mind that the Americans, British, and French have exactly the same rights in Berlin as the uh Soviets have. We came here by international agreement. This is it should be completely an international city.

[00:21:02]>> Howley's bluster is backed up by the very real drone of Western cargo planes overhead every 3 minutes like clockwork.

[00:21:11]The planes land at Templehof, Gateau, and a brand new airport, Teagel, that the Allies build from the rubble of Berlin.

[00:21:20]The hum of aircraft engines, which sparked terror during the war, becomes a sound of hope. Our faith doesn't come from our hearts, one Berliner says. It comes through the ears.

[00:21:34]Soviet common and his men are listening too and they work hard to make life miserable for the western pilots. Some of these airfields in the western sectors were right on the border of the Soviet sector so the Soviets could install search lights and literally try and blind pilots as they came into land.

[00:21:54]>> The Soviets fire incendiary bullets between the planes causing the sky to explode into fragments of light. I couldn't see from here to the windshield. One pilot says the one thing the Soviets don't do is open fire on the planes themselves. That would be one step too far.

[00:22:13]>> Stalin didn't ever dare to try and shoot the planes out of the sky. That would be a declaration of war and Stalin wouldn't risk it.

[00:22:24]>> Still, the airlift is really dangerous.

[00:22:27]At least 80 airmen and ground crew die in the operation. many crashing in Berlin's heavy fog.

[00:22:35]Gradually, the airlift grows into a streamlined juggernaut. By the spring, Howley's initial target of 4 12,000 tons of supplies, it's being met every single day. The airlift becomes so successful that the American commander managing the day-to-day, General William Tonnage Tunner, worries that pilots and crews are resting on their laurels. So, one day while he's getting a massage from a stout German woman in the basement of the Schwarzerbach Hotel, General Tunner has an idea.

[00:23:08]He decides to throw down a challenge to his men. A 24-hour liftathon in which crews will compete to double their daily average. He wanted to mark Easter Sunday by having the biggest load of supplies ever flown into Berlin. A challenge went out and really everyone just worked around the clock to try and break the record.

[00:23:29]Air crews work feverishly, landing, unloading, taking off, coal, manel covers, condoms, dried apricots, cougar clocks, tobacco. A plane lands every 63 seconds. The Soviet air controller storms out of the joint control room in protest. "Your planes are coming in too fast," he yells. Ever the showman Comedon Howie rushes to Templehof airport to deliver a grand speech, but his words are drowned out by the roar of aircraft engines.

[00:24:01]At noon on Easter Sunday, the very last C-54 Skymaster of the Easter parade touches down. The final tally is painted in sloppy red paint beneath the cockpit window.

[00:24:13]>> They did spectacularly. I think it was 12,900 tons.

[00:24:18]>> 12,941 tons to be exact. 1,398 flights. The coal alone would have filled 600 freight cars. The stunt boosts morale. And more importantly, it breaks the will of the Soviets to keep the blockade going. For Stalin as well and for the Soviets on the ground, they realized that the allies, the Western Allies had won at that point. They won with the Berlin Airlift.

[00:24:45]>> Another major factor in Stalin's decision to give up is the Allies punishing counter blockade. It completely stops the flow of machinery, steel, and coal from West to the east. A move that cripples industrial production in both East Berlin and East Germany.

[00:25:05]And so at 1 minute past midnight on May 12th, 1949, the Soviets finally lift the blockade.

[00:25:15]In an instant, as the electricity is restored, the lights of Berlin snap to life. 100 miles to the west, journalists line up in hired sports cars, practically revving their engines.

[00:25:28]They're ready to race down the moonlight Ottabbon, hoping to be the first into the newly liberated city.

[00:25:34]>> It's going to be the new scoop of a lifetime, you know. And so you have this fantastic moment. The literally the barriers go up, you know, the frontier between West Germany and East Germany goes up and off they go charging down the autob barn in their cars.

[00:25:49]>> The city they arrive in is still scarred from the war, still recovering. But today it's celebrating. And it is a moment of jubilation for Berliners. This is the party of a lifetime. Everyone turns out in the streets. People put on their finery. They women put on their evening dresses. Men all dress up in dinner jackets and in their bow ties and everything.

[00:26:15]In a sense, this is their real end to World War II. 4 years after Nazi Germany surrenders. A West Berlin politician sums up the feeling in four words. the West has won.

[00:26:28]And I think for Berliners that was true because they'd been saved, the city had been saved, and they knew that nothing now could impede or impinge on their lives in in West Berlin. They were going to be safe for as long as the West was there.

[00:26:44]>> The Western Allies had discussed a security alliance before the Berlin crisis, but the blockade accelerates those plans. It makes the Soviet threat tangible and shows that a united West could win. And so in April 1949, NATO is born.

[00:27:02]>> The signatures to this treaty agree on one key thing and one key clause of the NATO treaty, which is that an attack on one of the signary countries is considered to be attack on all of them and everyone will go to the defense of that one country. America's commitment to defend Western Europe becomes fundamental to the post-war order. It's a commitment that today seems uncertain. What happened in Berlin in the post-war period remains incredibly important because I I I feel we're at the tail end of the post-war order. We're entering a new period of great uncertainty and I don't think anyone could tell you where the world is going at the moment. In the aftermath of World War II, the West faced a similar moment. Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech is remembered as a warning about the Soviet Union. But it's also a call to action for a bruised and divided alliance. We face a choice, he says.

[00:28:03]Unity or disunityity. If the Western democracies stand together, their influence will be immense. If on the other hand, >> they become divided or alter their duty.

[00:28:16]And if these all important year not allowed to slip away, then indeed catastrophe may overwhelm us all.

[00:28:33]Thanks for listening to History This Week, a Backpocket Studios production in partnership with the History Channel. To stay updated on all things history this week, sign up at historyweekodcast.com.

[00:28:45]And if you have any thoughts or questions, send us an email at history [email protected].

[00:28:51]Special thanks to our guest Giles Milton, author of Checkmate in Berlin, the Cold War Showdown that shaped the modern world. We also used the books Battleground Berlin by Ruth Andreas Friedrich, Berlin Command by Brigadier General Frank Howley, Daring Young Men by Richard Reeves, among other sources.

[00:29:09]You can find all the books we use to research our episodes at our website history thiswispodcast.com.

[00:29:16]This episode was produced by me, John Earl, and soundesigned by Ben Dixon. For Backpocket Studios, our executive producer is Ben Dix from the History Channel. Our executive producers are Eli Lair and Liv Fiddler. Don't forget to follow, rate, and review History This Week wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you next week.