70 years after the Berlin blockade and airlift, the first major crisis of the cold war

The division of Germany had already been raised as a necessity in 1943 in Tehran, when the three great leaders of the Allied Powers, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin met in the Iranian capital to define a post-war period that still seemed distant.

The Second World War seemed in full swing, even though there were also signs of an inevitable turning point to the German defeat, and plans for a future Europe after the fall of Nazism coexisted with the most urgent need to open new fronts and ease the pressure on the Soviets.

In Yalta, Russia, the "Big Three" met again in February 1945, this opportunity with the future decided and a few months before the fall of Berlin and the suicide of the dictator Adolf Hitler. This time, the partition of Germany into four occupation zones under the control of the Soviet Union, United States, Great Britain and France, who did not participate in the summits but was rehabilitated as a power anyway. But the details were not yet decided and there were many different plans on how to carry it out.

Finally, the leaders met again in Potsdam (Germany) in August 1945. Berlin had fallen, and it was a week before the capitulation of the rising sun empire.

In this last big summit, in which Harry S. Truman replaced Roosevelt as President of the United States and Clement Attlee, along with the British Prime Minister, following Churchill's election defeat. the three powers agreed on the limits and scope of the partition of Germany and the annexation of territories that would make the Soviet Union and Poland.

The initial goal, shared by all parties, it was weakening Germany and preventing it from becoming the leading continental power in Europe, although the situation becomes precisely that of necessity rebuild the country and involve it in a new conflict that was looming.

But there would be a difficult problem to solve. Berlin, capital of the German Reich's failure, was also divided into four occupation zones attributed to the victorious powers despite the fact that the city was deep in Germany under the Soviet occupation.

After the Second World War, a new period of mutual mistrust, ideological competition, arms race and tension between the three Western powers and the Soviet Union, which will later be known as the Cold War, started almost immediately and the strange partition arrangement in Berlin was the focus of the first major crisis of the period.

Between June 24, 1948 and May 12, 1949 (exactly 70 years ago this Sunday), the occupation zone of the United States, Britain and France in Berlin were almost completely cut off from the territories to West by Stalin's decision. , and this part of the city populated by two million inhabitants has managed to survive only through the shipment of supplies by air, in what has become Berlin Airlift (Berliner Luftbrücke).

For almost a year he transportedn about two million tons of staple goods on 277,569 flights, or 300 tons carrying 5,000 tons per day in its most intense form, as the agency recalls AFP. The traffic was concentrated in the airport Tempelhof, which was then the main airport of Berlin, now converted into a park, remained south of the US occupation zone.and at the Gatow Military Airfield in the west and the British Zone.

How they were not enough, A third aerodrome had to be built rapidly in the north, in the French region and in the district of Tegel. It is the main international airport of Berlin today.

But why did the Soviet Union launch a land blockade of the German capital that seemed dictate the death of the alliance that defeated Nazism and lay the foundation for another possible world war?

Since the end of the war and the beginning of the occupation, it was difficult to respect what had been agreed in Potsdam. and the Western powers did not yet know what role Germany should play in the future. For the Soviets, however, it seemed simpler. The country should become a new communist nation under the Moscow wing, which could never again start an offensive against their territory like the one launched in 1941, which caused tens of millions of deaths and the destruction of huge portions of territory in Russia, Ukraine and the Baltic countries.

Almost immediately, German Communist leaders were summoned to carry out this process and The German Communist Party (KPD) was strongly supported, founded at the beginning of the century but completely annulled by Nazism, which had forced its leaders to exile precisely in the USSR.

In the midst of these ideological tensions, in 1946, the Soviets stopped sending food and fuel to the US, Britain and France occupation zones., as required by the Potsdam agreements, and Western allies in turn have sent industrial machinery.

It is clear that cooperation between Moscow, on the one hand, and Washington and London, on the other hand, would be impossible, The United States and Britain unified their areas of occupation of Germany in January 1947 in what would be called bizona. In 1948 France would unite to form the triangle to ensure the development of the West German territories, and even the German mark has been restored as a common currency, a Bases of the emergence of the Federal Republic of Germany shortly thereafter.

In response to the creation of Trizona, Stalin decided to relaunch the bet and On June 24, he closed access to Berlin by land, rail and water, turning it into an island in the middle of the Soviet occupation zone. Moscow has also announced the creation of a new currency for its zone of occupation.

Two days later, the first planes loaded with food and necessities began flying. what was called "Operation Vittles" (provisions of operations or victuals), facing different air transport units of the United States Air Force and the Royal Air Force of the United Kingdom. Although France has not been able to provide aircraft, it has ordered the construction of Tegel Airfield as a contribution to the operation.

By previous agreements with the Soviets, Three air corridors connected West Berlin with the territory triangle of Germany occupied by the USSR.

The northern corridor connected the cities of Hamburg and Bremen, among others, to the Tegel Airfield. The downtown corridor connected Hanover and Colonia to Gatow. And the southern corridor was with Frankfurt and Munich and Tempelhof airport.

The runners came 32 kilometers wide and planes could fly at a maximum altitude of about 3,000 meters so as not to harm Soviet military operations at high altitude. They remained the only three air access routes in West Berlin until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

To the extent that the main aircraft used in the airlift by the Americans were theDouglas C-47 Skytrain, C-54 Skymaster and Douglas C-74 Globemaster; the Fairchild C-82 package and the Boeing C-97 Stratofreighters, according to data from the Air Mobility Museum of Delaware, USA.

The British, on the other hand, used their bombers Avro Lancaster and Lincoln, and the cargo ships Avro York and Handley Page Hastings, among others, several times landing to unload food and sometimes parachuting it.

Thus, they managed to supply the population of a town that had been left in ruins by Allied bombing and the Soviet offensive during the war and which still suffered severe limitations in its basic public services.

Although the airlift started with limitations and problems, then it was perfected and the flow of goods intensified even during the harsh winter months, ensuring the survival of the city and its inhabitants. Pilots who participated in the operations began to receive names such as "Der Schokoladen Flieger" (The chocolate aviator) on behalf of the children of Berlin and the flights themselves have received different nicknames, among which that of "Raisin Bomber" or grape bomber, a designation that today, from a distance, could be considered ironic given that just three years ago, the same pilots and planes had downloaded other types of documents on Berlin, but that it was at the time a sign of gratitude.

The "break" of the terrestrial blockade from the air, to an embargo launched by the Western powers against the Soviet zone, the high political costs related to the prevention of access and the increase of military tensions, they seem to have taken Moscow for finally restore traffic to West Berlin on May 12, 1949, exactly 70 years ago. The airlift would be extended a little more, until September 30, to ensure the city's full supply.

But the hostility between the United States bloc, Britain and France, which only a month ago had been militarily linked to the new Atlantic Alliance (NATO) and the Soviet Union, were not in force. was manifested.

Ten days after the end of the blockade the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany on the territory of the triangle would be announced. On October 7 of the same year, it would be the turn of the German Democratic Republic in the Soviet sector.

So the first big crisis had been overcome, but the cold war had just started and Berlin would still have a lot of history to go through, including the construction of the infamous wall by the Soviet authorities (whose collapse will soon be 30 years old), as one of the first scenarios and fronts of the conflict that would eventually mark the twentieth century and lay the foundation for the twenty-first century.