Sweet Victory
How the Berlin Airlift Divided East and West
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The fascinating story of how a forgotten group of airmen—who had spent World War II dropping Allied bombs on Berlin—risked their lives in 1948-49 dropping chocolate bars from the sky.
After Hitler’s defeat in World War II, Europe’s ruins were divided between East and West. The center of the struggle for influence was Berlin, split between the victorious Allied powers: the Soviets on one side and the Anglo-American and French forces on the other. Berlin was closer to the Soviet border than Paris, a strategic springboard for Stalin to rule Central Europe.
In June of 1948, three years after the war, Stalin made his move to take complete control of the city. Laying siege, he blocked off supplies and transport to the Western sectors. The stakes could not have been higher: the Russian leader risked nuclear conflict. A false move––even one plane shot down by Russian fighters––could mean the atomic drop that American generals wanted. Was Berlin worth this enormous risk, and how would the West react?
The Soviets expected West Berlin would be easy to win. They were stunned when their adversaries launched, instead, a daring operation to supply Berlin by plane. With 277,500 flights in total, one landing in Berlin every three minutes, British and American pilots delivered 2.3 million tons of essentials such as coal and flour and, famously, candy and chocolate. The Berlin Airlift became the largest air operation in history.
The airlift, meanwhile, transformed West Germans from foes into willing partners against Stalin. In this sense, the first victory against Germany came in 1945—when the Allied powers pummeled it into submission. The sweet victory came three years later when the Western powers conquered the hearts and minds of their former enemy.
The Berlin Airlift is one of the century’s most dangerous and least understood crises of the twentieth century. Inexperienced and armed to the teeth, the world’s superpowers surveyed each other for the first time. The Cold War began in this city in 1948-49, just as it would end there forty years later.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Pearson (Berlin) takes an illuminating up-close look at the Berlin Airlift and the kicking off of the Cold War. The common narrative goes that on June 28, 1949, Berlin—sliced into quadrants occupied by American, British, French, and Soviet forces—was blockaded by Josef Stalin to squeeze out the Westerners. To save the starving Berliners, American and British aircrews delivered more than two million tons of supplies by plane from June 1948 to May 1949. Pearson pokes holes in this version of events: he dispels the notion that Berlin was completely sealed off—"land crossings were commonplace"—and notes that Berliners themselves could easily cross between sectors. "In effect," he contends, "there was no blockade." Moreover, he finds among the German populace some initial sympathy for the Soviets, who had placed restrictions on the movement of U.S. military supplies in response to an American plan to introduce a new currency that would "flood zone and make their currency worthless." Through probing interviews with those who were present, Pearson reveals how the airlift, more than just a successful propaganda campaign by the Westerners, was a viscerally felt moment of political realignment, which engendered doubt among some Americans (who didn't want to ally with former Nazis) and hope among Berliners (who wanted to rehabilitate their image in the West). This adds complexity to a major historical turning point.
