2023-06-26 02:30:04
Little Wolfgang wrote to the “dear chocolate plane” with an important request. “Oh, be so kind and write me where you always drop off your chocolate,” the five-year-old asked US pilot Gail Halvorsen on a postcard in 1948. “I’m always looking with my little sister, but I’ve never found any.”
The map in the Berlin Allied Museum’s inventory reveals a great deal regarding a key date in the Cold War. The Berlin Airlift, which began on June 26, 1948, was the first climax of decades of East-West confrontation, helping two million people survive in West Berlin. Only three years following Germany’s surrender in 1945, Washington, together with its allies Great Britain and France, decided on the logistical tour de force to secure their West Berlin outpost and stand up to the Soviet Union.
The occupation zones of the three Western powers France, Great Britain and the USA, which had existed since the end of the Second World War, introduced the D-Mark with a currency reform in the summer of 1948. Its own currency signaled that divided Germany was drifting apart. The USSR saw an opportunity to take over the Western-controlled sectors of Berlin, which lay as an island in the middle of the Soviet occupation zone. Stalin cut all land routes and bet that the western powers would give up their outlying outposts. By May 1949, France, Great Britain and the United Nations had flown 277,000 flights to West Berlin, bringing around two million tons of essential goods. By this time, the former wartime allies, the USA and the Soviet Union, had long since become estranged. The British ex-Prime Minister Winston Churchill coined the term “Iron Curtain” in 1946. The airlift was a humanitarian achievement, but it was also a geopolitical move.
She signaled to Berliners “that we can rely on a certain firmness on the part of the Americans,” said later Governing Mayor Klaus Schütz. Care packages and candy bombers have all become myths. The West German view of the former wartime opponents was to change fundamentally.
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