The Berlin Airlift: When Aviation Fed a City From the Sky

In June 1948, as the Cold War hardened, Soviet forces cut all road, rail, and canal access to the western sectors of Berlin, deep inside Soviet-controlled territory. More than two million people in West Berlin were suddenly cut off from food, coal, and supplies. The Western Allies faced a stark choice: abandon the city or supply it by the only route left open — the air corridors. They chose to fly, and what followed was one of the greatest logistical feats in aviation history. In Operation Vittles, American and British aircraft — workhorse Douglas C-47s and the larger C-54s — flew a continuous conveyor belt of cargo into Berlin's airfields. At the operation's peak, aircraft landed at Tempelhof and the other fields roughly every few minutes, day and night, in all weather. Pilots flew precise, disciplined approaches with no second chances; a missed approach meant returning to base fully loaded rather than circling and disrupting the flow. Over nearly eleven months the airlift delivered well over two million tons of food and fuel — including the coal that heated the city through winter — proving that air power could sustain not just an army but an entire civilian population. A pilot named Gail Halvorsen began dropping candy on tiny handkerchief parachutes to the city's children, earning the nickname the "Candy Bomber" and giving the operation an enduring human face. The Soviets lifted the blockade in May 1949, having failed to force the Allies out. The Berlin Airlift remains a landmark in the history of both the Cold War and aviation — a demonstration that the airplane, barely four decades after Kitty Hawk, could be an instrument of humanitarian resolve on a scale no one had imagined.