The March program meeting for the Bridgeville Area Historical Society exceeded our most optimistic expectations. Todd DePastino, probably our all-time favorite guest speaker, made an outstanding presentation on the 1948 Berlin Aiflift, a presentation that was remarkably relevant to our situation today. His combination of extemporaneous speaking skills and detailed knowledge of his subject is priceless. No one witnessing this specific presentation could go away without marveling at the difference between “the Greatest Generation” and its successor today. If only we would learn from history!
Our friendship with the USSR ended shortly after VJ Day and by June, 1948, the Cold War was officially on. The Potsdam Agreement in July 1945 divided Germany into four occupation zones, each to be administered separately by France, Great Britain, the United States, and the USSR. Although Berlin was deep in the Russian Zone, it too was divided into four parts, with overland access ensured through the Russian Zone.
By 1948 Stalin’s drive to dominate Europe was losing momentum; in response, on June 24, 1948, he initiated the Berlin Blockade, stopping all truck, rail, and barge traffic from the western zones. The (“last straw”) incident that precipitated this action was the Allies’ decision to exchange the highly inflated Reichsmark with a new currency, the Deutsche Mark, backed by U. S. dollars, in an effort to control inflation.
The Blockade triggered a massive debate in Washington. One popular alternative was to abandon the two million citizens in West Berlin to communism. General Clay wanted to invade the Soviet Zone. General LeMay wanted to threaten the Soviets with the atom bomb. Fortunately, we had experimented earlier with supplying our 10,000 troops in West Berlin by air and had confirmed that the Russians would permit us to use three air corridors into Templehof and Gatow Airports.
We began the Airlift modestly with 102 C-47s, each with a freight capacity of three and a half tons. It was quickly determined that it would require 1,025 tons of food and 3,475 tons of fuel per day to supply the West Berliners. The C-47 fleet could deliver perhaps 1,000 tons per day; President Truman supplemented them with a comparable fleet of C-54s, each capable of transporting ten and a half tons. General Curtis LeMay was given overall responsibility for the effort. He assigned specific responsibility to General William Tunner, a logistics genius credited with the success of the “over the Hump” airlift in World War II that supplied China with supplies from India. He developed an innovative program that eventually permitted 1,440 aircraft (one per minute!) to deliver the required tonnage around the clock. The British contribution to the Airlift was massive, equal to ours.
The speaker included a delightful discussion about Captain Gail Halvorsen, “the Candy Bomber”. Tode had the good fortune to meet and interview Halvorsen on behalf of the Veterans Breakfast Club four years ago, before his death at the age of 101. According to (then) Lieutenant Halvorsen, early in the Airlift he met fifteen emaciated children peering through the chain link fence at Templehof. Embarrassed that all he had to give them was a single stick of gum which they carefully divided into fifteen pieces, he promised to be back in two days with more candy that he would drop out of his plane. “How will we know it’s you?” “I will wiggle my wings”. Back in the American Zone he and his crew collected a pile of candy and made handkerchief parachutes for them. Sure enough the kids had returned in force and were thrilled to see their treats arrive by air. Thus was born the legend of “Uncle Wiggly Wings”. General Tunner supported this effort enthusiastically – eventually thirty-two tons of candy were delivered by it.
The Airlift was so successful that 350,000 Berliners turned out for a Freedom Rally on September 9, 1948, organized by Berlin Mayor Ernst Reuter to demonstrate their resistance to the USSR’s effort to incorporate them into their communist empire. Stalin eventually realized that his blockade had provided the West with a major propaganda coup; on September 30, 1949, he terminated it and permitted the ground corridors to be reopened. In fifteen months the Allies had flown 280,000 flights and delivered two and a half million tons of supplies at a cost of five billion dollars (seventy billion in 2025 dollars). It was our first victory in the Cold War and a major contributor to the unification of West Germany and the establishment of NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization). The Communists responded with the Warsaw Pact, Chairman Mao’s defeat of Nationalist China, and North Korea’s invasion of South Korea. The Berlin Wall provided the opportunity for two American presidents to make memorable statements – John F. Kennedy (“Ich bin ein Berliner”) and Ronald Reagan (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”). In 1990 the wall was indeed torn down and (that phase of) the Cold War ended.
In the audience for this presentation was Bernd Stoy, a soon-to-be nonagenarian who was a teenager in the French Zone of Western Germany during the Airlift. Todd took advantage of the opportunity to get some poignant eye-witness comments on that era from him. Mr. Stoy’s contributions were a significant enhancement to the presentation.
After the presentation my astute cousin Cathy Smith shook her head and said “That’s what we used to be!”, eloquently summing up the changes in our society in the past seventy-seven years by contrasting our response to a bully in 1948 with our response to a comparable situation with the same bully today. “Great” used to imply courage, unselfishness, generosity, and compassion.
Next month’s program will feature another old friend, Glenn Flickinger. His subject will be “The General, the Major, and the Sergeant”, the story of the 29th Division at Omaha Beach in World War II. It is scheduled for 7:30 pm, Tuesday April 29, 2025, in the Chartiers Room of the Bridgeville Volunteer Fire Department.