262. Berlin Blockade: Airlift Across The Iron Curtain (Ep 2)

0:00If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to Empire Club at www.empirepoduk.com.

0:28Hello and welcome. What? What are you doing? What are you doing? Is this a clue? You're not nodding at me to go do it. Of course not. No, no, I think you should do it now. That was weird. No, no, no. No, no. It's not how we normally do it. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnott, and apparently an uprising from you, William Dalrymple. I just tried to do the intro and I got put firmly back in my place. So previously on this podcast, we have been in the company of the fabulous... Before the Southwest London spring, as we now call it. Bloody hell. We were in the company of the very patient, it turns out, and brilliant Giles Milton, author of the, I cannot recommend this book more highly.

1:20It's such a good book, Checkmate in Berlin. It is a rip-roaring ride. And if you haven't heard the episode before this, go back and listen because it is wonderful. A host of characters. And I've said this sort of before, history often presents you with people that a fiction editor would say, go back and rewrite this. This is not believable. This is not a convincing argument that a person like this could exist. This person could not possibly exist. No, so go and do it again. Anyway, Giles, just to remind people, in the last episode, very briefly, we were talking about the way in which the allies, the progeny, if you like, of the big three at Yalta are enacting the will of that conference.

2:01And it is actually in the spirit of the conference because they're all at each other's throats almost from the get-go. There are some horrific things that have happened in Berlin. And it culminated in the decision of Stalin to enforce a blockade on Berlin. Now, we should actually just say what this means to the people of Berlin. Yes, also why he decided at that particular moment to do that. Because, I mean, obviously now it's part of history, but it wasn't perhaps inevitable, was it, that it would be so? No. So what's happened is that the city of Berlin has been divided into East and West. The Soviets are on the East of the city.

2:35The Western powers, the British, the French, and most importantly, the Americans control the Western sector of the city. And over the course of three years, from 1945 to 1948, the divisions between these erstwhile allies during the war have become deeper and deeper. The police forces have split into two effectively rival forces, one in the Soviet sector, one in the Western sector. The city assembly has split into two as well. But the crunch, I think, really comes in 1948, in the spring of 1948, when the Western allies introduce a new currency into West Germany. The currency in Germany, and particularly in Berlin, is worthless.

3:16And so it's all, everything is carried on by barter, cigarettes, chocolate, silk stockings. That is what is being used to buy stuff. And the West realises they've got to bring in a new currency. They bring in the Deutschmark. Originally, they're not going to introduce into Berlin. Then they do. Stalin responds. He brings in what becomes known as the Ostmark. And so you now have two rival currencies to go along with the rival police forces and rival assemblies. It's an untenable situation. And Stalin, who's for the last three years has had his greedy eyes on the Western sectors of Berlin. I think he decides, right, now is the moment to strike.

3:57Giles, we're used to this idea of East Berlin being sort of poor and impoverished and full of crappy cars and sort of West Berlin being full of Mercedes and richer. Is there any sense two years in that this is already beginning to look different, that the East and the West have got very different levels of prosperity? Or is that not clear yet? No, that's definitely not clear at this point. There's nothing in any of the shops. And in fact, either way, yes, in terms of food, probably there's more food in the Soviet sector than there is in the Western sectors. And Stalin, he knows this, and he realised this is a very strong point in his favour, that traditionally Berlin was always fed by the farmland that lies to the east of the city.

4:38In Pomerania and places like that. Exactly, places like that. And so he realises, okay, so the Western sectors are dependent on food that comes from Soviet held territory. And so, you know, this is where he thinks, well, if I were to cut that off, the population of West Berlin would starve, you know, there's nothing the Western allies will be able to do about this. So this is it. He hatches this great plan. We're going to effectively create a medieval siege situation. Imagine a medieval castle. You pulled up the drawbridges. The people inside cannot get any food in. And what's his public excuse?

5:12Why does he say he's doing this? Oh, well, the excuse is the currency reform that the Deutsche Mark that's been brought in. But that's frankly, I mean, that is one reason. But, you know, he's been eyeing this up as a possibility for some time. He thinks this is now the moment to strike. And again, I mean, we'll just have a little brief look over our shoulder because one man has warned that this is coming all along. And he was sort of like Cassandra at the Yalta Conference and he remains that. And that's Churchill, who in 1946 makes his famous Iron Curtain speech. Just throw back a little bit before the blockade was a thing, just one year into this sharing of Berlin and the carving up.

5:47He's in America. He's with Truman, happens to be with the bow-tied car salesman, Truman, soft-soaping him or whatever it is that Truman complains about smarming up to him. He's lost the election, but he's still been invited to go over and has this sort of hero's welcome. He's very popular in America. And he does this warning that, you know what, something really rotten this way comes. And I'm trying to find the actual wording of this. I've got the quote here. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic. In the Adriatic. An iron curtain. You do it, Giles. You've got the voice. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

6:21Because I think you need to do it in Churchill. Go on, do it. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic. An iron curtain has descended over the continent. Very good. It's your audition for the movie. Yeah. Publicly, certainly, the front-facing thing is, you know, no, we're going to make it work. We're going to make it work. But there are increasing numbers of people who are saying, you know what, this is never going to work. So you've got, on February the 22nd, 1946, You've got the American ambassador to Moscow, George F. Kennan, who has this famous long telegram that he writes saying the Soviet Union is in a state of perpetual hostility towards the West.

6:57We cannot trust them. We must prepare when they move against us. And this will then shape foreign policy thereafter. But still, does it come as a surprise when the blockade actually happens and Stalin actually fronts up to the West? Just to very briefly rewind to that famous speech by Churchill. This speech caused shockwaves around the world. In Whitehall and Washington, the idea was to try to keep this allied alliance together, you know. And Churchill stands up on a world stage and basically says the man who he was toasting as Stalin the Great only a year earlier has now become public enemy number one.

7:37His speech causes uproar around the world. And Truman is asked by journalists, you know, what the hell are you doing allowing Churchill to make this speech in your own hometown? And Truman, who'd read every word of the speech, said, I didn't know what he was going to say. I had no idea. Shocking. I'm as shocked as you are. It's shocking. But anyway, but to talk about George Kennan, as you mentioned, he's a diplomat in the American embassy in Moscow. He's been there for years. He knows Stalin well. And actually, this long telegram is really crucial in turning foreign policy on its head in America, because he says, and I quote from the long telegram, one line, Soviet power is impervious to the logic of reason and highly sensitive to the logic of force.

8:24And this is going to become incredibly important. This is the whole policy of containment, containing the Soviet power, but also holding on to those Western sectors of Berlin. But also, it becomes the very foundation of what will become NATO, that you have to show force. The only thing that will make this man back down is a show of force. And that Kennan telegram is utterly transformative. I would suggest not just of American foreign policy, but everybody's foreign policy in the West. I mean, the crisis in Berlin, which we're about to come on to, is what leads to the foundation of NATO. I mean, there's a direct connection between the two.

9:03And of course, the central tenet of NATO being an attack on one is an attack on all. And this goes to the point made by both Kennan and Frank Howling Mad Howley that the Soviets will only dare to attack when they think they have overwhelming force. This is obviously why we are interested in doing this miniseries now, because now that NATO is under the scanner, now that Trump is calling into question whether this is a useful alliance for America, this is a moment when we examine how it all began. So we're here in Berlin now. Giles, tell us what happens next. And I think it's worth, given we're on a podcast called Empire, I think it's just worth reminding ourselves that this is a big clash of ideas that's taking place here in Berlin.

9:46Listen to Sir Brian Robinson, who's in charge of the British sector of Germany. He says, we are empire builders. He says, the empire whose boundaries we struggle to extend is the empire of true democracy, the empire of peace, the empire of dignity. So now we are presented with a real clash between Soviet ideology and the ideology of the free world. We're now in 1948. It's realised that the Allies really have to hold on to the Western sectors of Berlin. We should perhaps put this into the context that 1948, of course, means one year after the British have left India. And it's while the British are in the process of abandoning Palestine.

10:29So one empire is very much going down at this point. While they're trying to shore up the ruin of another. But what I'm really interested in is how easy it is to blockade the Western sector of Berlin. Because was nobody ever fussed about the fact that there was one main road and one main railway that could completely cut off the whole of the Western sector and starve them out? I mean, was nobody screaming that logistically this is a real problem and that logistically, you know, we're surrounded by Soviet territory and we need to have a plan B earlier than the actual blockade? It's absolutely extraordinary.

11:08It never ceases to amaze me that some of these conferences, someone doesn't say, hold on a minute, that's not going to work because if this happens, then this happens, you know. And so you're right. There was one autobahn leading from Western Germany into West Berlin. there was one railway line leading from Western Germany into West Berlin. And of course, what the Allies, some of the Allies had feared the Western Allies was that Stalin would shut these off and say, right, you're not using those anymore. And that means you've got two and a half million Berliners, you've got about six and a half thousand Allied troops, and they have got access to nothing, no food, no fuel, no supplies, you know.

11:46And this siege, this blockade is going to be more than just cutting the railway line and the autobahn. Stalin's going to cut off electricity, he's going to cut off the water supply, he's going to cut off the gas supply. He's really pulling up the drawbridges and leaving Western Berlin completely isolated. So there's the success with which this happens, and then you get cold feet. I mean, there are sources that suggest the Americans were thinking of hauling ass out of there, as they would say, and pulling out. But it is that man, Hawley, who we talked about a lot in the last episode, Howlin' Mad, Frank Howley, who says, I'm not going anywhere.

12:21Are you crazy? You think I'm going to leave these 2.4 million people to starve, cut off from all food? Because Stalin does not care about them. He doesn't care if they starve to death, they're collateral damage. That's absolutely right. And Howley's really fighting against the entire sort of bureaucracy of Washington. There's a growing feeling that they have to pull out of their Western sectors. There's a growing feeling, they'll be able to hold on, short of forcing, you know, battalions of tanks across, you know, Soviet-occupied Eastern Germany and forcing a way into the city, into the Western sectors.

12:57And they realise, well, that's going to be World War III, and no one wants that. And so the feeling really is, yes, we're going to have to pull out. But you're right, Colonel Frank Howley is saying, absolutely no way we're not pulling out. And we've got to find a way around this problem of feeding two and a half million people. So that is where the idea of an airlift, a bonkers idea, a mad idea, something that just, it just seems so insane that anyone would even countenance breaking a blockade from the sky. Who comes up with the idea that we will drop supplies from the air? Well, you know, when you're in a time of crisis, it's time to summon the expertise of a good old-fashioned English boffin.

13:39And that is exactly what Air Commodore Reginald Rex Waite was suddenly in a kind of 1940s patriotic film here. Bring on the Barnes-Wallace of Berlin. Well, he was. I mean, he was obsessed with maths, applied maths. So he loves logarithms and algebraics and, you know, all this sort of stuff. And he sits down and he works out. He says, OK, so in West Germany, there are eight air bases. And in Western sectors of Berlin, there are two airports. And he works out, it's just about possible if you have enough planes, and you fly them in at sort of 90-second intervals around the clock, you can just about supply the population of Berlin with what they need.

14:23And what do they need? Frank Howley has already worked this out. The absolute minimum subsistence level for Berlin is 4 ,500 tonnes of food a day, 6 ,000 tonnes of coal a day. Now, they've only got access to C-47 Dakotas, and they can carry 2 ,500 tonnes each time they fly into Berlin. So you realise that to bring in four and a half thousand tons or almost 10 ,000 tons of stuff, you need an awful lot of Dakotas. And so Reginald Waite presents this to his British overlords. They say, don't be ridiculous, Reg, get back to the maths in your study. But just one point on why they think it's ridiculous, because this mathematician's brilliant idea is that you have to fly almost six flights simultaneously at different altitudes.

15:07And they'll just land. They'll just land. One, one. They're barely off the tarmac. And another one will come in. It just seems completely illogical. It's logical on paper, they say, Reg, good job. But hang on, six different altitudes coming in at 90 second intervals. What on earth? How do you think that we're going to manage this? Yeah, and also, while we're at it, Reginald, what about the fog that afflicts Berlin all the time? What about the snowstorms that come in every winter? You're right, on paper, it was a work of genius. But actually, in practicality, everyone said it's not going to work.

15:39So eventually, it's presented to Frank Howley. eventually it goes all the way up to Truman. And Truman by this has, you know, come out with his Truman doctrine, this idea of containing Soviet power. We've got also the Marshall Plan, which we can touch on, which is rebuilding the German economy and other economies. And so Truman says, look, let's give it a go. You know, the American Air Force could do anything, lads, let's give it a go. And what begins at that point is one of the most remarkable logistical exercises, I think, in history. I think a lot of people have always found the Berlin to be a rather unsexy topic to write about, but it's absolutely extraordinary.

16:15The Americans bring in planes from every plane they have, from Honolulu, Hawaii, from Alaska. Everything is shipped to Germany. And the British as well comes in from India, comes in from the Pacific Islands. They just congregate. I mean, it's got a real D-Day feeling. It's got a real little boats, but here, big planes from everywhere we can get them. Just come one, come all. We need all of you and you need to report right now. Yeah. And it's, you know, when the Americans do things, particularly they do things on such a grand scale. You know, they don't bring in 50 pilots. They bring in sort of 10 ,000 or 20 ,000 pilots.

16:47And these planes, these are all survivors from the Second World War. They've still got their camouflage markings from North Africa on them. They've got their D-Day landing stripes painted on them. They're battered, they're, you know, they're dented and everything, but everything is brought into Germany to begin the greatest siege-busting airlift in history. Can I also just say another bit of kudos to Howley, who I may be a little bit in love with. I think I am. So he also comes up with this idea of, you know, to maximise the cargo on these things. You know, if we need fruit and vegetables, they're quite heavy, we'll dehydrate them, which is kind of a revolutionary thought from a man who is in military uniform, but as you say, quite a complicated man who went to the Sorbonne as well.

17:27It's extraordinary. I mean, they get around so many problems. Like salt was a real problem. They needed to bring salt into the city. If you put salt into cargo planes, all the electricity, the wiring rots and your plane doesn't work anymore. So they use Sunderland flying boats, which are used to flying on the sea or taking off and landing on the sea. They can bring in salt, you know. So every problem is going to be surmounted. Is there a lake? Where do the flying boats land? Yeah, Berlin's full of lakes, so they can land all over the place. Yeah, that's not a problem. Yeah. You also need somebody sort of nutty enough to make this come true.

17:58And let's bring in General Tunner here, because this guy is sort of a legend for doing the impossible airdrop, isn't he? I mean, he's made his name flying over the Himalayas and dropping cargo in places. The hump. Tell us about the hump. The hump lift is such a great thing. He's a great character. General Bill Tonnage Tunner. He's known. Tonnage Tunner. Tonnage. He's the man you need at this point. Yeah, exactly. So during the war, yeah, he's become famous for the hump. So what he's doing, he's been flying weapons, explosives and munitions into the forces of control by Chiang Kai-shek in China.

18:35And this was a remarkably difficult and dangerous flight because essentially you have to fly over the Himalayas with a plane laden with extremely heavy equipment and firepower. And so this became, this was the hump, the worst, the highest of the Himalayas were the hump. But tonnage just, you know, he didn't take no for an answer. And so anything he was told to do, he would do. And so when in Washington, they're thinking, now who could we get to run this airlift into Berlin? Wait, Nutter will do this. Well, which Nutter will do this? Oh, let's call tonnage, you know. So tonnage gets a summons to Washington, say, can you fly, you know, a ridiculous number of planes into Berlin at six different altitudes, flying through thick flog and snowstorms, landing every 96 seconds.

19:18Tarnage goes, yeah, I think I can do that. So he arrives in Western Germany and he orchestrates this truly remarkable operation. And remember what's at stake. It's not just the lives of two and a half million Berliners, six and a half thousand Allied soldiers, but the prestige and the ideology of the West is at stake here. So there is an awful lot hanging on this in the post-war world. Now, look, let's take a break and let's find out what impact this has, this crackers idea of just keeping Berlin fed, despite Stalin's best efforts to squeeze the life out of it, how it works out and what impact it has on actually the politics that we face today.

20:05So welcome back. We should talk about what life is like under the blockade, first of all. Until they get their act together, people really are on the brink of starvation again in Berlin, aren't they? It's terrible. I mean, there's no food, there's no running water. The sewage plants have ceased to work because Stalin's cut off the electricity supply. So the sewage bubbling into the rivers and lakes around Berlin. The electricity has been cut off. So the water purification systems which pull water out of the ground for Berliners, they've stopped working. But above all, everyone is starving. They're hungry.

20:39For fuel, they start chopping down trees. These wonderful 200-year-old, 300-year-old trees in the Tiergarten are all felled to provide fuel. It's a desperate situation. And the realisation is, well, can the airlift in the summer months, it can probably bring in just about enough food to keep people alive? We're talking subsistence rations, you know. But what's going to happen in the autumn and the winter when the fogs and the snowstorms start? That's the big concern. We've got another great character we should talk about, and this is Ernst Reuter, who is the mayor of West Berlin. Is that his title?

21:15He's been elected by the city assembly. Life was slightly happier in Berlin. He's been elected as the mayor of the whole city, but the Soviets simply refused to have Ernst Reuter. He's a hated figure by the Soviets. They refuse to have him as mayor. So he eventually ends up as mayor of the western part of the city, but not of the east. And that's because he's a very steadfast opponent of the Soviet system, isn't he? Anti-Borznik. Yeah, but he's particularly dangerous to the Soviets because look at his past. Ernst Reuter was previously a communist. He knew Lenin. He knew Stalin. He lived in Moscow.

21:49He fled Nazi Germany. He knows these guys. And then he turned and he became a nice woolly liberal. And this makes him an extremely alarming and worrying figure for the Soviet authorities because this guy understands them. And once he's become this woolly liberal supporting Western democracy in Berlin and in Germany, he becomes a formidable enemy. And one of the things that Ernst Reuter is a remarkable figure for is his oratory. He looks very unremarkable when you see a photo of him. Oh, he sort of wears that little sort of French resistance cap and he looks like, you know, he carries Werther's original in his, you know, sort of cardigan.

22:28He looks like that kind of man. He does. But then, you know, the Allied commanders who met him, they said, my God, when you come into his presence, it's like another Churchill, you know. And he was great in a small room, but put him in front of a million people, put him on the Reichstag balcony and get him to speak to a million people. And he starts delivering these extraordinary speeches. Can I give you a couple of lines of one? Yes, 100%. Please do. Because Ernst Reuter knows he's not only speaking to the people of Berlin. He is speaking on a world stage. This is going to be transmitted across the Western world.

23:02And listen to this. He says at one of his speeches, we cannot be bartered. We cannot be negotiated. We cannot be sold. Whoever would surrender the people of Berlin would surrender a world. People of the world, look upon this city. you cannot, you must not forsake us. So these words are sent around the globe and they're electrifying in their effect. So I mean, you know, his words outwardly are one of the reasons that things like the Berlin Airlift are even countenance because he is telling the world very, very clearly, you abandon us, you might as well abandon all of Europe. But also internally, he's telling his Berliners, do not give up.

23:38They are a menace. They want to kill you. So it sort of galvanises internal public opinion, as well as provoking the conscience of external public opinion in other countries. Let's get back to the airlift. I've always wondered... How do the Soviets react? Yeah, why don't they just shoot the planes out of the sky? Do they shoot them down? They could, but they don't. But why don't they? This is a very good question, which the Americans and Brits kept asking themselves, is how will Stalin respond to this? What they do is they set up blinding searchlights at the end of the runways. Remember, the sectors are very close to each other.

24:09So they send up tracer fire into the air all the time. What they don't do and what the Americans and British are gambling on is that Stalin won't dare shoot them out of the sky. He'll do everything he can to make them crash, but he won't actually shoot them out of the sky because that will be an act of war. So an act of war. So what is his calculus here? Because, you know, if it was an act of war... He doesn't want a shooting war. But he's still got the upper hand here. You know, he's got the territory. He's got, you know... He thinks, Anita, that he is going to win. Now, Stalin has made a study, a very careful study of the siege of Stalingrad.

24:43The Luftwaffe, which had enough planes to resupply the German army in Stalingrad, simply could not make that airlift work. It failed. And of course, Stalingrad famously held on. So he thinks they're just going to screw up on their own. He doesn't need to do it. There's absolutely no way that they're going to be able to carry this through, particularly a long-running airlift which runs through the winter months. I mean, it works. It works. It keeps people fed. And then what happens after it's sort of proven to work? Does the blockade get lifted? What does Stalin do? Because he's been confounded.