The Berlin Airlift 70 years on - the moment that Stalin lost the Cold War

USAF C-54 flies in to Berlin's Templehof airport

In 1948, Joseph Stalin ordered the closing of access by land to West Berlin, which was part of a 4 power occupation zone.

The Lancastrian - conversion of the RAF Lancaster bomber from WW2

The response from the Allied powers - Britain and America was to fly in supplies by air to keep Berlin alive and functional.

The early days saw Lancaster bombers converted to civilian use called Lancastrians, along with C47 Dakota transports, start the process of supplying Berlin. Former German service personnel and civilian labour unloaded each aircraft in around ten minutes.

It is somewhat ironic that many of the volunteer civilian pilots who flew in the Berlin airlift had been RAF pilots some of whom had been bombing Berlin three years earlier.

C-54 Skymaster being refulled from a GMC 353 6x6 tanker

The USAF then brought in the C54 to increase the capacity for each trip. Throughout the transport campaign, Russian aircraft harassed the allied flights but stopped short of a formal attack, which would likely have led to another war starting.

A number of aircraft crashed on the hazardous flights

The flights were not without incident and aircraft were lost to accidents.

A memorial stands to the people who helped save Berlin

The medal for Humane action given for airlift particpants

The pilot who started the candy drops

The young people often gathered under the flight paths of the aircraft and one of the pilots decided to make up small parachutes which had chocolate bars or sweets as their payload, on one flight they let them go as they made their descent into Templehof airport and a legend was born.

This single bit of public relations which was from an unauthorised act of goodwill, was in public relations terms gold. Once the media had hold of the story, it was all over the world. 

Stalin had lost the authority to continue and the gates were opened to admit land access to West Berlin. 

Dead end street: Why social deprivation was still prevalent in swinging 1960's Britain.

Dead end streets -

did not disappear with the advent of victory in WW2

With the end of WW2, there was no instant about face in the fortunes of Britain. In fact, it was almost tougher post war, for the country and its people.

Rationing continued post war, longer than the term of the war, lasting until 1954.If we were victorious, why was this so? The reason was simple.

As WW2 had ended, the Cold War started as relations between the Allies fragmented, largely over a fragmented Berlin, controlled by four powers, the UK, USA, France and Russia.

In Britain, a country ravaged for 5 years by Luftwaffe air raids, many houses were damaged or destroyed. This often meant families moving in with relatives whilst they waited for suitable replacement houses, or even temporary prefab buildings to live in.

The state of the UK economy post WW2 was dire. It was essentially broke, having borrowed heavily from the USA to finance the war against Hitler's Third Reich.

With the post war economy geared to earning US Dollars to pay back America, Britain's home economy struggled back to work, industry and financial health.

A friend of mine a few years older than me said that where he lived in Essex after WW2, was not a rich area, nor were many areas of the country by comparison. Even into the 1960's and beyond, social conditions were for some way below what the cosy adverts in magazines and on television portrayed.

Social deprivation has never really gone away, it has remained a constant in the background of our lives.

Reading a recent newspaper article, it was no surprise to see even 1960's London areas in poverty. Notting Hill, a trendy enclave today much as Islington and Kensington, were in the 1960's often very poor. These areas today boast house prices in the millions, in the 60's many of them were fleapits that were controlled by cruel landlords.

Will we ever solve this problem?

Korean War in 1953 - the year the Cold War was lost

              USAF Pilots return from combat in F-86 Sabre jets in the Korean War in 1953

Although the Cold War may have started building as long ago as 1943, it was in 1945 with the defeat of the Nazi regime that the Cold War became hot.

With Europe divided in the middle of Berlin between East and West, Allied controlled West and Soviet controlled East, the political picture of the world was clear.

The Korean War was a symptom of Korea which had been under Japanese occupation for many years. With Soviet communism moving eastwards, the pro Communist Mao came to power in 1949, displacing the West-friendly President Chang Kai Shek who the Allied Forces had supported in WW2.

As such, the communist invasion from North Korea into South Korea was started with support from Soviet and Chinese resources. Soviet and East European air squadrons were rotated through the air campaign and although shot down, none were captured alive, indeed, a Soviet pilot was gunned down on the ground by his own side because the capture alive would have been a coup for the Allied cause.

Air power did help win the Korean war for the Allied side. It was combined with effective ground troop deployment, this close air support which was developed in WW2 was now bought to the fore as was nuclear weapons in theatre for the first time.

President Eisenhower, the former Allied Commander in WW2 sanctioned the 509th Bomb Group to fly to Okinawa in Japan in readiness for delivery of an atomic weapon if the situation demanded it.

Clearly, the effects of an atomic bomb were known from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons, but they were not as in the case of Hiroshima, at full capacity. The Hiroshima weapon detonated much less material effectively than it could have. It could have been far more devastating.

The Korean war was all about a communist expansion into Asia, it would lead to a war in Vietnam a decade later. But why did Korea and Vietnam fail?

They failed as outright victories because the movement of materiel, support and supplies was not halted.

So why did the Soviet backed Korean war not be a victory for them? Lets look at the facts. China backed Russia in the Korean war, early in the Korean war when the push came from the North, the South Koreans took losses, when the US Forces in Japan became involved, their superior equipment and fighting skills decimated the North Korean advance.

The North Koreans were pushed right back to the Manchurian border, it was only when significant support from Soviet and Chinese regimes came on stream, that the Allied forces were pushed back.

The problems were for the Allies that the Soviets operated aircraft out of Manchuria, over the border from North Korea and out of bounds to the Allied pilots. The Soviets gave Mig 15 jet fighters to the Chinese and North Korean airforces in addition to stationing Eastern Bloc squadrons from East Germany, Poland and Russia in Manchuria.

The allies had to rely on piston engine fighters in the early days of the Korean war, but as soon as this geared up to the Mig 15 arriving on the scene, the jet on jet combat scenario was about to occur.

The Allies were at a disadvantage of slightly slower aircraft, which were easier to fly and more flyable than the unsteady Mig. They also had a 200 mile journey to intercept or to go into combat and this was over enemy territory in North Korea. They had to carry drop tanks because of the range of the jets was limited.

The Mig squadrons were many but never deployed en masse, only up to 50 planes at a time. The Soviet air forces were rotated frequently and as such, the new squadrons had to learn fresh the air combat scenario and did not have the benefit of instruction from the wise predecessors.

Also the US and Allied Navy operated from carriers off the coast which provided an extra dimension of availability and closeness to the objectives.

These factors helped the US Sabre pilots to record a victory ratio over the Soviet bloc jets of 7 to 1 or greater. They were also helped by the fact that the Soviets pulled back in later years over Korea from combat, with less experienced Eastern Bloc pilots being used, this then extended to the Chinese being less effective still and the North Korean pilots least effective of all.

 

The B29 was at the time the heavy bomber of choice for delivering armament to target. This bomber which was advanced for the time was operational in 1944 and served in the Far East campaigns of late WW2. One had been forced to land in Russia and was seized by the Russians who copied it as the Tupolev 4. 

The B29 was operational in Korea as a heavy bomber full time but with the arrival of the Mig and the problem of operating protection flights by the F86, the B29 was switched to night operations. The jets were less able to protect the B29 having to fly at lower speeds than the attacking Migs which could dive in from 50,000 feet at speed, making F86 pursuit unworkable as an air fighting concept.

Thus the USAF brought on stream a range of fighter bombers that were near as fast as the Sabre but smaller. The Soviet Bloc did not have a heavy bomber on stream in the Korean war.

The allies other than the US were the British RAF, Canadian Air force (RCAF), Australian RAF, South African Air Force and the Greek Air Force. The British and Australians operated the twin engine Meteor jet from 1944 as their front line jet, although it could top 600mph, it was not a suitable jet for the combat that would occur, being out turned by the Mig. Saying that, there were Meteor on Mig victories.

The Canadian and South African along with some RAF pliots flew the F86 made under licence in Canada and with the superior Rolls Royce  Avon jet engine which was about half as powerful as the General Electric Jet engine of the early Sabre.

As in WW2, the P51 Mustang was significantly improved with the fitment of the Rolls Royce Merlin engine, the F86 Sabre was likewise improved with the Rolls Royce Avon engine, coincidentally, both aeroplanes were made by the North American aviation company.

The fact that the Soviets could not progress despite overwhelming resources, ensured that the Cold War was not winnable in a conventional sense, i.e. going into a land battle situation with an air force assistance as had been the case in WW2.

With President Eisenhower bringing the nuclear option to the table by positioning the 509th Bomb Group on Okinawa, it was clear where the defining action would be taken.

However, the nuclear option was total destruction with no winners, so that was out. Also, the only nuclear delivery Stalin had was the copy of the B29 and as he had seen from the US Air Force removing that from daylight missions, their Tupolev 4 would have been shot down long before it could have gotten a far as Berlin, leave alone trying to sneak across the Bering straights.

The Korean War effectively upped the game of the warmongers to the stalemate situation of building a nuclear arsenal for a war that would never come. The US built a bigger and bigger stockpile, the Soviets tried likewise but in the end, they didn't have the money to do so and America out-pokered them with the result the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989.

Effective use of air power ensured that the Soviet backed forces could not make the desired progress in the Korean war. The demonstration that a smaller multi-franchise military alliance of the Allied nations could hold the line and inflict losses on far superior forces convinced even Stalin that he could not win a ground war in Europe if he chose to start one.

Perhaps Korea was the test case for Europe and with the test case disproven, it would have been political suicide for Stalin to have attempted to have started a war in Europe. By supporting the North Korean effort, he was only assisting by proxy, not as a director or prime mover.

He was too wily to put his own head on the block.

When the Korean war failed in 1953, coincidentally the same year that Stalin died, a position of belligerence and grumbling threats from the Soviets was the norm. They knew though that they could not start a European war and win it. 

One of their big problems was the way that they treated the East German people, they never trusted them and always tried to suppress them.

The nuclear capability of the GDR (East Germany) post Korean War even up to the fall of Communism in 1989 was the crude but effective by today's standard use of WW2 stock V2 rockets, to which the Soviets kept the nuclear war heads separate from the rockets.

So that should answer the question as to why the Korean war never was won or lost and why the Cold War could never be won by Russia. Part of the problem of it never being won from the allied side was that the Manchurian border could never be contained without involving China fully into war, the same fluid borders in Vietnam meant that the superior equipment of the allied forces there could not prevent the resupply.