Fed From the Air: Where It Happened, Episode 4
On 24 June 1948 the Soviet Union closed the land and water routes into West Berlin, and the Western powers answered by flying food, coal and medicine into the city. I tell how the airlift worked, from the first planes at Tempelhof to the record Easter Saturday of 1949, and where the sources disagree on the numbers. Along the way it is also the story of one pilot who dropped sweets to children on the approach to Tempelhof.
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In this episode
0:00 The blockade
4:24 Three airfields
8:32 Candy from the sky
11:57 Record day
16:00 The monument
Where to stand today
The square is being rebuilt, so check on the spot what is open before you walk over. These are the places the episode names.
Platz der Luftbrücke, Tempelhof. The square in front of the old Tempelhof airport holds the airlift monument, a reinforced concrete sculpture about 20 metres high. Its three ribs stand for the three air corridors, so count them. At the base, a bronze band commemorates the people who died in the operation.
Tempelhof airport building. Tempelhof was the main airport of the airlift, and the planes landed on this field. Look at the terminal from the square before you go, and remember that the field closed to flights in 2008.
Allied Museum, Clayallee 135, Dahlem. A British Hastings transport aircraft, registration TG 503, stands outside. Inside, a section on the years from 1945 to 1949 covers the airlift.
Read the full guide
The episode tells the story. My written guide covers the same airport in more detail: Tempelhof Airport Berlin: Field, Tours and What to Do.
Transcript (text)
The blockade
Start on 26 June 1948, at Tempelhof, the big airfield in the American sector of Berlin. The first American transport planes were getting ready to bring food into a city that had been cut off by land and water for two days. West Berlin then held just under two million people, according to the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (the Tempelhof airport's page says 2.1 million), and most of them depended on goods that had until then come in by rail, road and water. Picture the airfield, and the planes that would soon arrive there in a steady stream. Nobody on the ground could yet know how long those planes would have to keep flying. To see how a city came to depend on the sky, you have to go back about one week, to a decision about money that had nothing to do with food at all.
The trigger was money. On 20 June 1948 the Western occupation zones carried out a currency reform, and the new money was meant to reach West Berlin as well. The Soviet Union used that as the occasion to separate West Berlin from the Western zones, according to the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, the bpb. Three days later, on 23 June, the Soviet occupation zone carried out its own currency reform, and the Soviet side tried to extend that reform across the whole city. The bpb's chronicle says the attempt failed against the resistance of the Western powers. On 25 June they introduced the new Deutsche Mark in the Western sectors of Berlin. By then the city had two currencies in use, and the quarrel over money had become a quarrel over the city itself.
On 24 June 1948 Soviet troops closed all access routes to West Berlin, according to the bpb's lexicon entry on the blockade. The Deutsches Historisches Museum says the Soviet occupation authority blocked all routes through its zone, and that gas and electricity deliveries to the Western sectors were drastically cut. The bpb chronicle describes essential passenger and freight transport as interrupted. It puts the official reasons in quotation marks: alleged technical difficulties, and a coal shortage that halted power and coal deliveries. The bpb itself calls those reasons alleged. Read the official explanation next to the closing of the routes, and the gap between them is hard to miss.
Three sources describe the closing of the land and water routes in slightly different words, and together they give the picture. Berlin.de says rail and road links to West Berlin were cut. The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung says the Soviet Union blocked the land and water routes. The taz, in its feature on the seventieth anniversary of the airlift, says the Soviets had blocked the land and water routes to Berlin, and that the Allies then supplied the city over three air corridors. Roads, railways and waterways: each was part of how a city of about two million got its food, coal and medicine. The DHM also gives the intention behind it. According to the museum, the blockade was meant to force the Western powers to leave the three Western sectors of Berlin.
The answer to the blockade was a decision to supply the city by air. According to the Deutsches Historisches Museum, it came on the initiative of the American military governor, Lucius D. Clay. The bpb says Clay ordered the airlift set up in reaction to the blockade. Neither source gives the day he made the decision, so this episode does not give one. The berlin.de page and the bpb agree on the kind of cargo. Berlin.de lists food, medicine, coal and raw materials. The bpb says that for almost a year, all vital goods arrived by plane, above all food, building materials and fuel. Hold that list in your head. It describes a city's whole supply, not a few emergency crates.
Three airfields
Now go to the square. The Platz der Luftbrücke, the Airlift Square, lies in front of the old Tempelhof airport building. The first thing you see is the Luftbrückendenkmal, the airlift monument, a reinforced concrete sculpture about 20 metres high, in the form of a stylised bridge pillar. Berliners have long called it the Hungerharke, the hunger rake, a nickname that berlin.de records. The monument stands in a garden lawn that is listed as a monument in its own right, between the airport building and Tempelhofer Damm. The square has been under reconstruction since March 2026, so check on the spot what is open before you walk over.
Tempelhof was the main airport of the airlift. The Tempelhof airport's history page says so directly, and places the field in the American sector. Visit Berlin, the city's tourism portal, puts it in plainer words: the planes landed on the Tempelhof airfield, and the operation is known as the Luftbrücke, the air bridge. The berlin.de page says that up to a thousand take-offs and landings took place at Tempelhof every day. Hold on to that figure. It describes one airfield, and it is the reason the square still feels like the centre of the story.
Gatow was the second big airfield. It had been built in 1935 and 1936 to train pilots and officers for the Luftwaffe, the German air force. The German air force remained there until 26 April 1945, and the Royal Air Force took the airfield over on 2 July 1945. According to the Landesdenkmalamt, Berlin's monument office, Gatow played an outstanding role in the blockade, and only Tempelhof was more important. The same page gives a figure that is hard to forget: about 92,000 tonnes were flown in during the blockade. Fuel was among that cargo, and once it had landed, it had a second journey. A pipeline pumped it from the airfield to the British sailing club on the Havel, where tankers took it on.
The base changed hands again. The Bundeswehr, the German armed forces, took over in September 1994, and the Luftwaffe museum, now called the Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr, has occupied the tower and the adjoining hangars since 1995. So the place you visit today is a museum on an old airfield. Look at the tower from outside before you go in. The museum keeps its own hours, so check them before you travel, because they can change. The tower and the hangars are the buildings the museum has used since 1995. The monument office files Gatow under its list of Allied sites in Berlin, under the British heading.
The third airfield was built in the middle of the crisis. Slightly more than a month after the blockade began, the French occupation forces agreed to a new airport in their sector, according to the Berlin Airport's history page. The same page says the airport was built in a record time of only 90 days, on a former military training site. The first aircraft landed there on 5 November 1948. The Tempelhof airport's history page gives the opening as 1 December 1948 and ranks Tegel third among the airports of the airlift, after Tempelhof and Gatow. Could three airfields carry a city of about two million? The answer depends on which count you trust.
Candy from the sky
Now the sweets, and the story of one pilot. Gail Halvorsen was an American pilot on the airlift. The Berlin tourism portal tells his story in a few short steps. According to Visit Berlin, children came running up to him one day, and he gave them the two sticks of gum he had in his pockets. There were not enough to go round, so he promised to drop chocolate and gum from his plane the next time he flew over. That is the whole of the first scene. A United States law, Public Law 117-134, tells the same story in its findings: two sticks of gum, and a promise to drop more candy from his plane.
The promise had to be kept, and the method is part of the story. The Air Force Reserve's account says he combined his candy rations with those of his co-pilot and engineer, and made parachutes out of handkerchiefs and string. An Air Force news article on his death says he attached handkerchief parachutes to chocolate bars and dropped them from his aircraft. A handkerchief is an ordinary thing, which is why the detail is easy to picture. Think about what it meant for a child on the ground to watch a small parcel come down from an aircraft. It started with one pilot, one promise and a few sweets from his crewmates.
The children also needed to know which plane was his. On the approach to Tempelhof, Halvorsen rocked the wings of his aircraft from side to side, so that they could pick it out from the others. The children gave him a nickname: Onkel Wackelflügel, Uncle Wiggly Wings. Visit Berlin describes the wing-rocking on the landing approach as the origin of the name, and an Air Force article gives the same wing-rocking and the same nickname. The same law lists other names the children used, including The Chocolate Flier and The Gum Drop Kid.
The airlift also left physical objects in Berlin, and one of them you can walk around. The Allied Museum has a Hastings, the British transport aircraft with the registration TG 503. The museum says the aircraft came to it in 1997, when the British government and the Royal Air Force donated it, and that it recalls the British contribution to the airlift. The Hastings was not ready for service when the airlift began on 26 June 1948. Its first cargo flights, mainly carrying coal, came in November 1948. Coal is less romantic than chocolate, and the story of the airlift needs both.
Inside the Allied Museum, the Berlin Airlift is part of a new section on the years from 1945 to 1949. The museum says over 100 photographs, documents and objects tell the story of Berlin and Germany in those years, and the airlift is among them. Outside, among the large objects, is the Hastings itself. The Deutsches Historisches Museum says Berliners called the airlift planes Rosinenbomber, raisin bombers. Stand by the aircraft outside, and then try to picture the sweets falling from an aircraft like it.
Record day
By the spring of 1949 the airlift had a record day, and the Tempelhof airport's history page gives it a name: the Easter Parade. It dates the record to 16 April 1949, and the Allied Museum gives the same date. Within 24 hours, the airport's page says, 12,940 tons of freight came in on 1,398 flights. Easter Sunday that year fell on 17 April, so the record was set on the Saturday before the holiday. A record day is also a test. This one came less than four weeks before the blockade was lifted, and it showed what the airlift could do at full stretch.
Now the totals, which is where the sources part company. The Tempelhof airport's history page says that between 26 June 1948 and 6 October 1949 there were almost 278,000 flights, carrying more than 2.3 million tons. The taz gives 277,560 flights and about 2.1 million tonnes, counted up to September 1949. The Deutsches Historisches Museum says almost 200,000 flights brought around 1.5 million tonnes, and it does not say which period it counts. The gap is too large to be a rounding error. This episode gives a range, and it names the source for each figure.
Whatever the total, the rhythm is what the numbers help you picture. The record-day figures are the most vivid, so be precise about which source each one belongs to. The DHM says that every two to three minutes a transport plane landed at one of the three West Berlin airports. The Tempelhof airport's page gives one landing about every 63 seconds on the record day, and the Allied Museum says 62. All three figures are attributed, and none is the one true number. Picture the Tempelhof apron at that pace, with one plane coming in roughly every minute and the next already on the approach.
Compare that with the first day. On the first day, the Berlin newspaper Telegraf, which had links to the SPD, reported, as the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung's archive records, that an American transport plane landed with food and supplies every eight minutes. The Telegraf figure and the Tempelhof airport's figure measure different things, one on the first day and one on a record day, so they are not a simple before and after table. They do show how far the operation had grown in under a year. Read that sentence slowly. It is a newspaper's view of the first day, not an official record, and the pace it describes is far slower than the one that came at Easter.
The city's leaders knew what was at stake. The district's page for the monument quotes Ernst Reuter from his 1948 appeal before the Reichstag: "Look at this city, and recognise that you must not abandon this city and this people, and that you cannot." In German, roughly. The sentence is short, and it carries the whole argument. The quotation comes from the district's page, and this episode gives it in English, translated from the German. Reuter was asking people to hold on to Berlin, and the airlift was the means by which the city was kept fed. Who paid for those long days?
The monument
The memorial answers that question with a number. The berlin.de page for the monument says that 39 British, 33 Americans and 5 German workers lost their lives in this demanding operation. That makes 77 people, in the memorial's own count. The number is the memorial's own, and it is one of the few figures in this episode that comes from the monument's own page. The five German workers matter, because they were not pilots, and the count does not leave them out. A bronze band at the base of the monument commemorates the victims. The page does not quote the band's wording, so this episode does not quote it either.
Other sources count differently, and the differences are worth hearing. The Tempelhof airport's history page says that 77 people had been involved in accidents by the end of the airlift: 41 British, 31 Americans and 5 Berliners. It does not say how many of those were killed, so it cannot be set against the memorial's count of deaths. On the district's own page, the historian Andreas Etges, of Munich University, counts 78 people who lost their lives. This episode uses the memorial's own figures, 39, 33 and 5, and it treats the other totals as attributed alternatives.
According to the district's page, the memorial was unveiled on 10 July 1951, in front of the old airport, two years after the blockade ended. The district's page says tens of thousands of Berliners came to the unveiling. The architect was Eduard Ludwig, and he designed the 20-metre-high reinforced concrete sculpture in the form of a stylised bridge pillar. Stand where the unveiling crowd stood, and you have the scale of the thing in front of you. The monument is not a statue of a man or a plane. It is a structure. The district's page marks 10 July 2026 as the 75th anniversary of the unveiling, so the monument has stood for three quarters of a century.
Its three vertical ribs stand for the three air corridors, according to the berlin.de page, which reduces three routes to three upright ribs. Those corridors ran north towards Hamburg, south towards Frankfurt am Main, and west towards Hanover. They were the way round the blockade. The roads and railways into West Berlin had been closed, and the corridors were the routes the planes used instead. All three routes ended in the same city, and the three ribs are the reminder of that, set in a square that once received the planes.
At the unveiling, Ernst Reuter spoke, and the district's page quotes him from that speech. He said that the three arms symbolise the help of the American, British and French nations. He also described the arch as turning towards the West, and he said, in German: "Zu diesem Westen gehören wir, mit ihm wollen wir verbunden sein." In English, roughly: we belong to this West, and we want to be connected with it. That sentence was spoken in 1951, in a city that was already divided between East and West.
The blockade ended on 12 May 1949. The berlin.de page gives that date as the end of the blockade, and so do the bpb and the taz. The taz adds that the airlift officially ended on 30 September 1949. The Tempelhof airport's history page runs its totals to 6 October 1949. According to that page, the flights were used to fill the warehouses in case the access routes were closed again. So the sources agree that the blockade was lifted in May, and they differ on the last flight by a few days. The airlift carried on for more than four months after the blockade was lifted.
The Western powers did not leave after the blockade. The Allied Museum says its exhibition traces the history of the Western powers in Berlin from 1945 to the Allies' withdrawal in 1994, so the airlift is only one chapter of that story. For a visitor, that means the airlift is a starting point for the Western presence in the city, not the end of it. In other words, the city stayed divided, and the airlift did not change the political map that the blockade had tried to change. What the airlift changed was the way the city was fed for almost a year.
Tempelhof itself closed to flights in 2008, according to Visit Berlin. The former airfield is now a large open space for Berliners, as Visit Berlin describes it, and the old airport building is still there, next to the square. The U6 station is named Platz der Luftbrücke, so the name is on the map before you reach the monument. The monument stands in front of the airport where the planes landed. The airlift and the field belong to the same story: planes landing on the field, and the operation known as the Luftbrücke, the air bridge.
The square is changing. The redesign of Platz der Luftbrücke by Grün Berlin has been under way since 20 March 2026, starting with the west side, and that section is due in early 2028. The garden section with the monument is the next phase. No source says whether the monument lawn is fenced during the works, so check on the spot before you walk over. If the lawn cannot be reached, stand at the edge of the square and look at the monument from there. A May 2026 report on the project lists an Ehrenhof, a courtyard of honour, as a further phase after the monument.
So, the close. Stand at the edge of Platz der Luftbrücke, facing the monument, with the old airport building behind it. Count the three ribs, and find the bronze band at the base that commemorates the victims. Think of the arch turning towards the West, as Reuter described it in 1951. The square is under reconstruction, so the close view may have to be from the edge, and that is enough. Then look past the monument to the old terminal, and remember that for almost a year the planes came in from three air corridors, and that, by the memorial's count, 77 people lost their lives in the operation.
Sources
The podcast is narrated with an AI voice; the short breaks are read in my own voice.
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Image credits
Source and licence details for the photograph used on this page.
Cover: C-47 transport planes in the unloading line at Tempelhof, 1948 to 1949, U.S. Air Force photograph, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped to 3:2 and resized; no other changes.