Ukraine is the new Berlin

Instead, they carried food, fuel and medicine. And they were flying in defiance of their former allies, the Soviet Union. It was the winter of 1949 and what has become known as the Berlin Airlift was well underway. 

Exactly three-quarters of a century later, support in the west for Ukraine in its struggle against Russia has been holding firm. For the moment at least, governments and, crucially, the western public, with a few exceptions, have rallied around Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration. The flow of arms and aid remains steady. 

But staunch supporter of Ukraine, US president Joe Biden, will be gone in early January and comments on the conflict from his replacement, president-elect Donald Trump, a man who has promised to end the war in a day, have led to jitters in Kyiv, in Nato and in parliaments across the west. What Trump does, or doesn’t do, we shall soon discover.

Nonetheless, back in 1948, the west had found itself in a similar situation. And public support once more was key to one of the most logistically challenging endeavours in human history and one that – similar to Ukraine today – showed the power of collective effort in the face of uninvited hostility.

At the end of the second world war, Germany’s battle-scarred capital, wholly within the country’s Soviet-occupied zone, was divided by the victorious allies into four sectors, one each to the Soviet Union, the USA, Britain and France. This meant the sectors belonging to the three western powers formed an enclave – later known as West Berlin – deep inside Soviet-occupied territory, in what would become communist East Germany.

The only way into West Berlin was by air or designated road and rail routes through the Soviet zone. “This worked fine while everybody got along,” says Peter Johnston, curator and historian at the Imperial War Museum, Duxford. But in March 1948 Soviet forces began restricting entry into Berlin. 

Soviet high command insisted this was to deter “subversive terrorist elements”. More likely it was in response to the United States’ European Recovery Program. 

Instigated by secretary of state George Marshall, and known as his eponymous plan, its intention was to support economic recovery in western Europe and to act as a bulwark against Soviet communism sweeping through the nations of eastern Europe. 

“(Soviet leader Joseph( Stalin wanted no more invasions of his country,” explains Johnston. “He wanted Germany under Soviet influence and was using the nations of eastern Europe as a buffer zone.”

The Soviets also learned that the western Allies planned to amalgamate their zones into a single West German state, to further stymie any westward march of communism. The Marshall Plan would create a capitalist, liberal Germany. This included a new currency, the Deutschmark, introduced in the west including West Berlin.”

But in the late 1940s, borders between the occupying zones were relatively permeable. People crossed back and forth quite readily.

“This gave the Soviets a problem,” explains Johnston. “The Deutschmark and investment in West Berlin was making it a more desirable place to live than East Berlin.”

So the Soviet Union began slowly and brutally to close the doors to the city, trapping its residents behind what Winston Churchill had called the Iron Curtain. It was clear the Soviets expected Berlin to be absorbed into their territory.

Then came what they envisaged would be the coup de grâce. They blocked land transport into Berlin, depriving the city of food, medicine and coal, leaving only three narrow air corridors, patrolled by Soviet fighter jets, through which to fly from western Germany into West Berlin’s main airport, Tempelhof, plus the smaller airfield at Gatow. 

“Although the Soviets could close off road, rail and canal routes, they couldn’t cut off the air corridors because that would mean shooting down western aircraft – an aggressive act which could lead to war,” explains Johnston.

The Soviet plan began with the expectation that the western Allies would back down. “It was a hostile – but just about legal – act,” says Johnston. “They set out to test the Allies. How much did they value Berlin?” They would quickly depart, concluded Stalin. He was mistaken. 

General Lucius Clay, head of the US-controlled sector of Germany, told US president Harry S Truman: “We are convinced that remaining in Berlin is essential to our prestige in Germany and in Europe. It has become a symbol of American intent.” 

The British agreed and Clay’s counterpart General Sir Brian Robertson already had the figures outlining what essentials Berlin required. An absolute minimum of 4500 tons of cargo – food, coal, fuel, medicine and other goods – would be needed daily to feed a city of two million.

On June 26, 1948 the US launched Operation Vittles and on June 28 the British followed with Operation Plainfare. Flying eye-to-eye with the Soviet airforce, 230 American and 150 British aircraft undertook missions day-in, day-out to keep West Berlin supplied. 

When winter arrived more fuel was needed. By February 1949, 8000 tons were landing daily. The record for a single day came on 16 April 1949 when 1400 flights landed – one every 62 seconds – bringing in 12,940 tons.  

In total, an estimated 278,000 flights kept West Berlin afloat. It was an achievement of unprecedented logistical choreography. It would cost more than US$6 billion in today’s money, but it changed forever the context of the occupation.

“It was transformative for the German-Allied relationship,” explains Johnston. “Before, the western Allies were viewed as occupiers. Now they were seen as being on the same side.

“And the western public was generally supportive,” adds Johnston. “In Britain, some questioned why we were helping Germans, while Britain still had rationing. But the arguments that it was morally right held sway.

“Maybe even more significantly, at a human level it created the idea in the west of the ‘Good German’ and that a sovereign state of West Germany might be in the west’s interests,” says Johnston.

Accidents meant 25 aircraft would be lost, with 39 British and 31 American airmen killed, alongside civilians. But despite these setbacks, the Soviet Union realised it had to relent.

A western counter-blockade was stifling East Germany. World opinion was against them. They offered to open the borders if the Deutschmark was disbanded. 

But West Berliners protested in hundreds of thousands and the Allies refused. The Soviet Union had run out of road. 

On May 12 the blockade was lifted and on September 30, 1949 the airlift officially ended. However, the alliances of the second world war were over. The new ideological divide would see construction of the Berlin Wall a decade later and a fortified border between East and West Germany. 

Today Tempelhof, the scene of such frantic activity, is closed; half city park, half ruin, its apron used for occasional motorsport events. It’s a far cry from the place where, according to Andreas Pohl’s mother, people “did the decent thing”. But it remains a tacit symbol of what collective will can achieve. 

And maybe the airlift still has resonance today. Many international strategists see similarities between Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine, as it takes territory it “rightfully believes to be its own”, and the de facto Soviet occupation of East Germany.

In April 2022, in the New European John Kampfner wrote that Ukraine needed the kind of commitment from the west that it once provided to Berlin. “Ukraine needs a new Berlin Airlift” read the headline. 

The article went on to say: “Ukraine will need not only weapons but supplies of food, medicines and other humanitarian aid. Think Berlin 1948, think Mariupol, Kharkiv and other Ukrainian cities now.”

Many agreed with Kampfner. But nearly two years on, do the parallels hold true?

“Some, yes,” Johnston replies. “One important one is lesser known. When the Berlin blockade began the Allies imposed economic sanctions on East Germany and eastern Europe. Eventually, the Soviet Union abandoned the blockade because these sanctions were causing poverty.

“This is similar to sanctions on Russia today. The Russian people are economically isolated due to a hostile act by their government.”

There is an obvious second parallel: an identification of common purpose and ideological principle. Ukraine is not in Nato – yet – but there is a recognition by the west of a shared interest and shared goal.

“Of course, the difference is the west today is mainly supplying arms with only limited humanitarian aid,” says Johnston. “That was not the case with Berlin.

“However, the arms have to be supplied through ‘corridors’. They are funnelled through Nato territories such as Poland because Russia will not risk attacking these, just as it once could not risk attacking planes in the air corridors. As with the airlift, although there is hostility between the west and Russia, there is not outright war.”

Similar to 1948 and 1949, the west is stepping up its military capability. In 1948, the British army increased its presence in the Rhine, now it has moved troops to Estonia. And the EU is putting troops into Nato’s battle groups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. Britain is also training Ukrainian soldiers in the UK.

“If they were trained in Ukraine that would clearly be an escalation,” explains Johnston. “As during the airlift, there is limitation on what can be done.”

However, at this point the parallels begin to diverge, especially after in November both the US and the UK governments gave permission for missiles they have supplied to Ukraine to be fired into Russian territory for the first time.

“The airlift was not designed to remove the Soviets from East Germany,” Johnston points out. “But Ukraine wants Russia removed from its soil. So the west’s commitment is to provide them with the tools to do this themselves. 

“In the airlift, West Berlin was the west’s own territory, Ukraine is not. It’s a significant difference. It’s impossible to say whether, in the face of sanctions, Putin will back down as Stalin did. But what exactly is backing down? 

“What will Ukraine accept? A full retreat including from Crimea (annexed by Russia in 2014)? This is one big difference between Ukraine and the airlift. And will the sanctions hold?”

More to the point will public support hold? What is the resolve in each country – Ukraine and its western Allies – especially if Trump cuts off the supply of American weapons or offers Ukrainian territory to Putin as part of a “deal” to secure peace? 

“No-one knows. It will depend on how the war progresses, and on Trump, and who gets elected elsewhere” says Johnston. “The airlift ran only for a year, so the public had no time to tire of it, but had it gone on longer, who knows?”

Perhaps much depends on Putin’s resolve. Has he, like Stalin, miscalculated? “Putin might have thought a quick victory meant the west would not intervene,” Johnston says.

“Putin probably didn’t expect NATO to back Ukraine with arms which wouldn’t have happened had victory been swift. But his biggest miscalculation was not realising how much resistance Ukraine would put up, its military and civilian populations. It’s also exposed how brittle and corrupt the Russian military is.” 

Putin is already relying on troops from North Korea and elsewhere to bolster his army.

Parallels exist between Berlin and Ukraine, but there are differences too. It is likely, however, that 75 years after the Ukraine war – whatever the outcome – it too will be remembered by those alive at the time. The airlift shaped the futures of those who lived through it, and in many ways created the post-war world. The consequences of the divisions created then are still being played out today. 

Dieter Hummel, now in his nineties, moved to live in Vienna in the 1970s. But in 1949, aged 18, he lived in Berlin and worked at Tempelhof, unloading pallets. “I was amazed,” he says, “how committed the Americans and British were to helping us, putting their lives at risk. Four years earlier we had been sworn enemies. I will be forever grateful.”

Meanwhile, Andreas Pohl recalls something else his mother said. “If we give in now, Germany will never be free,” she told him. She didn’t live to see the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 nor the reunification of Germany in 1991, but with remarkable prescience she had realised that the constant buzz of planes flying overhead was the first step on what would be a slow, tortuous road to a free nation.

Volodymyr Zelensky is, with reservations, almost certainly entertaining similar thoughts.