Based on historical events, the Bridge to Tomorrow Series brings to life the dramatic story of the West’s bloodless victory against Russian aggression via the Berlin Airlift. The first book in the series, Cold Peace, focused on the factors and events leading to the crisis. Now Berlin is under siege. More than a million civilians must be supplied by air — or starve.
The first battle of the Cold War is about to begin….
Berlin 1948. In the ruins of Hitler’s capital, former RAF officers, a woman pilot, and the victim of Russian brutality form an air ambulance company. The West is on a collision course with Stalin’s aggression and Berlin is about to become a flashpoint. World War Three is only a misstep away. The economy is broken, the currency worthless, and the Russian bear is hungry.
In the ruins of Hitler’s capital, war heroes and resilient women struggle in the post-war doldrums — until they discover new purpose in defending Berlin’s freedom from Soviet tyranny. When a Russian fighter brings down a British passenger plane, the world teeters on the brink of World War Three.
Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/Cold-Peace-Novel-Berlin-Airlift-ebook/dp/B0C771JV6R/
Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cold-Peace-Novel-Berlin-Airlift/dp/B0C6NLZVHK
Fighting a war with milk, coal and candy bars….
In the second book of the Bridge to Tomorrow Series, the story continues where “Cold Peace” left off. Berlin is under siege. More than two million civilians in Hitler’s former capital will starve unless they receive food, medicine and more by air. USAF Captain J.B. Baronowsky and RAF Flight Lieutenant Kit Moran once risked their lives to drop high explosives on Berlin. They are about to deliver milk, flour and children’s shoes instead. Meanwhile, two women pilots are flying an air ambulance that carries malnourished and abandoned children to freedom in the West. Until General Winter deploys on the side of Russia….
Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/Cold-War-Berlin-Airlift-Tomorrow-ebook/dp/B0D2JP4YS8
Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cold-War-Berlin-Airlift-Tomorrow-ebook/dp/B0D2JP4YS8/
The First Battle of the Cold War: The Soviet Blockade of Berlin 1948-1949
The Soviet Blockade of the Western Sectors of Berlin 1948-1949 was the first clash between the Soviet lead Eastern Block and the American-lead West in the post-WWII era. It triggered a British and American Airlift that proved to be one of the most dramatic examples of non-violent resistance to aggression in modern history. That airlift is widely seen as the first decisive Western victory in the Cold War. It remains to this day the most comprehensive and successful airlift of all time.
On 24 June 1948 the Soviet Union abruptly stopped all road, rail and canal traffic to the Western Sectors of Berlin while simultaneously cutting off electric power. At this time, the former German capital was located more than one hundred miles inside the Soviet Zone of occupation. The residents of the parts of the city controlled by the Americans, British and French were dependent food, medicine and other necessities of life brought into Berlin from the American, British and French Zone of Occupation to the West. They were also dependent on electric power produced in the Soviet Sector. The Soviet interdiction of access routes and power supply therefore put the 2.2 million civilian residents of the Western Sectors of Berlin under siege. Although the immediate victims of the blockade were the Germans living in west Berlin, the blockade was intended to force the 8,500 American, British and French troops out of Berlin in order to incorporate Berlin into the Soviet Zone. The Western garrisons were in Berlin in accordance with wartime agreements. Months before Hitler’s Germany surrendered in May 1945, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed that each of the victorious powers would control a “sector” of Berlin and station their troops there.
By 1948, however, times were changing. Stalin didn’t really care about the promises he had made when the Soviet Union was still fighting Nazi Germany and dependent on Western aid. He believed it was time to continue the “march of History” toward world communism. A Communist Germany was high on his priority list (following the absorption of the Baltic States into the Soviet Union and the on-going installation of Communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia and Greece).
Western presence in Germany was an obstacle to Communist control, and Western troops in Berlin, more than 100 miles inside the Soviet Zone of Occupation, were a particular irritant. Stalin wanted the Western powers out of Berlin sooner rather than later. However, he didn’t want to provoke war with the sole nuclear power of the age, the United States of America.
The blockade of the Western Sectors of Berlin appeared to offer a brilliant — and non-violent! — means of forcing the Western powers to withdraw their troops. This tactic exploited two facts. First, the lack of written agreements guaranteeing the Western powers use of the roads, rails and canals which crossed the Soviet Zone to reach Berlin. Second the heavy dependence of the Western Sectors of Berlin on goods transported overland from the Western Zones. Just as in a medieval siege, by cutting the Western Sectors off from supplies of food, medicine, clothing, and raw materials, the inhabitants of these Sectors faced slow starvation, unemployment and eventually disease.
Unlike a medieval siege, however, the Western Sectors of Berlin were made particularly vulnerable by dependence on electricity and/or gas and oil to power the water and sewage systems, to run public transport, provide lighting, heat homes and offices, and to keep factories running. Although the Western Sectors of Berlin had a few out-dated power plants, the bulk of Berlin’s electric power was produced in the Eastern Sector. Furthermore, even the inadequate power plants in the Western Sectors were coal fired, and the blockade severed coal supplies. In short, Berlin’s lights would go out, its public transport halt, it’s factories close, and the sewage and water systems stop functioning as soon as the coal reserves stored in the city were exhausted. (Image of Post-War Germany – a grim place to live even without a blockade.)
The Soviets (not unreasonably) believed that the residents of the Western Sectors of Berlin would rise up in rebellion against the Western powers. They expected the German population to riot and demand the withdrawal of Western troops as soon as all public utilities broke down — if not before. From the Soviet point of view, it was a perfect plan to turn German public opinion against the West without firing a shot. The Soviets were confident that the Western powers would be forced to retreat from Berlin with their tails between their legs in shame.
When the Blockade started, the Western Allies appeared to have only two choices: to withdraw their troops to avoid causing unnecessary suffering to the inhabitants of Berlin, or to defy the blockade by sending armed troops to escort convoys of goods transiting the Soviet Zone. Unsurprisingly, the Western political leadership shied away from armed sending troops into the Soviet Zone — even as escorts for convoys of food, medicine and coal — for fear they might provoke a shooting war.
Yet it was also less than ten years since Neville Chamberlain had flown to Munich to make territorial concessions to another dictator, Adolf Hitler. The result of his policy of appeasement had been a bitter and costly world war. No one in London or Washington was inclined to follow in Chamberlain’s footsteps and appease Stalin.
It was at this juncture that a relatively junior RAF officer, Air Commodore Waite, drew attention to a loophole in the Soviet blockade. While the Soviets had never provided written guarantees of land access to Berlin, they had signed protocols guaranteeing the Western Allies use of three delineated “air corridors.” These were each 20 miles wide and 10,000 feet high and all Allied air traffic was confined to these corridors plus the airspace inside a twenty-mile radius of Berlin’s center.
Air Commodore Waite suggested it might be possible to supply the Western Sectors of Berlin by air — as a stop-gap measure. At the time, the task seemed quite hopeless. Nothing even remotely similar had ever been tried before. Contemporary aircraft had very small cargo capacity (except for a handful of aircraft that could carry twenty tons, most cargo aircraft of this period had a capacity of between three and ten tons). The Western Sectors of Berlin, on the other hand, consumed roughly 14,000 tons of goods on a daily basis. Policy makers were also acutely aware that earlier attempts to airlift supplies to besieged populations — like the Luftwaffe effort to supply the Sixth Army at Stalingrad — had all failed.
More by default than conviction, the Western leadership decided to attempt an airlift. The decision was undertaken notin expectation of victory, but in the hope that an airlift would buy the West time to negotiate a satisfactory settlement with Stalin. The instructions to both air forces boiled down to nothing more than: “Do the best you can as fast as you can.”
In short, the Berlin Airlift began without the West really knowing how much of what the Berliners needed to survive — much less how much those things weighed. It was launched despite an almost complete absence of cargo aircraft and aircrew in Germany and despite serious inadequacies in airfield capacity and air traffic control. It started without airlift expertise in theater and without a unified command structure.
In the months to come, the Airlift faced severe challenges and more than once faltered. On a single day, for example, three aircraft crashed at Tempelhof Airfield in the American Sector shutting down the airfield for hours. In November 1948 fog descended over northern Germany grounding aircraft for roughly fifty percent of the time. In December, intense cold followed the fog and hundreds of Berliners froze to death in their unheated apartments, while the Berlin city government begged the Allies to evacuate 17,000 of the most vulnerable residents. At the turn of the year 1948-1949, the Airlift stood on the brink of failure.
Yet something else had happened too. Almost imperceptibly former Allies were becoming friends as German gratitude for the Allied effort overcame lingering mistrust. What most captured the hearts of the Berliners were the people-to-people contacts and the unofficial generosity of the individual Americans and British participants. None of these were more famous — nor nearly as influential — as one American lieutenant, who has gone down in history as “the Berlin Candy Bomber.”
Lt. Gail Halvorsen by chance encountered a group of kids standing by the perimeter fence at Tempelhof and struck up a conversation with them. He was dumbfounded to discover that they were “more interested in freedom than flour.” When he turned to go, he automatically reached into his pocket to see if he had something he could share with them. He found only two sticks of gum. Two sticks of gum and thirty kids? He feared a squabble but tore each stick in half and gave half a stick to each of the four “translators.” Not only was there no fighting, the wrappings were passed around and the kids sniffed them rapturously.
Halvorsen crumbled. He promised to drop more candy from his aircraft the next day. Back at base, however, Halvorsen rapidly realized he’d let himself get carried away. He couldn’t just drop candy out of an aircraft still flying at 200 feet and doing about 120 miles an hour as it came over the fence. Furthermore, his crew mates were convinced that they were going to get into all sorts of trouble and did not want to participate. Halvorsen solved the first problem by fashioning a couple of mini-parachutes out of spare handkerchiefs and the second by stubbornly overruling all objections. Halverson and his crew made their first “candy drop” out of the flare chute and the kids were delirious with joy.
Of course, they couldn’t leave it at that. Not only his own crew but other pilots and friends started leaving their rations and handkerchiefs on Halvorsen’s bed. Again and again, they made candy drops as the crowd of kids beside the fence grew and grew until the inevitable happened. A newspaper cameraman snapped a picture of a candy drop in which the tail-number of the aircraft could be read. As a result, Halvorsen’s superiors found out what he’d been doing. He was ordered to report to commander of the Combined Air Lift Taskforce, General Tunner.
Lt. General Tunner had the reputation of being a stiff disciplinarian with no sense of humor. His nickname was “Willy the Whip.” To Halvorsen’s amazement, however, far from being angry, Tunner was delighted. Tunner had the political savvy to see and seize upon the propaganda and psychological value of Halvorsen’s actions. Recognizing that the candy drops would have huge popular appeal, he sent Halvorsen back to US on a PR tour. While there, Halvorsen met John Swersey, the chairman of the Confectioner’s Association of America. Swersey promised to collect donations from all the major candy manufacturers of the US, and his wife (a former Congresswoman from Arizona) promised to deliver a thousand parachutes a week. Swersey kept his word; an entire boxcar full of candy, chocolate and gum made its way across the Atlantic by ship to arrive at Rhein-Main airfield before Christmas.
Meanwhile, back in Berlin the candy drops were expanding. Various “drop zones” were identified on maps and any crew departing from Wiesbaden or Rhein-Main could pick up a box of sweets attached to a mini-parachute. Each participating plane was given a “drop zone” and diversions to deliver candy from the sky were factored into the air traffic controlling patterns. In fact, the candy drops became an official operation. The official name of the Airlift was “Operation Vittles,” and the candy drops became “Operation Little Vittles.” When Halvorsen rotated out of Berlin in January 1949, he officially handed over “command” of Operation Little Vittles to a new “commander.”
By then the other difficulties confronting the Airlift had also largely been overcome. An entirely new airfield had been built in the French sector and a new, modern powerplant had been constructed as well — both using construction equipment that was first cut up into pieces, put aboard aircraft disassembled, and then welded back together again in Berlin. In addition, almost forty tanker aircraft had joined the airlift to bring diesel, propane and aviation fuel to the beleaguered city. Last but not least, air traffic control had been reorganized and modernized to unprecedented levels including Ground Controlled Approach in all weathers.
By May 1949, the Soviets knew they had been defeated, and on 12th, less than a year after it had been instituted, the Soviets ended their Blockade. Stalin’s attempt to swallow West Berlin into his Zone, to humiliate the Western powers and to disrupt the establishment of a free and democratic German government in the Western Zones had failed. Not only was the Federal Republic of Germany established, so was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the foundations of the European Union were likewise laid. All these institutions were instrumental in defending Western Europe from further Soviet — and now Russian — aggression. Meanwhile, the Western Allies remained in Berlin until German reunification, and West Berlin became a beacon of freedom deep inside the Soviet sea of authoritarianism. All that was due to the Berlin Airlift.
Meet Helena P. Schrader
Helena P. Schrader is an established aviation author and expert on the Second World War. She earned a PhD in History (cum Laude) from the University of Hamburg with a ground-breaking dissertation on a leading member of the German Resistance to Hitler, which received widespread praise on publication in Germany. Her non-fiction publications include Sisters in Arms: The Women who Flew in WWII, The Blockade Breakers: The Berlin Airlift, and Codename Valkyrie: General Friederich Olbricht and the Plot against Hitler, an English-language adaptation of her dissertation. Helena has published nineteen historical novels and won numerous literary awards, including “Best Biography 2017” from Book Excellence Awards and “Best Historical Fiction 2020” from Feathered Quill Book Awards. For more on her publications, works-in-progress, reviews and awards visit: http://helenapschrader.com. Or Visit me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/helena.p.schrader.7
