Sixty years ago last week, the Soviet Union sealed all road, rail and river links into Berlin. Millions of German citizens under the protection of American, British and French forces faced starvation.
It has the ring of ancient history today. But at the time — just three years after the furious coda of World War II — the Soviets’ simple, brutal act contained the seeds of a new global inferno.
American Gen. Lucius D. Clay wanted to force supplies through the Soviet lines. His plan relied on what latter-day military analysts would call “hard power.” The Russians had more tanks and troops, Gen. Clay reasoned. But we had nuclear weapons, and they didn’t. If the Soviets tried to stop our supplies, we could destroy Moscow or any other city. Who could stop us?

President Harry Truman took a different tack. Years later, it would come to be known — a bit pejoratively, perhaps — as “soft power.” He would use his air force, all right, but not to drop atomic bombs. Instead of destruction and death, it would deliver relief and life.
Nothing like it had been done before; Truman was calling for an armada of airplanes to provide at least 5,000 tons of supplies each day. If it worked, it would demonstrate a kind of power greater than that which flows from the barrel of a gun. It would show the world a United States that was powerful enough to defeat any enemy, wise enough to know best how to apply that power and magnanimous enough to rescue the people of a country we had just defeated.
To my boyish eyes, it wasn’t much to look at: a gleaming, silver military transport plane, decades obsolete, parked at the back edge of a busy flightline. “Holy smokes,” my father said, pulling onto the shoulder of the road. “Would you take a look at that.”
I must have been 8 or 9 years old, craning my neck in the back seat, trying to catch a glimpse of what I assumed must be something very special. Growing up on Hickam Air Force base in Hawaii, I’d seen sleek, silver fighter jets and giant, black B-52 bombers. A poster-sized photo of an F4F Phantom fighter jet (made in St. Louis by McDonnell Douglas) adorned my bedroom wall.
But from the back seat of our family car, all I could see was a tired-looking old military transport plane. It sat, empty and alone, outside a little-used Air National Guard hanger.
My father said, “I flew that plane to Berlin.” And with those words, spoken so softly I almost didn’t catch them, he was out of the car and walking.
I caught up with him at a chain-link fence on the airport’s edge. We leaned against it, side by side, our fingers interlaced with galvanized steel fencing warmed by the sun. We stood there, silent, staring at the plane for what seemed like a very long time. I couldn’t make out what all the fuss was about.

There was no such thing as the Military Channel when I was growing up. There was no need. Kids of my generation grew up steeped in World War II. We watched “Combat” on television and “The Guns of Navarone” at the movies. My school library was filled with books about the war.
And yet, no one I knew ever talked about the Berlin Airlift. We reveled in the hard power of American victory in World War II: Marines storming ashore at Iwo Jima, bombs transforming European and Asian cities into lunar landscapes of craters and dust. Maybe if those big cargo planes flying over Berlin had dropped explosives, we would have cared.
My father knew a few things about dropping bombs. He flew 30 combat missions in a B-17 during World War II. He was shot down and captured and escaped, and for most of his life, he never said a word about any of it. But he didn’t hesitate to speak to me about the Berlin Airlift.

The airlift continued for a year, he told me. At its height, there was an American or British airplane landing or taking off every 90 seconds, 24 hours a day. Most were C-54 transports, the kind in which my father served as flight engineer.
The plane on the other side of the fence from us — that specific plane — was one he had flown. He recognized it from the serial number on the tail. The number was a kind of unchanging secret code, a marker of the heroic history of an otherwise unremarkable airplane, a sign that stayed with it long after it was retired from the U.S. Air Force and sent out to pasture with the Air National Guard.
About 380 C-54s and dozens of other types of planes participated in the airlift. In Berlin, space was at such a premium and schedules so tight that my father and the other flight crews weren’t allowed to leave the aircraft.
More than a few planes crashed while trying to land in winter rain and fog. The burned-out skeleton of one lay just beyond the runway’s edge in Berlin for several months; it had become a landmark for other pilots making their final approach. If a pilot missed the airport, he couldn’t come back around and try again. The skies were so full that a second pass would have risked a crash that could have shut down the whole operation.
I can’t say what my father remembered most about the Berlin Airlift: the harrowing landings, perhaps, or the long days.
But what German kids seem to remember most — what they’ve written and talked about as adults most frequently during this 60th anniversary year — is the unimaginable luxury of chocolate bars dropped from passing American planes.

It’s traditional on Independence Day to remember the long military struggle that culminated with our nation’s birth. We think, also, about the many difficult battles fought to keep our people free, about the millions who fought and died during the Second World War and all the bloody conflicts since: Korea and Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
This year, I’m picturing my father seated at the flight engineer’s control panel on a C-54 headed into Berlin.
World War II destroyed totalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy and Japan. But the rain of bombs and bullets didn’t destroy totalitarianism. It rose again from the ashes of Europe, this time as Soviet communism.
Without the sacrifices of my father and millions of others who served in combat, our world today would be a very different place.
Without the added force of America’s soft power — shown by the Berlin Airlift — the world today still might be as it was before the outbreak of World War II and throughout the Cold War: divided and ripe for destruction.

— John G. Carlton

Veterans of the Berlin Airlift are mostly in their 80s today, but we know some are living in St. Louis and elsewhere around the country. We’d like to invite them, and their children, to tell us about their exploits. You can use the comments section just below. Our hope is to preserve those stories for a new generation of Americans.