Operation Vittles: Black Friday at Tempelhof and the 1949 Easter Parade

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On June 24, 1948, the Soviet Union halted all trains, freight and highway traffic into West Berlin, a city of about 2.8 million sitting roughly 100 miles inside the Soviet zone, after the Western Allies introduced the Deutschmark. Citing technical difficulties, the Soviets also limited electricity to two hours a day. The West relied on a 1945 guarantee of three 20-mile-wide air corridors, and on June 26 General Lucius Clay launched Operation Vittles while the British ran Operation Plainfare. On the first day 32 C-47s carried 80 tons against a daily need of 4,500 to 5,000 tons, and every sack had to be carried uphill by hand into the tilted cabins of the tail-dragger planes.

Major General William Tunner, who had run the Hump airlift over the Himalayas, arrived as the operation neared collapse. After crashes and blind stacked planes on Black Friday, August 13, 1948, he ordered instrument flight rules around the clock and sent any plane that missed its approach back to West Germany with its load. He standardized on the 10-ton C-54 Skymaster, kept crews in their cockpits and fed them from Jeep snack bars, cutting ground time to 30 minutes. Winter added 6,000 tons of coal a day, Tegel airport was built in 90 days with bulldozers cut apart and rewelded, and pilot Gail Halvorsen started dropping candy on handkerchief parachutes. The blockade ended at one minute past midnight on May 12, 1949.

• The Soviets offered free food and coal to West Berliners who registered their ration cards in the East, and most refused.
• British Short Sunderland flying boats landed on the Havel and carried salt, since their hulls were built to resist corrosion.
• Halvorsen's drops began after children at the Tempelhof fence split two sticks of gum and passed the wrapper around to smell it.
• The Easter Parade starting April 15, 1949, delivered nearly 13,000 tons of coal in 1,383 flights in 24 hours without an accident.
• Over 15 months crews flew 92 million miles and delivered more than 2.3 million tons, and 101 lives were lost.