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14 May 2009



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Berlin Airlift's 60th Anniversary Reminds People Why Freedom Matters

Earlier this week, the 60th anniversary of Stalin's surrender to the West passed. Outside Berlin, few noticed. However, Berlin in 1949 was where the Cold War's beginning ended. Ahead lay Korea, Hungary, Cuba and Vietnam, but May 1949 showed that freedom beats slavery, that democracy beats dictatorship, and that candy makes more effective bombs than plutonium.

For reasons that are obscure and largely unimportant after 1945, Berlin was divided into four sectors – as was Germany itself. In other words, there was an island of freedom in the middle of the Soviet Zone of Occupation called West Berlin. To the kids of today, the entire situation seems silly. More than one Germany? A city divided against itself? A society where people informed against one another? Yet that's the way things were.

Stalin, ever the grand master of brinkmanship, decided to prevent goods from coming into West Berlin. As there were no formal agreements about access to West Berlin by rail and road, he was within his rights to limit things to 10 trains per day. On April 1, 1948, he went farther and demanded that every train and truck be searched before it would be allowed to pass through East German (that is Soviet occupied territory). The solution was to fly supplies in. Should Stalin want to shoot down a US or British aircraft, he could do so, but no way in hell could he stop the supplies otherwise.

Templehof Airport became the bridgehead of freedom in the East. Roughly 7,000 tons of supplies landed every day. What eventually broke the back of Soviet resistance was the “Easter Parade,” when nothing but coal was delivered, but from midnight April 15 to midnight April 16, 12,941 tons of coal had been delivered by 1,383 flights, without a single accident. On May 12, 1949, the Soviets lifted the blockade – their first surrender of the Cold War.

And a special note should be made here of the Candy Bomber, Gail Halvorsen, and his colleagues. America won the Cold War because its way of life is simply more attractive than that of the defunct Soviet Union. Colonel Halvorsen had landed his plane and had a few minutes. He walked over to the fence surrounding the airport where he met some children of Berlin. He had two pieces of Wrigley's Doublemint Gum. He told the kids if they shared them, he'd find a way to get them more. They'd know it was him because he would wiggle his wings. The next day, he dropped some chocolate bars tied to a parachute made of a handkerchief. Within a few days, there was a stack of mail at Base Ops for “Uncle Wiggly Wings.” The story appeared in the news, and when the high command got over its initial annoyance, it realized the propaganda value of “Operation Little Vittles.” Soon, other pilots were involved and America's chocolate companies got into the act. Before it was over, America had bombed Berlin with 3 tons of candy. That probably did more to convince the Germans that the Yanks were liberators rather than occupiers than anything else.

The lesson here is simple. The Islamic fundamentalists of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq-Nam will never give up, but they can be undermined. The war will not be won by killing, but by winning over the vast majority of decent Muslims in that region. The weapons that will win this conflict aren't depleted uranium shells or cruise missiles. Schools, shoes and chocolate are the weapons most needed. Is anyone in the Obama administration paying attention to the lesson of Berlin?

© Copyright 2009 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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