The Berlin Airlift Supplies a Blockaded City

On 24 June 1948, Soviet forces severed land and water connections between the Western zones of occupied Germany and the city of Berlin. The capital, situated over one hundred miles inside Soviet-controlled eastern Germany, had been partitioned after the Potsdam Agreement into four occupation sectors. Tensions between the former wartime Allies had escalated following Western agreements to coordinate their zones and extend assistance under the Marshall Plan. Relations ruptured definitively after the United States, Britain, and France introduced the Deutsche Mark to stabilize the currency in their areas, prompting the Soviet military administration to cite technical problems and halt all highway, rail, and canal traffic into the western sectors of Berlin.

Cut off from surface supply networks, the western portions of Berlin faced severe isolation. Soviet authorities also cut off the electricity supplied to the western sectors, leaving more than two million inhabitants reliant on existing stockpiles. Although ground access had only ever rested on verbal understandings between Allied commanders, a formal written agreement concluded in November 1945 explicitly reserved three twenty-mile-wide air corridors connecting the city to the western zones. Western leaders rejected military plans to force ground passages and instead resolved to use these designated air routes to transport vital supplies directly into the municipal airfields.