The Berlin Airlift by the Numbers

  The Berlin Airlift remains to this day the largest and most successful airlift in history. There have been many airlifts in the 80 years since the Berlin Airlift ended,  but none has come near to the scale of joint USAF/RAF effort in 1948-1949. On the contrary, not all of them together carried as much as the Berlin Airlift alone. So just what were the logistical achievements of the Berlin Airlift?

Below is a short summery of the numbers.

Tonnage: The most common way of measuring the accomplishments of the Airlift is the one Tunner favored: tonnage. During the first five days of the Airlift, June 1948, the Allies managed to fly in 1,274 tones in 500 flights – and were proud of it. By the end of the Airlift, they were routinely flying seven times that much each day. Or put another way: the daily tonnage improved 40-fold in the course of the Airlift. On the Airlift’s best day, Tunner’s “Easter Parade,” the 12,940 tons flown into Berlin corresponded to roughly 22 freight trains each composed of 50 cars full of coal, or the complete cargo of a modern bulk carrier with 15,000 dwt registry. A total of 2,325,510 tons of supplies were flown to Berlin during the Airlift, of which 1,613,119 tons were flown in during the Blockade itself, and the remaining 712,391 tons arrived during the summer of 1949, when the Allies were building up the reserves of the city. Of that total tonnage, ca. 1,587,000 tons or 68% was coal. Food accounted for roughly 538,000 tons or 23% of the tonnage, and liquid fuel for 92,000 tons or 4%.

But tonnage is not the only way to quantify the achievements of the Airlift. Here are some others.

 

Sorties and Miles Flown: There were 277,569 Airlift sorties flown, covering 124 million miles – or the same distance as circumnavigating the globe at the equator 3,960 times. 

Air Movements/Air Traffic Control: As many as 4,000 take-offs and landings were registered on peak days. In fact, what is now routine at all major airports in the world – parallel runways with take-offs and landing taking place simultaneously and the system by which an aircraft at the head of the runway is cleared for take-off the minute a landing aircraft turns off onto the taxiway at the other end – was first pioneered during the Airlift. Gatow was the busiest airport in the entire world at that time, with the number of flights exceeding New York’s La Guardia. There were more GCA approaches made at Tempelhof in the last days of the Airlift than were made at all civilian airports in the United States altogether. In fact the entire air traffic control system introduced on the Airlift, which enabled streams of aircraft of different types fed in from different air corridors to be safely directed to different airfields in very limited airspace, was at the time a revolutionary innovation and accomplishment. Veterans of the great bomber offensives of the Second World War and the Airlift attest to the fact that the complexity of air traffic control during the Airlift exceeded the difficulties of assembling the large bomber formations and streams of WWII.

 

Infrastructure: At the start of the lift, there were only two major airports in West Berlin, two in the American Zone and one in the British Zone. At the end of the Airlift there were three major airports in West Berlin, and six in the British Zone. Of lasting significance were Tegel Airport, Berlin’s major civil airfield for the next fifty years, and Fühlsbüttel, which is still Hamburg’s principle airport. Tegel’s runways, built by the most primitive methods and using unorthodox materials to support Skymasters, proved capable of handling both the Boeing 747 and the DC 10. The Skymaster had a weight of 33 tons fully loaded; a 747 weighed in at 355 tons. Yet perhaps the most astonishing and unique accomplishment was the construction of a modern power plant using materials that had to be transported in pieces on - by today’s standards - tiny aircraft. Right into the 21^st century, the power plant built with airlifted components remained the most important source of electricity in West Berlin.

 Passengers: a total of 227,655 passengers were transported in and/or out of Berlin during the Airlift. Of these, over 168,000 passengers were flown out of Berlin, and the remainder were in-bound passengers.

Outbound Freight: 35,843 tons of industrial goods produced in Blockaded Berlin were flown out of the city during the Airlift. These products had an estimated value of 230.5 million DM – a significant contribution to Berlin’s badly damaged economy.  The contribution made to West Berlin morale by keeping factories open, keeping people employed and even selling goods abroad, while not quantifiable, was certainly significant in maintaining Berlin’s pride and determination to defy the Soviet blockade. Pride can be decisive in times of adversity. 

The Costs: The Berlin Airlift had a price too, of course. Various attempts have been made to quantify the monetary costs, but in fact no one kept track and it is almost pointless to try to reconstruct. For a start, it is virtually impossible to come to a consensus on what to include in the costs. Clearly the costs of Airlift aircraft, crew, aviation fuel, spare parts etc. are part of the costs, but what about the services of the Occupation forces, who were there anyway? Clearly the cost of food, fuel and coal supplied by the Allies are costs of the Airlift – or are they? Food and fuel and coal would have been supplied to Berlin by other means as long as it remained an Occupied territory. And what about the CARE packages which were contributed by Americans as gifts? Or the contributions to Halvorsen’s “Little Vittles”? What about the economic costs of lost jobs and unemployment benefits put on the Berlin treasury? Are those the cost of the Airlift – or the Blockade? When the U.S. was pouring millions of dollars into the Marshall Plan, why should the cost of keeping the Berlin free be charged against the Airlift? Surely, the point of the Marshall Plan was to keep as much of Europe democratic as possible? The loss of Berlin would have been a disastrous blow to European recovery.

All that can be said with certainty is that the USAF calculated the direct costs associated with the Airlift (but not training or the transport of men, machines and materiel across the Atlantic) at $ 252.5 million. A British historian estimated the British costs at £ 17 million. German historians have “guestimated” that the German taxpayer paid altogether DM 1.2 billion. Exchange rates for these various figures from different sources, however, do not exist so a comparison remains illusive. The bottom line is that the decision to supply Berlin by air was a political one, and at no time did the monetary/financial costs of the operation play even a secondary role in Allied or German decision-making.

 

By contrast, the human cost did play a role. If the Airlift had been costing young men’s lives on a regular basis, who is to say that the American public would have remained supportive? If the images coming out of Germany had not been children collecting tiny parachutes with chocolate attached but rather coffins covered with American flags, then the vital Will of the West to continue might indeed have broken. In this sense, Tunner’s determination to make the Airlift as safe as possible was crucial to its success.

Expressed another way, despite the almost 278,000 sorties and the 124 million miles flown on the Airlift, the USAF recorded only 70 major and 56 minor accidents or 126 altogether. The RAF reported 46 accidents requiring salvage. The accident figures for the many civil companies have not been tabulated. In all there were 24 accidents ending in fatalities, only one of which was a mid-air collision.  We should never forget that a total of 78 men, 32 Americans, 39 British and 7 Germans, gave their lives to keep Berlin supplied during the Soviet Blockade of 1948-1949.

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[i] Cox, p. 37.

[ii] Keiderling, p. 138.

[iii] Clay, p. 267.

 

The Berlin Airlift is the subject of Bridge to Tomorrow, a trilogy of novels starting with Cold Peace.

Watch a video teaser here: Winning a War with Milk, Coal and Chocolate

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. But 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. Buy Now

Berlin is under siege. More than two million civilians must be supplied by air -- or surrender to Stalin's oppression.

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. Buy now!

 Based on historical events, award-winning and best-selling novelist Helena P. Schrader delivers an insightful, exciting and moving tale about how former enemies became friends in the face of Russian aggression — and how close the Berlin Airlift came to failing.