Backstory to the Berlin Airlift: Flawed Blueprint for a Post-War World
The Western Allies blundered into the absurd situation that culminated in the Blockade of Berlin 1948 by a series of strategic miscalculations. To understand how the West was backed into an outrageously expensive Airlift it is first necessary to return to 1945 and the Potsdam Conference that was supposed to establish the blueprint for the Post-War World. Both Great Britain and the United States came to the first post-war summit conference, held at Potsdam between 17 July and 2 August 1946, with a very strong commitment to continuing the “good working relationship” they had developed with the Soviet Union during the War. By contrast, the Soviet leadership came to the Conference fully conscious that the Soviet Union was more powerful than it had been at any point in its history and that its armies were in occupation of vast areas of rich industrial and agricultural territories that were now theirs to exploit. From the Soviet point of view, the need to compromise with the ideologi...