The Berlin Airlift: How the RAF Helped Kept a City Alive by Air Alone
A Dakota comes down through cloud thick with sleet, another aircraft already queued behind it in the corridor, and ground crews are waiting on the tarmac at Gatow with a stopwatch running before the wheels have even touched. This is what it looks like to fly a city back from the edge of starvation, one twenty-five-minute turnaround at a time.
This episode matters because the Berlin Airlift settled a real question about what air power alone could achieve: whether an entire modern city, sealed off by blockade, could be kept alive indefinitely by aircraft, with no negotiation and not a single shot fired.
In this episode:
- How the Soviet blockade of June 1948 sealed every road, rail and canal route into West Berlin
- Why Operation Plainfare and the American Operation Vittles depended on three narrow air corridors fixed years earlier
- The aircraft that carried it, from the Dakota and the Avro York to the Sunderland flying boats hauling salt across the Havel
- How unified command under Major General William Tunner turned the airlift into a precision-timed system
- The record-breaking Easter Parade, and the human cost behind the operation’s reputation for discipline rather than combat
Listen if you’re interested in:
- Cold War history and the origins of a divided Germany
- RAF transport operations and the logistics of large-scale airlift
- How thousands of ordinary, relentlessly repeated flights built one of the RAF’s most disciplined operations
Explore more from The RAF Chronicle: Read more RAF history, from squadron stories to aircraft deep dives, at therafchronicle.co.uk.
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