The Berlin Blockade

Citizens of Europe were living in shambles (See Fig 2). Politically, Americans knew spreading capitalistic ways in Europe would gain support from the Europeans, giving the United States trade partners. During the Cold War, Germany became the center of all the tensions between Capitalism and Communism. Germany was the ideal gateway between East and West Europe. Its location made it a suitable place for these political struggles to occur. This angered the Soviets because they too wanted to influence their ways on Europe. The Marshall Plan, following the Truman Doctrine-- which supplied $400 million to countries under totalitarian regimes (Turkey and Greece), appeared to be another anti-communist move made by the United States. However, the United States still successfully achieved the goal of making Europe economically stable.

The first source which will be evaluated is Richard Harris’ excerpt of "The Berlin airlift" from the textbook American History, published in 1998. The source origin is valuable because the author

In 1958, Kruschev had asked NATO to give up West Berlin to East Germany and by the summer of 1961, Kruschev and Kennedy met during the Vienna Summit, where Kruschev insisted upon East German control over West Berlin. On August 13, the Soviets and East Germans built a wall that limited free means of access between the Western and Eastern zones. American and Soviet forces confronted each other at “Checkpoint Charlie,” which controlled the passage across.

Instead of the U.S. and the Soviet Union fighting head on, they competed by controlling and influencing other countries(Jeffery, Riley, 4). The U.S. affiliated themselves with West Berlin just like the Soviets associated themselves with Cuba. It escalated to nuclear tension when the U.S. placed weapons in Turkey and Italy(The Choices Program). The U.S had many more missiles than the Soviets had at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. They also produced missiles much faster than the Soviets. The Soviet Union knew these disadvantages and were very aware of what the U.S. could do(Schwarz).

On June 20th, 1949, President Truman met with his cabinet to discuss an important event. Four days prior, the Soviets had blockaded Berlin to force them to cede it. With only 36 days of food and 45 days of coal remaining, time was of the essence. The cabinet had listed three options. First, leave Berlin, but that would signal that western democracies couldn’t handle the Soviets. Second, stay until the starving population forced them out. Third, they could send an

They did this in order to stop communism from expanding. The Berlin Airlift in 1948 was a key occurrence in the Cold War, it molded the present Germany. The United States and Free world owned Western Europe, they were supposed to share both Germany and Berlin. But the Soviets would not comply, so that in the end Germany would crumble and they could have it all instead of just a portion. The US reacted with the Berlin Airlift, completely providing Berlin by air, which resulted in the defeat of the Russians’ arrangement and it recovered Germany for the

In 1948, the United States, Great Britain, and France united their separate zones of the city into one single entity in West Germany, called the Federal Republic of Germany. Following a disagreement on currency reforms, the Soviet Union responded by blockading the western area of the city of Berlin. Since the city was surrounded by the rest of Soviet-controlled East Germany, the Soviets were able to successfully cut off their supplies. The rest of the Allies quickly retaliated with what became known as the Berlin Airlift, so named because they used planes to continue supplying their areas of the city with necessary materials. In May of 1949, the Soviets ended the blockade, but with Cold War tensions running high between the years of 1949 and 1961, nearly 2.5 million East Germans fled from East to West Germany through Berlin. Since many of these people were skilled laborers, professionals, and intellectuals, the East German economy suffered a great deal. To put an end to this, East German soldiers went out during the night on the 12th of August 1961, and laid down more than thirty miles of barbed wire through the center of the city. After this, East German citizens were forbidden to pass into West Berlin. On the 15th of August, the barbed wire was stripped away and replaced with concrete. When the Berlin Wall was completed, it

The geopolitical strategy of the United State at the time of the blockage was about preventing control over Eurasia by any single power. Strategic bombing fundamentally couldn't provide that guarantee because in a war, there wouldn't be enough bombs and there wouldn't be time to use them before Eurasia was overrun and then once the USSR obtained an atomic bomb, the advantage of the U.S. rapidly dissipated throughout the 1950s. The key players in the U.S. militarization of Berlin were a crowd of Republican Senators, very insular and hostile towards Europe and prizing individual liberty. A lot of them were the isolationists

In June 1948, the Western Allies, Britain, France and the U.S, secretly began to plan the creation of a new German state by uniting their zones. Tensions between the Western Allies and the U.S.S.R continued to grow and, after the western powers introduced a new currency in 1948, Stalin cut off all rail and road links to West Berlin. In response to the Soviet Blockade, the Western Allies organized the Berlin Airlift to carry supplies to the city. Even though the Blockade was lifted on 12 May 1949, the airlift continued until September. In total, more than two million tonnes were delivered on approximately 275,000 flights to Berlin.

The Berlin Blockade was where the Soviets closed all the ways in for the americans and britians to help the people of berlin. The Soviets only did it because they did not like the way we introduced a new way of currency in Berlin.

Between the years 1958 and 1961, the dispute over Berlin (often known as the ‘Berlin Crisis’) was one of the main issues between the USA and USSR, and caused a considerable amount of growing tension between the two states. The dispute over Berlin was a continuing issue over who was to occupy Berlin, the capital city of Germany. The city was seen as an important area for both states and led to several conflict issues throughout the time period. It could be argued that this issue and the tension caused by this was the primary reason (or, the main reason) for the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The Cuban missile crisis was an issue over the placement of nuclear weapons on the island of Cuba by the Soviet Union and brought the world closer than

Of the night of August 12 1961, the cold warfare took a turn for the worse, extending the Iron Curtain into the very coronary heart of a divided Europe. This pass with the aid of the government of the German Democratic Republic to stem the massive-scale exodus of East Germans to the Federal Republic of Germany through Berlin became now not an remoted event. It became a part of a broader plan to foster East-West anxiety in and around Berlin.

And despite their endorsement, indications from behind the scenes seemed to indicate otherwise with the NATO members' deafening silence on the merit of a physical confrontation with the Soviets. When the attention turned to newly elected American President Kennedy, whose recent encounter with Fidel Castro had escalated into an embarrassing fiasco at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, his response seemed conspicuously muted as well. Kennedy ultimately conceded opposition to the construction of the Berlin Wall and, in the eyes of the Kremlin, further enhanced his reputation as an indecisive leader while emboldening an already aggressive Soviet Premier Khrushchev. In short, the viewpoint of Soviet self-determination for their property (i.e. the East German province) likely established an amicable reason to back away from a rather tenuous situation. It now seems plausible that Kennedy and Khrushchev may have settled this matter through covert channels as the Western powers clearly had no vested interest and evidently no stomach for pursuing it further based on their striking ambivalence. Lost in the mêlée with pundits’ points and counterpoints half a century later, in addition to the ensuing hypothetical speculations to no avail, reveals the sad reality of a generation fundamentally abandoned as political pawns of the Cold War. East Germany, in retrospect, seems thrown under the bus due to their limited strategic value. Not until President Reagan came into office in 1981 that the goal of defeating communism and the Soviet empire began to materialize as a strategic objective. By decade's end, the Soviet Communism model had imploded and with it the Berlin

What were the main factors that ultimately led to the failure of the Berlin Blockade?

They wanted to drive The United States of America, The United Kingdom and France out of the city. So, in 1948, what came to be known as the Soviet Blockade was an event that aimed to starve the western Allies out of the city. The United States could have retreated and started a war. But they did not. In fact, they themselves sent food to the city of Berlin and wanted to bring it back to normal. This is because they did not want Soviet Union to gain full control over the city. They could not see this part of the city turning totally communist. This effort, known as the Berlin Airlift, lasted for more than a year and delivered more than 2.3 million tons of food, fuel and other goods to West Berlin. 300,000 Berliners demonstrated for the international airlift to continue. In May 1949, The Soviets lifted the blockade, permitting the resumption of Western shipments to Berlin.