Michael Rubin, Senior Fellow, AEI, American Enterprise Institute
President Joe Biden and his team have compared the air operations to evacuate Americans and Afghans from Kabul’s international airport to the Berlin Airlift.
Many commentators and politicians fell into line and adopted the talking point, and White House Chief-of-Staff Ron Klain rewarded some by retweeting their comments.
To compare the two, however, is nonsense.
Put aside the difference in scale. In 1948-49, the Berlin airlift landed a 10 ton C-54 plane every 45 seconds, supplying 5,000 tons per day of food and fuel to 2,500,000 people.
The real difference is that President Harry S. Truman ordered the Berlin Airlift to stop an enemy bent on denying freedom to the citizens of West Berlin.
The crisis in Berlin originated in Moscow. Truman sought to protect people by holding firm. The crisis in Kabul is one solely of President Joe Biden’s own making.
Had he not ordered a unilateral withdrawal, the Taliban would not now be in any Afghan provincial capital let alone in Kabul. More importantly, the Berlin Airlift affirmed that the United States would not give ground.
Biden’s withdrawal signals the opposite: it is all about giving ground. Rather than signal that the United States was willing to hold firm in the face of an ideological enemy bent on denying freedom to American allies.
Biden’s Afghanistan surrender is the opposite: It is about ending a fight against terrorists without any real care about what happens next.
So how about a little history.
After World War II, the Allies partitioned Germany into four sections. A Soviet-occupied zone, an American-occupied zone, a British-occupied zone and a French-occupied zone.
Berlin, the German capital city, was located right in the middle of the Soviet zone. So, being the capital of Germany, it was also divided into four sections.
In June 1948, the Russians–who wanted Berlin all for themselves–closed all highways, railroads and canals from western-occupied Germany into western-occupied Berlin.
Bear in mind, there were French, British, and American zones in Berlin and the city sat as an island surrounded by the Soviets.
The Soviets believed that by cutting off all supply lines to Berlin, it would make it impossible for the people who lived there to get food or any other supplies and would eventually drive Britain, France and the U.S. out of the city for good.
Instead of retreating from West Berlin, however, the U.S. and its allies decided to supply their sectors of the city from the air. This effort, known as the “Berlin Airlift,” lasted for more than a year and carried more than 2.3 million tons of cargo into West Berlin.
So how did they get in this situation?
As World War II came to an end in 1945, the Allied powers held peace conferences at Yalta and Potsdam to determine how they would divide up Germany’s territories.
As I stated earlier, the agreements split the defeated nation into four “allied occupation zones”: They gave the eastern part of the country to the Soviet Union and the Western part to the U.S. and Great Britain. In turn, those nations agreed to cede a small part of their territories to France.
Even though Berlin was located entirely within the Soviet part of the country (it sat about 100 miles from the border between the eastern and western occupation zones), the Yalta and Potsdam agreements likewise split the German capital into Allied sectors: The Soviets took the eastern half, while the other Allies took the western.
This occupation of Berlin, governed by a multipower agency called the Kommandatura, began in June 1945.
The Soviets were dissatisfied with this arrangement. Twice in the past, they had been invaded by Germany, and they had no interest in promoting that country’s reunification–yet it seemed that was exactly what the United States, Great Britain and France had in mind.
In 1947 the Americans and the British combined their two sectors into a single “Bizonia,” and the French were preparing to join as well.
In 1948, the three western Allies created a single new currency (the Deutsche Mark) for all of their occupation zones—a move that the Soviets feared would fatally devalue the already hyperinflated Reichsmarks that they used in the east. For the Soviets, it was the last straw.
The Russians were also concerned about a unified West Berlin: a capitalist city located right in the middle of their occupation zone that would likely be powerfully and aggressively anti-Soviet. They decided that something needed to be done to stop this creeping unification.
The Soviets now withdrew from the Kommandatura and began a blockade of West Berlin, a maneuver that they hoped would effectively starve the western powers out of Berlin.
If West Germany was to become its own country, they argued, then Berlin, located more than 100 miles from its border, could no longer be its capital.
On June 24, 1948, the Soviet authorities announced that the Autobahn, the highway connecting western Germany to Berlin, would be closed indefinitely “for repairs.” Then, they halted all road traffic from west to east, and barred all barge and rail traffic from entering West Berlin. Thus began the blockade of Berlin.
As far as the western Allies were concerned, withdrawal from the city was not an option. “If we withdraw,” said the American military commander, “our position in Europe is threatened, and Communism will run rampant.”
President Harry Truman echoed this sentiment: “We shall stay,” he declared, “period.” Using military force to strike back against the Soviet blockade seemed equally unwise: The risk of turning the Cold War into an actual war—even worse, a nuclear war—was just too great. Finding another way to re-provision the city seemed to the Allies to be the only reasonable response.
It was quickly settled: The Allies would supply their sectors of Berlin from the air. Allied cargo planes would use open air corridors over the Soviet occupation zone to deliver food, fuel and other goods to the people who lived in the western part of the city. This project, code-named “Operation VITTLES” by the American military, was known as the “Berlin airlift.” (West Berliners called it the “Air Bridge.”)
The Berlin airlift was supposed to be a short-term measure, but it settled in for the long haul as the Soviets refused to lift the blockade.
For more than a year, hundreds of American, British and French cargo planes ferried provisions from Western Europe to the Tempelhof (in the American sector), Gatow (in the British sector) and Tegel (in the French sector) airfields in West Berlin.
At the beginning of the operation, the planes delivered about 5,000 tons of supplies to West Berlin every day; by the end, those loads had increased to about 8,000 tons of supplies per day. The Allies carried about 2.3 million tons of cargo in all over the course of the airlift. An Allied supply plane took off or landed in West Berlin every 30 seconds. The planes made nearly 300,000 flights in all.
Life in West Berlin during the blockade was not easy. Fuel and electricity were rationed, and the black market was the only place to obtain many goods. Still, most West Berliners supported the airlift and their western allies. “It’s cold in Berlin,” one airlift-era saying went, “but colder in Siberia.”
By spring 1949, it was clear that the Soviet blockade of West Berlin had failed. It had not persuaded West Berliners to reject their allies in the West, nor had it prevented the creation of a unified West German state. (The Federal Republic of Germany was established in May 1949.)
On May 12, 1949, the Soviets lifted the blockade and reopened the roads, canals and railway routes into the western half of the city. The Allies continued the airlift until September, however, because they wanted to stockpile supplies in Berlin just in case the blockade was reinstated.
Most historians agree that the blockade was a failure in other ways, too. It amped up Cold War tensions and made the USSR look to the rest of the world like a cruel and unpredictable enemy.
It sped up the creation of West Germany, and, by demonstrating that the U.S. and Western European nations had common interests (and a common foe), it motivated the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance that still exists today.
So folks, with the history I just provided, let’s go back to Joe Biden stating that the Afghanistan airlift was like the Berlin Airlift.
The Kabul airlift was an operation removing Americans and allies from a country we were, by President Biden’s order, abandoning.
The Berlin airlift was the opposite. It was a US effort to avoid abandoning West Berlin which was threatened by Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. And it was very successful.
One thing both airlifts have in common is that they were the products of the personal decisions of American presidents made against much expert advice.
Biden says he was bound, in this one case, to carry out a decision of his predecessor, former President Donald Trump. Despite indications that the very limited troop deployment in Afghanistan was sustainable, he ordered it ended within a short deadline.
President Harry Truman’s decision was made in almost the opposite circumstances. In June 1948, the Soviet Union cut off all motor, rail and barge traffic from the US and British occupation zones to West Berlin, which was landlocked deep in the Soviet zone.
The city’s 2.5 million people had only 36 days’ supply of food and 45 days’ supply of coal. Allied troops were vastly outnumbered by Red Army units. The Berlin blockade looked impossible to break.
Truman’s top military and diplomatic advisers, men of great ability, doubted that Berlin could be supplied solely by air. But Truman ended a key meeting in July 1948 by starkly declaring, “We’re not leaving Berlin.”
Air Force Gen. William Tunner, who supervised the Burma-to-China “hump” airlift during World War II, organized logistics until airplanes landed at Berlin’s Tempelhof airport every 30 seconds and were unloaded within 30 minutes. Berlin was supplied with food and coal over the winter, and in May 1949, the Soviets called off the blockade.
Now the people of East and West Berlin had a choice. Stay in East Berlin and live under communist rule under a Soviet dictatorship or flee to West Berlin under democratic leadership where you had the opportunity stay in West Berlin’s free, capitalist society, or fly out of West Berlin to a new life of freedom elsewhere in the world.
By 1961, an estimated 1,000 East Germans were fleeing every day. From 1949 to 1961, an estimated 3.5 million people, or fully one-fifth of the East Germans citizens, had left for the West.
This mass exodus eventually led to the night of August 12, 1961, when East German soldiers began to construct what became known as the Berlin Wall.
Initially, streets were torn up and wire fences were strung, soon to be replaced with a brick wall, and then much more.
The barrier got ever higher, more complex, and deadlier. Eventually, there were two walls with a death strip in between.
The Berlin Wall had miles of concrete walls, wire mesh fencing, barbed wire, trained dogs, and anti-vehicle trenches surrounding the western section of Berlin.
The boundary was supplemented with watchtowers, bunkers, and mines. Border guards were told to shoot those attempting to escape from East Berlin to West Berlin.
So, folks, Truman’s steadfast support of the Berlin airlift provided the opportunity for millions to flee communist rule between 1948 and 1961. It was also one reason Truman, at age 64, won the 1948 election after trailing for months in the polls.
Today, it’s beginning to look like Biden’s role in this Afghanistan airlift may have the opposite effect in the 2022 midterm elections.
Just as Truman’s airlift, blocking totalitarian advances, strengthened the president and his party in 1948, President Biden’s airlift accommodating totalitarian advances is, at least temporarily, weakening the president and his party in 2021.
Obviously, the President should have paid more attention in his history class. The answers to this recent mess were right there in front of him.
Finally, something to think about. What message did Truman send to our allies in 1948 as compared to the message sent by Biden to our allies today?