When the Russians cut off the access roads to West Berlin the Americans organized the largest "airlift" in history.
With the blockade of Berlin the Cold War reached its hot spot
The Berlin Blockade was the ultimate confrontation of the Cold War. It was over Berlin that the decisive showdown between the United States and the USSR took place; During the blockade, the United States brought its strategic bombers to Great Britain, thus threatening Moscow for the first time with its nuclear weapons. When the blockade was lifted, the Soviet Union and the Western powers had reached a tacit agreement on Germany, which was to decide its future.
For all these reasons, the blockade of Berlin can be considered a major turning point in the Cold War.
At a time of ideological clashes and bitter discussions, mistrust and misunderstandings succeeded a period of long conflicts during which each camp settled on already defined positions
It was also a dramatic event. For eleven months the fate of West Berlin depended entirely on planes landing at Tempelhof, Gatow and from 1948 at Tegel.
The airlift was staged on a fantastic scale that did not equal even the height of World War II. And the endurance of the airmen was matched only by the courage of the people of West Berlin.
the blockade and the airlift brought dramatic unity to the political and diplomatic confusions of the Cold War, thus helping to condense and clarify the problems of East-West antagonism which had only been accentuated since 1945. The drama of the blockade also had a vital role in German history as it enabled the Germans to erase another consequence of Nazi rule and military occupation and to identify their futures with the defense of democratic values.
To say that the blockade was doubly important would be to give the appearance of deceptive simplicity.
Trying to understand how it came about, trying to relate it to the "cold war", a number of questions come to mind and one of them in particular:was the blockade intentional?
The reality of events cannot be denied. For all the Berliners who shivered with empty stomachs during the winter of 1948, for all the American and British airmen who endured the extreme fatigue and the permanent dangers represented by the airlift, the blockade was real. But is this what the Soviet leaders wanted? Did they really intend to cut off all access to West Berlin? Was the showdown deliberate or simply the consequence of a series of coincidences and misunderstandings?
One of the curiosities of this blockade is that an interpretation was given before the events occurred. During 1947, as relations between the Soviet Union and the Western powers deteriorated, the American government had been warned by two of its most important representatives abroad that Russia might very well attempt a blockade of Berlin. . One such representative was the US Ambassador to Moscow, Walter Bedell-Smith; the other, the military governor of Germany, General Lucius D. Clay.
It can be inferred that the Soviet Union was planning something 'and that the representatives of the United States, one way or another, had known about it. But it is more likely that the two men were simply speculating on what the Russians might do if they came to the point.
In 1948, General Clay warned the commanders of American General Staff that a war could well be imminent. But war never broke out, and there was no reason to suppose that Clay's report was anything other than a reflection of growing tension. Neither warnings about the likelihood of a blockade nor warnings about the imminence of war could be taken as clear evidence of Soviet intentions. However, when the Soviet army began to erect blockades, the Western powers, influenced by these warnings, immediately thought of the blockade. The reactions ranged from deep desperation to firm determination. But long before the blockade of Berlin was total, it was already assumed that it would be. What happened?