Victory: The Dramatic Conclusion of the Berlin Blockade

Fog arrived at the end of October, threatening serious disruption to the airlift. “Thick, impenetrable fog,” Frank Howley wrote as he stared out his window into a zero-visibility blanket of whiteness. Ice-cold fog had settled over four million square miles of Europe, from Finland to Italy, a thousand-foot cloud that thickened with every passing day.

Even General Tunner, director of the airlift, grew alarmed. “The weather closed in on us,” he wrote, only to learn that even worse conditions were on their way.

The first sign of serious trouble came on November 3, 1948, when the fog thickened to such an extent that all three of Berlin’s airfields had to halt their operations. Two hundred planes were forced to turn back as the runways were swallowed by the blanket, depriving Berlin of 1,500 tons of essential supplies. Visibility dropped from 50 yards to 20, before dropping once again and rendering it impossible to see anything.

Airfields in Berlin, West Germany, and across Europe were paralyzed. Britain’s supply hub for Berlin, Northfield airfield, was crippled completely, and most other airports were forced to close.

By the last week of November, the fog had reduced visibility to such an extent that even Tunner conceded defeat. “On November 30th one of those pea-soup fogs closed in on Berlin,” he wrote. “You couldn’t drive a car in the city that day, much less land a plane.”

Frank Howley now feared the worst. “We faced a grave situation,” he said. “The frightening way in which our stocks were disappearing warned us that unless we replenished them at once, they would be exhausted within a week or—at the most—10 days.

The fog caused a catastrophic disruption to the supply of fuel. “We heard that coal supplies were dwindling and would be exhausted within days,” said one young Berliner. “Then, Berlin would begin to die.”

And then came a sudden plunge in temperature that coincided with a complete rupture of West Berlin’s power supply. The outage happened in an abrupt and spectacular fashion. “Everything ground to a halt,” said Fräulein Gross, who was traveling in a streetcar when the vehicle suddenly shuddered to a halt and gave up the ghost. Frank Howley’s worst nightmare had come to pass: Berlin had been brought to its knees.

But just when the airlift reached its deepest point of crisis, at the beginning of January 1949, there was a sudden and dramatic meteorological upturn. “The weather miraculously improved,” wrote a relieved Howley, who saw the first glimmer of hope in the milder temperatures. Planes began landing within hours of the improved conditions, and the city’s empty warehouses were slowly but steadily...

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