Berlin Blockade Quotes

Wars have an unpleasant habit of evolving in ways that none of the participants anticipated. When, in the summer of 1914, Europe resounded with cries of “A Berlin!” or “Nach Paris!”, no one imagined the Somme, or Verdun, or the starvation blockade of Germany that killed 750,000 civilians.

The events in Prague, together with the Berlin blockade, convinced the European recipients of American economic assistance that they needed military protection as well: that led them to request the creation of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which committed the United States for the first time ever to the peacetime defense of Western Europe.

Okay, I’m going to tell you what I think. It’s like this,” he said grimly. “Quit or don’t quit. Take the promotion or not take it. But, if you take the graveyard shift, mark my words, we will eventually—I don’t know how, and I don’t know when—live to regret it.” Without saying another word he walked inside. In bed Alexander let her kiss his hands. He was on his back, and Tatiana sidled up to him naked, kneeling by his side. Taking his hands, she kissed them slowly, digit by digit, knuckle by knuckle, pressing them to her trembling breasts, but when she opened her mouth to speak, Alexander took his hands away. “I know what you’re about to do,” he said. “I’ve been there a thousand times. Go ahead. Touch me. Caress me. Whisper to me. Tell me first you don’t see my scars anymore, then make it all right. You always do, you always manage to convince me that whatever crazy plan you have is really the best for you and me,” he said. “Returning to blockaded Leningrad, escaping to Sweden, Finland, running to Berlin, the graveyard shift. I know what’s coming. Go ahead, I’ll be good to you right back. You’re going to try to make me all right with you staying in Leningrad when I tell you that to save your hard-headed skull you must return to Lazarevo? You want to convince me that escaping through enemy territory across Finland’s iced-over marsh while pregnant is the only way for us? Please. You want to tell me that working all Friday night and not sleeping in my bed is the best thing for our family? Try. I know eventually you’ll succeed.” He was staring at her blonde and lowered head. “Even if you don’t,” he continued, “I know eventually, you’ll do what you want anyway. I don’t want you to do it. You know you should be resigning, not working graveyard—nomenclature, by the way, that I find ironic for more reasons that I care to go into. I’m telling you here and now, the path you’re taking us on is going to lead to chaos and discord not order and accord. It’s your choice, though. This defines you—as a nurse, as a woman, as a wife—pretend servitude. But you can’t fool me. You and I both know what you’re made of underneath the velvet glove: cast iron.” When Tatiana said nothing, Alexander brought her to him and laid her on his chest. “You gave me too much leeway with Balkman,” he said, kissing her forehead. “You kept your mouth shut too long, but I’ve learned from your mistake. I’m not keeping mine shut—I’m telling you right from the start: you’re choosing unwisely. You are not seeing the future. But you do what you want.” Kneeling next to him, she cupped him below the groin into one palm, kneading him gently, and caressed him back and forth with the other. “Yes,” he said, putting his arms under his head and closing his eyes. “You know I love that, your healing stroke. I’m in your hands.” She kissed him and whispered to him, and told him she didn’t see his scars anymore, and made it if not all right then at least forgotten for the next few hours of darkness.

It wasn’t that I was a fan of Stalin; I didn’t like his eyes, which were beady and shifty in the news photographs; and his hands looked too small for his body. More important, I knew that there were no freedoms in the Soviet Union (or Russia, as we all called it), and I was sure that if I lived there I’d have to be against the government, and that meant I’d end up in Siberia. But I thought there was something amazingly stupid about the Cold War; Stalin was now the devil incarnate, only four years after he had served on the side of the angels, namely us. Either we’d made a mistake during the war, or we were making a mistake now. And there was a larger problem, of which Stalin was part: Why were so many Americans so scared, all the time? We were the strongest country in the world. We won the war. We had the atom bomb. In May, Truman finally broke the Russian blockade of Berlin with a giant airlift. So why were these people shitting in their pants when they thought about communists? The communists won in China, but that didn’t mean they were about to land in Los Angeles. And why did so many people think that the communists might be behind anything that made sense: unions, health care, free education? Even in 1949, there were people saying that we shouldn’t have stopped in Berlin in 1945, we should’ve kept going all the way to Moscow. George Patton, he knew how to deal wit’ dese bastids. Oney thing they respect is force.

Margit Hosseini’s family, now safely back together after the drama of August 13, feared, like all West Berliners, for the future of their city. In a wider political sense, many questioned the Allies’ response, and more significantly what America would now do. Just as worrying was what the Russians intended. Would they attempt a second blockade of the city? Or would they simply invade and capture it? As Hosseini remembered, “There was very little reaction coming first from America,

Situated 177 kilometers (approximately 100 miles) inside the Soviet Zone of Occupation, West Berlin was isolated and vulnerable, surrounded by at least three hundred thousand Soviet troops and three thousand tanks. Although Stalin had signed in 1946 to formally grant the Allies access of supply into Soviet territory, the agreement could easily be thwarted if he so wished. Thus, on June 24, 1948, the Soviets mounted a blockade of the city, effectively turning the supply tap off from its western road,

Sometimes, just to see what was happening, my father would drive to the airport…. Before my birth, during the “Roaring 20’s” Newark Airport was the first major airport to serve the greater New York area. It was opened for traffic on October 1, 1928, on 68 acres of reclaimed marshland adjacent to the Passaic River. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey later took it over from the Army Air Corps and in 1948 started a major expansion and improvement program. Driving by and seeing activity from the road, we drove to where Eastern Airlines had a shiny new DC-3 on display, and as luck would have it, it was open to the public. It was an exciting moment when I boarded this aircraft and discovered that it was first constructed in 1934, the same year I was born. An example of modern technology, it was the first modern airliner and the forerunner of commercial aviation. The DC-3 was used during World War II, when the military version was identified as the C-47. After the war it continued as the primary carrier keeping Berlin open during the Berlin Airlift. On June 24, 1948 the Soviets prevented access to Berlin to the Western Allies’. Two days after the Soviet (Russians) announcement of the blockade, the United States Air Force airlifted the first cargo into Berlin. The American nicknamed the effort, "Operation Vittles," while British pilots dubbed the operation "Plain Fare." In July 1948, the operation was renamed the Combined Airlift Taskforce. Normal daily food requirements for Berlin were 2,000 tons with coal, for heating homes, being the number one commodity and two -thirds of all the tonnage flown in. The airlift ended on May 12, 1949 when the Soviets realized that the blockade wasn’t effective against the “Allied Resolve” and reopened the roads into Berlin.

On the Jewish side, the war years passed in the shadow of the White Paper, with its restrictions on immigration, a ban on most land purchases, and the prospect of an independent state in which the Jews would become a permanent minority. David Ben-Gurion famously pledged to ‘fight the White Paper as if there were no war and to fight the war as if there were no White Paper’. He also declared that just as the First World War had given birth to the Balfour Declaration, this new conflict should give the Jews their own state. Even before news of mass killings of Jews began to filter out of Nazi-occupied Europe, facilitating illegal immigration had become a preoccupation for Zionist institutions. Running the British blockade became a national mission. In November 1940, a rickety ship called the Patria sank in Haifa harbour after Haganah operatives miscalculated the force of a bomb they had planted. The intention had been to cripple the vessel and prevent the deportation of its Jewish passengers, but in the event three hundred drowned. Far worse was to come. In January 1942 the Wannsee Conference in Berlin secretly drew up operational plans for Hitler’s ‘final solution’. In February, an old cattle transport called the Struma was hit by a mine or torpedo and sank in the Black Sea, where it had been sent by the Turkish authorities after the British refused to transfer its Romanian Jewish refugees to Palestine. This time the death toll was 768, a grim dramatization of the plight of Jews fleeing for their lives and the impossibility of relying on British goodwill. ‘The Zionists,’ said Moshe Shertok, ‘do not mean to exploit the horrible tragedy of the Jews of Europe but they cannot refrain from emphasising the fact that events have totally proven the Zionist position on the solution of the Jewish problem. Zionism predicted the Holocaust decades ago.

During the blockade, the Berlin airlift cost the United States thirty-two million dollars a month,

According to Howard Zinn, such events as the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe—during which the Communists blockaded Berlin and “ousted non-Communists from the government” (that’s Zinn’s description of a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and in a way it’s accurate: the Czech Foreign Minister was literally “ousted” from an upper-story window to die when his body hit the courtyard below)2—Mao’s conquest of China, Communist spies stealing the secret of the atom bomb for the Russians, and Communist North Korea’s unprovoked attack on the South were irrationally “portrayed to the public as signs of a world Communist conspiracy.” One wonders, what would the signs have been if there had been an international Communist plot?