When it comes to food airdrops like the one in Gaza that President Biden recently authorized, the United States has a long history to draw on. Seventy five years ago, the Berlin Airlift of 1948/49 marked a turning point in our Cold War with the Soviet Union.
The airlift broke the Soviet Union’s blockade of road, rail, and water access to Berlin, which lay in the zone of East Germany the Soviet Union controlled as part of the post-World War II occupation of Germany the Soviets shared with America, England, and France. The result was that food and fuel supplies made it to vulnerable Berliners.
The Soviets initiated their blockade to counter the Western powers’ introduction of a new currency, the Deutschmark, into their zones. The Soviets feared their influence in Germany and Eastern Europe would be undermined if America, England, and France were able to run the areas they controlled in Germany and Berlin in ways that highlighted Soviet economic failings.
America’s airdrops in Gaza, which began with C-130 cargo planes parachuting 38,000 meals into southwest Gaza, have come about under very different circumstances from those that led to the Berlin Airlift, but the airdrops were by any measure a rescue operation. Israel’s efforts to root out Hamas fighters in Gaza in the wake of Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attacks have led to widespread food shortages among Gaza’s Palestinian population.
A tipping point was reached when Israeli troops, fearing they were about to be attacked, opened fire on a Palestinian crowd scrambling for food packages. The result was horrific: at least 115 Palestinians were killed and many more were wounded by either the stampede or gunfire.
In 1948 the immediate question for President Harry Truman was what, short of war, could America do to counter the Soviet blockade. A ground war made no sense. Soviet troops vastly outnumbered those of the West in and around Berlin.
The great tactical advantage the Western Allies had was in the size of America’s and England’s air forces and the skill of their pilots, many of them World War II vets. The toll on those participating in the Berlin Airlift was, nonetheless, high.
Some 65 pilots, crew members, and civilian workers died during the airlift. According to Department of Defense figures, American pilots made more than 189,000 flights, totaling nearly 600,000 flying hours to help supply West Berliners with more than 2.3 million tons of cargo.
On May 11, 1949, the Soviet Union, seeing no end in sight for the airlift and no weakening of western resolve, ended its blockade. Fearing that the Soviets might change their minds, the Americans and British continued their flights until Sept. 30, 1949.
Can we expect a similar outcome in Gaza? Not without changes in American policy. “Airdrops are not the solution to relieve this suffering, and distract time and efforts from proven solutions to help at scale,” the New York-based International Rescue Committee has pointed out.
Today the Biden administration does not face the risks — a possible all-out war in Europe — that the Truman administration did in 1948. At this moment the president still has the option of putting pressure on Israel’s military to let more aid get to Gaza’s civilian population by slowing or pausing the delivery of offensive weapons to Israel.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that Gaza does not have the kind of resources even a damaged Germany had in 1948, and, after years of neglect, Gaza is in no position to rebuild itself. With a quarter — 576,000 — of Gaza’s 2.3 million people facing famine and the rest of the territory in dire need, symbolic gestures won’t do.
When it came to the Berlin Airlift, the United States went all out, and it did the same in the other major foreign policy venture it undertook in 1948 — the Marshall Plan. In its first fiscal year the Marshall Plan absorbed more than 10% of the federal budget in helping Western Europe recover from World War II.
In his State of the Union Address, Biden never spoke of the Berlin Airlift, but he showed he understands there is no cheap shortcut to helping Gaza’s civilian population. He committed the United States to establishing a temporary pier in the Mediterranean capable of handling large shipments of aid to Gaza.
It’s a commitment that should benefit Gazans as well as the president’s effort to win back Democratic Party voters angry over his failure to come up with a peace plan in the Middle East.
Mills is a professor of American literature at Sarah Lawrence College and author of “Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower.”
