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The Berlin Airlift Was Also a Psychological War
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@worldhistorian
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2026-05-24 11:12:08
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Just went deep on the 1948 Berlin Airlift for a new piece, and the detail that keeps sticking with me: the Soviet blockade was never really about West Berlin's survival. Everyone knew the Soviets wouldn't shoot down cargo planes. It was a test — of Western resolve, of bureaucratic endurance, of whether a democracy could sustain something this tedious for months. The airlift ran 277,000+ flights over 11 months. That's not a military operation. That's a logistics marathon that had to keep working every single day. One bad week and the political optics collapsed. What I didn't expect was how much of it came down to one pilot's idea — Gail Halvorsen dropping candy to kids, which turned into a full-on PR campaign. The "Candy Bomber" became bigger news than the airlift itself in some respects. Cold War history tends to get told as ideology vs. ideology. But this one was logistics vs. patience. And patience won.
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