End Of Berlin Airlift Remembered Sixty Years On
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On the 12 May 1949 in an attempt to remove Allied powers from Berlin, Joseph Stalin shut all supply routes except for three narrow air corridors which prompted the Berlin Airlift to come to be ended.
Sixty years on, the veterans who took part in the frantic efforts to keep the city supplied with food have been and also will be recalling events of the biggest operation since the end of the second world war.
A veteran David Edwards of the Berlin Airlift has one memory that sums up the contradictions faced by Allied forces struggling to supply a city they had recently tried to wipe off the map three years previous. He and his unit had saved their sweet rations and were holding a Christmas party for local Berlin children. As he lifted a young boy onto a chair, he saw the boy only had one arm. With a sickening moment he realised that only three years earlier the allies had bombed the very people they were now trying to save.
Three years after the end of World War II, Stalin had drawn the Iron Curtain across Europe and the cold war was beginning. The allies responded by launching an operation of procession of cargo planes to feed, heat and clothe the two million people of West Berlin. This operation that became known as the Berlin Airlift lasted over a year and cost 39 British lives. Pilots, crew and Planes flew a distance equivalent to flying to the moon and back 63 times
Sixty years on, the veterans who took part in the frantic efforts to keep the city supplied with food have been and also will be recalling events of the biggest operation since the end of the second world war.
A veteran David Edwards of the Berlin Airlift has one memory that sums up the contradictions faced by Allied forces struggling to supply a city they had recently tried to wipe off the map three years previous. He and his unit had saved their sweet rations and were holding a Christmas party for local Berlin children. As he lifted a young boy onto a chair, he saw the boy only had one arm. With a sickening moment he realised that only three years earlier the allies had bombed the very people they were now trying to save.
Three years after the end of World War II, Stalin had drawn the Iron Curtain across Europe and the cold war was beginning. The allies responded by launching an operation of procession of cargo planes to feed, heat and clothe the two million people of West Berlin. This operation that became known as the Berlin Airlift lasted over a year and cost 39 British lives. Pilots, crew and Planes flew a distance equivalent to flying to the moon and back 63 times
