Tuesday marked the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the Berlin Airlift. I first wrote the following post in 2006. My father is now 87, which means he was 27 years old at the time - younger than my oldest son today.

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My liberal friends openly fret about anti-American attitudes in Europe. To them, this is George W. Bush’s fault for being so unilateralist and America’s fault for electing him. What I see in Germany is historical ignorance (theirs) and resentment common to spoiled adolescents who’ve been given much and asked for little.


I was 12 years old in 1961 when I took this photograph. A wooden platform had been erected to allow visitors in West Berlin to see the city-cum-prison just over the wall. The East German Communists, ashamed of what they had wrought, screened the views as best they could. West Berlin, by contrast, was a thriving, colorful city. For those don’t remember, the barbed wire and wall was built by the Communists to keep citizens from leaving.

At the end of WWII, the United States took the long view and instead of lording our victory over the vanquished Germans, we helped rebuild their country. First, billions of American dollars in the Marshall Plan went to get Europe back on its feet. When the Soviets got nasty, we launched the Berlin Airlift and kept West Berlin alive.


From June 1948 to Sept. 1949, daily flights by the US and the UK delivered fuel and food to West Berlin that kept the city alive and free from Communist domination.

My dad was a pilot in that effort: an amazing 278,228 flights in 15 months brought vital supplies into the city that had been blockaded by the Soviets. The planes would touch down, unload, take off and do it again. And again. Day after day. On one day there were 13,000 sorties — one every minute.

What makes my father’s story more astonishing is how quickly the enemy had changed. Some four years earlier, he had been delivering P-39 fighters to the Soviet Union, flying them from California to Alaska to better arm our Soviet allies. Those P-39s were put to use fighting Germany.

Even then he sensed something suspicious about Soviet attitudes. For example, the American and Soviet pilots in Alaska were forbidden from mingling or socializing in any way. When the war ended, he had a hunch more trouble was ahead. Passing up a cushy airline job, he remained in the Air Force.

So there he was in 1948 flying cargo planes into Berlin to help the Germans. And our enemy was now the Soviet Union. To harass the airlift pilots, the Soviets set up a fighter firing range adjacent to the runway and fired across their approach. My father said he’d look at the Soviet P-39s firing away and wonder whether that was a plane he’d delivered.

The United States could make such a sudden switch because we didn’t make war on the German people, but on the Nazi government. Rather than punish our vanquished enemies, we helped rebuild their nations and establish sovereign governments. Our interests were both noble and selfish.

The German people then were quite grateful. But today? Let this German blogger tell it:

I watched a television documentary on Berlin earlier this summer that included a segment on the Berlin airlift. It showed clips of the Berlin Airlift but not once did it mention who flew the planes. There is no doubt that history is being re-written in Germany today.

Some family history: when my father returned from his long German deployment, my older brother, then three years old, did not remember him. In the middle of the night he crawled out of his bed, shook my mother awake and whispered, “Tell that man to go home.” My dad, now 85 years old and still going strong, has never forgotten that moment.

Eleven years later he was back in Germany, with the whole family in tow this time, to do his part in the Cold War. Without the US to defend it from Soviet aggression, the photo I took of East Berlin in 1961 would be a picture of Europe today: shabby, forlorn and impoverished.

And how does Germany remember our sacrifice for them?

At the base of the walkway that leads to the top there is a photographic exhibit on the history of the building, beginning with its construction as the Reichstag and ending with its reconstruction as the Bundestag. Naturally much of the exhibit is devoted to the post-war period, the division of Berlin, and reunification.

To my amazement, there was not one mention in either the photographs or the accompanying narrative of the United States and the role it played in bringing down the wall and reunifying the city. Without the United States the Bundestag would still be meeting in Bonn but here were busloads of German and international school children reading a history that would have made the East German Communist Party proud. The experience reminded me of those photos of the Politburo where the faces of party members who had fallen out of favor had been cropped out.

This is largely the doing of the German left wing, I believe. In this regard, they are soul mates of America’s Chomsky-ite lefties who see everything the United States does as part of some nasty imperialist scheme.

Granted, the USA has many blemishes in its history. There are no perfect nations. But at a critical moment in world history, we stepped up and did the heavy lifting. We did a lot of good for a lot of people. Ignoring that history, or worse, rewriting it, is wrong on principle.

As it happens, commercial television in Germany probably did more to keep the airlift history alive. Joerg Wolf brought to may attention a made-for-TV movie about the airlift. My German is rusty, but I could tell from the website for the show that it would probably reach more minds than any museum. I guess we can take comfort in knowing that Oliver Stone didn’t direct the show.