Berlin Airlift

The Berlin Airlift followed the Soviet blockade of land routes into West Berlin in 1948. Western aircraft supplied the city with food, fuel and essentials for almost a year. The crisis turned Berlin into the most visible early flashpoint of the Cold War.

It mattered because it showed that the postwar alliance had split into hostile blocs. The airlift also made ordinary Berliners part of a global ideological contest. It gives fiction a setting of pilots, hungry families, black markets, spies and a city suspended between occupation and confrontation.