-President Truman addresses
a joint session of Congress.
After World War II, U.S. President Harry Truman
feared the Soviet Union would spread Communism
across Western Europe.
So in 1947, he announced a new foreign policy to stop it.
-It must be the policy of the United States
to support free peoples
who are resisting attempted subjugation.
If we falter in our leadership,
we may endanger the peace of the world.
But Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin
saw the Truman Doctrine,
and the American aid that flowed into the continent
through the Marshall Plan,
as threatening his hold over Communist Eastern Europe.
He feared that Germany,
which had been divided and disarmed after the war,
might be reunified under Western control.
-Stalin doesn't like that idea.
It's a threat to Soviet survival.
And so he's trying to find some way to, to stop that.
And then right at his feet here,
is this city of three million people
that's surrounded by the Soviet zone.
Berlin, which had itself been divided into Soviet
and Western zones,
was located deep within Communist territory.
So the Soviets set up a blockade
to cut off West Berlin from the rest of Europe.
-Berlin becomes a city of darkness
as all ground communication is severed
and industry comes to a standstill.
-We consider this hunger blockade
a crime against humanity.
The Americans,
the British and the French: Be steadfast.
You must not desert the Berlin population.
Although the Western powers
quickly began to airlift in what supplies they could,
they realized that without enough troops,
they wouldn't be able to hold the city for long.
-The expectation was that we would have to,
we would withdraw
and probably with our tail between our legs,
and just try and make the best of it.
So the airlift sort of begins as an improvisation attempt
to buy some time,
an attempt to reassure the Berliners.
Gail Halvorsen was one of the American pilots
who volunteered to airlift food into Berlin.
-At the time,
I was having difficulty in a relationship with my girlfriend
of long-term standing
and I decided I'd just as well be over there as over here.
One day, after landing in Berlin,
Halvorsen started talking to a group of German kids
standing at the fence line.
-I went over a little ways to meet the kids,
and I was impressed with them.
Ten, plus or minus two years old,
and just said to say hey, uh,
we don't want to go to the Soviets.
We'll do anything.
Just don't give up on us.
Kids that age, knowing the importance of free agency,
the ability to govern yourself,
and they said, just don't worry about us.
Someday we'll have enough to eat.
But if we lose our freedom, we'll never get it back.
And I marveled at that.
Halvorsen wanted to give them something,
but he only had two sticks of gum.
So he broke them in half
and told the children to keep an eye out for his plane
the next go-around.
-Well, I knew what it was like to be cut off
and to be out on the end of the string.
And so it was just a no-brainer
to drop chocolate bars to the kids in West Berlin
who didn't have any.
-I was elated.
I saw Gail Halvorsen's airplane
wiggling the wings.
And we all waved.
We called him the Schokoladen Bomber,
the Chocolate Bomber.
And then we saw these parachutes coming out of his airplane.
Of course, there were more children than parachutes
and the boys were always faster.
But that was not, that was not important.
The important thing was,
this was something hopeful happening to us.
This was like, you know,
in those ruins, all of a sudden, flowers came to bloom.
-The newspaper guy was there covering the kids
and the airlift,
and all of a sudden, they looked up above
and parachutes with candy bars were coming down.
And he had that on the news right away,
and the colonel called me.
He says, Halvorsen, what are you doing over Berlin?
Well, then I knew he knew.
I says, I'm dropping candy to the kids.
He says, well, keep it up, but keep me informed.
Candy companies were super.
They sent over all I could drop.
And we had all our pilots tying up handkerchief parachutes.
We even dropped some in East Berlin.
The Soviets complained about that,
so we just kept doing it in West Berlin.
Halvorsen's candy drops
soon became the face of an airlift
that was rapidly succeeding beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
-It seems laughable at first
that planes can bring in enough food
to keep alive a city of more than two million, but they do.
As the deliveries mounted steadily
until over 5,000 tons a day were being unloaded
at Berlin's airports,
the supplies came to mean something more than food
for hungry people.
Aircraft were continually in flight
at three-minute intervals around the clock.
-It was a case of responding
to the human need to stay alive.
23 tons of chocolate from the beginning to the end
was dropped by me and my buddies.
-You know, candy is candy,
but there's more to that.
It was the empathy,
the thought that he would sit in this bunk
and fabricate these parachutes.
I mean, it's just unbelievable that someone did that.
Halvorsen and the other pilots of the airlift
had helped Truman avoid either retreat or war,
and pushed Stalin into a corner.
-Stalin in the March of 1949 realized
that he had a losing hand.
He hoped to take over West Berlin, and that didn't happen.
He hoped to stop the move toward a West German government
and an independent West Germany.
And he lost on that.
The last thing he wanted was a U.S. alliance
with Western Europe,
and that's what he got with NATO.
So he was losing on all grounds.
NATO became the defining alliance
of the Cold War, and has continued to shape relationships
between countries today.
-The United States is fully committed to our NATO alliance.
An attack on one is an attack on all.
That is our unshakeable vow.
-One reason why people hold NATO in high respect
is because it works.
It's a ready-made forum for the democracies to cooperate.
NATO is important today because having partners,
having friends in a dangerous world is a good thing.
In the end,
by the time Stalin lifted the blockade,
one of his greatest fears had become assured.
American popularity had soared across the globe.
-Americans look at themselves
as the saviors of the free world.
But it may be that right here we really earned that,
in the sense that we saved this city.
We did it out of sort of strategic
or geopolitical considerations,
but there was a strong humanitarian element to what we did.
The airlift is really one of the shining hours
of American history.