Long Island played key role in historic Berlin Airlift during Soviet blockade, 75 years ago 

Long Island played a key role in a storied chapter at the beginning of the Cold War known as the Berlin Airlift.

June 26 marked the 75th anniversary of the start of the pivotal campaign during which the United States and Britain responded to a Soviet blockade of road, rail and water access to Allied-controlled parts of the city by airlifting in fuel, food and other supplies.

At the airlift’s peak, one plane every 45 seconds landed at Tempelhof Airport, whose runways had a steady pace of Western cargo planes that got the nickname “Raisin Bombers.”

The crisis ended after about 322 days later, on May 12, 1949, after the Soviets lifted their blockade. Until the airlift ended, the planes used to get the supplies to the city needing reconditioning.

Putting planes back up in the skies

That’s where Long Island came in. With all those flights back and forth, the planes had to be serviced on a regular basis, and Sayville became a hub for doing just that. Helping recondition the C-54s used by the U.S. Air Force in the Airlift was the military contractor Lockheed Aircraft Service at MacArthur Airport.

About 800 skilled technicians worked at airport hangars to help get the planes back into shape — what was known as the “1,000-hour-cycle reconditioning” — so pilots could get back up to the skies.

“The planes are flown into MacArthur from the airlift as part of the regular service between the United States and Europe,” The New York Times reported from Sayville in 1949. “They all bring useful cargoes back to this country, and also return to service loaded.”

One of those waiting for places like Long Island to finish plane reconditioning was Ralph Dionne, now 95, of Nashua, New Hampshire, who would head from the U.S. to Europe first as a sergeant and aircraft mechanic and then on flying status as a flight engineer.

“We flew over New York, and I looked at the Statue of Liberty, and I said, ‘Young man, you may never see that statue again,’ ” Dionne recalled days before the airlift’s 75th anniversary. “It was a 50-50 proposition as far as we knew, because we knew that the Russians were encircling the city, and we were gonna be inside, and you had no idea what was going to happen.”

By 1949, on Long Island, according to an article in The Advance newspaper of Patchogue, the need to rehab aircraft helped hundreds of workers who had been laid off get their jobs back, as Lockheed’s contract was extended.

During the airlift, over 2.3 million tons of fuel, food and supplies were delivered to West Berlin in over 278,000 airdrops, according to a history of the campaign, by the U.S. Department of Defense. The Americans made over 189,000 flights, adding up to about 600,000 flying hours and topping 92 million miles.

Some of the pilots who took part came from Mitchel Field in Uniondale. Among the correspondents who covered the airlift was Alicia Patterson, the co-founder, publisher and editor of a young tabloid newspaper called Newsday.

Nowadays, one of dozens of vintage military planes on the display at the Airpower Museum in Farmingdale is Second Chance, a Douglas C-47B, built in 1944 and transferred to the British air force the next year, according to museum spokesman Robert Salant. The Brits flew it during the Berlin Airlift, and it was transferred to other nations to be used in other military campaigns. It can still fly, he said.

Critical time in history

The roots of the crisis started about three years after the end of World War II, when the Soviets, Americans and British divided up a defeated Germany. Berlin was split — the Soviets in the eastern area of the city, the Americans, French and British in the West.

Although the Soviets would coordinate occupation policy with the Americans, British and French regarding their respective zones, the Russians cut off that cooperation in early 1948 after finding out that the allies were planning to fashion a new German country out of their zones.

The wartime alliance of the Soviets and the allies frayed, and the control of the western part of Berlin came into question: who would be in charge there? The Soviets or the Western allies?

“Two and a half million Berliners, spread between four zones of occupation, faced profound privations: allied bombing had reduced the city to rubble, shelter and warmth were scarce, the black market dominated the city’s economic life, and starvation loomed. While mired in such conditions, Berlin emerged as a forward salient in the Western struggle against the Soviet Union,” the U.S. State Department wrote in a history of the crisis.

The administrator of U.S.-occupied Germany, Gen. Lucius Clay, conceded that maintaining the allies’ position in Berlin was impracticable, but he argued: “We are convinced that our remaining in Berlin is essential to our prestige in Germany and in Europe. Whether for good or bad, it has become a symbol of the American intent.”

The Truman administration agreed.

The Cold War — the long struggle for supremacy between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and their respective allies — went on for years. It began to thaw decades later, eventually ending in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed.

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.