Berlin pays thanks to airlift veterans

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Veterans attended the anniversary events at Berlin's Templehof airport By Steve Rosenberg BBC News, Berlin

"Would you like to see my kitchen cupboard?"

Horst Simon gets up and leads me into the kitchen of his small Berlin flat. I am intrigued. It is the first time anyone in Germany has offered to show me their cupboard.

Mr Simon opens the cupboard. It is bursting with food - tins and packets and bottles all battling for a place on the shelves, far more food than you would expect to see.

"Ever since the blockade, I always make sure I have a month's supply of food," he explains. "Just in case. Berliners of my age - we're a little crazy like that!"

If we hadn't succeeded in the airlift, the Soviets would have taken over Berlin and then they would have pressed further westwards and we might have lost the whole of Europe Colin Parry, British airlift veteran

Mr Simon was five when Josef Stalin tried to starve West Berliners into submitting to communism.

The Soviet leader ordered all road, rail and river links into West Berlin through Soviet-controlled eastern Germany to be closed.

The city, he thought, would rather embrace the Soviet forces than go hungry; the British, American and French troops would surely abandon West Berlin.

Instead, the Western Allies launched the biggest airlift in history.

Over a period of 11 months, British, American and French pilots flew more than 200,000 missions into West Berlin, bringing food and fuel and machinery.

At times the planes were landing every two minutes.

Stalin could do nothing to prevent the humanitarian effort. He knew that if he gave the order to shoot the planes down, it would have led to war.

'Outfoxing the Russians'

Among the pilots was Leroy Williamson from Dallas, Texas. Mr Williamson is among a group of 100 airlift veterans in Berlin to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the blockade.

"Outfoxing the Russians - that was one of our greatest achievements" he tells me.

I'm speaking to Leroy on board an old Dakota - one of the original airlift planes. Sixty years on, it is flying again over Berlin to give some of the veterans an aerial view of Berlin today.

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"I knew what I was doing was important," Leroy says. "We had to keep two million West Berliners fed."

Colin Parry, a British airlift veteran, agrees.

"If we hadn't succeeded in the airlift, the Soviets would have taken over Berlin and then they would have pressed further westwards and we might have lost the whole of Europe," he says.

At Tempelhof airport on Tuesday, Berlin thanked the visiting veterans.

There was a ceremony by the memorial to the 78 airmen and ground crew killed in the airlift. Military bands played sombre music and soldiers laid wreaths.

And then a salute from the skies - a fly-over to honour the veterans down below.

Mr Simon was there, too, as well as other Germans who lived through the Berlin blockade like Gerhard Kapito.

"After the war, we looked on the Allies as occupiers," he says. "But after that we came to see them as our friends."