If you like history, chances are you enjoy watching old newsreels. But how authentic are they? What can they really tell us?
Remember the successful Berlin Airlift of 1948? For months, as I’ve watched the challenges of getting humanitarian aid into Gaza I’ve wondered why we didn’t just ‘airlift’ the needed supplies. Now several countries are attempting to supply Gaza by air, but the effort is mostly symbolic — paltry at best, and widely criticized by humanitarian aid organizations as inefficient and even deleterious.
So I wonder what’s going on? Can watching old video of Operation Vittles tell us anything about the viability of delivering food by air in today’s world? Here’s a newsreel from the US National Archives.
Newsreels
Newsreels: Are they “fake and engineered” or are they “authentic truth tellers?” In other words, can you believe everything you see?
Well, did you know that newsreels were first called actualities because they were thought to “actually” deliver living images? Soon, however, they were renamed newsreel, an acknowledgement that they combined two industries, entertainment and journalism. So, even though they were packaged as “news,” they often served an agenda and were sometimes manipulated to present the social and economic perspective of their almost exclusively white cameramen.
Lift vs Drop
Four letters of the English alphabet make all the difference.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
An airlift is a system of transporting cargo or passengers by aircraft often to or from an otherwise inaccessible area.
An Airdrop is delivery of cargo, emergency supplies, or personnel by parachute from an airplane in flight.
Airlifts were the chief mechanism for food delivery in 1948. But as you can see in the featured image and in the newsreel below, tiny handerchief parachutes delivered candy to Berlin kids.
Candy aside, I’m sure you can see the difference between airlifts and airdrops, but I’ll go into more detail a bit later.
And a personal note: I let my wishful thinking get in the way of my intellect when I thought it would be easy to feed the Gaza population by using 1948 as a prototype. As soon as I started digging, it was easy to see why one mechanism achieved such success and the other just isn’t a solution.
Triggers: Then and Now
Berlin 1948
In 1948 a communist threat was looming over Europe, and the Truman administration was determined that the Soviets would not gain inroads into Western Europe.
American and Soviet agreement on the reunification of Germany proved futile. The Americans were convinced that the prosperity of Western Europe depended on the industrial recovery of Germany, while the Russians wanted to extract reparations from the German industrial areas to rebuild capacity in their own war devastated country.
An American plan called for Great Britain, France, and the United States to develop the western, industrial areas of Germany that were under their control, integrating these areas into a new European Community. If the US plan was successful, a revitalized West Berlin would continue to exist deep inside the Soviet zone.
In response, on June 24, 1948, Stalin began blocking all surface traffic between Berlin and the Western zones.
The US reacted quickly by launching a massive airlift to deliver food, coal, and other supplies to the 2.4 million trapped West Berliners. The airlift lasted 324 days, soon delivering 13,000 tons of supplies a day. Unlike today’s mixed response, the Berlin Airlift was almost universally supported.
Gaza
On October 27, 2023, Israeli citizens were brutally attacked by Hamas, a terrorist group based in the Gaza Strip. War ensued, with Israel determined to end the possibility of future terrorist threats from Hamas.
Subsequently, intense bombing and destruction of Gaza has left the civilian population isolated with little access to food, clean water, and other necessaries.
While aid groups, particularly, are extremely critical of air drops and attempts to create sea lanes for food delivery by ship, few other options are available. The political will to find a solution is just not in evidence.
Population Size
The populations of West Berlin in 1948 and Gaza in 2024 are quite similar, about 2.5 million, but that’s about all that the two have in common. In one, aid was substantial and swift, in the other, it comes in dribs and drabs even though malnutrition is commonplace and starvation for many is said to be imminent.
Delivery
Berlin 1948
Unlike the situation today in Gaza, the planes in the Berlin Airlift had secure allied controlled bases to use for take-offs and landings.
British and American aircraft used three designated air corridors to fly into and out of Berlin. The Americans landed at Tempel Hof airport and the British at RAF Gatow in their sector. France and Canada, as well as aircrews from Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa soon joined in the ‘round the clock’ effort.
By the end of August 1948 more than 1,500 flights a day were delivering over 4,500 tons of needed supplies. By September C-47s were replaced by US Air Force and US Navy C-54s which improved the cargo capacity to 5,000 tons daily. As the winter of 1948 approached, cargo loads included more coal, necessary for heating. This raised the total daily requirement to 6,000 tons. By the end of the airlift, loads had increased to about 8,000 tons of supplies per day.
During the entire airlift, the US and UK delivered more than 2.3 million tons of food, fuel and supplies to West Berlin via more than 278,000 airdrops.
Gaza 2024
Food delivery to Gaza by land is considered the most cost-effective and efficient method of meeting the needs of the Gazan population. But land access is extremely limited. According to the New York Times, the problem isn’t a lack of available aid. The problem is one of delivery, chiefly issues surrounding Israel’s security check points and the challenge of working in an active war zone.
The New York Times has an informative interactive article showing delivery options and challenges.
I encourage you all to access it here.
I have not been able to find updated information on the amount of food dropped into Gaza by air in recent days, but we do know that the US airdrops have been quite small, around 40,000 to 50,000 ‘ready to eat’ meals per flight. Several other nations including France and Jordan are also engaged in the endeavor which has been roundly criticized by aid groups for its ineffectiveness.
Access by sea is also quite difficult. World Central Kitchen, a US non-profit founded by the chef Jose Andres, has managed the first large scale maritime delivery to Gaza.
According to the group’s posting on X (formerly Twitter):
WCK provided almost 200 tons of food in northern Gaza that arrived in our first maritime shipment. The aid went to families facing starvation in areas largely cut off by the war. Our teams are working to provide millions more meals via sea to Palestinians.
WCK’s founder said their teams have “worked nonstop to open this maritime aid route into Gaza,” adding that they built their own jetty using “rubble from bombed buildings to safely unload cargo.”
A second ship, carrying hundreds of tons of food for Gaza, along with heavy machinery to “expedite the offloading process” will soon be on the way.
Distribution
Berlin 1948
According to Living History Farm
Ships were unloaded and supplies were put on Army trucks that usually traveled directly to the airbases in the western zones in Germany. Controllers made sure there was always a steady stream of trucks ready to load the planes. Once they were loaded, planes were coordinated so that a new plane landed in Berlin every three minutes. They taxied to unloading docks. Local Germans loaded and unloaded the planes by hand. Each worker was expected to load one ton per hour. The food was distributed to warehouses across the city. Meanwhile, the pilots and crew took a break at a snack wagon that pulled up to them, got the latest weather report and got back on the plane when it was reloaded.
Gaza
The situation in Gaza today is quite dissimilar. Order has broken down in some areas of the Strip and looting is becoming the norm, threatening the safety of any food trucks and aid workers that do manage to make the journey. Equitable distribution of arriving resources is almost impossible to accomplish.
Still, despite major issues, Andrés wrote in a post on Tuesday (March 17, 2024)
World Central Kitchen delivered this morning eight trucks safely to the north, 200 tons . . .
Almost 500k meals equivalent …but we all need to continue this nonstop and daily and reach every community north …thanks to World Food Program for helping us with cars and drivers.
You can read more about World Central Kitchen and their efforts in Gaza here.
WCK is also on the ground in Israel. Click here for an in-depth spring 2024 update of all their work.
Hunger in Gaza
In Gaza today, the threat of the most severe level of hunger is said to be imminent.
According to a report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Global Initiative — a group set up in 2004 by UN agencies and international relief groups:
as many as 1.1 million people could face the severest level of hunger classified by the group, with ‘alarmingly high acute malnutrition rates among children under 5, significant excess mortality and an imminent risk of starvation’.”
You can read more about the assessment here.
What Now?
If you’ve read this far (and watched the newsreels), you’ve figured out why the Airlift of 1948 was so much easier to implement than airdrops are today. Although it wasn’t possible to deliver food by any easier method, the infrastructure necessary for take-offs and landings was already in place, and warehouses were available for storage and distribution. Plus, the area was under the control of the US and its European Allies. No outside permissions or check points were required, and the Truman administration was determined to achieve success. As far as Gaza is concerned, Israel controls access, there is no appropriate infrastructure, the area is an active war zone, and the political will to solve the problem is lacking. Consequently, we are left grasping for solutions.
Back to Newsreels
The photo below will take you to a large selection of British Pathe newsreels from the 1948 Berlin airlift. Just click here or on the photo below to access. What do you think? Are they propaganda, entertainment, or truthful reportage? I’d love to see your opinions in the comments.
_____________________________________________________
Berlin Bases Map: Wikimedia Commons
