Brexit: The London Airlift?

As if Britons hadn’t heard it before, they spent the weekend being told the worst. “Operation Yellowhammer,” a supposedly confidential document prepared by Her Majesty’s civil service, imagines the chaos that would follow a no deal Brexit. It was leaked to the Sunday Times in advance of Prime Minister Johnson’s negotiations this week with President Macron and Chancellor Merkel.Supposedly, the Civil Serves say, Britain will face a “three-month meltdown” as trucks back up at its ports. It will need to restore border checks between Northern Ireland and the Irish republic. Critical shortages of food, fuel, and medicine are predicted if it leaves the EU without a deal. The Johnson government has denounced the leaks as the latest effort by Remainers to strike fear in the public.One answer to all this, it occurs to us, could come from America. For it turns out that a no-deal Brexit could coincide almost exactly with the 70th anniversary of the last time an ally like the United Kingdom was cut off from vital supplies sourced from other parts of Europe — only to be rescued by American and British grit. We speak of the Berlin Airlift that triumphed on September 30, 1949.In the spring of 1948, the Russ strongman, Joseph Stalin, was on a roll; that February, the communists had executed a coup at Czechoslovakia and the Soviets were consolidating their control of Eastern Europe. A divided Germany stuck in the dictator’s craw, as the Western Allies appeared intent on reviving a democratic Federal Republic and holding on to their half of Berlin by introducing a new currency, the Deutschmark.On June 20, as America prepared to roll out the Marshall Plan (the Kremlin turned down an allied invitation to join), Ludwig Erhard, director of economics of the Allied Zone, and the High Commissioner, General Clay, rejected the advice of their advisers and went for a convertible currency. Price fixing and production controls were simultaneously abolished.The doubters were proved wrong. The black market and use of cigarettes as money disappeared overnight. The seeds of the postwar German economic miracle, the Wirtschaftswunder, had been sown. This was too much for Stalin. He introduced his own East German currency. When the Allies refused to honor it, he began on June 24 the Soviet blockade of the arteries leading to free Berlin from West Germany.That’s when General Clay ordered the commencement of Operation Vittles, better known as the Berlin Airlift. Over the next 15 months, allied aircraft transported more than 2.3 million tons of supplies to Berlin on 280,000 individual flights. Asked at the beginning of operations whether he could transport coal, the legendary air commander, General LeMay, responded, “We can haul anything.”Two thirds of the tonnage eventually flown was coal. Via tiny parachutes, thousands of pounds of candy was dropped for Berlin children. Stalin retreated, ending the blockade in May, 1949, though the allies continued flights into September. What really had worried Stalin, it turned out, was not troop movements or artillery deployments but something more threatening — honest money.What Stalin really wanted was for the allies to drop the introduction of a hard currency and all it meant for freedom and property rights, for economic growth and prosperity of the Western Zone. There are those who even argue that the introduction of the Deutschmark foretold the fall of the Soviet empire. We wouldn’t want to make too much of that. Neither would we want to discount the point entirely.Nor do we, even for a moment, mean to equate the leaders of the European Union with those of the Kremlin camarilla. The showdown coming to a head over Brexit, though, was foretold by the refusal of the UK to join the European monetary union, preferring instead to maintain sterling. All these currencies would be better linked to gold, but at least Britain stood for its own money.So if Brexit brings short-term hardship, Britain and America have plenty of history from which to take heart. President Trump could summon the spirit of Clay and LeMay and send our planes into the skies as a lifeline. Daily flights of food and medicine could be airlifted from American military bases. Maybe we could even see relief flights from Ramstein dropping chocolate into the hands of delighted British children.________Mr. Atkinson, a contributing editor of the Sun, covers the 20th Century.Image: A Douglas C-54 Skymaster swoops in for a landing at Templehof during the Berlin Airlift; United States Air Force Historical Agency, via Wikipedia.

Brexit: The London Airlift?

Brexit: The London Airlift?

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