The Soviets did not block the air corridors. Under the 1945 agreements, three aerial routes connected western Germany to Berlin, and those agreements remained technically in force. The Western powers seized on this. If the Soviets would not let food and fuel in by land, the Allies would fly it in. The United States launched what it called Operation Vittles on June 26, 1948, two days before the last Soviet ground-route blockade took effect. Britain launched a parallel operation, Operation Plainfare, shortly afterward.
The question was whether an airlift could actually supply a city. West Berlin needed something in the range of 4,500 tons of food, coal, and other essentials per day just to keep its population alive at minimal levels. Military planners were skeptical. Some generals thought the city could not be sustained from the air indefinitely. The answer would take months to arrive, and it would require a thoroughgoing transformation of how the airlift was organized and flown.
## The Scale of the Operation
On June 26, 1948, the first day of Operation Vittles, American aircraft flew 32 missions and delivered approximately 80 tons of supplies to West Berlin. The next day they delivered 295 tons. The day after that, 384 tons. The numbers were rising, but they were nowhere near what the city needed. The opening weeks of the airlift were a scramble, as commanders assembled aircraft, bases, and crews.
The United States initially relied on C-47 Skytrains, the workhorse two-engine transport of World War II. Each C-47 could carry about three tons of cargo. The plane was capable and familiar to the thousands of pilots who had flown it in the war, but its payload was modest. By the time Gail Halvorsen was assigned to Germany on July 10, 1948, the airlift was already shifting toward larger aircraft. The four-engine C-54 Skymaster, which carried about ten tons of cargo per flight, became the primary workhorse. By late September 1948, C-47s had been largely phased out in favor of C-54s.