Tunner did not design Operation Little Vittles. He expanded and authorized it after Halvorsen had already started it without authorization. His decision to continue and expand rather than stop was correct, and it was not obvious. An officer with less political sensitivity might have seen the unauthorized drops as a disciplinary matter and shut them down. Tunner saw them as a resource: a demonstration that the airlift was not simply about calories and coal but about the relationship between the American personnel flying it and the Germans receiving it. He was right about this too.
## A Contested City
West Berlin during the blockade was not simply a city under siege. It was a city whose political identity was itself under contest, and the contest was real in ways that affected daily life.
The Soviet-backed Socialist Unity Party, the SED, operated in West Berlin throughout the blockade period. It had newspapers, organizations, and political candidates. In the city elections held in December 1948, West Berliners voted while the blockade was in effect. Ernst Reuter and his Social Democratic Party won a substantial majority. The Communist and Soviet-backed parties were decisively defeated. This was an election held under blockade conditions, with the electorate aware that the Soviet Union disapproved of the outcome they were choosing.
The result was widely interpreted, in both the Western and Eastern press, as a demonstration of West Berlin’s political choice. It did not change the military or diplomatic situation, but it changed the political context in which the airlift was operating. The Western powers were no longer simply defending a city they occupied; they were defending a city whose population had demonstrated, under pressure, that it preferred the Western option.