## What Berlin Was Living Through
The statistics of the airlift are impressive from a distance. They are more difficult to absorb when translated into what they meant for the people receiving them.
West Berlin in the summer and fall of 1948 was a city still visibly damaged from the war. Much of the urban center had been bombed and shelled during the final Soviet offensive in April and May 1945. Three years of reconstruction had cleared rubble from many streets and restored some buildings, but the city remained scarred. The population was exhausted. Many Berliners had spent the war years under Allied bombing, then the final Soviet assault, then the dislocations of occupation. They were not strangers to hardship.
The blockade added a new and specifically modern kind of pressure. The Soviets controlled the electrical supply feeding West Berlin from the east, and they cut it sharply. West Berliners were limited to electricity for a few hours per day, usually in short windows distributed through the day and night. Coal was critically short. The cold months of late 1948 and early 1949 put severe pressure on the airlift to deliver more coal and less food, and the balance between the two was a constant logistical preoccupation.
Food was rationed. The initial ration goal was 1,600 calories per person per day, a subsistence level that health professionals considered barely adequate for sedentary adults and inadequate for people doing physical labor. The airlift carried coal, milk, dried potatoes, dried eggs, gasoline, flour, and other basics. Each cargo consisted almost entirely of necessities. There was no room for luxuries.