It was one of the major events of the beginning of the Cold War – the Berlin Blockade. Begun in June 1948 and terminated in a drawn out fashion with the culmination of armed contravention from May 1949, it increased the verve between the United States and the Soviet Union, and laid manor to the division of Germany.

What Was the Berlin Blockade?

The Berlin Blockade was the Soviet attempt to seal West Berlin, a city occupied by the United States, Great Britain, and France, off from the rest of Germany. In this blockade they had used the full force to cut off West Berlin’s land, water and rail routes of which the two million people of West Berlin were trapped.

The Blockade – Why

As a result of the Western Allies’ decision to introduce a new currency, the Deutsche Mark, in West Germany and West Berlin, the Soviet Union’s main motivation for the blockade was its reaction. The Moscow regime regarded this as a threat to its control of the region, and it set out to press the Western Allies to pull out of Berlin.

The Consequences

The fact that Berlin Blockade had had large consequences that had hit the United States and the Soviet Union hard only increased the tension between these two superpowers. Here are some key outcomes:

Airlift Operations

When the blockade started, in retaliation the Western Allies started a huge airlift in order to supply food, fuel and medication into West Berlin to keep people fed, providing them with fuel to do business or travel and medication to maintain some kind of health. In Berlin, this was an operation called the Berlin Airlift that lasted for over a year—a logistical wonder where, every few minutes planes would land in West Berlin.

NATO Formation

Time presents many examples of the formation of intergovernmental alliances, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), formed in part due to the Berlin Blockade. When the Soviet threat loomed to counter, NATO was a military alliance of European and North American Western countries. It was a dramatic change in the geopolitical order and continued to heighten the tensions of the Cold War.

Division of Germany

The Berlin Blockade cemented the division of Germany into two separate countries: citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), and also of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). The blockade was a marker of the fundamental gulf between the capitalist West and communist East with the country split down the line into formal halves in future years.

On the Context of the Cold War

Right in the beginning of the Cold War the Berlin Blockade was a very important event. It showed that the Western Allies had the patience and the guts to stick to it in spite of Soviet aggression and confirmed to what ideological conflict is what, namely communism and capitalism.

Its significance was that proceedings of the post World War Two era when the Allies had borne a cooperative tone and become more adversarial, as it paved way to the hot headed tensions that came about in the cold war.

In Conclusion

Development of the Cold War was largely dependent on the Berlin Blockade. Besides forming NATO, breaking Germany into halves, the Western Allies had shown the readiness to withstand the Soviet aggression. It helps understand the meandering Cold War.