Paul Steege, associate professor of history at Villanova University, and author of *Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin, 1946-1949* has argued that conventional discussions of the Berlin Blockade and Airlift start from a faulty premise--namely that the Soviets had entirely shut off supplies to West Berlin by land, and that only the Airlift stopped West Berliners from starving. Actually, Steege argues, West Berliners (who to survive even before 1948 had to use technically illegal methods of getting food and other necessities) continued to get food and other resources from the Soviet zone, and if they had not been able to do so--in other words, had the blockade on the ground been complete--the Airlift would not have been enough to supply West Berlin:
"While the airlift delivered more than 2.3 million tons of supplies to Berlin, this amount failed to meet West Berlin's food needs, and the planes never even attempted to supply coal to heat private homes. The Western victory in this first Cold War battle came in spite of the fact that the airlift never achieved its ostensible purpose: to fully supply West Berlin.
"That the West 'won' depended first and foremost on Berliners' survival practices in the face of ongoing scarcity - practices that the great powers could not control and failed to understand...
"After World War II, the four victorious allies - Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States - divided Germany into occupation zones. Berlin, located more than 100 miles into the Soviet zone, was likewise divided into four occupation sectors. By spring 1948 the four-power structures designed to administer occupied Germany had collapsed.
"On June 24, 1948, the Soviets halted rail and road traffic from the three Western zones to Berlin. Because each occupying power was obligated to provide the food and fuel for the inhabitants of its sector, most historical accounts assume that this step completely cut West Berliners' supply lines, leaving them dependent on airlifted supplies.
"But West Berliners did not just tighten their belts and wait for a delivery of dried potatoes or stand at the end of the runways at Berlin's Tempelhof Airport in an effort to catch the chocolate bars imaginative airlift pilots dropped by handkerchief parachute.
"They embarked on foraging trips into the surrounding Soviet zone, made under-the-table arrangements with shopkeepers and bartered and traded on the streets and squares of Berlin. Berliners had practiced these black market strategies since war's end and were used to depending on them for their survival.
"These ordinary if technically illicit practices continued in 1948-1949 and made for a steady if occasionally hazardous flow of goods through the Soviet blockade. More than a month into the blockade, one German Communist begged Soviet officials to do something about the vegetables streaming into the Western sectors, which were available in greater quantity and at lower prices than in the Soviet half of Berlin.
"Even after the blockade had been tightened in October 1948, it remained rather porous. In mid-November U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall received an intelligence report entitled, 'Is Berlin blockaded?' The answer provided by the report and supported by evidence from East German archives: Only partially.
"Rejecting the standard account of a total blockade does not deny the incredible technical accomplishments of the airlift or the sacrifice of the American and British personnel killed while flying supplies to the former German capital. Nor does it deny the ruthlessness of the Soviet and German Communists who showed no qualms about defending their hold on power with brutal violence. But it does challenge Cold War Berlin's status as the West's Achilles' heel that only a miracle could save from the Soviets.
"In fact, Berlin was a site of Western (and especially American) strength. Even at the height of the blockade, German communists in Berlin repeatedly expressed how they felt besieged in the city.
"The international settlement that resolved the blockade crisis guaranteed West Berlin's independence, but it also marked the West's acceptance of a Stalinist state in half of Germany. It thus helped assuage the Communist anxieties that motivated their expanded 'control measures' in the first place.
"In 2008 we risk conflating the symbolic and the material accomplishments of the airlift. While the airlift did cement the alliance and even friendship between Germans and Americans after World War II, the blockade never threatened West Berlin with starvation..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/opinion/13iht-edsteege.1.13693535.html
Steege's argument is supported by William Stivers, "The Incomplete Blockade: Soviet Zone Supply of West Berlin, 1948-49," Diplomatic History (1997).
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119170267/abstract Unfortunately, only the first page is available online for non-subscribers but it at least indicates the article's thesis: "For it is not only the commonly held popular view but also the understanding of surprisingly many professional historians of the period that the Berlin blockade entailed an *isolation* of West Berlin--as if the Wall were already reality in 1948--and that West Berlin survived the blockade months on supplies brought by the airlift alone. What has hardly been questioned, or at best rather sparsely been questioned, is the understanding--fundamental to the entire history of the blockade--that West Berlin was isolated. In fact, the Soviet blockade neither attempted nor achieved the isolation of West Berlin..."
See also Roger G. Miller, *To Save a City: The Berlin Airlift, 1948-1949*:
"Additionally, it is now clear that the Berlin Airlift was aided by the fact that the Soviet blockade was loosely applied, especially during the first few months. According to historian William Stivers, 'the Soviet blockade neither attempted nor achieved the isolation of West Berlin.' The Western sectors of Berlin simply could not be walled off from the rest of the city: The railroad system wound in and out of the Western and Eastern sectors and occasional Soviet attempts to reroute trains proved fruitless. Canal traffic from the Elbe and Oder Rivers also passed through the British sector of Berlin. In addition, thousands of Germans who lived in one sector and worked in another traveled between the sectors daily. Such access offered endless temptation and little hazard to German traders, who often had to do little more than falsify their manifests to show a delivery destination in the Soviet zone and then deliver their cargo to the Western sectors. American military intelligence reported the arrival in August of large amounts of foodstuffs--including fish products, vegetables, cereals, soups, and fruits--fodder, firewood, coal, and building materials in this manner. Such deliveries were documented well into October and apparently continued throughout the blockade.
"The enterprise of individual Berliners with access to the Soviet occupation zone contributed as well. Before the blockade, citizens had foraged for food in the countryside in the Eastern zone to supplement bare shelves, and that practice continued even after the borders closed. During the crisis, Germans developed a 'widespread and efficient smuggling organization' that brought truckloads of food into the Western sectors of the city. Berliners flocked to the *Potsdamerplatz* in the center of Berlin, where black market items were available in substantial amounts to those who could afford them. Frank Howley counted on the porousness of the Soviet blockade: 'Tight lines were drawn between the Soviet sector and the three Western sectors, but they didn't prevent intermingling during the blockade...About eighty thousand Germans, living in our sector and working in another, or doing business outside their own sector, went back and forth daily...Theoretically, the Germans were not permitted to bring anything into our sectors, but the Russians, so keen on searching people on the slightest pretext, shrank at the formidable task of searching eighty thousand every day.'
"Additionally, the Soviets kept the door to Berlin half open because they needed the West as much as, if not more than, the West needed them. Industries in Berlin were able to negotiate deals with suppliers in the Eastern zone in exchange for finished goods that the Russians were interested in obtaining...When Marshal Sokolovsky and Col. Sergei Tiulpanov met with members of the East German Industrial Committee on June 28, they appear to have been shocked when their hosts explained that industry in the Soviet zone would soon cease to function without access to raw materials and parts from the Western zone. Seemingly, Soviet leaders lacked any understanding of the extent to which their region of Germany depended on Western materials and industries. Ultimately, various sources estimate that as much as five hundred thousand tons of supplies reached the Western sectors of Berlin through either authorized or unauthorized means during the months of the blockade.
"The interdependence of the sectors was demonstrated by an incident that bordered on the farcical...At one point during the blockade, the irrepressible [Frank] Howley [US commander in Berlin] learned that Marshal Sokolovsky's home was serviced by a gas main that went through the Western sector. He turned off the heat, forcing the Marshal to move. When Soviet soldiers loaded Sokolovsky's furniture on a van and tried to cross the American sector, Howley's alert men confiscated it all...."
http://books.google.com/books?id=3I-m9WkwwBYC&pg=PA52
As Miller notes (p. 54), the dependence of the Soviet occupation zone on the western zones was the "Achilles heel" of the Soviet blockade. Ultimately, the Allied counterblockade (officially begun in September) hurt the Soviet zone's economy much worse than the Soviet blockade did the Western areas of occupation where "rations of bread, sugar, and potatoes suffered little as a result of the stoppage of meager deliveries previously received from the Soviet zone"...
Interestingly, restraint by the US (at its Allies' urging) may have been partly responsible for the Soviets discreetly allowing some leakage:
"In another important instance, as the United States probed ways to wrest time from the list of Soviet advantages, and before the Western counter-blockade, or embargo, could pose serious inconveniences for the East, General Clay wanted to make the westmark *sole* currency in the western sectors of Berlin by November 1. Britain and France again reacted cautiously, fearing that forcing the Soviets to negotiate on currency from a position behind where they were when they imposed the blockade was, at the onset of winter, a needless provocation. In fact, the Western currency did not become exclusive tender in West Berlin until March 20, 1949, months after Truman's reelection, with the delay attributable mainly to Allied objections.
"William Stivers [in the article I mentioned]...concludes that Allied obstructionism and US sensitivity to its junior partners helped the Western cause in this case. Particularly, during those foggy months in late fall, there are no records confirming how the airlift tonnage in those days could have kept West Berliners fed and warm unless the Soviets were discreetly permitting leakage. This means that during November-December 1948, the Russians had maneuvering room to counter any American 'currency offensive' by squeezing Berlin harder on the ground, threatening the slim margin remaining to the airlift without the necessity of actually attacking the air corridors..." Damon V. Coletta, *Trusted Guardian: Information Sharing and the Future of the Atlantic Alliance,* p. 76.
http://books.google.com/books?id=6TZk3xhe0pgC&pg=PA76
I really do have to get around to reading the books by Steege and Miller as well as the entire article by Stivers. But in any event: Suppose the Soviets really did institute a complete ground blockade of West Berlin--and were willing to pay the price of the counterblockade crippling Soviet Zone industry in order to starve the West Berliners out? Or was a complete ground blockade even technically possible in those pre-Wall days, even if the Soviets had been determined to impose one?