By the spring of , that number was often met twofold, with the peak daily delivery totalling 12, tons. Having initially concluded there was no way the airlift could work, the Soviets found its continued success an increasing embarrassment. On 12 May , the USSR lifted the blockade of West Berlin, due to economic issues in East Berlin, although for a time the Americans and British continued to supply the city by air as they were worried that the Soviets would resume the blockade and were only trying to disrupt western supply lines.
The Berlin Airlift officially ended on 30 September after fifteen months. The US Air Force had delivered 1,, tons American C and C transport airplanes, together, flew over 92,, miles ,, km in the process, almost the distance from Earth to the Sun. At the height of the airlift, one plane reached West Berlin every thirty seconds. Seventeen American and eight British aircraft crashed during the operation. The Berlin Blockade served to highlight the competing ideological and economic visions for postwar Europe.
From 17 July to 2 August , the victorious Allies reached the Potsdam Agreement on the fate of postwar Europe, calling for the division of defeated Germany, west of the Oder-Neisse line , into four temporary occupation zones each one controlled by one of the four occupying Allied powers : the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union thus re-affirming principles laid out earlier by the Yalta Conference.
These zones were located roughly around the then-current locations of the allied armies. The United States, United Kingdom, and France controlled western portions of the city, while Soviet troops controlled the eastern sector. In a June meeting, Stalin informed German communist leaders that he expected to slowly undermine the British position within their occupation zone, that the United States would withdraw within a year or two and that nothing would then stand in the way of a united Germany under communist control within the Soviet orbit.
A further factor contributing to the blockade was that there had never been a formal agreement guaranteeing rail and road access to Berlin through the Soviet zone. At the end of the war, western leaders had relied on Soviet goodwill to provide them with access. Clay , responded by stopping shipments of dismantled industries from western Germany to the Soviet Union. In response, the Soviets started a public relations campaign against American policy and began to obstruct the administrative work of all four zones of occupation.
