With the 70th anniversary of the start of the Berlin blockade fast approaching, this is a great time to visit that city. I wonder if our aviation publications will choose to cover the anniversary and, if so, if they will find anything new to say, given the many books on the subject.

It really depends what you mean by “shortly”.

The Shrader book (mentioned above) and “The Berlin Blockade” by Ann & John Tusa are solid history books and, in paperback, relatively cheap. If time is short, you may not get through them in time (the former is over 300 pages of text and the latter over 500) but they are comprehensive.

Dudley Barker’s “Berlin Air Lift – An Account of the British Contribution” (prepared by the Air Ministry and the Central Office of Information”) was published by HMSO in 1949. It is much shorter in terms of text length (about 60 pages, including those with illustrations). It has the limitation indicated by the sub-title but carries the power of a (relatively) contemporary document. [My copy, bought second hand, bears the stamp of the “Daily Worker Library” which gives it an extra frisson for me). [A few years back, on-line, I found a PhD thesis that set out to assess the British contribution within the overall context; I can’t recall the details but it was for the University of Buckingham, as I recall.]

In late November 1988, BBC Radio 4 marked the 40th anniversary with a programme entitled “Blockade”. I don’t know if it can be found through the BBC website (perhaps through their Genome project rather than the BBC i-Player).

I still have a soft spot for Robert Rodrigo’s 1960 book “Berlin Airlift”, having had the book for so long, but it has over 200 pages of text.

If time is indeed short, I’d probably suggest Arthur Pearcy’s “Berlin Airlift”. It has less than 150 pages and, with photographs on most pages, the text is readily digestible. It has an aviation bias, as one might expect from an Airlife publication, but covers the basics of the events well enough. It is also on glossy paper, which shows off the photos well, so you will end with – well, not quite a coffee-table book (it’s not a tome) but – something you can look through again (and again?) long after you’ve read it and returned from Berlin.