This is my father, when he was a young Air Force captain, flying cargo planes during the Berlin Airlift.

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The once-bustling airport -- it was the site of the 1948 Berlin airlift that brought food to West Berliners after Soviets blockaded the city --closed in 2008 when a new international hub opened on the outskirts of the city.

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Just as the Berlin airlift in the late '40s created a generation of Germans who remembered American support in their hour of need, Syrian children suffering today in refugee camps should understand that the U.S. government and American people care about their plight and are taking action to assist them.

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He stopped the spread of communism through the Marshall Plan, coming to the aid of Greece, protecting our position in Berlin with the airlift and coming to the aid of South Korea when the North invaded.

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The airlift to Berlin continued until September 1949, when the Russian blockade was lifted.

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But there was some tricky diplomacy over Japan, which wanted to come but was refused, and the Soviet Union, which didn't turn up unsurprisingly, perhaps, since the games coincided with the Anglo-American airlift to Soviet-blockaded Berlin.

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The heroes of the blockade turned out to be Bevin, President Truman and Clay, the American proconsul who created the airlift which succeeded in supplying Berlin in the face of a belief within the Pentagon that Berlin could not be sustained by air.

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