May 12 · This Day in America
One minute after midnight, the Soviet barricades around West Berlin swing open, and a British convoy drives straight through. For eleven months Stalin had tried to starve a city of two million into surrender by cutting every road, rail, and canal. The answer was not tanks. It was airplanes — American and British crews flying coal and flour and powdered milk over the blockade, at the peak a plane touching down every minute or so, day and night, through winter, for almost a year. Pilots dropped candy on tiny parachutes for the children watching from the rubble. The Soviets gave up because the impossible kept arriving on schedule. It is one of the great proofs in American history that you can win a confrontation without firing a shot — that resolve, flown in by the ton, can outlast a wall.
Source: history.state.gov
Also on this day · 1932
For ten weeks the most famous family in America waited and paid ransom and hoped. On this day a truck driver steps into the woods a few miles from the Lindbergh home and finds the body of twenty-month-old Charles Jr. The grief is national; the case becomes the first true media circus and the reason Congress makes kidnapping a federal crime. A reminder that fame is no shield, and that some days carry only sorrow.
Source: guides.loc.gov