This fairly short book provides a history of the Berlin Airlift, the tense stand-off between the western allies and the Soviet Union in 1948-49 which in many ways marks the real beginning of the Cold War. The author is a former RAF squadron leader turned full-time writer of military and aviation history, but my problem as a lay reader was that there was, for me, too much dry technical detail about different types of aircraft and military and ancillary operations, and too little broader political history and wider geopolitical background, which meant I skimmed large parts of this. This Kindle edition also lacked the map and photographs the paper copy has (the publisher's fault, not the author's). ( )