Every military conflict contains situations that eventually become its defining symbols.
The second world war, for example, could be summed up in the following seven symbols: the Munich agreement (appeasement), Battle of Britain (resistance), attack on Pearl Harbor (US entry), Auschwitz concentration camp (inhumanity), siege of Stalingrad (turning point), Normandy landings (decisive action), bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (end). Symbols, as the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz once put it, “store” meanings.
The Berlin airlift, initiated in response to the Soviet blockade of western-controlled sectors of the city in June 1948, is among the most potent symbols of the cold war.
