The Berlin Wall (10 page)

Just after midnight on 24 June 1948, the Berlin Blockade had begun.

The Soviet/East German attempt to force the issue on Berlin started out as a potential catastrophe and ended as a political and moral triumph for the West.

The question was, could the two-and-a-half million West Berliners survive? The city had coal supplies sufficient for around forty-five days. There were reasonable stocks of diesel fuel and oil, less so for petrol. All raw materials for Berlin’s factories had to be imported. Having been forced to feed their own sectors of the city since they arrived in 1945, the Western Allies were well aware of what it took to save their civilians from starvation: 641 tons a day of flour, 105 of cereals, 106 of meat and fish, 900 of potatoes, 51 of sugar, 10 of coffee, 20 of milk, 32 of fats, 3 of yeast.
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Before 24 June, most of Berlin’s power had come from the Russian sector. Even after energy rationing, there was no prospect that the
shortfall in the city’s electricity supply could be made up from generating capacity in the Western sectors. The Berlin West power station, in the British sector, had once supplied a quarter of the city’s electricity. It had been stripped by the Soviets in June 1945. Only in April 1948, after three years of fruitless four-power negotiations over reconstruction plans, did the British decide to go it alone. Work on the plant had not yet started. With all access by land and water cut off, how could steel, concrete and other raw materials and machinery be brought to Berlin?

At the time the Soviets enforced the blockade, the US army’s Chief of Plans and Operations, General Albert Wedemeyer, was on a tour of inspection in Europe. Wedemeyer had commanded the China Theatre in 1944-5. He was familiar with one of the most famous supply operations in history: the Allied airlift from India across the Himalayas (the ‘Hump’) to Chinese troops fighting in southern China and Burma. Wedemeyer thought an airlift for Berlin could work, and suggested a suitable organiser—another veteran of the ‘Hump’, Lieutenant-General William H. Tunner.

The track record of airlifts was patchy at best. Notoriously,
Luftwaffe
commander Hermann Göring had boasted of his ability to supply the beleaguered Germany army in Stalingrad by air during the savage Russian winter of 1942/3. He had failed miserably, leading to one of the Third Reich’s most humiliating defeats.

None the less, the Western Allies in 1948 had advantages over their wartime predecessors: two decently equipped airports to fly into (at Gatow in the British sector and Tempelhof in the American); a supportive population; and last but not least, the fact that, as things stood, no one shot at the aircraft as they went about their business.

The Russians, by contrast, seemed confident that the West could not supply Berlin by air, and their optimism was not irrational. Tempelhof in particular was not an ideal cargo port. It was hemmed in by suburbs, with seven-storey buildings looming either side of the landing-path. Gatow was way out on the periphery, with a long arm of the river Havel between it and the main part of the British sector.

There were basically only two alternatives to an airlift. Either an Allied military strike along the autobahn to open up the route through to Berlin—which would lead to war if the Soviets chose to oppose it. Or, on the
other hand, surrender. The former was considered too risky and the latter would mean a humiliating defeat that might have repercussions throughout the world. This was why the airlift started quickly. Once war not an option, and surrender considered out of the question, there was no alternative to supplying Berlin by air.

The nearest equivalent operation was the RAF’s effort to supply the starving German-held areas of Holland during the last days of the war. In 1945, 650 sorties by Lancaster bombers had been required to drop 1,560 tons of food in two days. This, however, occurred under wartime conditions of full mobilisation, with massive numbers of aircraft in service that could be diverted to such a mission at short notice. The operation also enjoyed unequivocal public support. By 1948, airforces had been run down to something like peacetime levels, military aircraft scrapped or converted to civilian use. A Berlin airlift would require a similar mobilisation on the part of countries that were struggling to feed their own people, let alone the inhabitants of a city that had recently symbolised all the evil in the world: Nazi Berlin.

Astonishingly, the Anglo-Americans pulled it off. The French were not actively involved, although they helped achieve the rapid construction of a new airfield in their sector, at Tegel. This was one of the few places in West Berlin where sufficient open space existed. However, an obstruction had to be removed: the radio tower used by the Soviets for ‘Radio Berlin’, their local broadcasting mouthpiece.

At first the French attempted to negotiate, but when the Soviets proved stubborn, the French commandant, General Jean Ganéval, had his men attach explosives to the tower’s base and blow it up. General Kotikov stormed up to Ganéval and demanded to know how he could do such a thing. ‘With the help of dynamite and French sappers, my friend!’ Ganéval coolly replied.
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Seventeen thousand civilian volunteers from the Western sectors of Berlin helped construct 5,500 feet of runway, built with over ten million bricks salvaged from wartime rubble. The first transport plane landed at Tegel Airfield on 5 November 1948.

The American supply operation was codenamed ‘Operation Vittles’, and the British ‘Knicker’ and then ‘Carter Patterson’ (a reference to a well-known British freight company). In July 1948, the airlift moved 69,000 tons per month.

Things were initially chaotic. On 13 August, in foggy conditions, a C-54 Skymaster overshot the runway at Tempelhof and caught fire. Others also suffered from misjudged landings and burst tyres, leading to incoming aircraft stacking up over the airfield. General Tunner later described such a scene in his memoirs:

As their planes bucked around like grey monsters in the murk the pilots filled the air with chatter, calling in constantly in near panic to find out what was going on. On the ground a traffic jam was building as planes came off the unloading line to climb on the homeward-bound three minute conveyor belt, but were refused permission to take off for fear of collision with the planes milling around overhead.
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Tunner, the systems expert, gradually imposed order. By October, the monthly tonnage had risen to 147,581. In April 1949, 7,845 tons was achieved in a single day, almost a quarter of a million tons on a monthly basis. By Easter, a fully laden plane was landing in West Berlin every sixty-two seconds.

It was a feat of organisation, far beyond anything thought possible. It would never have happened without the thousands of Berliners who threw themselves into the tasks of unloading and distribution, and who tolerated the shortages and privations of the blockade with amazing good grace.

Western aircrew were mobbed by cheering, flower-presenting Berliners. British and American pilots became celebrities. Lieutenant Gail S. Halversen, who started out casually dropping candy wrapped in handkerchiefs to kids he saw watching his plane from the ground, became a popular hero, and started a trend for Allied pilots to drop sweets and chocolate bars on their landing approaches. In honour of the little luxuries they brought along with the basic necessities, and in a play on the fact that just a few years earlier the same aircraft had delivered a much deadlier wartime cargo, the aircraft were known as
Rosinenbomber
(‘raisin-bombers’).

The Soviets never actually attacked the Western aircraft. Stalin was not prepared to risk outright war. But their Yak fighters did everything short of inviting combat. They played ‘chicken’ with the incoming planes,
buzzing them aggressively and performing dangerous acrobatics around the air corridors. The Soviets blinded Allied pilots with searchlights, jammed radio frequencies, and carried out ‘exercises’ with their antiaircraft artillery that involved shooting perilously close to the corridors.

In those months, blockaded Berlin changed its character. The population felt for the first time that the West really cared about them. A wave of affection for the USA swept through Berlin. American slang, films and music became wildly popular.

To complement the morale-boosting drone of supply aircraft overhead, there were the newly powerful media that the West had established, especially RIAS (Radio in the American Sector). Founded in September 1946, after the Soviets refused to relinquish unilateral control of ‘Radio-Berlin’, RIAS was controlled by the United States Information Agency. However, the station featured an extraordinary cavalcade of German journalistic and artistic talent. Its 20,000-watt transmitter enabled it to broadcast twenty-four hours a day from new studios in the Kufsteiner Strasse in Schöneberg, with a good reach into the Soviet Zone. This was further aided by a booster transmitter at Hof, in northern Bavaria, which could reach into the key Soviet-controlled industrial areas of Thuringia and Saxony.

Apart from intrepid news journalists such as Peter Schulze, Richard Löwenthal, Jürgen Graf and Egon Bahr, RIAS also became popular for the quality of its entertainment shows. Most famous was the cabaret-style satirical show
Die Insulaner
(The Islanders), where the cast made fun of Berlin’s position in the middle of the Soviet Zone and mocked the hardships this entailed. By 1948, 80 per cent of Berliners listened to RIAS. Despite Eastern jamming and interference from Radio Belgrade, it had a good audience in the Soviet Zone.

RIAS played a crucial role, since the drama within the city itself was almost as important to its survival as the external one symbolised by the airlift.

Since 1946, Berlin’s city assembly or
Magistrat
met at the ‘Red Town Hall’. This landmark, with its 230-feet high tower, stood near the Alexanderplatz in the Soviet sector. Its name had nothing to do with politics. It was due to the fact it had been built in 1870 of garish red brick.

When the D-Mark was introduced in June 1948, the SED organised protest demonstrations. There were altercations in the city assembly. The crisis came, however, a month later, when a majority of representatives demanded an end to the blockade. In response, the Soviets’ tame press accused them of ‘crimes against humanity’. The city treasury, also based in the East, froze the
Magistrat’s
bank accounts. City employees could not be paid. On 4 August, Police President Markgraf’s deputy, Johannes Stumm, announced he was setting up a police authority in West Berlin. Stumm invited all Berlin policemen to join him. Three-quarters of them—1,500 out of 2,000—soon did so.

Markgraf and the Communists remained very much in control of the Eastern sector. When the
Magistrat
met on 26 August, a huge and intimidating crowd of SED supporters showed up, waving red flags and shouting slogans such as ‘Down with the bankrupt
Magistrat
!’, ‘No Marshall Plan’, and ‘No more airfields’. The SED called for the
Magistrat
to resign. It would be replaced by a special commission, whose job would be to enact emergency measures and co-operate with the ‘great Soviet Union’.
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That evening, 30,000 anti-Communist Berliners gathered on the parkland in front of the Reichstag to hear a speech from Ernst Reuter:

We Berliners have said
No
to Communism and we will fight it with all our might as long as there is a breath in us…the
Magistrat
and the City Assembly together with the freedom-loving Berlin population will build a dam against which the red tide will break in vain.

The next day, another threatening crowd of SED supporters gathered outside the Red Town Hall. Markgraf’s police were clearly on their side.

The acting Mayor, Dr Friedensburg, tried vainly to persuade the Soviets to guarantee the safety of the city assembly. The non-Communist councillors were divided. The Right wanted a safe place to meet in the West, while SPD members felt they should continue to work in the East until this became impossible. The SPD won. A new council meeting was announced for 6 September, ten days later.

By eleven a.m. on 6 September, 3,000 Communist demonstrators had gathered. They let the assembly members enter. Then they violently invaded the building. Western journalists were attacked, microphones ripped out. Some assembly members managed to break through the cordon around the building and escape. Others holed up in their offices. Markgraf’s police did nothing.

The Communists roamed the town hall, discovering forty-six plainclothes West sector (‘Stumm’) police that assembly members had brought for their protection. Other Westerners fled, or found refuge in the offices of the Allied liaison officers attached to the
Magistrat
. Things went quiet. Then, at around eleven p.m., Markgraf police demanded that Dr. Friedensburg unlock his office. He refused. They marauded through the building, trying doors until they managed to break into the American liaison officer’s room. They found a number of German civilians in there and carted them off in handcuffs.

From now on, all
Magistrat
members and employees, as well as the Western liaison officers, were hostages. A break-out attempt in the early evening foundered on the tightness of the ring around the town hall, now reinforced by Soviet troops. The British liaison officer had his answer: he sent out urgently for tea, milk and sugar. His French colleague, Captain Ziegelmeyer, also reacted admirably in accordance with his national stereotype. On returning at around nine p.m. from a visit to the theatre, he found his way blocked. Ziegelmeyer, not to be foiled by a handful of Germans, pushed past and sprang through the shattered glass doors, crying out, ‘This is the French way in!’ Other French colleagues, bearing champagne, followed him.

Finally, the Soviet commandant responded to Ganéval’s plea to allow the remaining inmates of the Red Town Hall to leave in safety. At five a.m., Western-sector police officers who had spent the night in hiding inside were loaded into one French truck, and exhausted German and American journalists into another.