The Cold War (5 page)

The Soviets and their SED clients were not amused. Unable to alter the results of the election, they acted as if the new city government were illegitimate, overriding its policies unless approved by the Kommandatura, and harassing and sometimes even kidnapping non-Communist functionaries. A standoff arose when the city assembly appointed Ernst Reuter as lord mayor. He was a former Communist who had split with the party in 1921 because he could not tolerate its subordination of German working-class interests to the demands of Moscow. Upon joining the SPD, he had become a vocal opponent of the Nazis and had spent the war years in exile in Turkey. Upon his return to Berlin in 1946, he worked to rally local Socialists against the Soviets. Unwilling to accept such an independent spirit as lord mayor, the Russians vetoed Reuter's appointment. Yet the intrepid Reuter continued to speak for the city, and most Berliners saw him as their leader (he duly became mayor of West Berlin once the city was formally divided).

As it grew increasingly evident that Germany and Berlin were becoming prime battlegrounds in the emerging Cold War, the Western Powers started taking measures to protect and rehabilitate “their” Germany. In early 1947 the Americans and British fused their zones economically into “Bizonia.” (France, intent upon keeping Germany divided and weak, kept its zone separate for a time.) The Russians, who had been extracting war reparations in the form of coal and manufactured goods from the Western zones, were officially prevented from continuing this practice. A few months later, George Marshall, the new American secretary of state, announced his famous plan for European economic recovery, the Marshall Plan, in which he pointedly included Germany. The program was also open to the Soviet Union and the regions in Eastern Europe that it controlled, but Marshall expected Moscow to spurn the aid, which it promptly did. If the Soviets in 1946–47 were bringing down an Iron Curtain across Europe, the Western Powers were drawing some lines of demarcation of their own.

The Soviets bitterly protested the Western initiatives as violations of the Potsdam Agreement and as steps toward the formal division of Germany. They retaliated
in the most effective way they could: by interfering with traffic into Berlin. Claiming “technical difficulties” on the rail lines, they restricted the number of freight trains allowed to pass through their zone, thereby creating a serious food shortage. In early 1948, with their Berlin garrisons feeling the pinch, the Americans and British launched a baby airlift with a few planeloads of supplies, a preview of the much larger lift to come. Although the Allied Kommandatura continued to meet during this crisis, Robert Murphy, political adviser to the American military government, reported that the agreement had become impossible “even on the most routine questions.” General Lucius Clay, the U.S. military governor, sensed “a feeling of new tenseness in every Soviet individual with whom we have official relationships.” He feared war might come with “dramatic suddenness.”

The situation was so menacing because, following extensive postwar troop withdrawals from continental Europe, Western strength on the ground was very thin relative to the massive Soviet presence. According to American intelligence estimates in early 1948, the Russians had eighty-four divisions stationed in eastern Germany and in other satellite countries, while the West could muster only sixteen divisions stationed in Germany, Austria, the Benelux countries, and France. American officials worried that the Russians might be inclined to exploit their conventional superiority through a rapid push westward. “All the Russians need to reach the Rhine is shoes,” said Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett.

Yet heightened tensions with the Soviets did not prevent the Western Powers from taking further steps to ensure the political and economic viability of western Germany. In early June 1948 they instructed German officials in the Western zones to draft a constitution for a new federal state “best adapted to the eventual re-establishment of German unity at present disrupted.” They also announced that they would begin formulating an “Occupation Statute” to define relations between themselves and the new German government. Finally, on June 18 the Western military governments announced that a new currency, the deutsche mark, would replace the inflated reichsmark (the old Nazi currency) in their zones. The new currency was not designated for use in Berlin, but when the Soviets tried to impose an Eastern-zone currency on the entire city, the Americans, having secretly flown in loads of deutsche marks in case they might be needed, started issuing the new bills on June 24. Now Berlin had competing currencies to match its competing ideologies: Western deutsche
marks stamped with a large B for Berlin, and Soviet-issued reichsmarks bearing thumb-sized coupons stuck on with potato glue. No sooner had the Russians introduced their “wallpaper marks” (so named by the Berliners) than their representative on the Kommandatura, Major General Alexander Kotikov, stalked out of the Allied body, allegedly in response to the equally abrupt departure of his American counterpart, Colonel Frank Howley. Now even the pretense of cooperation was gone.

The battle of the bills turned into a full-scale battle for Berlin, because the Soviets, citing additional technical difficulties, stopped all road traffic coming into Berlin on June 18, the day the deutsche mark was launched in western Germany. On June 24 they halted rail and barge traffic as well, and they cut deliveries of electrical power and coal from the Eastern sectors to the west. In the following weeks they also established checkpoints along their sector border in Berlin to monitor (but not yet prevent) the passage of goods and people.

While the currency imbroglio provided the immediate backdrop for these dramatic measures, it was not the central issue behind the blockade. The Soviets hoped to use their stranglehold over Berlin to force the Allies to rescind their plans for a West German government, which Moscow resolutely opposed. The Soviets also wanted to regain the right to extract reparations from the Western zones, especially from the coal-rich Ruhr. These were the immediate goals; down the line they hoped to show the Western Powers that it made no sense for them to stay in Berlin, deep within the lair of the Bear.

Colonel Howley, commandant of the American sector in Berlin, labeled Russia's decision to impose a full blockade “the most barbarous in history since Genghis Khan reduced conquered cities to pyramids of skulls.” His comment was a bit hyperbolic, ignoring as it did some rather more barbarous decisions of recent vintage. Yet the Soviet move was indeed a bitter blow to the 2.1 million people living in the Western sectors of Berlin. It promised more hardships on top of the miseries endemic to the entire city in the late 1940s. The capital of the Cold War was still a living monument to the horrors of World War II. Enormous piles of rubble blocked central streets; bands of displaced persons, German and foreign, roamed the town, looting, robbing, raping, and murdering. The most prosperous business was the black market, where everything was traded, from pieces of coal to Lucky Strike cigarettes, long the city's currency of choice. But while all Berliners had to contend with high crime and chronic shortages, those in the Western sectors now faced a life-or-death crisis, since
most of the food and energy they required came either from western Germany or from the Soviet-controlled zone of occupation. No wonder they cheered when Ernst Reuter called upon the world to help Berlin “in the decisive phase of the fight for freedom.”

The primary targets of this appeal, the Western Allies, were in something of a quandary about how to respond. Official Washington was caught off guard and full of trepidation. George Kennan, head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, recalled: “No one was sure how the Russian move could be countered, or whether it could be countered at all. The situation was dark and full of danger.” France waited to see what action its partners might take. Only Britain adopted an immediate unequivocal stance. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin announced that Britain would neither abandon Berlin nor back away from plans for a separate West German state.

On the scene in Germany, General Clay also appeared steadfast, at least outwardly. Interpreting the Russian move as a bluff designed to frighten the West out of Berlin, he publicly promised that the Americans would not leave. “If Berlin falls,” he said, “Germany will be next. If we intend to defend Europe against Communism, we should not budge.” In private, however, he worried that if Berlin could not be fed, a starving populace would force the Western Powers out in order to get the blockade lifted.

None of the Allied officials contemplated a fight by the tiny Western garrison in Berlin, which in total comprised about fifteen thousand troops. A possibly more viable option involved breaking the blockade by dispatching an armed convoy from western Germany. General Clay was an avid proponent of this gambit, going so far as to lay plans for a six-thousand-man task force to storm 110 miles down the autobahn from Helmstedt to Berlin. Clay asked General Curtis LeMay, commander of the U.S. Air Force in Europe, to provide air support in case the Russians started shooting—an eventuality LeMay did not expect but which he welcomed as a fine opportunity for a preemptive strike on all Russian airfields in Germany. “Naturally we knew where they were,” LeMay said. “We had observed the Russian fighters lined up in a nice smooth line on the aprons at every place. If it had happened, I think we could have cleaned them up pretty well, in no time at all.”

But of course “it” didn't happen. The State Department thought the convoy option was far too risky, while the Pentagon dismissed it as militarily unworkable. As General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote
later, “The Russians could stop an armed convoy without opening fire on it. Roads could be closed for repair or a bridge could go up just ahead of you and then another bridge behind and you'd be in a hell of a fix.”

If the Western Powers were unwilling to confront the Russians with ground forces, and were equally determined to stay in Berlin, they had to find a way to keep the city supplied, pending a still-hoped-for diplomatic solution. In the given circumstances, an airlift of some kind seemed the obvious answer, but at first only Foreign Secretary Bevin pressed it with any vigor. He argued forcefully that an airlift would at once reinforce the morale of the West Berliners and show Moscow that “we are not powerless but on the contrary possess a wealth of technical ability and spectacular air strength.” Clay, having reluctantly given up his convoy idea, soon came around to Bevin's view. But the State Department and Pentagon still dithered, worried that this gambit, too, posed the risk of war, and that the Soviets might take advantage of Western preoccupation with Berlin to strike elsewhere. Finally, on June 26, President Truman put an end to all the equivocation by ordering that an airlift to Berlin be made operational as soon as possible. To Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall's objection that this might mean war, he replied that America would “have to deal with the situation as it developed.”

Even if, as Clay and Bevin were convinced, an airlift did not lead to war, there were legitimate reasons to doubt that it could save Berlin. No one had ever attempted to air-supply such a huge population with almost everything it needed for survival over a prolonged period. The Americans had been successful in airlifting supplies “over the Hump” of the Himalayas from India to China in 1942–43, and the British had supplied their troops similarly in Burma, but these missions had been limited largely to military materials and had operated in uncontested (and uncongested) airspace. Moreover, at the beginning of the airlift, the West did not possess spectacular air strength, at least not in the form of cargo planes readily available in the region. The U.S. Air Force in Europe had only two C-54 Douglas Skymasters, which could ferry almost ten tons, and 102 battered C-47s, known as Gooney Birds, with a three-ton capacity. The British air command in Germany could deploy a total of fourteen Dakotas, their version of the C-47. The French had six Junkers and one Dakota, all derelict.

Existing loading and landing facilities were also inadequate. America's primary air base in western Germany, Rhein-Main, had a runway of good length, but its surface was not designed for heavy transport use. The RAF's Wunstorf
base in the British zone had little hardstand for parking and loading. At the Berlin end, Tempelhof, in the American sector—built largely by the Nazis in the 1930s—had a massive administrative complex, but its single runway (another was soon added) was surfaced with tire-busting steel planks, and the approach to it from the west required coming in between high apartment buildings and a four-hundred-foot-tall brewery chimney. A cemetery near the field reminded pilots where they would end up if they miscalculated the approach. Gatow, in the British sector, was much easier to fly into but lacked a good off-loading area. There were no airfields at all in the French sector, though Paris allowed the Americans to start building a new one (with German labor) at Tegel in July 1948. Because access to Tegel was impeded by transmitting towers belonging to the Soviet-controlled Radio Berlin, France's Berlin commandant politely asked the Russians to dismantle them. When the Russians refused, he ordered the things blown up. This was France's major contribution to the airlift.

As soon as the lift got under way, a call went out for cargo planes from all over the world. In the American case, aircraft arrived from bases as far away as Guam, Alaska, Hawaii, and Panama to make up what was at first labeled the “LeMay Coal and Feed Delivery Service” and later rechristened “Operation Vittles.” Although the build-up was impressive, the enterprise at this point was definitely seat-of-the-pants. “It was a cowboy operation when I got there in July,” recalled an American pilot. “It was a joke if you could take off after your buddy and get back to Rhein-Main before he did. It did not matter how you beat him, just so long as you beat him.” Loading operations were also chaotic, with trucks smashing into planes and even driving into spinning propellers. In the early days, pilots experimented with low-level drops over Berlin's Olympic Stadium to avoid time-consuming landings, but all the food ended up as puree, while coal became coal dust. Worse, although the deliveries increased each week, they were not nearly enough to meet Berlin's needs, even in summer. Observing this painful reality, Robert Murphy, Clay's aide, speculated on July 9 that “within a week or so we may find ourselves faced with a desperate population demanding our withdrawal to relieve the distress.”