Six months later the USA, Great Britain, France and other West
European countries agreed to a plan to create a West German state
which would enjoy a limited degree of sovereignty by 1949. A prerequisite
for an independent nation was a revival of its economy. In West
Germany the only active economy was then the black market. This
now had to be destroyed, and this could only be done by currency
reform-the substitution of the almost worthless Reichsmark for
a brand new currency, the Deutsche Mark, with a stable and universally
accepted value.
The currency reform operation was carried out in the utmost secrecy,
for any leak would have led to grave international repercussions.
One of the few people in the European command entrusted with prior
knowledge of the operation was the civilian head of the U.S. Currency
Bank in Frankfurt, Frank C. Gabell, whom some remembered as an
American Military Government officer wrapped in an SS flag in
the front-line town of Homberg in 1945. On Gabell fell the responsibility
for directing the shipment and distribution of the new currency
in the western Occupation zones.
Twenty-thousand cases of the new notes arrived in Frankfurt from
the USA, where they had been printed, each case weighing 90 lbs.
and marked "Bird Dog"-the operation's codename. Only
Frank Gabell and five others knew what they were. "Some of
the soldiers who helped load them thought they were dog food,"
Gabell recalled. "Others figured they were atom bombs. But
it was only money. We thought about it in truckloads. For eleven
days and nights the distribution went on...Then on June 18 the
new currency was announced to the world."
The result was electrifying. West Germany's economic miracle began
on that day. The black market was wiped out almost overnight,
and the back-market barons were beggared. The cigarette, which
for three years had been Germany's only valued unit of exchange,
became once again merely something to smoke, as confidence in
money was restored. Traders abandoned the barter system and returned
to selling goods for cash. But for the ordinary German the greatest
wonder of currency reform was the magical, virtually immediate
stocking of shop windows with a variety of foodstuffs and consumer
goods which had not been seen legally for years.
The Soviets were caught off-guard and reacted angrily. The first
step toward the independence and economic revival of the western
zones aimed at the heart of their German policy. Hot on the heels
of the Marshal Plan (the American aid program for European recovery)
and the Treaty of Brussels (the European mutual defense pact which
preceded NATO), currency reform goaded the Soviets into massive
retaliation. Their target was the isolated outpost of Berlin.
The first sign of trouble had been at a meeting of the four-power
Allied Control Council in Berlin on January 20, 1948, when the
Soviet Military Governor, Marshal Sokolovsky, formally condemned
the British and American plans for an economic merging of their
two zones. Bizonia, Sokolovsky complained, amounted to the establishment
of a separatist German government in western Germany, and was
a violation of agreements reached by the Allies at Yalta and in
the Control Council.
At subsequent meetings of the Control Council in Berlin efforts
were made to reach a joint agreement with the Russians over currency
reform, but without success. Finally, on March 20, Sokolovsky
brought matters to a head. Britain and America, he said, had in
effect broken away from the system of Control Council rule in
Germany by making a bipartite agreement between themselves which
was in contravention of existing Allied agreements. That being
so they would have to face the consequences of their actions.
From now on, said Sokolovsky, the Control Council had ceased to
exist as an organ of government. He then adjourned the meeting
and the Council never met again (until shortly after the opening
of the Berlin Wall in November 1989).
Shortly after the March 20 meeting General Clay's political advisor,
Robert Murphy, sent a report to Washington containing a very shrewd
interpretation of the situation. The Soviets, he claimed, were
now embarked on a program to force the Western Powers out of Berlin
in order to liquidate this remaining "center of reaction"
east of the iron curtain. Sokolovsky's charge that Britain and
America had destroyed the Control Council was the first step.
The second step would be to make a formal demand for the withdrawal
of the Western Powers from Berlin. If the Western Powers refused,
the third step would be to apply pressure tactics to make it difficult
for them to stay-for example, by interfering with the fragile
lines of communication between Berlin and the Western zones. "Our
Berlin position," Murphy wrote, "is delicate and difficult.
Our withdrawal, either voluntary or involuntary, would have severe
psychological repercussions which would, at this critical stage
in the European situation, extend far beyond the boundaries of
Berlin and even Germany."
The day after Murphy wrote this report the predicted Russian interference
began. The Russians demanded the right to board and enter Allied
trains coming to Berlin from the West. At the same time they interrupted
vital telephone links. These actions were trivial in themselves
but were clearly sighting-shots in a more ambitious campaign.
Murphy advised against hasty concessions; Clay advised against
the evacuation of American dependents. Any compromise, he said
in a phone call to Washington on the evening of April 2, would
have a serious adverse effect for the Western Powers throughout
Europe. But the British and American governments were against
any retaliatory action-certainly nothing as drastic or potentially
catastrophic as the course put forward by Winston Churchill, who
proposed that the soviets should be forced out of Berlin and eastern
Germany while America had the atomic bomb and the Soviet Union
did not, and that their cities should be razed to the ground if
they failed to comply.
Though four-power government had come to an end for Germany as
a whole, the four-power Kommandatura which controlled Berlin struggled
on for a little while longer, though the meetings grew chillier
and more ill-tempered from week to week. Finally, after a futile
and petulant meeting lasting thirteen hours on June 16, the Russian
Commandant walked out and never returned. This marked the beginning
of the division of the city. Two days later the British and Americans
launched the new currency in the Western zones.
The Russians' reaction was instantaneous. On the evening currency
reform was announced they stopped all passenger traffic between
the Western zones and Berlin by road and rail. On the autobahn
at the Helmstedt checkpoint, Soviet guards turned back all eastbound
traffic. At the border station of Marienborn trains carrying German
passengers were also turned back. Patrols of Russian and East
German frontier guards were greatly increased in strength along
the entire length of the Soviet zonal border. Equally drastic,
the Russians imposed major electricity cuts. Two days later Russian
guards stopped an American military goods-train at Marienborn
and removed a rail in front of it. The blockade of Berlin had
begun.
The halting of all rail, road and water traffic between Berlin
and the West had various implications and presented various options
to the Western Allies. Over two million inhabitants of the British,
French and American zones of Berlin were largely dependent for
food on supplies from the west. By cutting off West Berlin from
overland supply the Soviets had launched-in General Clay's words-"one
of the most ruthless efforts in modern times to use mass starvation
for political coercion." For their part, the Western Powers-meaning
to all intents and purposes the Americans and the British, for
the French were in political crisis at home and vacillated weakly
over Berlin-could do one of three things.
They could give way to Soviet pressure, move their forces out
of Berlin and abandon the West Berliners, who were staunchly anti-communist,
to communist rule. For trenchant political as well as humanitarian
reasons this option found favor with almost nobody on the Western
side. "We have lost Czechoslovakia," General Clay warned
the Department of the army. "Norway is threatened. When Berlin
falls, West Germany will be next." Berlin had to be held
in order to sustain the morale of the peoples of Western Europe.
Alternatively, the Allies could slug it out with the Russians.
At the very beginning of the confrontation General Clay favored
the use of tanks to force the Allies' overland entry into Berlin.
"I am still convinced," he reported in June, "that
a determined movement of convoys with troop protection would reach
Berlin and that this might well prevent, rather than build up,
Soviet pressures which could lead to war. Nevertheless, I realize
fully the inherent dangers in this proposal, since once committed
we could not withdraw."
One of the most cogent reasons for not using force on the ground
was the fact that Stalin had seventeen Red Army divisions deployed
in the Soviet zone, while the US Army in Germany had been drastically
weakened by demobilization and redeployment since the end of the
war, and neither the British nor the French, heavily committed
to colonial wars and policing actions in other parts of the globe,
were in a position to contemplate a new war in Europe so soon
after the last one. In general the armed forces of the Soviet
Union, now the world's greatest land power, were stronger in men
and conventional weapons than the combined forces of the USA,
Great Britain, Canada and France.
Sending an armored convoy down the autobahn was not recommended,
the American Defense Secretary, James Forrestal, reported on July
28, "in view of the risk of war involved and the inadequacy
of United States preparation for global conflict." But he
added: "contingency planning for an armored convoy would
go ahead in case every other solution were to fail, and in case
evaluation showed that the armored convoy was likely to get through,
and in case the United States decided the risk of war for the
Berlin cause was acceptable."
This left the Allies a final option-to vault over the Russian
blockade and supply Berlin by air, an idea first put forward by
Lt.-General Albert Wedermeyer, former U.S. Commander in China,
whose forces had been supplied by an airlift over the Himalayas
during the war. This option raised two objections. The first was
that technically it might prove impossible to supply West Berlin's
needs-which amounted to 4,500 tons a day in food alone-purely
by air. General Clay was one of those who simply could not believe
that a major metropolis could b e relieved for an indefinite period
from the air alone. The American Ambassador in Moscow, Walter
Bedell Smith, Eisenhower's wartime Chief of Staff at SHAEF, was
another. Even if the Berliners could be saved from starvation,
he cabled Washington, the economic life of West Berlin could not
be supported by food alone. "Time is till working entirely
in favor of the Soviets if they desire to make the position of
the western powers untenable."
The second objection was that the Russians might attempt to cut
the air corridors from the West, just as they had cut the land
corridors-though there were few who believed that the Soviets
would risk such a serious escalation of the crisis by sending
up fighters against US Air Force and RAF transport aircraft, which
would be tantamount to an act of war. The Soviets were doubtless
well aware that American bombers capable of flying deep into the
USSR had been adapted to carry nuclear weapons. They may have
suspected, if not actually known, of American contingency plans,
the first drawn up less than two months after the surrender of
Japan in September 1945, for a nuclear air-attack on key cities
in the Soviet Union.
A revised plan, codenamed "Charioteer" and drawn up
by the Joint Chiefs of the Joint Intelligence Group at about the
time of the start of the Soviet siege of Berlin, envisaged dropping
133 atom bombs on 70 Soviet cities and industrial centers, including
eight on Moscow and seven on Leningrad, thus destroying the political
and administrative centers of the USSR, the whole of the Soviet
petroleum industry, 30-40 percent of all other industry and nearly
seven million members of the work force.
All in all, it was not fear of what the Soviet Air Force could
do but what the Allied Air Forces could not do that worried the
critics of the airlift option to the Soviet blockade. On June
26, 1948, the Commander of the US Air Forces in Europe ordered
the air-lift to begin. He had 70 aircraft and he lifted 225 tons
a day. With another thirty aircraft he would be able to lift another
275 tons. But this was still only one-ninth of the daily total
of 4,500 tons which was considered necessary simply to keep the
population of West Berlin alive-not counting fuel for domestic
heating, raw materials and normal consumer goods. The chances
of an airlift succeeding seemed slim. But there was, finally,
no alternative.
The British and Americans were resolved to stick it out. The retreat,
Murphy told the American Secretary of State on the evening of
the first supply flights into Berlin from Western Germany, "would
be the Munich of 1948"-a craven admission of lack of courage
to resist Soviet pressure short of war. The same day the British
Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, recommended that the Combined
Chiefs of Staff in Washington and London make a joint assessment
of the military situation while the Allied authorities in Berlin
looked at he logistics of feeding the civilian population by air.
A force of heavy American bombers should be sent over to Europe,
he suggested, as evidence that he Western Allies were in earnest.
President Truman concurred, as did Secretary of State Marshall.
The problem over Berlin was not one of currency but of four-power
government. The Russians wanted the Allies out of Berlin: it was
as simple as that. The Soviet position was made plain at a subsequent
meeting between Stalin and the three Western Ambassadors in Moscow.
Stalin told the Ambassadors that Germany was now divided into
two states with two capitals-Berlin and Frankfurt. Since Berlin
was no longer the capital of the whole of Germany but only of
Eastern Germany he could not accept the introduction of a separate
West German currency in West Berlin. The Soviet government would
only lift the blockade if the Western Powers accepted East German
currency as the only legal tender in Berlin-meaning Soviet control
of the whole of the city. This the Western Powers would on no
account agree to. "We are going to stay, period," President
Truman declared.
On July 1 Britain and America publicly committed themselves to
the support of the West Berliners. Three weeks later, when all
attempts at diplomacy with the Soviet authorities in Berlin and
Moscow had failed, the National Security Council in Washington
authorized the transfer of seventy-five Skymaster transport planes
to reinforce the airlift and the construction of a third airport
(which was built in only three months) at Tegel in the French
sector. The Airlift was on. To run it the Chief of the Air Staff
of the US Air Force, General Vandenberg, sent for the most experienced
air-transport officer in either the American or British air forces-General
William H. Tunner.
Turner had learned his business in World War Two when he had been
in charge of a remarkable operation which had kept the American
forces in China supplied by air "over the hump"-across
the Himalayas-from India. He arrived in Berlin on July 28 at a
time when the tonnage being flown into the city was still far
below the minimum required. He recalled later: "My first
overall impression was that he situation was just as I had anticipated-a
real cowboy operation. Few people knew what they would be doing
the next day. Neither flight crews nor ground crews knew how long
they'd be there, or the schedules that they were working. Everything
was temporary. I went out to the Wiesbaden Air Base, looked around,
then hopped a plane to Berlin-confusion everywhere."
A successful airlift, Tunner knew, was an unglamorous exercise
in pure efficiency measured in maximum turn-round of aircraft
and unbroken build up of tonnages. Planes were either in the air
or at the loading and unloading ramps. Crews were either flying
or resting in order to fly again. There were no heroics, just
getting on with the job. Tunner's first act was to make sure the
air-lift was under a single command. The Combined Air-Lift Task
Force was an Anglo-American operation under his command, with
an RAF officer, Air Commodore G. W. F. Meren, as his deputy. His
second act was to lay down a set of guiding principles for the
conduct of the airlift to be observed by all aircrews and all
airfields. The first principle was that aircraft would fly at
three-minute intervals all around the clock. The second was that
if a plane could not land in Berlin at its first attempt it should
fly straight back to the west. The third was that all pilots would
fly under the same set of rules at all times-namely instrument
rules, i.e. flying by instruments as if in fog. The fourth was
that pilots would not be allowed to leave their aircraft in Berlin
but would take off for the return leg as soon as the plane had
been unloaded.
There were technical problems peculiar to the airlift. One was
lack of repair facilities, so that if a four-engined transport
came in with one engine dead it would have to take off and fly
out with only three engines on the return leg. Another problem
was navigation. The approach to Tempelhof left a lot to be desired.
Lt. Gail Halvorsen of the US Air Force, who became renowned among
Berlin children as the "chocolate bomber," because of
his custom of dropping bags of sweets through the signal chute
of his C54 transport, recalled getting in to the American air
base at Templelhof in the south of the city: "As we came
in looking for this place all we could see were bombed-out buildings
all around. Then we spied this grass field-it seemed more like
a pasture than an airfield-and came over the homing beacon. We
came right on over the top of an apartment building and over a
little opening in the barbed wire fence and there we were. It
kind of reminded me of the feeling that a crop duster would have
in western America, landing on a highroad or in the pasture he's
dusting."
There were three air corridors allowed for Allied flights into
Berlin-two inward and one outward bound, each of them only 32
kilometers wide and patrolled by Yak fighters of the Red Air Force,
which often buzzed Allied transports or held mock dogfights near
the air lanes. In the early weeks of the air-lift there were only
160 aircraft, most of them small twin-engined C47s and Dakotas
with only 1.5 3.5 ton cargo capacity. But gradually bigger aircraft,
such as C54 Skymasters with a 10-ton cargo capacity, began to
arrive from American bases all over the world and the daily tonnages
started climbing. In July it had averaged 2,226 tons or just under
half the necessary minimum; in August it rose to 3,839 tons; by
October, at 4,760, it had exceeded the minimum requirement for
the first time.
During the winter months the main worry was not food, but fuel.
West Berlin needed three times as much coal as it did foodstuffs
to keep the populace from freezing to death, as well as diesel
oil and petrol amounting to nearly 100,000 tons (flown in by British
civil airlines planes). By the spring of 1949 the airlift was
in full stride and running as efficiently and tidily as a railway
freight line. There were now over 400 aircraft-250 American, more
than 150 British, and all makes from Skymasters to Dakotas-shuttling
back and forth between the three airfields in Berlin and the airfields
in the American and British zones, one plane every three minutes,
twenty-four hours a day. At the peak of the airlift a plane was
landing or taking off from Berlin's airfields every thirty seconds
round the clock and daily tonnages were averaging 8,000 tons.
"The sound of the engines," wrote one Berliner, "is
music to our ears."
At Easter 1949 General Tunner mounted what he called his "Easter
Parade"-an all-out effort to achieve a record lift and convince
the Soviets of the futility of their action. Between noon on Easter
Saturday and noon on Easter Sunday, the air forces flew 1,398
sorties and carried just under 13,000 tons of supplies into the
blockaded city. In the course of over 550,000 sorties in thirteen
months the planes from the west brought in over 500,000 tons of
food-much of it in super-lightweight from, such as dehydrated
eggs and potato, boneless meat and saccharin-and over 1,500,000
tons of coal. The planes also brought in special cargos-feed for
the animals in the Berlin Zoo, special diet packs for nursing
mothers, the sick and elderly, chocolate for Christmas, newsprint
for west Berlin's free press, two million seedlings to replace
the trees that had been cut down, Volkswagens for the Berlin police.
The planes did not always leave Berlin empty. Nearly 175,000 people
were airlifted tout of the city, most of them children and TB
patients, along with thousands of tons of manufactured goods stamped
"Made in Blockaded Berlin."
Still the Berliners did not have an easy time, especially during
the bitter winter months. There were drastic power cuts and the
Berliners had to learn to live yet again by the light of candles
and oil lamps. Food was strictly rationed and fresh vegetables
were scarce. Materially it seemed that little had changed since
the end of the war-people were still cold and hungry, they still
lived in ruins, still had to forage from the bomb sites and chop
down trees in the parks for firewood.
But in reality they knew, the Allies knew and the Russians soon
learned that the Berlin airlift had brought about an historic
change. It could not be regarded simply as a colossal exercise
in logistics, the US Air Force's major operation in Europe at
the time, and the greatest relief operation in aviation history.
Nor could it be looked upon as just a great Allied victory. It
was Robert Murphy who first pointed out that the airlift had actually
achieved little except demonstrate that a big city could be kept
going from the air by anyone who had the resources to afford it.
Politically, diplomatically, the Allies had won nothing from the
Russians. The problem of West Berlin was the same before the airlift
as it was after it, and the city remained an island in a Soviet
sea.
What had changed was the relationship between the members of the
Allied Occupation and the people of Berlin-and by implication
the people of Western Germany as a whole. Whatever the political
motivations of their leaders might be, the American and British
soldiers and airmen looked upon the airlift as humanitarian mission,
and began to see their ex-enemies as comrades in adversity. "The
airlift," said one German housewife, "was the intermediary
between us and the rest of the Western world." On May 17,
1949, General Clay reported to Congress: "I saw the spirit
and soul of a people reborn. This time the people of Berlin cast
their lot with those who love freedom." The attitude of the
West Berliners to their ex-enemies can be judged by the fact that
to this day a quarter of the population of West Berlin turn up
on Air Force Day to give thanks for the airlift and pay honor
to the men who made it possible, including the forty-eight British
and American airmen who lost their lives in twenty-four flying
mishaps during the course of the operation.
The position of West Berlin remained as precarious as it ever
was. But West Germany's alliance with the USA and the West sprang
directly out of the circumstances of the Berlin blockade. That
is the measure of the Allied victory and of Russia's loss.
A few days after General Tunner's "Easter Parade" the
Soviet Union threw in the sponge. The blockade had not only failed,
it had hurt them. They had been made to look silly and suffered
a moral defeat. The West Berliners had spurned all Soviet blandishments,
and only twenty thousand of them accepted the Soviet offer of
East Berlin ration cards. The trade embargo between the Western
zones and the Soviet zones had severely hampered the development
of the East German economy, whereas the West German economy was
beginning to take off in the wake of currency reform. On May 12
the siege was lifted. Vast crowds gathered to welcome the first
Allied trucks that arrived overland from the West down the autobahn
into Berlin. The locomotives of the first trains to roll in were
garlanded with flowers. But the airlift continued in full spate
for another four months so that stocks could be built up in case
the blockade was reimposed.
The year 1949 was the watershed, not just for Germany but for
Europe as well. It was the year when Germany's future was decided
and most of the world's political and military divisions were
resolved. On May 23, eleven days after the lifting of the Berlin
blockade, the Federal Republic of Germany was created out of the
Western zones. On August 24 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) was formed, in which the USA, Canada and most noncommunist
European countries pledged themselves to mutual assistance in
case of foreign aggression. On September 23 President Truman announced
that the Russians had successfully exploded their first atomic
bomb and thus achieved nuclear parity with the West.
Finally, on October 5, 1949, the German Democratic Republic was
formally created out of the Soviet zone of Germany. Equilibrium
of a kind was reached, with the frontier between the two halves
forming the front line of the Cold War in Europe.