To Save A City: The Berlin Airlift, 1948-1949 [Illustrated Edition]

Roger G. Miller

• Publisher: Tannenberg Publishing
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781786252487
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe

Includes 30 IllustrationsIn this expert survey Air Force Historian Robert Miller explores the Epic story of the Berlin Airlift, the confrontation of Democracy and Communism as the world teetered on the brink of the Third World War.The Berlin blockade (24 June 1948;–12 May 1949) was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War. During the multinational occupation of post–World War II Germany, the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under allied control. The Soviets offered to drop the blockade if the Western Allies withdrew the newly introduced Deutschmark from West Berlin. In response, the Western Allies organised the Berlin airlift to carry supplies to the people in West Berlin. Aircrews from the United States Air Force, the British Royal Air Force, the Royal Canadian Air Force, the Royal Australian Air Force, the Royal New Zealand Air Force, and the South African Air Force flew over 200, 000 flights in one year, providing up to 8, 893 tons of necessities daily, such as fuel and food, to the Berliners. Neither side wanted a war; the Soviets did not disrupt the airlift.By the spring of 1949 the airlift was clearly succeeding, and by April it was delivering more cargo than had previously been transported into the city by rail. On 11 May 1949, the USSR lifted the blockade of West Berlin. The Berlin Crisis of 1948–1949 served to highlight competing ideological and economic visions for post-war Europe, particularly Germany. The clash ultimately led to the division of that country into East and West and to the division of Berlin itself.

To Save a City: The Berlin Airlift, 1948-1949

The Berlin Crisis of 1948 had its origins in the dark mind of Joseph Stalin. Plans to interfere with Western access to Berlin were already hatched and harassment had begun by March 19, 1948, when the dictator met with German leaders of the Soviet-controlled Party of Socialist German Unity (SED). During the subsequent discussion, German communist leader Wilhelm Pieck warned that the elections scheduled for Berlin in October threatened a disaster for the SED. But, he argued, that humiliation could be prevented if, somehow, the Western powers could be removed from the city.

“Let’s make a joint effort,” Stalin replied, “perhaps we can kick them out.”{1}

Germany in Defeat

The war Adolf Hitler had begun in 1939 ended in May 1945 with the almost total destruction of Germany and its occupation by the victorious Allied powers—the United States, Great Britain, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Allies of the “Grand Alliance” had laid the foundations of the peace during a series of wartime conferences between President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and First Secretary of the Communist Party Joseph Stalin. Roosevelt and Churchill first addressed the question of Germany with the acceptance of Roosevelt’s controversial demand for unconditional surrender. At Teheran in December 1943, the “Big Three” discussed partitioning Germany into several smaller states, an idea ultimately abandoned because it threatened to sow the seeds for a rebirth of German nationalism.{2}

The most important meetings were held at Yalta in February and Potsdam in July 1945. The Allies agreed that their occupation forces would reshape Germany. The German army would be disbanded; its arms industry eliminated; the Nazi party and all aspects of Nazi influence on government, law, culture, and daily life destroyed; and war criminals punished. Economically, the emphasis would be on developing agriculture and peace-related industries. Germany would be administered as a single economic unit and controls introduced to ensure an appropriate distribution of resources throughout the zones. Reparations would be exacted for the horrors inflicted by the Nazi war machine, but enough would be left for the German people to survive on without outside assistance. The occupation would continue until all reforms had been completed, a satisfactory constitution written, and supervised elections held.{3}

During the war, the Allies had agreed to divide Germany into three occupation zones. The Soviet zone occupied the eastern third of the nation, while the British and Americans divided the western portion of the nation, with the British zone in the north and the American zone in the south. A zone for France was eventually carved out of the American and British zones. The Soviet zone, under normal conditions, produced much of Germany’s food; the British zone was heavily industrialized and had to import food in the best of times; the American zone also produced insufficient food for its population. A contemporary saying opined that “the Russians received the agriculture, the British the heavy industry, and the Americans the scenery.”{4} The Allies also agreed to operate the occupation from Germany’s capital, Berlin, which lay over one hundred miles inside the Soviet Zone of Occupation. In the same way, the Allies divided Berlin into what were termed sectors administered by the military forces of the four powers. The decision to establish sectors for the Western nations deep inside the Soviet zone of occupation provided the setting for the Berlin Crisis of 1948.

Another development exacerbated the economic situation for the Allies. As the Red Army advanced across Eastern Europe, Stalin unilaterally moved the Russian-Polish border westward, and then compensated Poland by moving its border with Germany fifty miles to the west, giving the Poles about a quarter of Germany’s most fertile land and displacing several million Germans, most of whom ended up in the Western zones.{5} This step seemed to be done with sinister purpose. In Churchill’s words, “the Russians, pushing the Poles in front of them, wended on, driving the Germans before them and depopulating large areas of Germany, whose food supplies they seized, while chasing a multitude of mouths into the overcrowded British and American zones.”{6} At Potsdam, Churchill tried to make the point that Poland and Russia were getting the food and fuel—in the form of Silesian coal—from a prostrate Germany, while the British and Americans were getting the mouths that had to be fed. Stalin refused to concede the point, however, and there was little the Western leaders could do but acquiesce.{7} Ultimately, both Great Britain and the United States would have to import food at tremendous expense to feed the Germans in their zones of occupation.

The four military commanders-in-chief, General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, Field Marshal Sir Bernard L. Montgomery, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, and Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, met in Berlin on June 5, 1945, to sign the formal “Declaration Regarding the Defeat of Germany and the Assumption of Supreme Authority” and to proclaim the protocols on zonal boundaries and the Allied Control Council. The movement of Allied military forces into their occupation zones and the garrison troops into Berlin was completed on July 4,1945, and the Allied Control Council held its first meeting on July 30. Comprised of the military governors of Germany and located in the American sector of Berlin, the Allied Control Council was the four-power agency that would govern occupied Germany.{8} It does not get too far ahead to note that Gen. Lucius D. Clay, Gen. Sir Brian Robertson, Marshal Vassily D. Sokolovsky, and Gen. Pierre Joseph Koenig were the military governors for Germany during the Berlin Crisis in 1948.

Berlin

Like the rest of Germany, Berlin had suffered enormous damage. In May 1945, 2.8 million people remained in the city, down from a prewar population of 4.6 million. Of the prewar work force, only 28.5 percent remained. The medical profession had been especially hard hit, with only 2,400 of the 6,500 prewar doctors remaining. Housing space had been seriously reduced. Some 70 percent had been damaged, but could still provide shelter, and an additional 10 percent was reparable; but 20 percent had been demolished. Bomb damage had been concentrated within the city center, where 70 percent of the area had been completely devastated. Only 43 percent of the work places in Berlin survived. Hospital beds had been reduced from 33,000 to 8,500. None of Berlin’s eighty-seven sewer systems functioned, so diseases like typhus and dysentery spread quickly, a situation exacerbated by the shortage of physicians. The Allies had rendered Berlin’s drinking water system unusable. The food system was also critical. Berlin could produce only 2 percent of that necessary. Only the importation of food from the Soviet zone of occupation prevented starvation. The Soviet Union refused to allow Western troops into Berlin for two months following the city’s surrender on May 7, 1945. During those eight weeks, Berlin and the Berliners were subjected to brutal treatment at the hands of the Soviet army.{9} “It was like a city of the dead,” General Clay observed soon after the war. “I must confess that my exultation in victory was diminished as I witnessed this degradation of man.”{10}

In the confusion of ending the war, negotiating the shape of postwar Europe, and establishing the occupation, Allied planners overlooked a significant detail: no formal agreement guaranteed Western access by surface transportation. Opportunities to negotiate access had presented themselves between 1944 and 1946, but other subjects had taken priority. It was variously assumed that the presence of the Western garrisons guaranteed access; that the West could always get along with the Soviets and thus there was no reason for written guarantees; or that the occupation would end within a reasonable time, making the subject irrelevant. In 1948, Soviet harassment would set off a scramble in Washington for a copy of a written guarantee of Allied access to Berlin, but none existed. The lack of a formal agreement enabled the Soviets to claim that the Allies were in Berlin only with the special permission of the Soviet Union, not because of their rights as victors, and that this special permission could be withdrawn.{11}

Air routes were another matter. In 1945, concerns about air safety led to a written guarantee signed by all participating nations. The number of flights in and out of Berlin had increased dramatically after the war. With airplanes from three nations involved and much flying done at night or under conditions of reduced visibility, the need for some kind of standard rules and flight patterns in the air routes was readily apparent. In late 1945, the Aviation Committee of the Allied Control Council proposed the establishment of six twenty-mile-wide corridors between Berlin and the cities of Hamburg, Hanover (Bückeburg), Frankfurt, Warsaw, Prague, and Copenhagen. During subsequent negotiations, the Soviet Union argued that only three, those with Hamburg, Bückeburg, and Frankfurt, were actually necessary. The Allies approved an agreement defining these corridors on November 30, 1945.{12} The agreement failed to provide complete freedom for Allied aircraft. Limitations still applied to altitudes and Soviet aircraft engaged in military activities often flew through the corridors. And the agreement ultimately would not prevent the Soviets from attempting to control Western aircraft operating in the corridors under the guise of “safety considerations.” But the presence of the three corridors, guaranteed in writing, was unarguable, and would make the Berlin Airlift possible.

Breakdown

The wartime illusion that the United States could work with a friendly Soviet Union died a relatively quick and probably inevitable death in the postwar period. Roosevelt had introduced Stalin to the American people as “Uncle Joe,” putting a kindly face on the brutal dictator for public consumption during the war. Sometime after 1945, however, Stalin ceased to be the amiable, stout-hearted, pipe-smoking friend of World War II propaganda and emerged instead as the dictator he was, and the principal threat to peace in the world. Further, the motives that drove each nation in the postwar era were mutually exclusive and the victorious allies were destined to clash.

American leaders expected to maintain a short-term military and political presence in Europe after the war, a presence that would ensure the reconstruction of a stable Europe. Initially, much hope was placed in being able to reach consensus with the Soviet Union. However, even before Potsdam, the administration of President Harry Truman had recognized the Soviet Union as a potential threat, and had begun operating on the premise that a stable, confident Europe would serve as a “third force” between the United States and the Soviet Union. As Britain, France, and the other nations recovered, they would jointly “redress the balance of power” and constrain the Soviet Union. It is important to remember that it is impossible to separate the apprehensions of American leaders about Soviet actions in Eastern Europe from their apprehension about stability and democracy in Western Europe. The chief fear between 1946 and 1948 was not Soviet invasion of Europe, but the strength of communist parties in France and Italy, and their ability to take advantage of economic hardship.{13}

Additionally, it gradually became apparent that Germany had to play a major role in a stable Europe. During World War II, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau had proposed eliminating German industry and “pastoral-izing” the country’s economy. Approved in September 1944, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff paper governing American occupation policies, JCS 1067, embodied the essence of the Morgenthau Plan and envisioned restricting the German economy to the bare minimum required to satisfy the population’s immediate needs. This directive proved impractical and American policy shifted gradually to a belief that a strong, stable, democratic Germany would make a good partner and ally in central Europe. JCS 1779, directing more liberal occupation policies, replaced JCS 1067 in July 1947. As the American military governor in Germany, Gen. Lucius D. Clay, was a primary instrument in this policy change. A courtly Southerner from a distinguished family, Clay was a brilliant military administrator noted for his refined manners, incisive mind, and formidable will.{14} Clay would be instrumental in establishing the position of the United States in postwar Europe, determining the shape of western German democracy, and drawing the line on Soviet expansionism, a line that would begin in Berlin.

Soviet policy in Germany and Eastern Europe was largely shaped by that na...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• To Save a City: The Berlin Airlift, 1948-1949
• The Berlin Airlift: A Tally and Legacy