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The Berlin Airlift E-Book

Barry Turner

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Herausgeber: Icon Books
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

Acclaimed historian Barry Turner presents a new history of the Cold War's defining episode. Berlin, 1948 – a divided city in a divided country in a divided Europe. The ruined German capital lay 120 miles inside Soviet-controlled eastern Germany. Stalin wanted the Allies out; the Allies were determined to stay, but had only three narrow air corridors linking the city to the West. Stalin was confident he could crush Berlin's resolve by cutting off food and fuel. In the USA, despite some voices still urging 'America first', it was believed that a rebuilt Germany was the best insurance against the spread of communism across Europe. And so over eleven months from June 1948 to May 1949, British and American aircraft carried out the most ambitious airborne relief operation ever mounted, flying over 2 million tons of supplies on almost 300,000 flights to save a beleaguered Berlin. With new material from American, British and German archives and original interviews with veterans, Turner paints a fresh, vivid picture the airlift, whose repercussions – the role of the USA as global leader, German ascendancy, Russian threat – we are still living with today.

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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

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Leseprobe

Title PageList of illustrations and mapsMapsCHAPTER ONECHAPTER TWOCHAPTER THREECHAPTER FOURCHAPTER FIVECHAPTER SIXCHAPTER SEVENCHAPTER EIGHTCHAPTER NINECHAPTER TENCHAPTER ELEVENCHAPTER TWELVECHAPTER THIRTEENCHAPTER FOURTEENPOSTSCRIPTTHE FINAL TALLYBibliographyAcknowledgementsIndexPlatesAbout the AuthorCopyright

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS

Plate section

All images from Landesarchiv Berlin/N.N.

Gathering firewood in the Tiergarten district.

Construction workers eat lunch at Tegel airport.

Women construction workers at Tegel.

Runway construction at Tegel.

Berliners watch an aircraft taking off from Tempelhof.

C-47 Skytrains waiting to unload at Tempelhof.

A Sunderland flying boat lands on Lake Havel.

Children from Berlin to be evacuated by flying boat.

A C-54 Skymaster burns at Tempelhof.

Remains of a C-47 that crashed into an apartment building.

Berliners watch as a C-47 comes in to land at Tempelhof.

C-47s being unloaded at Tempelhof.

A young Berliner enjoys Hershey Bars donated from the USA.

Berlin children re-enact the Airlift for a propaganda photograph.

The final flight of Operation Vittles.

US pilot Lieutenant Gail Halvorsen, goodwill ambassador for the Airlift.

Maps on pp. ix, x

Germany and the Allied occupation zones, showing the main air corridors to Berlin

Berlin and the occupation sectors, showing major airports used in the Airlift

They all remember the air-lift with great pride. Then Berlin was in the centre of the world-interest and the Berliners were convinced that the West really cared for them. The days of the air-lift were hard days, exciting days, terrible days. But those were the days.

George Mikes, Uber Alles: Germany Explored, 1953

Berlin is all about volatility. Its identity is based not on stability but on change. No other city has repeatedly been so powerful, and fallen so low. No other capital has been so hated, so feared, so loved. No other place has been so twisted and torn across centuries of conflict, from religious wars to Cold War, at the hub of Europe’s ideological struggle.

Rory MacLean, Berlin, 2014

CHAPTER ONE

For Pilot Officer John Curtiss, it was his second flight to Berlin. The first, in January 1945, had been a mission of destruction. As a Bomber Command navigator he had guided his Halifax through the waving crisscross of blinding searchlights to that night’s target, an oil refinery on the edge of the city. He had heard the order for the bomb doors to be opened, seen the orange flashes far below and tried not to think of the devastation and sacrifice. Now, in July 1948, just three years after the end of the war, John Curtiss was flying not over but into Berlin and his aircraft was carrying not bombs but food and fuel for a city under siege. He was just one of thousands of American and British servicemen taking part in the Berlin Airlift, the most ambitious relief operation of its kind ever mounted.

Over eleven months, from June 1948 to May 1949, 2.3 million tons of supplies were shifted on 277,500 flights. Average daily deliveries included 4,000 tons of coal, a bulk cargo never before associated with air carriers. A record day had nearly 1,400 aircraft, close on one a minute, landing and taking off in West Berlin, creating a traffic controller’s nightmare at a time when computer technology was still in its infancy. But just about every statistic of the Airlift broke a record of some sort. For those who took part, the sense of achieving something remarkable was to stay with them for the rest of their lives.

John Higgins was an eighteen-year-old dispatch rider when the Airlift was mounted.

Of my 22 years of service – I was in Cyprus, Kenya and other trouble spots – it was Berlin where I grew up. In eighteen months I changed from a young English hooligan. For the first time I saw the world as a decent human being should see the world.

Fifty years on, John took part in an anniversary veterans’ march in Berlin.

All the schoolchildren were giving us flowers. Then we went up the steps to take our seats and there was an old lady with tears running down her face, just saying ‘Danke, danke’. I gave her my flower. And I couldn’t talk.

John Curtiss, by then a retired air vice marshal, was also at the veterans’ reunion. He was approached by a middle-aged man who was eager to show his gratitude. ‘If it wasn’t for you and those like you, I wouldn’t be here. My parents swore that if the communists took over, they would never have children.’

Berlin was a divided city in a divided country in a divided continent. It was not supposed to be like that. Victory over Germany promised a fresh start, a concerted Allied effort to secure a lasting peace in Europe. But it was soon clear that the much-vaunted unity of America, Britain and Russia was based on little more than a joint interest in defeating Nazism. Once the enemy was vanquished, the thin veneer of military and political camaraderie peeled away.

For the more sceptical or more clear-sighted observers, the fragility of the alliance was apparent even while the war was raging. An inter-Allied dialogue on post-war Germany started in mid-1943 when the defeat of the Third Reich, though some time in the hazy future, was judged to be inevitable. In October, a deceptively constructive meeting of Allied foreign ministers in Moscow (Cordell Hull for the United States, Anthony Eden for Britain and Vyacheslav Molotov for the Soviet Union) led to the creation of a three-power European Advisory Commission (EAC) to be based in London. America and Russia were represented on the Commission by their respective ambassadors, John Winant and Fedor Gusev, while the British case was put by Sir William Strang, a long-time government adviser on international affairs.

Their brief was prescribed by decisions already made at top level. That Germany should submit to ‘unconditional surrender’, affirmed by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill in January 1943 at their Casablanca conference and subsequently endorsed by Joseph Stalin, was justified as a means of forestalling any inclination, east or west, to negotiate a separate peace. The absence of any flexibility in bringing the war to an end carried with it the message that a defeated Germany would have no say in managing its internal affairs. Unconditional surrender equated with the surrender of sovereignty. It would be up to the Allies to tell the Germans how to run their lives.

But this was to assume that the Big Three could agree on what they wanted for Germany. At no point was this seriously in prospect. The best that the EAC could come up with was a formula for partitioning of Germany into occupation zones under military government with no conditions on the length or terms of occupation. Matters of joint interest were to be settled by an Allied Control Council comprising the commanders-in-chief with their deputies. Berlin was to have its own Interallied Governing Authority (Kommandatura).

These arrangements, so neat and tidy on paper, came with a list of open-ended questions, not least the fixing of the lines of demarcation for the occupation and access to Berlin, which was likely to be in the Soviet zone. The assumption by the western Allies was of free and open transit to the German capital. But the Russians refused to be tied down. Strang noted a disturbing tendency for his EAC Soviet counterpart, ‘a grim and rather wooden person’1 to haggle over insignificant details. In putting this down to bloody-mindedness he failed to recognise the Soviet tactic of playing for time while the advancing Red Army tightened its grip on the territories it occupied.

With his innate distrust of communism in general and of Stalin in particular, Churchill had a clearer idea of what was going on. But priding himself as a realist, he acknowledged Stalin’s obsession with security, his own and that of his country. The Soviet leader’s resolve to surround Russia with states directly controlled by or submissive to the Kremlin was on a par with his need to be surrounded by underlings of unquestionable loyalty. Given Russia’s sacrifice in defeating Nazism, with close on 9 million military and 17 million civilian deaths, Stalin expected more than a share of Germany and was in prime position to get it. Hence Churchill’s infamous ‘percentages’ offer to Stalin exchanging Russian control of Rumania and Bulgaria for British ascendancy in Greece, leaving Hungary and Yugoslavia to be split evenly.

This did not go down well in Washington where President Roosevelt, ‘my very good friend’ as Churchill liked to call him, was of another school of diplomacy. Having served his political apprenticeship in the Great War, he was imbued with the idealism of Woodrow Wilson. The failure of the League of Nations, Wilson’s brainchild, only made Roosevelt more determined to create a new world order based on mutual trust. This was far distant from Churchill’s credo, practical or cynical according to taste, that the only way to keep the peace was to engineer a balance of power between leading nations, enabling each to satisfy its territorial ambitions without any one country becoming strong enough to overwhelm the others.

The cracks in the western alliance began to show at the Big Three conference held at Yalta on the Black Sea in February 1945. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill was at their combative best. The president, an invalid for much of his political career, was in terminal decline, capable, it was said, of little more than ‘talking situations through to a superficial conclusion’. Churchill was in better shape but after an arduous journey, he too was often compelled to rest. Stalin alone was buoyant, taking pleasure in the certainty that the Red Army was bulldozing German forces in the east.

Three weeks after launching their winter offensive, Russian spearheads were 300 miles west of their starting point. The Germans had been swept from Poland, except for the neck of the corridor leading to Danzig. There was no prospect of a German counter-offensive. By the end of January, the great industrial region of Silesia, with its tank and aircraft factories little touched by Allied bombing, was in Russian hands. But all this paled against a single, awe-inspiring reality: that from the bridgehead on the Oder river near Kuestrin, Berlin was little more than 60 miles away.

Meanwhile, to the embarrassment of the western commanders, the deep defences of the Siegfried Line were still intact while the Rhine, the prime objective of the D-Day invasion, was no closer to Allied forces than Berlin from the Russians. With Stalin already wielding power over large parts of eastern Europe there was little that Roosevelt and Churchill could say or do to dent his resolve.

The chief bone of contention was Poland. Britain was pledged to secure independence and free elections for Poland; it was, after all, to defend Polish liberty that Britain had gone to war in the first place. But Russia too had legitimate or, at least, irresistible claims to be part of any Polish settlement. Never again must that country’s wide open spaces tempt an invader. Stalin wanted the Russian frontier to be moved further to the west, while compensating Poland for loss of territory by allowing it to encroach on Germany. Stalin also demanded a government in Warsaw sensitive to Moscow’s wishes. This had no support at all in London where there was a Polish government-in-waiting. Churchill protested vigorously but had no choice but to accept Stalin’s handpicked nominees as the core of the new regime. The Soviet leader promised ‘free and unfettered elections’ at a still to be determined date. Churchill was not taken in but Roosevelt chose to be accommodating.

In late March 1945, fifteen Polish resistance leaders, who might reasonably have expected to be part of the new administration, were arrested and taken to Moscow where they were forced to confess to fabricated charges, including Poland’s participation in a British-organised anti-Soviet bloc. A reconstructed government had communists holding all important offices including justice and security. Wounded feelings in Washington that Stalin could act so blatantly against the spirit of Yalta were aggravated by news that a puppet government had been set up in Soviet-occupied Rumania.

Still confident that Stalin was ‘gettable’, Roosevelt looked to the newly created United Nations to provide the framework for the two superpowers, plus Britain, China and, more problematically, France, to sort out their problems and those of the rest of the world in an atmosphere of mutual regard. But even Roosevelt must have taken a deep breath when at Yalta he put his name to the Declaration on Liberated Europe, a commitment by the Big Three to help freed nations ‘to destroy the last vestiges of Nazism and Fascism and to create democratic conditions of their own choice’. The president lived just long enough to recognise the depth of cynicism measured by these words. For the rest, Russia joined the war against Japan in return for territorial and other concessions that, for the time being, were kept under wraps.

On the vexed question of reparations, the general principles were laid down that removals were to take place from the national wealth of Germany within two years of the end of the war so as to destroy its military potential; that there should be annual deliveries of goods from Germany ‘for a period to be fixed’; and that German labour should be used in the reconstruction of war-devastated lands. A detailed plan was to be drawn up by a three-power Allied Reparations Commission sitting in Moscow. In the teeth of British resistance, Stalin secured a basis for reparations of a total sum of $20 billion with 50 per cent going to the USSR. Was this a definite commitment? Russia later said it was. Britain and America denied it.

Churchill had his successes. Without too much trouble he saw off Roosevelt’s renewed attempt to incorporate the British Empire into the 1941 Atlantic Charter, a high-flown document promising global cooperation and freedom from political repression. It had taken some time for him to realise that when Roosevelt talked of nations having the right to choose their own government, he was including countries under British rule. There was a sharp reaction when Washington mooted the desirability of handing Hong Kong back to the Chinese. At Yalta, Churchill was able to take strength from Stalin’s interpretation of the Atlantic Charter that did not preclude Stalin’s own territorial demands. The breathtaking effrontery of Stalin speaking in support of an American proposal that all British dependent territories be placed under international trusteeship provoked Churchill to righteous indignation.

Churchill was on a hiding to nothing in standing up for French demands. As the leader of Free France and head of the Provisional Government, General Charles de Gaulle had expected to use Yalta as a platform for national rehabilitation. But neither Roosevelt nor Stalin was ready for that. Both were dismissive of French claims to big power status and Roosevelt had a strong antipathy to de Gaulle as a devious and ungrateful ally. Churchill too was liable to lose patience with the assertive French leader (‘Really, France has enough to do this winter and spring in trying to keep body and soul together, and cannot masquerade as a Great Power for the purpose of war’), but stood by his belief in a European future where a strong France balanced a German revival. Attracted to any idea that reduced the pressure on America to take care of postwar Europe, Roosevelt agreed to France having its own German occupation zone and to it becoming the fourth member of the Allied Control Council for Germany. Stalin reluctantly went along on condition that the French zone was carved out of territory designated for Britain and America.

As for Berlin, the Big Three approved a broad plan for putting the city under joint administration. By early 1945, the western Allies had accelerated their advance to a point where it was uncertain who would get to Berlin first. It was a prize dear to the heart of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Following the Rhine crossing, he assumed that his 21st Army Group would lead the race to Berlin. But as supreme commander of western Allied forces, General Dwight Eisenhower was acutely sensitive to the rivalry between American and British commanders. Anticipating repercussions in Washington, not to mention threats of resignation from senior officers if he gave Montgomery his head, Eisenhower opted to shift the centre of his advance to General Omar Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group with orders to make for the River Elbe, there to meet up with the Russians. The Red Army was offered the chance to be the first to fly the flag over the Brandenburg Gate. It was a paramount decision for which Eisenhower has been much criticised but there were sound strategic reasons for leaving Berlin to the Russians. For one thing they were closer, with a million-strong force ready for the knockout attack across flat, open countryside. The nearest Anglo-American forces were still 250 miles off target. The rate of their advance was impressive but not so great as to guarantee coming in first. Even assuming that the 200 miles to the Elbe could be covered speedily, the other 50 miles beyond was difficult terrain with lakes and rivers to hold up movement. Then there was the nightmare prospect of street fighting in Berlin with no means of distinguishing Russian friend from German foe. What would that do for relations with the Soviets?

Another factor weighed against Berlin falling to forces under Eisenhower’s command: the cost in young lives of trying to outpace the Russians. Bradley, who was content to forgo a triumphant entry into Berlin as long as Montgomery, his deadly rival, did not thereby steal an advantage, calculated that a breakthrough from the Elbe would incur 100,000 casualties, ‘a pretty stiff price to pay for a prestige objective’. The warning was not lost on Eisenhower, who was under pressure to conserve manpower against the then probability of the war with Japan outlasting the war in Europe by a year or more. Seasoned troops could expect their services to be in demand in the Pacific war zone.

But it was politics rather than strategy that made the running. At the very least Eisenhower was intent on holding the balance between American and British interests. Also in the back of his mind was the knowledge that his president was keen to foster good relations with the Russians. However naive this may have appeared once Stalin emerged in his true colours, those close to Roosevelt were strongly motivated to treat the Russians as friends and most definitely not as prospective enemies. Roosevelt had his warning voices but they were not loud enough to reach Eisenhower. What he did hear was the opinion of his mentor and army chief of staff, General George Marshall, who backed the Berlin decision as part of the American conciliation policy. For Marshall this had the added virtue of doing down the detested Montgomery.

The reaction from London was predictably hostile but when Roosevelt joined with his generals to deny that Eisenhower’s plans involved any far-reaching changes from the strategy agreed at Yalta, Churchill backed off, denying any attempt to disparage the supreme commander or to foster ‘misunderstandings between the truest friends and comrades that ever fought side by side’. Eisenhower grasped the olive branch, reassuring Churchill that far from leaving British forces ‘in a static condition along the Elbe’, it was likelier that ‘US forces would be shifted to Field Marshal Montgomery who would then be sent across the river in the north and to a line reaching to Luebeck on the Baltic coast’. The objective was to liberate Denmark and Norway ahead of the Red Army. The destiny of Berlin was left open, though the odds were heavily in favour of the Red Army achieving its dearest wish.

It is just possible that pitted against an ailing president, Churchill could have made more of his chances to influence Washington opinion. But after his initial protest he went soft on the issue until well after the war when hindsight embroidered his memoirs. Churchill was a realist. He knew above all else that he had to keep in with the Americans who held the whip hand. That made him the loser in more arguments than he cared to admit. As chief of air staff, Sir Charles Portal, observed of his boss, ‘Churchill will fight to the last ditch, but not in it’.

The final decision over Berlin was not taken until mid-April. By then, western forces were able to celebrate a much faster progress than originally anticipated. The US Ninth Army, headed by General William S. Simpson, was at the Elbe while Soviet forces were still battling their way through the Berlin suburbs. As Simpson saw it, nothing stood between his troops and Berlin except a wide-open autobahn. But his request to let him go the last few miles was denied.

For Eisenhower the risks were still too high. The Ninth Army was only 50,000 strong. Far ahead of its supply lines, it had a single bridgehead over the Elbe to bring up essential artillery and gasoline. The contrast with the Soviet build-up – 1.25 million men backed by 22,000 artillery pieces – was stark. In any case, whatever interest Eisenhower had once had in taking Berlin was now lost. On the very day that Simpson reached the Elbe (April 11th) Eisenhower dined with General Patton, the abrasive Third Army commander, who took the opportunity to urge an American incursion into Berlin. Eisenhower was not persuaded. The city had ‘no tactical or strategic value’, he argued. If, as Patton claimed, Simpson could take the city in 48 hours, this, in Eisenhower’s view, ‘would place upon the American forces the burden of caring for thousands and thousands of German displaced persons and Allied prisoners of war’.2

The Berlin garrison, mostly old men and boys huddled in the wreckage of a once great city, surrendered to the Red Army on May 2nd, 1945. As a young German educated in Moscow, Wolfgang Leonhard was in the Russian advance party.

Slowly our train wound its way through Friedrichsfelde towards Lichtenberg. It was an infernal picture. Fire, rubble, ghostly starving people in rags. Lost German soldiers who no longer knew what was happening. Red Army soldiers, singing, celebrating and often drunk. Long lines of people patiently waiting in front of water pumps in order to fill small containers. All looked terribly tired, hungry, exhausted and decrepit.3

Berlin was a cauldron for the hungry and the homeless. There was no gas or electricity, the gutters were open sewers, the trees had long gone for firewood and the streets were choked with rubble. Dogs were sold for meat and cats for their fur. It was reckoned that over 50,000 orphans were living like animals in holes in the ground. For a typical Berliner, the meal of the day was a bowl of thin vegetable soup, a slice of black bread with a smear of margarine and maybe a scrap of meat.

The Russians were quick to take command of what was left of the civilian population. Four days before the city was formally handed over to the invader, the Soviet commander-in-chief, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, was giving orders for a Soviet-style administration. Berlin was declared a Russian prize of war, irrespective of Allied agreements on its future status. Notwithstanding an orgy of rape and looting, there was hardly any resistance. With the Red Army as the only source of food, obedience was a matter of survival.

A Soviet Military Administration (SMAD), headed by Zhukov, was supported by ‘initiative groups’ of dedicated German communists trained in Moscow. Anton Ackermann led the way in Saxony, Gustav Sobottaka in Mecklenburg, while the ten-strong group that found a base in the Lichtenberg district of Berlin was headed by Walter Ulbricht. A 52-year-old exile from Nazism, Ulbricht gave unstinting loyalty to Stalin. Destined to become East German head of state, he was a colourless personality and no orator but what he lacked in charisma was more than compensated, in Soviet eyes, by his value as a dedicated functionary.

Under Ulbricht’s direction, politicians with anti-Nazi credentials were persuaded to be part of an anti-fascist coalition, though where Social Democrats and Christian Democrats were appointed mayors they were kept under tight supervision by loyal communists. In quick time Berlin had its own government, the Magistrat, with Dr Werner, a conservative professor of architecture, as Oberbuergermeister and Karl Maron, a communist who had seen out the war in Russia, as his deputy. Trade unions were reconstituted to form a Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB) under communist control. As too were the police who were now the People’s Police, led by Paul Markgraf, a one-time Wehrmacht captain who, captured at Stalingrad, quickly converted to communism. The Berliner Stadtbank, declared a public monopoly, alone was empowered to issue money. News and newsprint were reserved for communist publications while radio pumped out Soviet propaganda. All this and much more was accomplished before the western Allies had even a toehold in Berlin.

Ulbricht and his friends did not have it all their own way. The savagery of the Red Army against the civilian population was hard to erase. Moreover, the systematic destruction of the industrial base (more than 1,000 factories were marked for shipping to Russia) with the consequent loss of jobs led to widespread discontent. But while they were callous in their pursuit of objectives, the Russians were at least consistent in knowing what they wanted.

As the US commander in Germany, Eisenhower was empowered to create a tightly controlled financial and economic structure to allow for heavy reparations. He had no problems with this. With a hatred of Nazism reinforced by his visits to liberated concentration camps, Eisenhower was imbued with the Roosevelt spirit of friendly cooperation with Russia to make Germany pay for its misdeeds. He had public opinion on his side. A proposal put up by US treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, to reduce Germany from an industrial powerhouse to a predominantly rural economy, had wide popular appeal though there were snorts of derision from the Washington inner circle. Leading the realists, defence secretary Henry Stimson presaged a more constructive policy when he declared that ‘a nation like Germany cannot be reduced to peasant level without creating another war’. The Morgenthau formula, he told the president, was an ‘open confession of the bankruptcy of hope’.

Roosevelt was persuaded to distance himself from the Morgenthau Plan. Nonetheless, a watered-down version found its way into orders to American occupation forces. The assumption of collective guilt meant that the German people were to be treated harshly, their living standards kept low and their economic assets used to rebuild the Europe they had tried to destroy. The British military fell into line. All ranks of Anglo-American forces were subject to the non-fraternisation rule and a ban was put on political activity of whatever orientation. The determining factor was the fear of repeating the mistakes of 1918 when, it was said, the Germans had worked hard at being amiable, the better to argue later that they had been misjudged as the aggressors. As a veteran of the first German war, Montgomery was uncompromising, arguing that this time there must be no smokescreen put up by ‘appeals for fair play and friendship … A guilty nation must not only be convicted, it must realise its guilt.’

It was soon obvious that the non-fraternisation rule was unworkable. But it stayed in place, causing needless confusion, embarrassment and irritation all round. The Americans were more flexible than the British. GIs could not resist the importuning by small children who draped themselves over jeeps begging for chewing gum, chocolate and peanuts. From meeting children it was a short step to meeting their older sisters or widowed or lonely mothers. Non-fraternisation was wrecked on sex, admitted one senior officer who went on to say that to a young man ‘bored and fed up with the company of other men, almost anything in skirts is a stimulant and relief’.4 Sixty-five dollars was the standard fine for breaking the non-fraternisation rule. Propositioning German girls became known as ‘the 65 dollar question’. Many took the gamble. In the Anglo-American zones, up to 70,000 post-war babies were born to unmarried mothers.

In April 1945 there was a change of occupancy in the White House. Roosevelt died on the 12th. His successor was his vice president, Harry S. Truman. Two more dissimilar politicians it would be hard to find. Roosevelt was the grand patriarch, on easy terms with Ivy League intellectuals and at home in high society. The short, bespectacled Truman was a farmer’s boy from Missouri. He had no college degree and no pretence at sophistication. His favourite relaxation was a game of poker for small stakes. In his climb from local, to state to national politics he presented himself as a plain-speaking, no nonsense, ordinary sort of guy who could be trusted with the cash box.

In 1934, after a succession of minor jobs, Truman was elected to the Senate. Roosevelt backed his nomination for the vice presidency in the 1944 presidential election, judging him to be a safe, middle-of-the-road adjutant who would know his place. With the election out of the way, Truman had few meetings with Roosevelt and made little attempt to participate directly in foreign affairs. However, with increasing signs of Roosevelt’s frailty, he could not have been unaware of his likely elevation. His preparation took the form of a heavy reading schedule. But while he kept up with the reports that landed on his desk, when the call came he was still a novice. Diplomacy baffled him and his closest associates saw that he was nervous, uneasy and insecure.5

Truman was not short on advice. Most of it came from Roosevelt’s former advisers who contrived to push the late president’s idealistic notion that despite a deep-rooted antipathy to communism, America and Russia could get along for the sake of world peace. When Soviet demands threatened to derail the United Nations almost before it had got underway, it was Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s diplomatic guru, who was sent to Moscow to find a compromise. Having overcome the immediate crisis, Hopkins exuded optimism. A sick man in a hurry (he died in January the following year), Hopkins persuaded Truman that the president could do business with Stalin. Of Churchill, he was less sure.

The prevailing wisdom in Washington held that the British prime minister was best kept at a distance. While given credit as the country that had fought longest against Nazism, Britain was now seen, as the poker-playing Truman might have put it, as a busted flush. On paper this was true enough. When Britain went to war in 1939, the economy rested comfortably on its overseas assets and earnings. Six years later, the cushion had deflated. With a balance of payments deficit that had increased fifteen-fold, Britain was the world’s largest debtor nation.

By contrast, the economic muscle exercised by America was so mighty as to make all others seem puny. With a gross national product that had doubled between 1940 and 1945, it was now three times that of the Soviet Union and five times that of Britain. As to military strength, America had nearly 12 million men in arms against 5 million for Britain, the latter dependent on American weaponry.

Churchill’s counter-argument to raw figures, that Britain still had its empire, did not go down well in a country instinctively opposed to imperialism. Truman could not afford to ignore the impression shared by many Americans that Britain was hanging on to their coat-tails, enjoying the free ride as long as it might last. It was chiefly in response to broadsides from the American press and from Congress that Truman made the arbitrary decision to end Lend-Lease, the programme instituted by Roosevelt in 1941 for supplying America’s allies with warships and warplanes, food, oil and other raw materials needed to fight the war. For Truman to cut this lifeline, even going so far as to recall ships already at sea, was a diplomatic blunder. Churchill was aghast, though the strongest protest came from Stalin who, with some justification, called it a ‘brutal’ act.

The president backpedalled furiously while excusing himself for not having given close enough attention to the relevant documents. Lend-Lease was resumed with the cut-off date left undecided.* But if the slight to Britain was unintended, the feeling in Washington was that it served a purpose in warning Churchill that he could not expect preferential treatment or special regard for his opinions.

For now, Eisenhower and Zhukov took the lead in settling how Germany was to be run. Supreme authority was vested in the commanders-in-chief of the victorious powers. Matters affecting Germany as a whole were to be decided by unanimous agreement between the four occupying countries but when this was unachievable each commander could make decisions for his own zone. Berlin was to be divided into sectors. Though not recognised at the time, except possibly by the Russians, these arrangements made an east–west split almost inevitable.

The approved zonal boundaries required American forces to evacuate territory over a 400-mile front to a depth, in some places, of 120 miles. Churchill warned against the sacrifice of a strong bargaining counter but to no avail. When assurances were sought that Allied forces would retain open access to Berlin by air, road and rail, Stalin prevaricated. The danger signal was ignored, it being taken for granted that settling the details of four-power controls was bound to take time. After visits to London and Paris, where he was met by cheering crowds, Eisenhower flew to Washington for a tumultuous welcome home followed by two weeks of relaxing rounds of golf.

In Eisenhower’s absence from Germany, decisions were left to his deputy, General Lucius Clay. One of the most remarkable figures in post-war Germany, Clay was to play a pivotal role in frustrating Soviet ambitions in Berlin. He did not take full command of the American zone until the spring of 1947 after serving as deputy to Eisenhower’s successor, General Joseph McNarney. But his elevation was no more than a formality. From the first day he arrived in Germany, Clay was in the driving seat.

A tough-minded soldier administrator who combined managerial talent with the ability to inspire loyalty and enthusiasm, Clay was the first American four-star general with no combat experience. ‘He never commanded anything with more firepower than a desk’, said a colleague. It was more than enough. With an insider’s view of Washington’s political hothouse gained from his father, a senator for Georgia, this often waspish chain-smoking organisation man joined Eisenhower’s staff when he was 49. At the start he was as anti-German as any of his colleagues but he soon came to see Germany as an incubator for hatching ‘our ideals of democracy’. This, he believed, was the best insurance against the spread of communism across Europe:

I must say with all the sincerity at my command, that 42 million Germans in the British and American zones represent the strongest outposts against communist penetration that exists anywhere.

To support him in his endeavours, Clay had an Office of Military Government (OMGUS) in Frankfurt with a payroll of 12,000.

For most of his time in Germany, Clay’s opposite number in the British zone was General Sir Brian Robertson, another soldier administrator but one who had served in the Great War. His father had been military governor in Germany in 1918. Robertson had made his reputation by keeping open the supply lines to Montgomery’s Eighth Army, a role he reprised for Field Marshal Alexander in Italy. Deputy to Montgomery in Germany and subsequently to Sir Sholto Douglas, Robertson became military governor in his own right in 1947. With his straight back, clipped moustache and sharply pressed uniform, he was seen by Germans as a caricature of the senior British army officer. Slightly older than Clay, they shared experience as army engineers but otherwise had little in common.

While Clay could be mercurial, ever ready to vent his frustration with Washington by issuing thinly veiled threats to stand down, Robertson, ‘whose imperturbability was as solid as the cliffs of Dover’6, tempered efficiency with a readiness to toe the official line. In their relations with the Russians, both made strenuous efforts to keep on good terms with Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky, the approachable but enigmatic deputy commander of Soviet forces in Germany, who was soon to take over from Zhukov as commander-in-chief.

Food and fuel remained desperately short across Germany as hundreds of thousands of refugees forced out of Soviet-occupied countries to the east, straggled across the zonal boundaries to join the destitute and homeless in the bombed-out cities. Frankfurt’s housing stock was down by two thirds; in Nuremberg, scarcely one house in ten was undamaged; over half the buildings of Hamburg had been reduced to 43 million cubic metres of rubble. Cologne, the target of the first British thousand-bomber raid, was almost a wipe-out. Aachen was described as a ‘fantastic, stinking heap of ruins’.7 Yet, in less than a year after the surrender the population of what was one day to become West Germany had jumped by nearly 4.5 million.8

For the extent of devastation, Berlin was unique. Willy Brandt, a future mayor of Berlin and West German chancellor, called the city ‘a no-man’s-land on the edge of the world with every little garden a graveyard, and above this, like an unmovable cloud, the stink of putrefaction’.9

The gaunt hulk of the Reichstag, burned out in 1933 and blasted by Allied bombing, shadowed the famous Tiergarten park, now a desert of tree stumps and choked waterways.

George Clare, who had known Berlin in the 1930s, returned in 1945 as a Royal Artillery interpreter.

The absence of the constant roar of city life was more unsettling than the sight of bombed or shelled buildings, of jagged outlines of broken masonry framing bits of blue sky. I had been prepared for that, but not for a city hushed to a whisper. Yet Berlin was not a lifeless moonscape. It lived – albeit in something of a zombie trance – mirrored in the dazed looks of many of the people I passed, more often noticeable in men than women. But then the men were mostly old or elderly, bowed and bitter-faced; the few youngish ones who were about – emaciated shadows of the soldiers who had almost conquered an entire continent – looked pathetic and downtrodden in the tattered remains of their Wehrmacht uniforms. The women were of all ages and, with so many men killed and hundreds of thousands in prisoner-of-war camps, they, not as formerly, the Prussian male, dominated the scene.10

A German-American wine merchant turned CIA agent, Peter Sichel, was another whose images of pre-war Berlin were shattered.

Whole areas of the city were totally destroyed; some houses were cut open, with a portion of the house destroyed and a part still suitable for shelter. Apartments that were formerly supplied with central heating could no longer be heated because the fuel was not available. The apartments that were still viable were shared by many families, with one room often accommodating a whole family. Stoves were installed in each room, the stove pipes finding their exit through the nearest window. Food was scarce in spite of rations, rations that did not provide the necessary number of calories …

You can never forget the devastation and misery that war brings once you have seen it. In addition to the physical misery, there was the complete destruction of a society that, but a short time ago, had provided food and shelter, employment, and social contact. All these things were gone. People were left to their own devices, trying to survive the best they could, using whatever they had to exchange for what would enable them to live another day.11

American administration in Germany got off to a bad start. The guiding principles were set out in JCS1607, 6-7 which came into force three days after the capitulation. The letters stood for Joint Chiefs of Staff with the numerals at the end signifying the combined sixth and seventh drafts of the directive. An intense programme of denazification and re-education was to be accompanied by a dismantling of industries with military associations (embracing, by some interpretations, the entire economy) and the payment of reparations, chiefly to Russia.

Immediately there were protests from those who were charged with implementing the directive. Lewis Douglas, Roosevelt’s first budget director and soon to be US ambassador in London, declared it to be the work of ‘economic idiots’, adding, ‘It makes no sense to forbid the most skilled workers in Europe from producing as much as they can for a continent that is desperately short of everything.’ Clay thought the directive to be unworkable but was told to make the best of it. This he did by interpreting it in ways that suited his purpose. The frustration came with trying to get things done.

The early post-war military government was rarely competent. As the western Allies moved into Germany, the tendency of senior commanders was to drop off the least capable of their subordinates. They were tasked with restoring essential services while setting up an administration untainted by Nazism. With little backup (maybe ten or twenty junior officers and other ranks), minimum knowledge of German and fearful of reprisals, the no-hopers saved face by retreating into petty bureaucracy. The majority remained in place after the surrender.

Even after a fresh contingent of civil officers was brought in, standards remained mediocre. In the British zone the Control Commission Germany (CCG), with a staff twice the number of the American complement, was known as Charlie Chaplin’s Grenadiers or Complete Chaos Guaranteed. Preparation for the task ahead was limited to a brief and superficial course on German history and instruction on carrying out basic duties. The ability to speak German was deemed desirable but not essential.

The occupying forces did themselves well, starting with accommodation. Of the 1,050 undamaged houses in Munster, nearly half were requisitioned by the British military.12 The black market thrived on German cameras, binoculars, watches and pistols. The watches were standard Wehrmacht issue and were of higher quality than any that could be found in the Allied ranks. Many were sent home to friends and relatives; others sold or bartered. Cigarettes served as currency. A packet of twenty was liable to pass through many hands before the contents were smoked.

Whenever materials were available, lucky families were allocated prefabricated housing or places in former army camps converted to civilian use. But even so, hundreds of thousands were forced to live rough.

In the cities, water from the tap was no longer fit to drink, the sewers overflowed and gas and electricity cuts were frequent and protracted. Families adapted to make the best of a bad job – for example, getting used to cooking on an upturned electric iron. ‘We could even cook pea soup on it. Beetle peas were one of the few things we could get to eat; the peas had to be soaked and then inside every one there was a beetle which had to be removed. This job took ages, but the soup tasted good.’13

An outstanding contention between the wartime Allies was access to Berlin which, for a succession of spurious reasons, had been denied to all except Soviet forces.

On June 29th, 1945, Clay led an Anglo-American delegation to Zhukov’s Berlin headquarters. Under orders to go gently with the Russians, he made every effort to be reasonable.

We explained our intent to move into Berlin utilizing three rail lines and two highways and such air space as we needed. Zhukov would not recognize that these routes were essential and pointed out that the demobilization of Soviet forces was taxing existing facilities. I countered that we were not demanding exclusive use of these routes but merely access over them without restrictions other than the normal traffic control and regulations which the Soviet administration would establish for its own use. … We did not wish to accept specific routes which might be interpreted as a denial of our right of access over all routes but there was merit to the Soviet contention that existing routes were needed for demobilization purposes.14

Clay accepted a verbal agreement allowing for open access from the west along one main highway, a rail line and two air corridors. This he assumed to be a temporary arrangement that would last only until the Allied Control Council had cleared the way for free movement within and between all four Allied zones. Later, Clay conceded that he had put too much faith in Soviet good intentions. By acceding to Russian control over entry into Berlin, save for four vulnerable routes, Clay had given the advantage to Stalin should he ever decide to make Berlin his exclusive preserve.

The Russians did give way on one point. Self-interest dictated that some accommodation should be found on flying in and out of Berlin. The number of flights had increased substantially since the end of the war and with aircraft of three countries sharing airspace, it was clear that a set of rules had to be devised. In late 1945, the aviation committee of the Allied Control Council proposed six air corridors linking Berlin with Hamburg, Hannover (Bueckeburg), Frankfurt, Warsaw, Prague and Copenhagen. There were Soviet objections to including cities outside Germany but there was agreement on three air corridors, each twenty miles wide: two from the British zone (Hamburg and Hannover) and one, the longest, from the American zone (Frankfurt). As this seemed to be the best deal on offer, the two sides signed acceptance on November 30th. This proved to be the only written compact to emerge from talks on western access to the former German capital.

That easygoing cooperation might lead to Soviet concessions was suggested by the creation of the Berlin Air Safety Centre, where the Russian military was eager to learn from American expertise. When there was something to gain, all was sweetness and light. But it was unsafe to make generalisations. Attempts to establish an Anglo-American base in Berlin proved the point.

An American reconnaissance party to Berlin comprising a convoy of 100 vehicles carrying 500 troops and equipment set off on June 23rd. In command was the ebullient and brash Colonel Frank Howley. It was not an auspicious journey. Entering the Soviet zone at Dessau on the Elbe, Howley heard that there was an upper limit of 50 on the number of trucks that could accompany him. The diminished convoy then moved on to Babelsberg where it was ordered to stop. After more fruitless wrangling, Howley reluctantly decided to return to base. A British contingent was no luckier. Told that the Magdeburg Bridge was closed, they managed to find another crossing but achieved only a token presence.

After two more weeks of inconsequential talks, American and British troops were permitted their official entry into Berlin. It was slow going. The designated overland route, recalled Howley, was ‘the highroad to Bedlam’.

It was jam packed with tanks, trucks and other vehicles, all hurrying toward the previously forbidden city. Russian officers, in captured ramshackle cars and trucks, raced up and down our columns to see that we weren’t escaping with plunder. The road to Berlin was paved with drunks. Some wanted only to exchange toasts in vodka; others behaved like little commissars. When one particularly obstreperous Red Army officer tried to halt a column at a bridge, an American general jumped from his car and personally deposited the struggling Russian in the ditch to allow our column to pass.

A disagreeable summer rain was pelting down when we finally straggled into Berlin late in the afternoon. The Russians had not allowed us to look over our sector before coming in, and none of us knew exactly where to go once we arrived. As it was, hundreds of officers and men milled around, looking for places to stay in the ruins, and most of them, in Class A uniforms, wound up sleeping on the muddy ground in the rain.15

Howley soon discovered that the Russians had dismantled and taken away many of Berlin’s industrial resources including the plant of the big electricity firms in the west – Siemens, Borsig, AEG and Osram.

They had dismantled the refrigeration plant at the abattoir, torn stoves and pipes out of restaurant kitchens, stripped machinery from mills and factories and were completing the theft of the American Singer Sewing Machine plant when we arrived. Over in the British sector, they had taken out generating equipment from the only modern plant in the city. Much of the looted equipment was of dubious use or had been wrecked through ignorance.

The Interallied Kommandatura for Berlin opened for business on July 11th, 1945. Responsible to the Allied Control Council, those appointed to the Kommandatura had wide discretionary powers in governing the city, though in practical terms they were constrained by their decision to accept in total ‘all existing regulations and ordinances issued by the Commander of the Soviet Army Garrison and Military Commandant’.

What was not known at this time, except by Soviet occupiers, was the power that rested with the Magistrat, the German-run but communist-led administrative body set up well before the arrival of the Anglo-American forces. The Magistrat deserved credit for at least the partial restoration of essential services, though less appealing, from the western point of view, was the assumption of authority to remove whatever industrial fixtures were left in the American, British and French sectors. Western proposals for making life easier for themselves as much as for Berliners were either ignored or vetoed by the Soviet representatives on the Kommandatura.

Howley was not alone in wondering if he and his fellow commanders would ever be allowed more than a toehold in the city. But cynicism was in abeyance while Berlin played host to the last top-level get-together of the western Allies.