Berlin 1961 (52 page)

At 11:00 a.m. Berlin time, Lightner cabled Rusk his first full report, before that having only sent partial information bursts through a so-called critical channel that didn’t require the same clearances. He reported simply: “Early morning Aug 13 East German regime introduced drastic control measures which have effect of preventing entry into West Berlin of Sovzone and East Berlin residents.” He said the move was “evidently as a result of increased refugee flow with attendant economic loss to GDR and prestige loss to socialist camp.”

Lightner didn’t cable again until 10:00 p.m. that night, when he wrapped up the mission’s best knowledge of what had happened in the previous twenty-four hours. He put his emphasis on the massive military deployment, including significant backup by the Soviets, which was “designed to intimidate people from the outset and thus nip in the bud any possible resistance [by showing] civilian disobedience would be ruthlessly suppressed.”

He concluded that the sizable Soviet military mobilization throughout East Germany revealed Moscow’s doubts about the reliability of Walter Ulbricht’s military. He also noted, however, that the East German authorities were allowing Western military and civilian personnel to pass freely to and from East Berlin. Lightner reported that eight hundred new refugees had registered in West Berlin between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. on the first day of the city’s physical division, having either crossed on August 12 or “through canals and fields today.”

NEAR POTSDAMER PLATZ, WEST BERLIN
9:00 A.M., SUNDAY, AUGUST
13, 1961

West Berliners’ mood of disorientation and confusion shifted to rage as the morning wore on. West Berlin policeman Klaus-Detlef Brunzel, new at his job and only twenty years old, arrived for duty at Potsdamer Platz only to discover how drastically the world had changed in just a few hours.

On the previous evening, he had worked a routine shift, confiscating contraband and chitchatting with the prostitutes who loitered on the vacant, war-flattened square, which until that day had been an excellent spot for them to attract clientele from both sides of the city. Now he saw only East German border police in their place, using jackhammers to dig holes for concrete pillars, from which they were stringing barbed wire. Brunzel had only been four years old when World War II ended, but he feared a new war had begun as he watched East German tanks track him with their gun barrels as he walked back and forth in front of them.

By late morning, a crowd of angry West Berliners had gathered at the border, throwing stones at the East German police and calling them pigs and Nazis. Brunzel took cover “to avoid being hit by masonry thrown by our own people!”

Before long, the West Berlin fury turned on absent American soldiers, protectors who they felt should have saved them from this fate. All the rhetoric about American commitment to Berlin’s freedom had not produced a single U.S. rifle company.

U.S. MILITARY HEADQUARTERS, CLAYALLEE, WEST BERLIN
SUNDAY MORNING, AUGUST
13, 1961

General Watson, the American commandant in Berlin, had felt hamstrung by his reporting lines and instructions. He had also doubted his own judgment, having been in Berlin just three months.

He had considered Berlin a sufficiently calm place to have relocated his mother-in-law to the city. He compared the divided city’s role in the U.S.–Soviet standoff to the “quiet in the eye of the cyclone.” His time in Berlin had been spent less on military response and more on learning German, reducing his golf handicap, and playing what he called “elderly doubles” tennis with his wife.

In profiling the fifty-two-year-old commander, the Berlin press wrote of his fondness for horseback riding, bridge, light opera, and reading paperback mysteries. Watson was resigned to leading a command where he was so outnumbered by the enemy that he knew West Berlin would have been impossible to defend against a concerted Soviet conventional attack. Yet even if he had had the troops, he still lacked the independent authority to use them.

The bureaucracy of getting things done in Berlin was the worst Watson had experienced in the military, and that said a lot. He had one reporting line directly to U.S. Ambassador Walter Dowling, who sat three hundred miles away in Bonn. His second reporting line was to General Bruce Clarke, the U.S. Army Commander in Europe, headquartered in Heidelberg. Then there was a third line to NATO Commander General Lauris Norstad in Paris. Watson’s orders came from all three, and they were rarely consistent.

There were also times, like the night of August 12–13 and the following morning, when all those channels fell mostly silent. Watson’s instinct in such times of doubt was to stand whatever ground he occupied and hope for the best. For weeks, his instructions from the Pentagon had more often than not included warnings that he should not allow himself to be provoked by the East Germans or Soviets into a military action that could escalate into violent conflict, as if his superiors had known what was coming. So Watson played it safe in the early hours of August 13 and did nothing but observe the operation.

The East Germans hadn’t crossed any of his lines. They had not set a foot in any of the non-Soviet Allied zones. And for all the Soviet military activity around the city, his scouts had not reported any major movement inside Berlin. So Watson saw no reason to wake up General Clarke or General Norstad. The State Department folks would alert Ambassador Dowling in Bonn, so Watson didn’t contact him, either.

Early that morning, Watson had sent a helicopter over East Berlin airspace to monitor the situation. Yet he opted not to dispatch U.S. troops to the newly reinforced border. A show of U.S. force might have satisfied Berliners looking for a timely demonstration of American commitment, but Watson’s superiors would have considered it a reckless provocation.

Watson felt justified in showing such restraint at 7:30 a.m., when Colonel Ernest von Pawel reported in to his emergency operations center in the basement of U.S. headquarters on Clayallee. Von Pawel told Watson that four Soviet divisions had moved out of their usual garrison areas in East Germany and had surrounded Berlin.

At age forty-six, “Von” was the crucially important chief of the U.S. Military Liaison Mission to the Commander in Chief, Group of Soviet Forces, Germany. Though his name had the ring of German nobility, Von’s roots and manner were pure Laramie, Wyoming. He had won a reputation with Watson for getting things right.

Just four days earlier, Von had predicted during the regular meeting of the Berlin Watch Committee that Ulbricht was going to put up a “wall.” The committee was a secret interagency intelligence group in the city whose job it was to raise alarm bells at the first indication of hostile military action. Though no one had paid attention then, that gave Von credibility with his commander now.

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas McCord, head of the U.S. Army’s 513th Military Intelligence Group, Berlin, had been studying a number of pictures and reports of large quantities of construction material—concrete blocks, barbed wire, and other supplies—stockpiled near the city’s dividing line. But the material was in so many places and had been ordered by so many sources that his men had difficulty interpreting what they were seeing.

“Do you think they plan to build a wall, Tom?” Colonel David Goodwin, the chief of intelligence on General Watson’s staff, had asked at the meeting. McCord responded that he had three sources and they were contradictory. One “reliable” but untested source said there would be a wall and it was “imminent.” But two sources, who were judged as more reliable, had said there would be nothing of the sort.

All eyes had then turned to von Pawel. He reminded the group that during World War II the Germans had built a wall in Warsaw sealing off the Jewish ghetto, a comparison that seemed outlandish at the time. “If you think a wall is the least likely option,” he had said, “then that is where I place my bet, because we’ve never outguessed the Soviets before.” The problem was that von Pawel had lacked any hard evidence at the time to support his conviction.

The deputy chief of the CIA base, John Dimmer, dismissed von Pawel’s notion. It would be “political suicide” for Ulbricht to build a wall, he had said, and with that he had swayed the group to conclude a wall was the “least likely” of the many alternatives they were discussing.

Von Pawel’s report on the morning of August 13 left no room for doubt about what was occurring. Hiding under a bridge in East Germany from 4:00 to 6:00 a.m., one of his men had seen a whole Soviet division rumble down the Autobahn. Von himself had counted a hundred tanks while making his way to Potsdam. He reported to Watson:

The Soviet 19th Motorized Rifle Division, combined with the 10th Guards Tank Division and possibly the 6th Motorized Rifle Division, moved out early this morning and moved into position around Berlin. Elements of the 1st East German Army Motorized Rifle Division moved out from Potsdam and are presently unlocated. Soviet units deployed and moved off the autobahn, deploying units into small outposts and roadblocks composed of three or four tanks, an armed personnel carrier and several troops. These outposts were established 3 or 4 kilometers apart, and appear completely to ring Berlin.

It was an elaborately and perfectly organized operation, about which U.S. military intelligence had reported nothing in advance. What von Pawel’s report meant to Watson was that Soviet troops were primed to pounce in such numbers that they would overwhelm his paltry force if it dared respond.

It was 10:00 a.m. before the three Western commandants—the French, the British, and the American—and their staffs met on the Correnplatz, at Allied headquarters in the suburban Dahlem district of the American sector. All had been taken by surprise—and none had any good ideas about how to respond. Watson chaired the meeting by the coincidence of their monthly rotation. Yet for all Watson’s lack of Berlin experience, he knew how to count. His twenty-seven tanks, less than one for every mile of the West Berlin–East Berlin internal border, and six 105-millimeter howitzers were not sufficient to take on the Soviet army and their East German clients.

REUTERS NEWS AGENCY OFFICE, EAST BERLIN
MID-MORNING, SUNDAY, AUGUST
13, 1961

Mary Kellett-Long looked out their East Berlin office window and saw an angry and growing crowd that had been building in size with every hour of the morning. It had never struck Mary before how close their apartment at Schönhauser Allee was to the Berlin border, just four hundred yards away, as the line had never been so clearly defined.

Most of the crowd was made up of furious East Berlin youth who saw their connection to the West cut off. Her husband, Adam, who by then had made his way into the crowd, thought they looked like angry soccer fans after a heartbreaking defeat, looking for someone to take it out on. Police and the paramilitary factory forces pushed back the line of protesters, which by then was twenty deep.

When the explosions began, Mary feared that East German units had fired on civilians and perhaps her husband. But the blasts were the sound of police firing tear-gas canisters into the protesters, who responded by running in all directions.

Adam recalled a more innocent time. Not long before August 13, a Vopo had stopped his car for a routine check as he returned from a West Berlin shopping trip. As he searched the trunk, Adam pulled a can of baked beans out of a bag and threw it in the air saying,
“Das ist eine Bombe!”
The police officer fell to the ground and his colleagues pulled their guns. The Vopo then dusted himself off and laughed, letting the reporter pass. Clearly, the time for practical jokes was over.

Like the few sporadic protests that had occurred across East Germany that day, the demonstration lacked the scale, determination, or reach to challenge Ulbricht’s victory. In contrast to 1953, Ulbricht was firmly in charge, well prepared, and enjoyed the full military and political support of the Soviets. He had prevented any organized opposition both through the element of surprise and the deployment of thousands of police and soldiers at every strategic point throughout the city.

Ulbricht’s lieutenants used water cannons at several key locations to keep riotous West Berliners at bay. As long as the Allied troops stayed put in West Berlin, as they seemed determined to do, Ulbricht knew he could handle anything East Berliners or West Berliners might throw at him. Khrushchev’s insurance policy—the Soviet tanks waiting in Berlin’s hinterland—would not be necessary.

M
arshal Konev had won his second battle of Berlin, this time with no bloodshed.

Under four-power agreements, Kennedy would have had every right to order his military to knock down the barriers put up that morning by East German units that had no right to operate in Berlin. On July 7, 1945, the U.S., Soviet, British, and French military governors of Germany had agreed that they would ensure unrestricted movement throughout Berlin. That had been reconfirmed again by the four-power agreement that had ended the Berlin blockade.

However, Kennedy had made clear through several channels before August 13 that he would not respond if Khrushchev and the East Germans restricted their actions to their own territory. Beyond that, Konev had sent a clear message about the cost of intervention through his massive military mobilization. Not only had Soviet troops ringed Berlin in a manner the Allies could not miss, but Khrushchev had gone a step further, putting his missile forces on full alert throughout Eastern Europe.

Nonetheless, it had still been a tense night for Konev. If fighting had been necessary, he had doubted whether the East German military and police forces would have remained loyal, despite their training, indoctrination, and careful supervision. Hundreds among their ranks already had fled as refugees, and many had relatives in the West.

Konev had been confident that East German soldiers, militia, and police would put up their border barriers properly, but he had doubted how they would have responded if Allied troops had moved forward to tear down the barricades and restore free movement.