The Cold War (6 page)

Clearly, a great leap forward in terms of organizational sophistication was required if Western Berlin was to avoid going Red—or dead. Fortunately, even as Murphy was issuing his grim prognostication, measures were being taken to make the operation more viable. Dozens of American C-54s, along with newly arrived British Yorks and Sunderland flying boats (which landed on the Havel
River and Berlin's many lakes), were integrated into the system. The larger aircraft were able to carry bulky items like generators and power plant machinery, necessary to replace energy transmitters from the East. As for food, it was now delivered almost exclusively in dehydrated form, which made for less weight and more efficient packaging, if not for better eating. So many items arrived as powder that a cartoon showed a stork flying into Berlin carrying a diapered bundle labeled POWDERED
BABY.

The most crucial advances were key logistical and technical innovations introduced by General William H. Tunner, a veteran of the “Hump” who arrived in July to become commander of the Combined Airlift Task Force. Tunner's notion of an airlift sounded like something out of a primer by Henry Ford: “There is no frenzy, no flap, just the inexorable process of getting the job done. In a successful airlift, you don't see planes parked all over the place. They're either in the air, on loading or unloading ramps, or being worked on.” Tunner quickly imposed a rigid routine whereby planes were dispatched according to type, airspeed, and cargo loads, which avoided bunching up en route or on the ground. Pre-established flight plans put an end to races through the corridors. Improvements in air traffic control around Berlin made it possible to bring in planes at very short intervals. A special training facility in Great Falls, Montana, prepared air and ground crews to work together efficiently in this exacting environment.

Among inhabitants of the Western sectors, improvements in the airlift did not immediately dispel widespread fears that their “outpost of freedom” would be slowly strangled to death. The first months of the blockade brought significant reductions in daily food rations, which had been meager enough to begin with. Because the Eastern sector was better supplied, West Berliners now began crossing regularly into the East to buy goods (at hugely inflated prices) or to beg handouts from Eastern friends and relatives. The Soviets tolerated such exchanges, believing they would further a material dependency on the East without substantially undercutting the blockade. They remained confident that all of Berlin would soon fall into their hands without their having to fire a shot.

By late fall 1948, however, Tunner's innovations were bearing fruit (albeit dehydrated): Berliners were not starving to death, and the local economy had not ground to a halt. The children of Berlin could take delight in occasional drops of candy attached to tiny parachutes; the kids called the planes “chocolate bombers.” Yet everyone in Berlin understandably worried that the coming months might be a very different story, for harsh weather conditions would both
increase demand for supplies and render their delivery much more difficult. It was estimated that Berlin required a minimum of 5,650 tons of food and coal per day to survive during the winter months; in October the lift had managed 4,760, and in November 3,800—not encouraging statistics. There was another danger as well. Alarmed by the airlift's successes, the Russians were now sending signals that they might not continue to tolerate this Allied expedient. Soviet planes began staging mock air battles over Berlin, while ground batteries practiced antiaircraft drills in the northern corridor. Red fighters even buzzed Allied cargo and passenger planes. If these sorties escalated from harassment to actual shooting, the airlift might lead to war after all.

As it turned out, the Soviet interference, while dangerous and provocative, did not become more extensive; indeed, it abated somewhat with the onset of winter. As so often in the past, the Russians seemed to be counting on nasty weather to come to their aid.

The Western Allies confronted the approach of winter with a new display of commitment to Berlin. On October 22, President Truman authorized the dispatch of sixty-six more C-54s to Germany, raising the total to 225. In November the new airport at Tegel became operational, greatly increasing the city's receiving capacity. Meanwhile, advanced radar installations and improved cockpit instrumentation were making it possible for planes to fly “when birds walked,” as the pilots put it. After returning from a trip to Washington, Clay announced, “The airlift will be continued until the blockade is lifted.”

While the strength of the Western commitment, both material and moral, should not be doubted, the subsequent months turned out to be not quite the white-knuckle experience that everyone had feared. The primary reason is that old General Winter sided this time with Russia's antagonists. January 1949 was a meteorological miracle, with clear skies and no hard frost. During that month, the airlift managed an amazing 5,546 tons a day. With relatively mild conditions continuing through March, and daily deliveries sometimes exceeding 6,000 tons, many Berliners in the Western sector found themselves actually
gaining
weight; a few more months of this and they would begin to look like Bavarians.

At the peak of the Berlin Airlift, in spring 1949, planes were landing every ninety seconds and turning around within six minutes. Many of the planes did not return empty, but “backlifted” export goods or ferried out passengers, mainly sick children and politicians.

Many Berliners were not content simply to grab for this lifeline from the sky;
they contributed their part to make the airlift a success. Residents of the Western zones helped unload planes, worked as ground mechanics, and drove the trucks that distributed food and coal. To supplement the powdered largesse from the West, they grew vegetables on every available scrap of soil. Perhaps most important, they maintained morale by regularly displaying their famous
schnauze
(irreverent wit). “Aren't we lucky,” they joked, “just think what it would be like if the Americans were running the blockade and the Russians the airlift.” A radio program called
Die Insulaner
(“The Islanders”), beamed from the American sector, featured easily identifiable Berlin types offering a running commentary on life in the beleaguered city. Older Berliners still remember the
Insulaner
theme song, which described the sound of four-motored aircraft as “music to the ear” and expressed longing for the day “when the lights are on and the trains are moving.”

All of which is not to say that there was no self-pity or resentment, even toward the Western Allies. Some claimed that Berlin would not be in such a fix if the West had not “given” a third of Germany to the Soviets. Others complained about having to pay high prices for dehydrated foods that they didn't like anyway. Yet on the whole, the Berliners were deeply appreciative of the effort being made on their behalf, and they relished the chance to work hand in glove with the Western Powers against the hated Russians. In the end, they were certainly more thankful and cooperative than their countrymen in the Western zones, who howled in protest over a “Berlin tax” imposed by the new German Economic Council in Frankfurt to help relieve the distress of the city.

By spring 1949 the airlift was so successful that it seemed capable of going on forever. The preparations for a West German state had also proceeded apace, with the drafting and passage of a Basic Law, or constitution, for the new entity. Another epochal creation, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), was formalized in April. Short of going to war, there was little that the Soviets could do to impede these developments. They had blockaded Berlin partly to strengthen their hand in dealing with their former allies on the German question; instead, they were being dealt out of the game.

The Western Powers, moreover, were putting pressure on the Russians through a small but painful counterblockade consisting of trade sanctions that prohibited shipments of crucial raw materials and manufactured goods from the Western zones to the East. The Soviet zone stopped receiving key items such as hard coal from the Ruhr, electrical motors, ball bearings, transmission systems, diamond drills, and optical equipment. The losses were all the more
grievous because the economy in the Russian zone was in terrible shape due to earlier industrial pillaging and ongoing mismanagement by
Sowjetische Aktiengesellschaften—
Soviet-controlled companies known by their apt acronym, SAGS.

Obviously, this was not what the Soviets had intended when they launched their blockade, so they decided to bargain. In March 1949 their delegate to the United Nations Security Council, Yakov Malik, began meeting secretly with his American counterpart, Philip Jessup. After lengthy negotiations, the Soviets agreed to lift their blockade if the West consented to hold a Council of Foreign Ministers meeting on Germany in May. When this deal was announced in early May, many Berliners remained skeptical, fearing a Russian trick. But at one minute after midnight on May 12, 1949, all the lights finally came on in Berlin for the first time in eleven months, and the trains started rolling again between Berlin and western Germany.

There were no lavish celebrations in Berlin when the blockade was lifted. After all, the Cold War that had occasioned it was still very much alive, and everyone knew that the Soviets could cut off the city again if they chose to. In fact, they continued to interfere periodically with surface traffic, causing the Allies to keep flying in supplies through September 1949. Also, Berlin was now split sharply into two sections, with each part increasingly taking on its own character. Berliners had to wonder whether their city would ever become one again.

The Western Allies remained concerned about their own status in the divided city, but for the moment they could take quiet pride in the tremendous accomplishment that the Berlin Airlift represented. Some 238,616 flights had transported over two million tons of supplies into the blockaded city. Seventyseven British and American airmen had lost their lives in the operation. These were painful losses, but remarkably few given the scope and duration of the undertaking.

Like many successful military operations—and the Berlin Airlift was essentially military, despite the participation of some civilian crews from commercial airlines—this enterprise had further payoffs down the line in terms of technical innovations and logistical lessons. “A lot of the procedures that were developed [for the airlift] were used to upgrade the air traffic control system in the United States,” wrote a veteran of the campaign. One of these innovations is taken for granted today by all air travelers: those wandlike torches used to guide airplanes
on the ground. In the military realm, with operations on distant battlefields demanding massive transport of men and material, the lessons of the lift were especially useful.

As for the Berlin Airlift's place in postwar politics, we can see that this initiative, along with the crisis that provoked it, helped to establish the parameters within which the victors and vanquished of World War II would operate for the next half century. By remaining steadfast in Berlin, the Western Allies placed an outer limit on Soviet expansionism in Europe. The Russian threat to Berlin, and the cooperative response it occasioned, helped spur the creation of NATO. The experience was also instrumental in forging the most important new bilateral partnership in the second half of the twentieth century—the bond between the United States and West Germany, founded in May 1949. As Robert Murphy correctly noted, it was through this cooperative effort that “the American people, for the first time in their history, formed a virtual alliance with the German people.”

Alas, Murphy should have said “part of the German people.” East Germany was left out of this embrace, and out of the “economic miracle” that emerged from it. As many feared in 1949, there would be more Berlin crises down the line to test the ties between West Berlin and its Allied protectors. In 1958, Moscow threatened once again to drive the Western Powers out of Berlin and to integrate the entire city into the Soviet-dominated East German state. The fact of the matter, of course, was that the tender testicles of the West had become the loose sphincter of the East—an opening through which thousands of East Germans were fleeing every year. The Berlin Wall that went up in 1961 to stanch the flow was in many ways as cruel as the Berlin Blockade, but it also turned out to be just as double-edged, since it purchased “security” at the price of continued economic stagnation and political oppression.

In 1951, Mayor Reuter of West Berlin, which was now a separate political entity and part of the West German state, dedicated a monument in front of Tempelhof Airport to commemorate the airlift of 1948–49. The structure consisted of a twenty-meter-high concrete slab with three prongs arching toward the West, symbolic of the air corridors into the city. Its base was inscribed with the names of the airmen who died in the lift. Looking at the monument now, in the wake of German reunification, one might propose that it stands not only for the enduring ties between Berlin and the West, but also for an act of faith in a perilous time that helped to make German unity possible fifty years later.

EUGENE B. SLEDGE

When World War II came to its abrupt atomic end in the summer of 1945, few paid much attention to Mao Tse-tung and his Chinese Communists. They seemed, as John Lewis Gaddis has written, “little more than an obscure group of revolutionaries who engaged in long marches, lived in caves, and lectured one another on their own peculiar understanding of Marxist-Leninism.” Even Stalin was inclined to put them down then, calling the Chinese Communists “Margarine Marxists,” substitutes for the real thing. Though Mao's enclaves occupied considerable territory, mainly in North China, they were disconnected and concentrated mostly in rural areas, lacking significant urban bases. Mao's armed forces were small, numbering no more than three hundred thousand, many of whom belonged to scattered guerrilla bands. With the surrender of the Japanese, the Communists saw a chance to consolidate many of these enclaves. They also began to push into Manchuria, where, after their August 1945 blitzkrieg, the Soviets were busy stripping factories of heavy machinery and herding off thousands of Japanese prisoners to work in Siberia as slave laborers. At this point, curiously, the Soviets had friendlier dealings with Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalist government than with Mao's Communists. No one yet contemplated a Far Eastern Iron Curtain.