GEORGE KENNAN WAS WORRIED. STILL Believing in the Marshall plan, still believing that containment was working, he was convinced Washington was overreacting to Soviet provocations.
The Czech coup had been predictable—indeed, Kennan had predicted it. So the surge of support it unleashed for a western defense pact was, he felt, setting the stage for a dangerous escalation of tensions. In a Policy Planning Staff paper written during the coup, he suggested that the success of the Marshall Plan might even help bring the Soviets to the table. Shortly after, he gave an off-the-record press briefing in which he opined that a “spectacular retreat of Soviet and Communist influence in Europe may be expected” within six months.1
Determined to help it along, Kennan advised a quiet démarche to Moscow in March. Truman approved it late the following month, and Marshall instructed Ambassador Smith in Moscow to approach Molotov with a carefully drafted oral statement. After warning Molotov at length that Moscow would be making “a tragic error” in assuming Washington would not defend its interests, Smith was to tell him that “the door” was nonetheless “always wide open for full discussion and the composing of our differences.”2
Molotov agreed to receive the “old spy,”3 as he called the general. Armed with intercepts of French cables from Berlin to Paris, he was aware of Franco-American tensions over the pace of West German unification and suspension of reparations to Moscow.4 The meeting was thus a golden opportunity to rupture Allied solidarity. Molotov greeted Smith on May 4, 1948, in a manner the latter described as “grave, attentive and courteous.”
Chief of staff to Eisenhower during the war, Smith was able, orderly, candid, straight-talking, “all business.” He had a harsh, powerful voice, intimidated subordinates, and made little effort to personate a diplomat. Upon learning that Smith would be sent to Moscow in the spring of 1946, Eisenhower remarked that it would “serve those bastards right.”5
Script in hand, Smith assured Molotov that America’s “entire history was [a] refutation of any suspicion of a policy which involved aggressive war.” But he stressed his country’s concern over Soviet behavior in Czechoslovakia. The Czech government had accepted the ERP conference invitation, and withdrew it “immediately following [the] visit of Masaryk and Gottwald to Moscow.” The United States, he said, “did not oppose Communism because of its Marxian ideology, but purely and simply because we had seen repeated instances,” as in Prague, “of Communist minorities coming into power by illegal means and against the will of the majority. . . . The US remained convinced that these minority coup d’etat would have been quite impossible without the moral and physical support of the USSR.”
“No one,” Molotov responded in a May 9 follow-on meeting, had “been able to find any facts to prove these false allegations. Nor can anyone state with authority that the Communists have used illegal means.” The fault lay instead, he said, with “rightist circles . . . that wish to induce changes by violence.” As for the United States, “it was well-known that the western European and American press were saying openly” that the military alliance and bases it was establishing “were directed against the USSR.” And “events in Greece are not the only example of [its] interference in the internal affairs of other states.”6
The two agreed on nothing, though Smith fulfilled his mission by transmitting the open-door message. Molotov ran the text up to Stalin, who read that part with delight—scribbling “Ha-ha!” in the margins.7 Here, he saw, was a chance to undermine Truman with American allies and voters. Kennan had been wrong. “Spectacular retreat” was not on Stalin’s agenda.
Though Molotov had agreed that the talk with Smith would be private, TASS published the Soviet version of it on May 10.8 The State Department was caught unprepared.9 Stalin, it concluded, was trying “to create the impression . . . that the US had been forced to appeal to the USSR for a settlement.” This, he hoped, would “undercut US leadership . . . by sowing distrust among our friends who were not consulted in advance.”10 Indeed, two days later an angry Bevin was, thanks to the TASS release, himself subjected to angry questioning in Parliament over what he had known and when he had known it.11
But Stalin wasn’t finished. “We do not conduct any cold war,” he wrote in a rare note to himself that month. “The cold war is being waged by the U.S.A. and its allies.”12 On the propaganda front, he was fighting back.
Stalin had an accomplice in the U.S. presidential race. According to Gromyko’s memos to Stalin from Washington,13 Henry Wallace began telling him of his plans to travel to Moscow sometime before April, using Czechoslovak U.N. ambassador Vladimír Houdek as a secret intermediary. Meeting face-to-face on April 2, Wallace and Gromyko first discussed Stalin’s questions about prospective U.S. presidential candidates—including Wallace himself, who would shortly be chosen by the Progressive Party and endorsed by the Communist Party.14 They then turned to Wallace’s agenda.
Wallace wanted “a statement on the major questions of Soviet-American relations” to be delivered “by Generalissimo Stalin, or by Wallace in agreement with Stalin.” It should emphasize, similarly to Smith’s later message, that “in relations between the USSR and USA there are no . . . differences that could not be resolved peacefully.” Such a statement, Wallace said, “would be important from the perspective of influencing general opinion in the USA.” He stressed that “the information spread about Czechoslovakia [in Washington] is a lie,” but that there was a “necessity of undertaking something from [Moscow’s] end with the aim of convincing [the American] public.”
Stalin was intrigued. Though “a trip” by Wallace “would do harm,” he scribbled in the margins of the transcript, “a statement would be helpful.” As for delivery, it would be “better if it’s done by Wallace,” Stalin wrote, “with Stalin stating he’s in solidarity.”15
On April 27, Gromyko cabled Molotov that he had received, through Houdek, a draft of Wallace’s proposed “Open Letter to Premier Stalin.” Stalin reviewed it line by line, scribbling “yes” next to the material he agreed with and edits elsewhere.
Headlining a campaign rally before nineteen thousand at Madison Square Garden on May 11, the day after the TASS publication of the Smith-Molotov dialogue, Wallace read out the “letter,” complete with Stalin’s edits. Disparaging Smith’s message for demonstrating “the same self-righteousness which has led to international crisis,” he declared that the open-door part nonetheless vindicated his long-standing claim that peace was in reach. To bring it about, however, Washington needed to change its policies. He called for the Marshall Plan to be “converted” into a U.N. effort to create an “economically unified Europe,” as opposed to the divided one Truman was creating. He further called for the “re-establishment of a peace-loving German government in charge of a united Germany which is obligated to the strict fulfilment of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements.” This was a swipe at American actions in western Germany.16
On May 17, Moscow radio broadcast Stalin’s effusive reply. The New York Times published the translation. Wallace’s “important document,” Stalin declared, had rectified “the inadequacy of the statement of the United States Government of May 4”—the Smith message—by providing “a concrete program for peaceful settlement of the differences between the USSR and the United States.”17
Stalin’s duplicity blindsided the State Department yet again. “The distorted publication of the Smith-Molotov exchange,” U.S. chargé Elbridge Durbrow cabled Marshall from Moscow, “successfully confused Europe.” Now, “Stalin’s open letter is primarily designed to confuse America, lend the appearance of substance to the vacuity of Wallace’s declarations on foreign affairs and thus emasculate American policy.”18 Kennan would later tell Smith that the department “unwittingly ran head on into a neat little arrangement between the Kremlin and some of the people in the Wallace headquarters.” Wallace, however, kept his Houdek-Gromyko channel to Stalin a secret, shielding himself from allegations that he was operating as a Soviet agent.
Kennan was “horrified by the ease with which the press [was] taken in by the Russian maneuver.” He was also distraught that there had been something so “seriously wrong with my analysis.”19 When he made the prediction that communism would stage a “spectacular retreat,” he had failed to foresee how the political tectonics would be shifting in Stalin’s favor. In Greece, Communists assassinated Justice Minister Christos Ladas on May 1; the panicked government declared martial law. In China, Mao’s Communists were gaining ground on Chiang’s Nationalists.20 And in West Berlin, the Soviets were tightening their chokehold. Soon enough, Stalin reasoned, the Allies would abandon the city or their planned West German state.
THOUGH STALIN AND MOLOTOV WERE trying negotiators, the Americans would repeatedly mistake their temperaments and tactics for genuine barriers to resolving the standoff in Germany. The problem was not personalities, but the untenable foundation of the Yalta-Potsdam accords: the idea that the other’s understanding of joint power in Germany could be changed through persuasion, coercion, or new circumstances. This foundation was now in rubble, owing to the urgency of dealing with the German economy. And at the heart of the conflict over how it should operate was the institution of money.
In the capitalist West, money and banking allowed autonomous individuals to make informed decisions on working, saving, investing, and exchanging. In the communist East, they allowed the state to direct resources without interference. After 1945, the Soviet Union used state direction of money and banks to eliminate private enterprise, stop unwanted spending, and prevent foreign trade from disrupting domestic economic plans (through inconvertible currencies).
In Berlin, now, there was no form of currency or banking regime that would accommodate western-style free enterprise without disrupting Soviet control of the city’s economy and that of the eastern zone more widely. Soviet transportation blockages and currency demands were, therefore, two sides of the same coin. Free Allied movement into and out of the city, together with central bank co-powers, meant uncontrolled commerce, and therefore an uncontrolled communist polity.21 This was not only unacceptable but a contradiction in terms.
The issue of Germany’s postwar currency had emerged as a source of contention as early as 1944, when FDR’s treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, unwitting as to the lengths his deputy would go to support Soviet economic interests, put Harry Dexter White in charge of organizing the German occupation notes. In overruling the director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Alvin Hall, who opposed Soviet demands for copies of the American currency plates, White lied in claiming that the Combined Chiefs of Staff had “directed” that such copies be handed over. The Soviets, who he said had to be “trusted,” went on to print up over 78 billion occupation marks—eight times what the Americans did. Notably, the mass of marks injected by the Soviets was almost identical to the number of reichsmarks put into circulation by the Nazis, while the smaller number of American marks was consistent with estimates of the number of reichsmarks that would have kept prices stable.
The Truman administration halted White’s generosity in July 1945, making the Soviet marks—fortunately distinguishable by a dash in the serial number—invalid in western Germany. The Soviets, who knew the marks were worthless, denied their soldiers the possibility to convert them to rubles. Red Army troops therefore bought what they could with them from American GIs, typically paying on the order of 10,000 marks for a $4 watch. The lucky watch seller would then convert the marks to dollars with the U.S. Treasury at the official rate, established by White, of 10 to 1, thereby netting himself a handsome $996 profit. The total cost to the American taxpayer, in current-dollar terms, was as high as $6.75 billion.22
In 1946, Clay’s currency experts called for the creation of a new western mark, the deutschmark, to replace the old one. A new currency would achieve maximum psychological effect. Clay proposed to the Allied Control Council that the notes be printed up under quadripartite control in the American sector of Berlin, and subsequently issued by a new central bank. The Soviets, who wanted the ability to print and issue notes at will to cover occupation costs, proposed a two-plant solution—with one in Leipzig, in their zone—that would allow them to evade western oversight.
Wrangling between the two sides went on into 1948. Each suspected the other’s intentions for a shared arrangement, and each worried about the cross-zonal impact of the other issuing its own notes. But by March 1948, separate Germanys seemed unavoidable in Washington. West German inflation was running at roughly 10 percent a month: at the official exchange rate, a carton of American cigarettes cost about $2,000, and would rise to $2,300 by June.23 Royall thought the administration had been patient enough waiting for Soviet cooperation on reform. The time had come to act. “We have tried to maintain an ‘open door’ to the Soviets in all our actions in Germany,” he wrote to Stimson, “but we cannot permit continued stagnation in that country and still hope to revive Western Europe’s economy in keeping with the objective of the ERP.” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Frank Wisner wrote to Lovett on March 10, advising that Clay be told that quadripartite currency reform was no longer a U.S. policy objective. This was, he acknowledged, a “definite move toward recognition of the East-West partition of Germany.”
Accepting the Army’s verdict that the currency stalemate was playing into Soviet hands, Lovett directed Clay to engineer a break-off in talks.24 Sokolovsky obliged on March 20, storming out of a meeting in choreographed pique. This served both sides’ purposes. Sokolovsky issued new orders “strengthening control on the external borders of Greater Berlin,”25 and State stepped up transition to the deutschmark.
On May 18, the Soviet government approved a plan to counteract western currency reform. In the event the Allies went ahead, the Soviet Military Administration would have its own East German currency at the ready, and would “allow circulation in the entire area of Greater Berlin exclusively to the new banknotes of the Soviet occupation zone.”26
Facing Soviet pressure, Washington struggled to keep its coalition together. Bidault and his prime minister, Schuman, had to maneuver the London Accord through the French Assembly, roughly half of whose members, mainly Gaullists and Communists, opposed an independent West Germany—or even a West German currency.27 Knowing, as Clay put it, that “the French . . . have no air transport worthy of the name,” the Russians ratcheted up road, bridge, and railway blockages with an eye to boosting the “no” vote on June 16. “French non-acceptance,” Clay worried, “will be interpreted [as] unwillingness to face [the] USSR.”28 It was, in the end, a close-run affair. But with the Socialists coming on board at the last moment, the vote was 297–289 in favor of the London Accord and 300–286 for the deutschmark.29 Allied unity had held, for now.
ON JUNE 26, HILDE SPIEL, the Vienna-born writer who had settled in London before the war, talked her way onto an American military aircraft from Frankfurt to Berlin. Warned of the risk of hostile Soviet air maneuvers, she was ordered to don a parachute. The plane shook violently as it entered the narrow, turbulent corridor permitted by the Soviets.
Disembarking unsteadily after vomiting, she found a city in a state of high tension. Berliners out scavenging for food returned to crumbling homes with no electricity, the main source having been cut off in the East. The drone of Allied supply planes overhead was relentless. The roars frightened Spiel, reminding her of the Blitz. But, strangely, the enemy was still invisible. At the theater, Russians greeted her as before. She didn’t know what to make of it.30
A currency war had just broken out, but the effects had yet to sink in. A week earlier, on June 18, Clay, with Robertson and Koenig, the British and French military governors, had given Sokolovsky a mere few hours’ notice before publicly declaring the currency changeover in the west of the country (though not Berlin), which would take place on Sunday the 20th. The angry Russian general called the move “illegal” and promised “actions to protect the economy of the Soviet zone.”31
On June 19, the Soviets announced that “banknotes issued in the Western occupation zones will not be allowed to circulate in the Soviet zone or in ‘Greater Berlin,’ which is situated in the Soviet zone and is economically a part thereof.” Fearing disorder in the Eastern zone, which would be flooded with old reichsmarks declared worthless in the West, Moscow also blocked all interzonal passenger traffic and incoming road traffic, while instituting an inspection regime for inbound trains. Use of the deutschmark in the east was banned.
Refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the transport restrictions, Clay, after warning Soviet officials, sent in a train to challenge them. Following a thirty-six-hour standoff, its crew was overpowered and a Soviet locomotive hauled it back to Helmstedt, on the western frontier.
Unable to provision his garrison by ground, Clay began ferrying in supplies by air.32 As tensions climbed, currency experts from each side argued bitterly over solutions for Berlin. On June 22, the Americans offered a proposal for a new Berlin currency, under four-power administration. The Soviets rejected it. The British offered a compromise, with the Allies accepting the Soviet mark but placing it under four-power control. Western access rights would be restored. The Soviets, however, spurned all notions of combined control or guaranteed access rights. “We give notice to you and to the German population of Berlin,” they told the Allies, “that we shall apply . . . sanctions that will ensure that only one currency will circulate in Berlin” as of June 26, “the currency of the Soviet zone.”33 This, Clay concluded, “would have placed Berlin financially completely in Soviet hands.”34 The Allied governors declared the Soviet decree invalid in the west of the city, and threatened to introduce the deutschmark in their sectors if the Soviets went ahead.
The local Berlin city government, the Magistrat, which functioned with limited authority allowed it by the ACC, now found itself in an impossible political situation. Whose orders would it obey? After emotional debate, it ruled that the Soviet order did not apply outside the Soviet sector. But the elected City Council had the final word. On June 23, the Soviets shuttled in hundreds of SED demonstrators in army trucks hours in advance of its 4 p.m. meeting. With raucous commotion in the hall delaying the start for several hours, the members voted to back the Magistrat. As legislators exited the building into the throngs of protesters, Soviet-sector police helped them identify those who had voted with the West. Many were severely beaten.
That same day, the Soviets announced the introduction of their own east mark into Berlin and eastern Germany, effective June 24. Gummed stamps were attached to old reichsmark bills until new bills were ready. On the 24th, Allied officers declared the Soviet initiative null and void in West Berlin and introduced the deutschmark into the city. To keep room for compromise, though, the bills were stamped with a “B” to distinguish them from non-Berlin deutschmarks. This would facilitate withdrawal at a later date.
Sokolovsky announced that the Allied military government had ceased to exist, and began isolating the three western sectors with a full-scale blockade. He suspended all road, rail, and barge traffic to and from the sectors owing to unspecified “technical difficulties.” He cut off electricity and food supplies from the east because of “coal shortages” and the need to prevent western currency from circulating illegally. He moved eight Soviet combat divisions into assembly points near the interzonal border. Reports emerged of Russian barrage balloons being placed near Tempelhof airfield in the American sector to disrupt landings.
The French had once again been dragged along against their will. Berlin Commandant General Jean Ganeval warned Clay of “incalculable consequences which will undoubtedly not be confined to Berlin.” Bidault thought “the Western powers [would] find it very difficult to stay there for more than a few weeks unless there [were] a radical change in relations with the Soviet authorities.” Those authorities were in turn receiving reports from their “leading comrades in [eastern] Germany,” indicating that “the Western powers would [soon] be forced to . . . surrender their positions in Berlin to the Soviet Union.”
Clay remained defiant. By the end of June, 480 relief flights were landing each day, one plane every three minutes. “I may be the craziest man in the world,” he told Berlin’s SPD leader Ernst Reuter, “but I’m going to try the experiment of feeding this city by air.”35
A BLACK MARKET MONEY EXCHANGE sprang up near west Berlin’s zoo train station, by the Tiergarten. East marks, which circulated freely in the west, traded at four or five to one against west marks, which were banned in the east. Newspapers sold in east marks, though their printing was paid for in west marks. Sugar sold in east marks; raisins in west marks. Potatoes were priceless, having not been seen in weeks. Still, most Berliners, 84 percent in one poll, believed the Allies would sustain the city with adequate food. When the Soviets offered to feed West Berliners who registered in the East a mere 2,050 (out of 2.4 million) showed up.36
In western Germany broadly, the new Allied currency, combined with price decontrols and other liberalizing reforms overseen by bizonal economics director Ludwig Erhard, had an immediate regenerative effect on business. “Almost overnight, hoarded goods in manufacturing plants began to move to the stores,” Clay wrote to Byrnes. “Even fruits and vegetables from the farm once more went on sale in the market place. . . . Germany is going back to work. . . . [T]he people on the street visibly have taken a new hold on life.”37
Yet at the time the outlook was ominous. There were now two police forces in the city. Two water and sewage systems. Two gas and light systems—though those in the West operated only during daylight.
Hilde Spiel could feel the change that had swept over Berlin since she arrived a few short weeks ago. Russian officials she knew well were now indifferent or hostile. Being no cold warrior herself, she was dismayed by the change. “Between us and the Russians,” she lamented in her diary, “it is all over.”
The East Berlin Tägliche Rundschau newspaper announced that the Soviet Military Administration was now “the only legitimate occupation authority” in the city. Rumors spread rapidly, fueled by radio reports, that the water supply was threatened by a power cutoff to the city sewage plants and that the western powers were evacuating. As Clay and other Allied authorities tried to reassure Berliners, Reuter and fellow city leaders organized mass meetings—one bringing out over eighty thousand—to rally resistance, to call out the Communists for using starvation as a weapon, and to appeal to the Allies for protection and support.38
The Soviets, meanwhile, struggled to communicate one message to Germany and another about Germany to the nations they dominated in the East. In an effort to, on the one hand, undermine the “so-called Marshall plan,” the Warsaw Declaration of the East bloc foreign ministers condemned it for placing West German industry into “the fetters of the American . . . capitalist monopolies.” One of the centerpieces of this policy, it said, was currency reform, the creation of a new west mark, which by serving the interest of such monopolies created unemployment and misery. Western Germany was being forced into “enslavement,” put to the service of “the military-strategic aims” of Washington and London and the emerging western security alliance. In an effort to, on the other hand, justify the Soviet Union’s ever-expanding control in eastern Europe, the declaration invoked the specter of German “militarism,” which the Anglo-American plan sought to revive and direct eastward.39 In the end, the Soviets failed to convince either Germans or their East European victims that they were defending them or their interests.
Soviet and western soldiers and police intermingled in Berlin in an atmosphere of crisis. When Sokolovsky’s car was stopped for speeding in the western zone, guns were drawn and angry words exchanged before the two sides backed down. The general returned to his headquarters without further incident. But a mistake on either side could have triggered a violent confrontation that would have been difficult to contain.
An intense, belated debate now raged within the Truman administration over Western vulnerability in Berlin. How far would the Soviets go? Would they starve Berliners? How would they react if ignored or resisted? Was the Allied presence in Berlin still tenable? What were the costs of withdrawing?
“We are in Berlin by right,” an emotional Kennan wrote to a friend, “and do not propose to be ridden out by any blackmail.” The United States could not abandon Berlin, or “the world would know well enough that we are turning 2,400,000 people over to all the rigors and terrors of totalitarian rule.”40 Others in the administration, however, were unsure it could be avoided, the president included—though he was determined to try.
For his part, Stalin was unwilling to part with Moscow’s unassailable right under Potsdam: veto power over the political architecture of Germany—all of it. “The most complete expression of [America’s] aggressive interests is the incorporation of West Germany and the Ruhr . . . into the ‘Marshall Plan,’ ” wrote foreign ministry official D. Ignatiev:
In order to preserve the military-industrial potential of the Ruhr and Western Germany as a whole, the Americans presented demands for the cessation of the dismantlement of German factories for reparations. . . . [This was] in violation of all existing quadripartite arrangements of the occupying powers. . . .
“The Marshall Plan” is aimed at the transformation of the Ruhr and the whole of West Germany into the main military-industrial base of American imperialism in Europe and the transformation of Marshallized countries in the areas dependent on this base. . . .
The Anglo-American economic policy in West Germany promotes German revisionist elements, which are campaigning against the Yalta and Potsdam decisions on the demilitarization of Germany and its obligations for damages caused by German aggression.41
“If we were to lose Germany,” Molotov told satellite foreign ministers at a gathering in Warsaw on June 24, “we would have lost the war.”42 Two weeks later, as British intelligence would discover, Moscow secretly informed the ministers of its intention to take control of all Berlin.43
The emerging showdown between Washington and Moscow, which would spread over the entire globe during the coming half century, for now seemed oddly fixed on a single city in central Europe. Berlin was a geopolitical black hole, one that was set to absorb ever more of the diplomatic energies of the two former war allies.
BY LEGEND, THE “BERLIN AIRLIFT” was a bold and decisive response to defeat the blockade and prevent humanitarian disaster. Yet as a strategy it was neither bold nor decisive; it was neither intended to beat the blockade nor to feed Berliners indefinitely. No one in the Truman administration believed, at the time, that an airlift was more than a short-term expedient to keep options open. Defeating the blockade, it seemed certain, would require a military challenge. As for humanitarian concerns, these were raised primarily by those who believed the Allies needed to withdraw from the city. Moscow would then bring in supplies to curb unrest.
Anticipating escalation after the Soviets shut down interzonal travel, the U.S. Army had begun to position supplies for an “air ferry” on June 18, a week before the full blockade began. The first C-47 flights flew in 5.9 tons of supplies to Tempelhof airfield on June 21. British Dakotas landed their first 6.5 tons at Gatow airfield on the 24th. Soon, massively laden planes would be rumbling over the city’s tattered roofs in quick succession, landing as often as one every three minutes. The Allies also began hitting back with a “counter-blockade,” halting shipments and traffic by rail and barge from western Germany into the eastern part. Allied officials wryly blamed “technical difficulties” of their own. Sokolovsky was, according to American intelligence reports, “greatly shocked” to discover how dependent the East was on coal, steel, machine tools, and industrial commodities from the West.44
On July 3, the military governors reassembled in Berlin for a last effort to defuse the crisis on the ground.45 The atmosphere was heated. “How long do you plan to keep it up?” Clay demanded of Sokolovsky. “Until you stop your plans for a West German government,” he replied.46
Truman had at first downplayed the crisis, referring to it as the “German currency squabble with Russia.” But Sokolovsky’s response made clear that the B-mark issue was secondary. As with the Marshall Plan, Stalin’s real concern was the political and military agenda that lay behind American economic interventions. Forever traumatized by the Nazi invasion in 1941, he was determined never again to leave his country vulnerable to German military capacity and intentions.
The timing was, however, also inauspicious for compromise. Only a few days earlier, Stalin had expelled Tito’s Yugoslavia from the Cominform. This was “a new factor of . . . profound significance [that] has been introduced into the world communist movement by the demonstration that the Kremlin can be successfully defied by one of its own minions,” Kennan observed. “By this act, the aura of mystical omnipotence and infallibility which has surrounded the Kremlin power has been broken. The possibility of defection from Moscow, [heretofore] unthinkable, will from now on be present in one form or another.”47 With dangerous division within his own ranks, Stalin could ill-afford to show weakness over Germany.
As for Truman, he told his staff that there was “nothing to negotiate. . . . Russia has never kept any of the agreements she has made.”48 Yet for all his legendary toughness, he was unwilling to confront Stalin at this stage. He pledged only to stay “as long as we could” without armed conflict. Nothing in the history of air logistics, north Europe’s weather, or Soviet behavior suggested that anything more was a responsible objective. An incident with Soviet personnel hampering western traffic could escalate into war. He feared an accidental conflict more than a deliberate one, with a “trigger-happy Russian pilot or hotheaded Communist tank commander” setting off a spiral of deadly response and counter-response.
An airlift, however, was “obviously no solution,” Bohlen said. Clay initially saw it provisioning his garrisons only. It could not possibly, he told Pentagon officials, belying his earlier bluster, “supply the German civilian population with adequate coal and food.” Bevin took it as given that it would not “be possible to feed two million Germans” by air. He hoped only that a “big display [of] strength and determination” would boost German morale. “Such humanitarian action in the face of the ruthless Soviet policy of starving the Germans [for] political advantage,” he believed, “would show the Russians up in . . . world opinion.”
Reuter agreed that Berliners would rally behind a show of will, but stressed that the city had barely a month’s supply of food left.49 It needed 1,300 tons a day, plus another 2,000 tons of coal, which required a much larger air operation. In Washington, the consensus was that the Allies had a two-month window to resolve the standoff. Ganeval thought the situation would be “absolutely hopeless” by the end of July. The Soviets would then have “a knife at our throat.” Army chief of staff Omar Bradley agreed: “We must decide now whether we are willing to fight.”50
Preparing to settle in for a diplomatic struggle, Truman was anxious to document the sources of Allied legal rights in the city. Yet the mass of diplomatic files assembled since Yalta offered the most meager basis for such rights. Ambassador Murphy blamed “a defective [wartime] agreement” with the Soviets, motivated by a naive American “outburst of faith and good will.”51 Faced now with the possibility of war if Truman were too aggressive, and a calamitous loss of credibility if he were too weak, impassioned advisers urged the president to move decisively in different directions.
Clay led the hawkish wing. “I am convinced,” he cabled the Army in Washington, “that a determined movement of [armed] convoys . . . would reach Berlin and [would] prevent rather than build up Soviet pressures which could lead to war.” The Russians, he argued, did not want war. Intelligence reports indicated no abnormal troop movements, stockpiling activities, or other military preparations. They would therefore not likely interfere. The blockade was intended to drive out the B-mark and halt the creation of a West German government, not to starve the population. The latter would, in Murphy’s words, only undermine “Soviet political aims in Germany.” “Nevertheless,” Clay conceded, “I realize fully the inherent dangers in this proposal since once committed we could not withdraw.”52
An armed convoy was a sound strategy if the Soviets were bluffing, but Clay was not consistently of that view. He had in fact told the French and British that war over Berlin was “inevitable” within eighteen months. If this were so, a convoy was reckless. There were only 6,500 western troops in Berlin, compared with 318,000 Soviet ones in Berlin and the surrounding eastern zone. Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, thought Soviet forces could overrun West Berlin in eight hours. Bevin and Robertson shared Clay’s assessment that the Soviets were bluffing, but thought the convoy scheme flawed. Robertson pointed out that the Soviets could simply stretch tanks out across the autobahn to block it. This would oblige Allied forces to shoot their way through, triggering escalation, or retreat.53 Lovett argued that the Soviets would just cut bridges in front of and behind the convoys, stranding them by blocking their advance and retreat.
Royall led the dovish wing. He demanded that Clay shut his mouth after being quoted in The New York Times saying that Moscow could “not drive us out by any action short of war.”54 What was at stake, Royall told him, was “a minor issue”: Berlin’s currency. In sharp contrast to Clay, who later reflected that there would likely have been no Marshall Plan or NATO if the United States had abandoned Berlin, Royall believed that the United States need not—and indeed, could not—remain in the city. Clay was, he felt, exaggerating the costs of withdrawal to U.S. prestige and influence while underestimating Soviet readiness to use force.
The Joint Chiefs concluded that the “entry of armed American Forces into the Russian zone would in fact be an aggressive act.” It was therefore too risky. Some Army officials argued that withdrawal would be necessary to avoid a civilian catastrophe; the only question was how to avoid “the appearance of a rout.”55 U.S. forces were “facing a defeat . . . if the war comes,” Leahy said. Yet a retreat, Murphy insisted, “would amount to a public confession of weakness under pressure. It would be the Munich of 1948.”56 (He would sixteen years later say he “should have resigned in public protest against Washington’s [feeble] policy.” Reliance “exclusively upon the Airlift was a surrender of our hard-won rights in Berlin, a surrender which has plagued us ever since.”57) Douglas argued that withdrawal “would probably cause failure of the European Recovery Program,” if not a complete collapse of confidence in American resolve on the part “of Western Germans and the people of Western Europe” generally.58
Marshall wanted to take the issue to the United Nations, but the French pushed back, fearing it would accomplish nothing except provide Truman with a moral basis for war—the effects of which they would bear. The compromise was a simultaneous written protest delivered to the Soviet embassies in the three western capitals on July 6. The Soviet reply came back eight days later.
Once again, Moscow blasted Washington and London for violating their commitments at Yalta and Potsdam: to pacify Germany and to extract reparations for its victims. The Allies were now using currency reform and “dismemberment”—creation of a West German state—to undermine Soviet rights in the country. Berlin, Moscow said, was part of the Soviet zone, and the economic threat to the zone from the B-mark’s circulation necessitated the protective measures the western powers were now protesting. “The interests of the Berlin population do not permit the introduction of new currency in the western zones of Germany and special currency in the western sectors of Berlin.”
Furthermore, it said, the West’s removal of the industrialized Ruhr from four-power control undermined the “demilitarization” and “democratization” of the country. By ignoring their obligations in Germany under earlier agreements, the western powers had forfeited “their right to participation in the administration of Berlin.” Moscow therefore not only rejected a lifting of “the measures for the restriction of transport communications between Berlin and the western zones” as a precondition for discussions over Berlin, but insisted that any talks on the city be conducted within the four-power framework. This demand was code for rolling back currency reform and plans for a West German state.
Finally, Moscow said it was willing and able to provide adequate supplies for the entire population of “Greater Berlin” on its own. West Berlin’s suffering was the fault of the Allies. Their withdrawal was the surest means of alleviating it.
In the wake of Moscow’s defiant response, Marshall told the cabinet confidently that the “tension in Berlin” owed to “Russian desperation in the face of success of [the] ERP.”59 The West was winning. And Clay was as upbeat as ever. “The very violence of the Soviet reaction now,” he cabled Army under secretary Draper, “is the proof of the success of our several programs to restore democracy in Europe.”60 His stance is stunning for an American military governor who, until the spring of 1947, had tended to ascribe breakdowns in U.S.-Soviet cooperation not to the triumph of democracy but to failures of unilateralism in Paris and Foggy Bottom, the State Department’s new home.
Clay continued to press for ground confrontation, proposing that Brigadier General Arthur Trudeau lead an armored convoy of Allied troops through the Soviet zone and into Berlin. LeMay would then bomb every airfield in East Germany if Trudeau met resistance, which he did not expect. Sokolovsky’s troops, however, had been conditioned to believe they were defending “sacred Soviet borders,” and would almost certainly have resisted the invaders. Yet when this possibility was put to Clay, he responded by asserting the futility of concessions: the Russians, if they were bent on war, would just pocket them. Nothing, it seemed, could dissuade Clay: both a weak and a bellicose Russia were reasons for confronting it. Bidault condemned his bluster. The British chiefs of staffs rejected his scheme “under any conditions.”61
Truman was morose. The Soviet response, he reckoned, had been a “total rejection of everything we had asked for.”62 At Bevin’s urging, he authorized sending sixty B-29 bombers to Britain, together with a public announcement from the Pentagon. B-29s had bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and he wanted Stalin to take note. “Our only advantage,” noted British Air Commodore William Arthur Darville Brook, “is our possession of W.M.D.”
Still, Brook wanted this only as a bluff—which it was. These particular B-29s could not carry atomic bombs, though Stalin should not have known this fact—that is, he would not have known except for the fact that Donald Maclean, his super-mole in Washington, told him.63
Continuing to take an upbeat tone with the press, Truman lamented to his sister that the situation was “all so futile.” Every major poll suggested he was headed for defeat in the November election. And “if I win, I’ll probably have a Russian war on my hands.”64
A TOP SECRET SOVIET INTELLIGENCE report in June 1948, possibly Written by Maclean, suggested the Kremlin was anxious to gauge how far Washington would go to defend its stake in Berlin. Despite French concerns that the U.S. position “seemed dangerous and irresponsible,” the report—clearly translated from a foreign source—said the U.S. military would “resort to force if the Russians at any time make it impossible for Americans to stay in Berlin.” Molotov, who annotated it, would have noted its observation that Truman had not decided “when and under what circumstances force would be employed, if it would be employed at all, to subvert [nonmilitary Soviet] measures.”65 There was thus scope for ratcheting up pressure on the city, short of downing Allied planes.
Determined to escalate the matter to the U.N. if diplomacy failed, Marshall was willing first to try engaging Stalin directly through an oral approach to Molotov. Bevin thought an oral approach weak, but Marshall insisted it was the only way to break the logjam. Written communications simply hardened Russian intransigence over wording.66 As usual, the American prevailed.
The Allied governments requested a combined ambassadorial-level meeting with Stalin and Molotov on July 30 to discuss Berlin and “its wider implications.” Molotov agreed only to meet them serially, hoping, in Smith’s estimation, “to maneuver one or the other” into revealing the price the West would pay to end the crisis. In his exchange with Smith, he continued to insist that the Allies could not hope for change in Berlin without engaging on “Germany as a whole.” But he agreed to forward the request for a meeting up to Stalin.67
Stalin, thinking the endgame he had envisioned in the spring had begun, invited the western emissaries to talks on August 2. Smith was accompanied by French ambassador Yves Chataigneau and British minister Frank Roberts. At nine that night, early by the Generalissimo’s standards, Stalin greeted them in his office. Highlighting the “unusual” nature of the audience he had granted, with three Allied representatives present, he set forth his position.
Western rights in Berlin, he said, derived from the city’s status as the capital of a unified Germany. Now, with the Allies setting up their own West German state, those rights no longer had a “juridical basis.” This stance was a dramatic hardening of the Soviet diplomatic line—denial of all western occupation rights in the city.
“There would have been no restrictions” in Berlin, he told them pointedly, “had it not been for the London decisions” to divide Germany. “The restrictive measures adopted by the Soviet authorities had been to prevent the invasion of the Soviet zone by the special western currency.”
Smith replied that his government would do nothing to prevent the formation of a central German government in the future, should the differences between the two sides be breached. But the United States would not negotiate under duress. As for the currency matter, he proposed that the Allies might withdraw the B-mark from Berlin and begin talks on Germany if the Soviets would lift the blockade.
But Stalin returned again and again to the London Program. “Stop applying the London decisions and withdraw the ‘B’ mark,” he said. Then “there will be no difficulties. It could be done tomorrow. Think about it.”
Smith said he would report Stalin’s position to his government, but felt “that the implementation of the London decisions had reached a point at which it would be extremely difficult to hold it up.”
Around 11 p.m., Stalin proposed resuming talks in the morning. But Smith insisted there was no point. Progress had been “quite inadequate.”
Stalin must have known, given Maclean’s intimate knowledge of Allied deliberations in Washington, that the West put little stock in the airlift beyond September.68 Time was on his side. He therefore needed to string the Americans along, to keep them hoping and talking.
Stalin lit a cigarette, smiling.
“Would you like to settle the matter tonight?”
Yes, Smith assured him; he would like nothing better.
Stalin made a new proposal. The B-mark and the blockade could be removed simultaneously. As for the London Program, it could be recorded that its postponement was the Soviet Union’s “insistent wish.”
Smith was taken aback. Was this a climb-down? He could see no diplomatic meaning in an “insistent wish.” It gave the Allies full freedom of maneuver. (He would even suggest that Marshall unilaterally “suspend” parts of the London Program to retain negotiating chits for the future.) The three emissaries agreed to present the proposal to their governments.69
Both sides now believed the other was anxious for agreement and looking only to save face. But neither was reading the other accurately. Stalin was ready to roll back the blockade, partially, but not as a prelude to restoring Western powers in the city. He intended to use the Soviet mark to push the Allies out.70 For its part, the State Department was ready to abandon the B-mark, but would accept nothing less than a full managing stake in a unified currency regime for the city. There was still no locus of interests.
On the ground in Berlin, Clay was horrified that Smith did not see the trap that was being set for him. Having through early 1947 condemned anything that interfered with efforts to bring the Soviets into a partnership for unified German government, Clay now argued against efforts that interfered with progress toward splitting Germany.71
Back on July 30, the Soviets had begun using their control over the city’s central bank to freeze the accounts of the Magistrat and all western sector enterprises. They were asphyxiating the economy of West Berlin and the powers of the non-Communist government. Municipal officials knew that, with Soviet control over Berlin’s money, it was only a matter of time before Moscow and their SED puppets controlled the whole city.72 “Berlin political leaders [are] frightfully upset at [the] rumor of Soviet currency becoming [the] single currency” in the city, Clay cabled Draper on August 7. “If we are voided of all control, they will be at the mercy of [the] Soviet government.”73
But Marshall was not as naive as Clay feared. With the B-mark gone, he told Smith, four-power control of the city’s currency would be essential and nonnegotiable. Whitehall understood the same.74
On August 6, the Allies presented Molotov with a draft communiqué calling for “all restrictions” on transport communications into and out of Berlin to be lifted, specifying conditions under which the Soviet mark would circulate in the city, and stating that four-power talks would aim to resolve wider issues related to Germany. Molotov “immediately opened vigorous attack” on western demands to “control” the currency of the Soviet zone, of which Berlin’s economy was an integral part. He further protested that there was “nothing in [the draft] about the insistent desire of Generalissimo Stalin for the postponement of the [London] decisions.”
Smith called Molotov’s response the “typical Soviet tactic of trying to sell the same horse twice.” Still, he assured Marshall there was “no reason to be either depressed or encouraged.” “The next meeting,” he insisted, “will be more significant.”75 To Bohlen, who had been certain Stalin’s “insistent wish” was a ploy to prevent creation of West Germany or pin the Berlin crisis on the Allies, Smith’s take must have appeared as dangerous wishful thinking, born of a reluctance to admit he had been snookered.
The British were alarmed. Roberts judged that the Soviets were not optimistic about killing the London Program, but thought they were in a strong position to expel the Allies from Berlin—a good consolation prize. The city’s currency, Bevin said, was now “at the heart of our difference with the Russians.” Robertson agreed, concluding that “if we withdraw our currency . . . without any agreement on quadripartite control, we shall have lost Berlin and the air-lift will have been in vain.”76
On August 9, Molotov presented the Allies with his own draft, which seemed to confirm British suspicions. Clay condemned it as “disastrous” and “unthinkable.”
Blockade restrictions imposed prior to June 18, the date of the western currency reform, would stay in place—implying that they were defensive in nature and legitimate. Western access rights would not extend beyond those accorded through the “present agreement”—which were nil, in that none were enumerated. Molotov rejected four-power control of Berlin’s currency. Power was to lie entirely with the Soviet-established Bank of Emission. A Soviet agency would assume control over the city’s exports. This new authority, he argued, was consistent with the Allies having illegally ended quadripartite control over Germany. Finally, Stalin’s “insistent wish” was to be clarified; a statement would be issued that the Allies “did not propose for the time being to deal with the question of the formation of a government for Western Germany.” This clarification meant that dealing with it would signify a change in the western position, giving Moscow a pretext for retaliation.77
On the ground in Berlin, Soviet officials turned up the pressure. They harassed the Magistrat and nullified its powers in the East. Thousands of SED supporters staged violent demonstrations throughout the summer, disrupting the Assembly. Soviet soldiers ran down an American MP in the Western sector before shooting their way out. Rioters beat up reporters from Radio in the American Sector. The CIA concluded that under present conditions the western position in the city was “untenable in the long run.”78
Further meetings between Smith and Molotov on August 12 and 16 yielded no movement. “All very hard going,” Smith said, belying his earlier prediction. Molotov “now appear[ed] to be . . . in no hurry about a settlement,” possibly because of “the anticipated effect of winter on our airlift, or hoped for deterioration of economic conditions of the western sectors.” His “attitude being quiet and reasonably pleasant,” the purpose seemed to be to keep talks going “almost indefinitely” to “prevent us from adopting an alternative course of action.” Matters, he told Marshall, were no longer “by any means hopeful.”79
At a National Security Council meeting on August 19, with Truman presiding, Marshall and Lovett said the Soviets were using power over the city’s currency to expand a “physical blockade” into an “economic” and “financial” one. The CIA pondered Stalin’s intentions, weighing the costs of compromise against the benefits of ending the “dilemma” in Berlin.80
Marshall concluded that “there is nothing to be gained and much to be lost by any further attempt to negotiate with [Molotov].”81 He decided to make a final appeal to Stalin before escalating to the United Nations—a move supported by Clay, but still opposed by Schuman, who saw it as a prelude to war.82
But both sides were feeling time pressure, raising hopes that a deal could still be done. Marshall was concerned about “signs of public restlessness,” given that mere technicalities seemed to be preventing agreement. For his part, Stalin was focused on the September 1 start date for the West German Parliamentary Council—staffed by sixty-four elected representatives, under the CDU’s Konrad Adenauer as president—to begin drafting a constitution in Bonn.83 This was his last chance to stop it.
Stalin granted a meeting on the evening of August 23, greeting the western emissaries “quite jovially.” Posing once again as the fount of affable reason, he offered broad-brush concessions on the blockade and the currency. He agreed in principle to remove all “recently imposed” communications restrictions on Berlin, no longer just those imposed since June 18. He further agreed that the four-power financial commission would be the “controlling body” for the currency operations of the Soviet bank. It looked like a deal.
Almost. Stalin continued to insist that “something must be said about the London Conference.” He wanted no further movement toward a West German government before a new meeting of the four-power foreign ministers. He preferred a published statement to this effect, but was willing to consider an exchange of confidential letters.
After two hours with Stalin, the emissaries spent three more working with Molotov “as a drafting committee.” Other than the ongoing matter of Stalin’s “insistent wish,” which the three agreed only to pass on to their governments, “things went so smoothly,” Smith told Marshall, “that I was a little worried. [I] remembered Stalin’s proverb, ‘an amiable bear is more dangerous than a hostile one.’ ” There was still inordinate detail being left to the military governors in Berlin to resolve. Would they be able to agree to a plan for simultaneous removal of the blockade and consolidation of the currency on a week’s deadline? It was “an impossible job,” Smith feared, but “I don’t see how we can spare more time.”84
Marshall and Clay expressed alarm that Molotov had refused, for reasons related to the Soviet “juridical position,” to affirm quadripartite control over Berlin in the draft directive. With what appeared to be a scolding from the secretary, Smith’s frustration boiled over.85 “Quadripartite control does not exist in Berlin today,” he cabled back, and “the Russians have no intention of permitting [its] revival . . . so long as they are unable to achieve quadripartite control of Germany.” Marshall, he believed, needed to accept reality and make up his mind: either “we simply stay [in Berlin] under present conditions and take the necessary measures to organize the life of the three western sectors independently” or we accept the blockade’s lifting “under circumstances in which we would not have complete control over the life of our sectors.” Trying to have an independent West Germany and a four-power Berlin was, to his mind, denying reality. He recommended that the Allies seek concessions from Molotov, with no expectation of success, and then pass on the directive as is to the military governors to see if they could make it conform to Washington’s demands. If they failed, Washington could then walk away.86
Ominously, Molotov refused to allow any of his or Stalin’s oral assurances into the directive, insisting he would not be drawn into discussing a “new document.” He asked repeatedly, however, that Soviet wording on the London decisions—which the Allies had rejected, and would not agree to in a form acceptable to Moscow—be included in an immediate communiqué.87 The reason for the hard line seemed clear. By the time the directive was ready to be issued to the military governors on August 30, the Bonn constitutional convention was two days away. Stalin was about to lose a critical leverage point and, with it, reason to follow through on concessions.
But Stalin had been prepared for this eventuality. He had told Tito deputy Djilas back in February that “the West will make Western Germany their own, and we shall turn Eastern Germany into our own state.”88 The objective was now to secure Berlin as East Germany’s undivided capital.
When the military governors gathered at 5 p.m. on August 31, it was the first time they had met in nearly two months. Sokolovsky’s demeanor, a concerned Murphy recorded, was “mildly provocative.” He seemed imperious, wanting to show his “mastery of the situation.” It was not an air he would put on without orders from the top. “I have never felt so discouraged and hopeless,” Clay wrote in anticipation of the encounter and the likely fallout.89
“Hold on tightly to, and do not make any concessions away from, the decisions agreed upon in Moscow,” Molotov had ordered Sokolovsky by Top Secret cable earlier that day. “Keep in mind that the western representatives are particularly striving toward a widening of the authority of the financial commission. This cannot be allowed.”90
Sokolovsky disavowed knowledge of oral understandings reached with Stalin and Molotov in Moscow. No communications restrictions introduced before June 18, he said, could be lifted.91 And new ones would now be imposed on air traffic into Berlin, limiting it to support of the occupation forces. Unregulated flights, he explained, undermined operation of the Soviet mark, the city’s sole authorized currency. As for the Soviet bank, he insisted the four-power financial commission could have no powers over its operation. Once the Allies withdrew the B-mark, the financial life of the city would pass to Soviet control. The following week, he announced that Soviet aerial military exercises would begin in the corridors over Berlin.92
With the airlift now under direct military threat, a furious Clay cabled Draper in Washington on September 3, insisting to know the endgame of U.S. policy. Was the United States determined to remain an occupying power in Berlin? Agreeing to any of Moscow’s terms, he was sure, was inconsistent with such an objective. Since the president was still groping for options short of war or withdrawal, Royall could only assure Clay that the administration would not sacrifice its rights for an end to the blockade.93
“I am sorry,” Murphy cabled Marshall on September 7, the deadline for the governors to complete an agreement, but “we are getting nowhere.” The Soviet “attitude is indifferent almost to [the point of being] contemptuous.” They “are making only those proposals which would give them complete control so as to make our acceptance impossible.” The governors adjourned without agreement on a joint report, or even agreement on a report of their disagreements.
But there were new problems, Murphy explained. Soviet “tactics in Berlin [were] getting rough.” On September 6, a 1,500-strong Communist mob blocked the City Assembly from meeting. Three American reporters were beaten up. Under orders from a Soviet officer, uniformed police from the eastern sector arrested dozens of plainclothes officers from the western sector brought in by the deputy mayor to keep order. Murphy feared they were led off “to death or worse.”94
Over 300,000 Berliners rallied on September 9 in the city’s Platz der Republik, near the Brandenburg Gate, to hear Reuter and other city leaders condemn the Soviet blockade. “We cannot be bartered, we cannot be negotiated, we cannot be sold!” Reuter shouted. “[We will] stand together until this fight has been won!” Riots broke out when East Berlin police beat back demonstrators passing through the gate. A Soviet War Memorial flag was burned and police cars overturned. Twelve days later, CDU interim mayor Ferdinand Friedensburg would meet with Major Boris Otschkin, the Soviet chief of the Department of Civil Administration within the city’s four-power occupation authority (the Kommandatura), using remarkably bold language to criticize the policies and behavior of the Soviet occupiers:
The fundamental relationship of the German population to Soviet power has been deteriorating. . . . A balancing of the tensions, that have now assumed global political extent . . . can only be achieved by improving the immediate relations of the German population to the Soviet occupation. . . .
The Soviet occupation forces have committed two fundamental errors. . . . The first is that the use of government and administrative forms that have proven themselves in the Soviet Union is in no way possible in the same manner towards the German population. [Germans] aspire to make their political life according to their own democratic forms and to establish good relations with the Soviet Union in accordance with those forms. However, these efforts stand against the policy of the Soviet military administration. . . . which holds fast to the imposition of other political forms and restricts the area of German self-government. . . .
The second is that the Soviet occupying power relies . . . on the Communists, to whom they give all possible support. [But] the Communists constitute a small minority, and will also be a small minority in the future, having been rejected by the vast majority of the German people. . . .
The intransigence of the Soviet occupying forces has led the German people to a rigid and often imprudent behavior towards them. [I] deeply regret that after 3 1/2 years of Soviet occupation the German and Soviet people have failed to achieve mutual understanding.95
Privately, the city leaders also criticized western diplomacy for being weak. They struggled to rebuff rumors in the city that the Allies would withdraw the B-mark as a prelude to withdrawing troops. These rumors were undermining the currency’s value.96
“Sokolovsky’s position,” Marshall concluded, “and with even greater force the Soviet-inspired disorders designed to overthrow the city Government elected under quadripartite supervision make it plain that the Soviet Government seeks to nullify our rights in Berlin.”97 Truman assembled his top military brass on September 13 to review options, including nuclear strikes.98
In Moscow the following day, the Allied emissaries made a final request for a meeting with the Soviet leader. They were told Stalin was “on vacation.” Molotov received them four days later, but dismissed their complaints that Sokolovsky had not followed the directive. It was they who had distorted it, he said, by demanding financial commission powers “over the whole activity of the German Bank” and repudiating an earlier 1945 air corridor accord.99
The directive being ambiguous on the commission’s powers, the Allies had depended on a measure of Soviet goodwill in hewing to Stalin’s oral assurances. Soviet literature, however, had extolled the use of currency manipulation during the Russian Revolution; and Douglas, for one, was not surprised that Stalin wanted to retain that weapon in Berlin. His backtracking on currency cooperation, together with new air traffic restrictions, convinced Marshall the Soviets were yet again negotiating in bad faith.100 Looking back on events months hence, Foy Kohler, the American chargé in Moscow, would conclude that the Kremlin had fashioned the impasse “to spin out negotiations indefinitely, maintaining [the] blockade meanwhile.”101
Indeed, Stalin had shifted his chips. Having failed to stop the Bonn constitutional convention, he was now betting the house on the airlift collapsing by winter—and with it the morale of West Berliners. The airlift “had been more successful than we had anticipated,” Marshall told the NSC, yet he warned that “in many respects time was [still] on the side of the Soviets.” British tonnage had topped out at 1,463 in August, and would fall to 1,259 in September and 1,030 in October as mechanical and logistical problems emerged.102 But on the American side, even Marshall could not yet see that the Allies were on the verge of a breakthrough. It began quietly in late July, with the appointment of a new airlift commander in the Wiesbaden headquarters.
MAJOR GENERAL WILLIAM TUNNER WAS not your typical air commander. He did not share his colleagues’ fixation on bombing. A devotee of Frederick Taylor’s theories of scientific management, Tunner took an odd interest in the ability of planes to move people and equipment long distances at great speed. He brought in motion-study engineers to analyze the airlift in theory and practice, and ordered what seemed to all involved baffling changes in practice and procedure. They paid off: average daily deliveries rose from 2,226 tons in July to just over 3,800 in August, within reach of Clay’s target of 4,500.103 That month the French also added a new airport in their zone, at Tegel.
By September, the airlift was shuttling in a record 4,593 tons daily, just above Clay’s target (though below the 6,000 tons Friedensburg thought necessary). Clay was now arguing that he could best the blockade indefinitely if he could just get some more planes—116 more, to be precise. In Washington, however, it seemed a dangerous gamble to commit more resources. Half the available military air fleet was already devoted to the Berlin mission. Shifting more would degrade the strike force the United States might need to deter or repel a Soviet attack.104
Politically, Marshall was being squeezed. To his right, the Joint Chiefs were critical of efforts to contain Russia with relief supplies and diplomacy. To his left, the president was frustrated by failure to nail down what seemed a done deal just a few weeks earlier. Stung by cries of “warmonger” from the Wallace camp,105 Truman began maneuvering behind Marshall’s back to cut a deal with the Soviet leader.
At the urging of political advisers who pointed to rising numbers of voters “fear[ing] the possibility of war,”106 Truman decided to send a personal envoy to Moscow to meet with Stalin. This would demonstrate to Americans his commitment to securing peace.
Eisenhower—like Marshall, a war hero—was the most prominent name in the mix.107 But Truman wanted someone he knew, someone who knew him and could speak for him. Someone not like Ike. He insisted on his longtime poker partner and former treasury secretary Fred Vinson. Now Supreme Court chief justice, Vinson had no special knowledge to bring to bear on Berlin, nor experience in Soviet affairs. But Truman hoped he might break down barriers with Stalin, letting him “unburden himself to someone on our side he felt he could trust.” The two sides might then “get somewhere.”
That a president who prided himself on standing up to the Russian menace should believe that such a complex, dangerous conflict could be treated as a personal misunderstanding reflected, in equal measures, desperation and ignorance of how the Soviet system worked. He had been unchastened by Stalin publishing Smith’s private remarks in May. Truman referred to “old Joe” as a “decent fellow,” one who was being misled by Molotov and pushed about as “a prisoner of the Politburo.” Yet even if it had been true, the idea that it could be overcome by a heart-to-heart with a hard-boiled Kentucky politico seemed far-fetched. Vinson himself was “astonished” at the request, and agreed only with reluctance.
On October 4, Truman finalized the draft of a public address explaining the gravity of the conflict with Russia and his decision to send an envoy to Moscow. Vinson’s assignment would not be to “negotiate with respect to the Berlin crisis,” but to discuss “the moral relationship” between the two countries. “Premier Stalin,” he wrote, had “assured [him] of his desire to talk with Justice Vinson.” Truman also implied that the secretary of state had approved the mission.108 Marshall knew nothing about it.
Lovett was beside himself. He warned the president that his boss, then huddling on the crisis with Bevin and Schuman in Paris, would resign. Truman agreed only to postpone a decision until he returned.
Marshall was now as bullish on Germany and the airlift as he had ever been, and therefore determined to take a firm line with Stalin. A presidential emissary with no knowledge of the recent months of grueling diplomacy was not what he had in mind. “We are on the road to victory,” he told Bevin and Schuman. “We have put Western Germany on its feet.” As for Berlin, “the air ferry counteracts the blockade very well.” It can “take care of the needs of the western sectors . . . for as long as we wish. It is not even [that] expensive.”109
So when Lovett broke news of the Vinson mission to him on October 5, he was apoplectic. This was, Marshall said, an initiative unique “in the history of diplomatic bungling.” But before he could get home to deal with Truman, the story had leaked and broken in the Chicago Tribune.
Now having to confront the fallout, Truman regretted the whole idea and was determined to put things right with Marshall. “I won’t do it,” he told his advisers, even as they insisted that the Vinson mission was still his best chance to stay in office. When Marshall arrived on October 9, the two concocted a story that they had discussed having Vinson carry a message to Stalin “regarding the atomic problem” and the president’s “desire to see peace firmly established in the world.” But in the end, the statement explained, Truman “decided not to take this step” owing to “the possibilities of misunderstanding.”110
Though the mission was now scotched, Marshall thought his efforts in Paris badly undermined. Indeed, Bevin and Schuman were now less sure than ever whether Truman wanted to start a war, abandon them to one, or both. On October 14, State Department Kremlinologist Foy Kohler cabled Marshall from Paris: Stalin, he said, had concluded that there was now “no chance of preventing” the creation of a West German state “by negotiation, even at the price of concessions with respect to Berlin.” The only way he saw to “[bring] about the destruction of the London decisions and [disrupt] the . . . unity of Western Powers” was, therefore, to undermine their governments. His new strategy was to use “Communist-directed disturbances in France . . . to hasten the advent of de Gaulle,”111 who was himself bitterly opposed to those decisions.
Loyal and discreet, Marshall may or may not have used the word “resign,” but, in poor health, he made clear to Truman that he would not remain in his post beyond inauguration day. Expecting Dewey to win the election in any case, he even suggested to John Foster Dulles that, owing to the “emergency character of the world situation,” he should replace him immediately following the election. A stunned Dulles reminded Marshall that Truman would still be in office another three months, and that even lame ducks choose their own secretaries of state.112
THE CREATION OF THE UNITED nations was meant to be Roosevelt’s crowning contribution to the postwar order. It would, he believed, prevent an American retreat into isolationism and turn the Soviets from confrontation to cooperation.
Instead, Marshall was now determined to use it to isolate Moscow on the world stage. In October, he took the blockade to the Security Council under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, which covered threats to peace. He set the United States up as prosecutor, targeting its case to the six “neutrals:” Argentina, Belgium, Canada, China, Colombia, and Syria.
Bevin and Schuman signed on only after putting up spirited resistance. The sole purpose they could discern in involving the U.N. was to secure moral sanction to break the blockade with arms, and it was their nations that would bear the brunt of the Soviet response.113 The Russians, Bevin groused privately, had “played their cards very badly,” but this had “forced us into a closer association with the Americans in Germany than we had wished.”114
Truman, however, who had only just abandoned a peace mission, had made no decision to use force. Some in the administration, like Royall, were still pushing for a face-saving withdrawal from Berlin. Draper called the city “an untenable military outpost.” Backtracking from his earlier hard line, Kennan, too, was now concerned over the Allies’ “increasingly unfavorable position.”115 He opposed using the U.N. to isolate the Soviets. Rather than mobilize the “smaller nations,” he said, it would likely “alarm” and “paralyze” them, undermining “their will to play an active part in the organization.” As for “the Russians,” if cornered they will just “leave the Organization.”116 Smith, believing the crisis to be a self-inflicted wound, argued that “any U.N. action that enables us to get out of Berlin would be very desirable.”117
For their part, the Soviets were thrown off guard by the U.N. gambit. To that point, they had had little experience manipulating the Security Council. On September 25, Vyshinsky, in a six-thousand-word speech before the General Assembly, denounced the Western powers and the “instigators of a new war.”118 In a show of sheer comedic paranoia, he backed up his claims of American warmongering by referring to a map allegedly showing “The Third World War, Pacific Theater of Military Operations.” The map had been forwarded to him in July by Colonel-General Fyodor Kuznetsov, head of the Main Intelligence Agency (GRU) of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, who said that it had been “created by the American oil company ‘ESSO’ ” and received “from our source in Tokyo.” The map was in fact titled “ESSO War Map III, featuring the Pacific Theater;” it was produced during World War II as a customer marketing give-away.119
Conscious of the West’s built-in voting advantage, and recognizing a show trial when he saw one, Stalin rejected U.N. jurisdiction on the Berlin question. He ordered Vyshinsky to invoke Article 107 of its Charter, which said that “Nothing in the present Charter shall invalidate or preclude action, in relation to any state which during the Second World War has been an enemy of any signatory to the present Charter, taken or authorized as a result of that war by the Governments having responsibility for such action.”120 On this basis, Vyshinsky insisted that German policy could only be discussed within the Council of Foreign Ministers.
By refusing to participate in Security Council debate, however, he gave the three permanent western members free rein to denounce Soviet behavior unrebutted.121 The result was predictable. On October 5, only Soviet Ukraine joined Vyshinsky in voting against U.N. jurisdiction.
The following week, Vyshsinsky tried to quash the intervention through the Security Council’s Argentine president, Juan Atilio Bramuglia. The Peronist is “critical of the capitalist system,” Vyshinsky noted approvingly in his diary; “he said [it] had outlived its day.” Fawning and apologetic in their secret meetings, Bramuglia had, Vyshinsky told Molotov, “tried to avoid presidency of the Council,” and with it responsibility for “the Berlin question, but did not succeed.”
On October 11, Bramuglia briefed Vyshinsky, warning him that they were speaking in the strictest privacy. Having conferred with the Allies, he said, the neutrals believed they could take Berlin off the Security Council agenda if the Soviets agreed to a simultaneous lifting of both sides’ trade and transport restrictions. The Council of Foreign Ministers could then reconvene to resolve remaining issues related to Berlin and Germany as a whole.
Vyshinsky demurred, demanding that the Allies also complete removal of the B-mark at the same time the restrictions were lifted. Bramuglia warned that the Allies would insist on an end to the blockade before the currency transition was complete—not after. If the Soviets wanted their version, what could they offer in exchange? Nothing, Vyshinsky said. The best option was to drop the point. Bramuglia responded that the Allied position was actually closer to the August 30 directive, to which Vyshinsky replied that it could in that case form the basis of the CFM discussion. This proposal served Molotov’s aim of elevating the directive—or the Soviet interpretation of it—into a legally binding commitment. Bramuglia liked the idea. Vyshinsky promised an official response within a few days.
After securing approval from Molotov and Stalin, Vyshinksy affirmed his stance, “remind[ing] Bramuglia that the Berlin question was not,” in any case, “subject to discussion in the Security Council.” It should be removed. Bramuglia returned for clarification the next day: were the Soviets saying the August directive should regulate matters “until” the CFM could meet? This was, he said, how the other neutrals understood it. No, Vyshinsky said. It must govern “within” the CFM. “I thought this was the case,” the Argentine responded dejectedly, knowing the Allies would reject it.
Bramuglia, Vyshinsky cabled Molotov on October 15, “expressed regret that he ever fell into this story.” The Argentine pledged to “do the utmost for the Berlin question to be decided in the interests of the Soviet Union, seeing as how he is a close friend of the USSR.” But “we of course know the worth of Argentine promises.” His translator, Yuri Dashkevich, suspected “Bramuglia was acting as a defender of the Anglo-Americans.”122
Unbeknownst to Vyshinsky, his useful idiot was feeling heat from Washington. The State Department, Acheson revealed years later, was working “to connect the price of Argentine wheat with cooperation on the Berlin matter.”123 On October 25, the neutrals put forward a broad resolution calling for the lifting of all restrictions on traffic and commerce into and out of Berlin, resumption of four-power currency talks, and a reconvening of the Council of Foreign Ministers to resolve other disputed matters in Germany. Marshall had wanted the neutrals simply to condemn the blockade, but the Allies joined in support. The Soviets cast their veto.
Vyshinsky was unconcerned. The French U.N. press department deputy had been passing on encouraging intelligence about airlift challenges from a loose-tongued American delegation contact. “In winter, flights are extremely complex and staff are so exhausted that it requires a great effort to keep the pilots flying,” Pravda journalist Georgii Mikhailovich Ratiani recorded; “material parts very quickly wear out. . . . [T]he American army command and the State Department fear that the ‘air-bridge’ will cease to operate in the very near future.”124 Time, it seemed, was on Moscow’s side.
For its part, the State Department suspected that “the Soviets count on the failure of the air lift during the winter months,” and “would not lift the blockade until proven wrong.”125 Philip Jessup, the U.S. representative to the U.N. General Assembly, “discounted at 1000 to one [the] probability [of] Soviet desire for [a] real settlement of [the] Berlin situation” at this point.126 Meaningful diplomacy would have to wait until the Allies could demonstrate mastery of the weather.
The Security Council resolution was, in the end, a minor diplomatic victory for Marshall, helping to show Moscow as intransigent on a matter of global security interest. But there was a cost. The issue would remain on the Council’s agenda, and continued efforts by the neutrals to resolve it would clash with events in Berlin—events that were now moving decidedly in Washington’s favor.127