PDF The Berlin Airlift The Cold War Mission To Save A City 1St Edition Ann Tusa Ebook Full Chapter
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Also by Ann and John Tusa
and
by Ann Tusa
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Foreword
Introduction
Sources
References
Index
List of Plates
When I was the British Minister and Deputy Commandant in Berlin during
the last five years of the post-war Four Power occcupation of the city,
which ended with its reunification in 1990, the memory of the blockade and
airlift of 1948/49 was still very much alive. The three Western Allies—the
US, Britain, and France—gathered every year, together with the leaders of
West Berlin, to place wreaths at the memorial outside Tempelhof, the
former US military airport. The memorial takes the form of a broken arch,
symbolizing the beginning of a bridge (the German term for the airlift is the
rather more graphic Luftbrücke or Airbridge). The corresponding western
arch is at Frankfurt International Airport. At the wreath-laying ceremony,
we were remembering those who lost their lives keeping West Berlin
supplied with basic foodstuffs, medical supplies, and fuel during those
fateful fifteen months. Although the airlift was US-led, it so happens that
the largest number of names recorded is British, largely due to a single
aircraft crash.
But the main heroes were the ordinary people of the western sectors of
the city who, in spite of their hunger, spurned the offer of improved rations
if they moved to the Soviet sector, and decided to rely on the Allied airlift.
The fact that the airlift was bringing relief, not just to the Allied military
garrisons but to the city’s civilian population as well, was a critical factor.
Not only did it make Stalin realize that the blockade was failing to starve
the city into submission, to induce the Allies to withdraw, and to turn the
Berliners against them, it also changed the fundamental relationship
between the Western Allies and the Berliners living in their sectors.
Previously, it had been that of occupiers to occupied. After the blockade
ended, it became more like a partnership, in the cause of keeping West
Berlin free and democratic. And in time it evolved into feelings of genuine
friendship on both side.
The epic events of the Berlin airlift made a major contribution to this
happy result.
—Sir Michael Burton
Introduction
From summer 1945 Germany was occupied by the four armies which had
done most to defeat her in the Second World War – the Russian, American,
British and French. For administrative convenience they divided the
country into four zones and split the city of Berlin into four sectors – one
zone and one sector for each victorious Power. Berlin remained the capital
of Germany, but there was no German government; the country was
controlled and run by the military government of the four Powers. In so far
as they had common policies, these were drawn up in Berlin by the Allied
Control Council, made up of the four Military Governors of the zones.
This much, but little else, had been agreed during the war. The allies who
fought Hitler had seldom considered what they would do if they won. As
the American Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg put it in February 1943: “We
must not fumble the peace … but there are very definite limits beyond
which post-war planning cannot yet go.”1 The British Prime Minister,
Winston Churchill, speaking to a Joint Session of Congress a few months
later, gave one reason for this reluctance to look ahead: “We must beware of
every topic, however attractive, and every tendency, however natural, which
diverts our minds or energies from the supreme objective of the general
victory of the United Nations.”2 That victory was far from certain.
It is easy now for historians and armchair generals to spot decisive
battles and to identify strategic turning-points when victory was ensured. It
was not possible then. No one could feel confident of beating Hitler until
his armed forces finally surrendered. Up to the last moment, every effort
and resource had to be directed to one goal: winning the war. Decisions on
what to do with the peace had to wait.
The four Powers had general aims in the European war, of course.
France, like other countries conquered by Hitler, sought liberation,
reparation for the degradation and pillage she had suffered, and adjustment
of frontiers to give her greater security in the future. The British fought at
first to avoid invasion and then to overturn Nazi domination of the
Continent. The Americans were fighting to stop fighting. They wanted to
end their involvement in yet another quarrel which was of European not
American making and which consumed vast American subsidies. They
wanted to go home as soon as possible and stay there. Their visions of the
future remained broad and idealistic: a world won for democracy and liberal
capitalism, which would flourish under a new world organisation created to
settle disputes and prevent war ever again. The Secretary of State, Cordell
Hull, promised Congress in 1943: “There will no longer be need for spheres
of influence, for alliances, for balance of power or any other of the special
arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to
safeguard their security or to promote their interests.”3 The Soviet Union,
by contrast, was often specific and practical. Joseph Stalin, the Soviet
Generalissimo, made dear to the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden,
in December 1941 that he wanted recognition of all the gains the Red Army
had made since 1939 – the Baltic States and part of Poland, for example.4
His price for entry into the war against Japan in 1945 was to move into
Manchuria, North Korea and Sakhalin.
Underlying their aims, the three great Powers – Britain, the United States
and the Soviet Union – had interests which would prove incompatible.
Britain was concerned with the defence of her Empire, the maintenance of
preferential trading agreements with it, and her traditional search for a
balance of power in Europe. The United States opposed imperialism,
supported a free market, and saw old European diplomatic concepts as
indefensible morally and a failure in practice. Yet Britain and the United
States had agreed on a set of principles for the post-war world, the 1941
Atlantic Charter: no territorial aggrandisement by the victors and
recognition of the right of liberated peoples to choose their own
governments. That agreement, however, conflicted sharply with the
ambitions of the Soviet Union, whose leader, Stalin, had neither negotiated
nor signed it. As the war ended Soviet armies marched into Rumania,
Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. In autumn 1944 Stalin
explained to the Yugoslav communist, Milovan Djilas, the political
consequences of such military deployment: “whoever occupies a country
also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system
as far as his army has power to do so. It cannot be otherwise.”5
Though few were privileged with so clear a statement of Stalin’s
intentions, many suspected them. But there could be no confrontation with
him while the war lasted. The alliance had to be preserved if the war were
to be won. Could Stalin be persuaded to change his policies once it ended?
Churchill increasingly thought not Stalin might be bullied but not
persuaded. President Roosevelt was more confident: “I can handle Stalin,”
he often said.6 And he believed that an alliance with Stalin was essential in
the post-war period. If a world organisation were to preserve peace, then the
Soviet Union must be a full member of it. If Europe were to be stabilised
and rebuilt, the acceptance and assistance of Russia were essential. If
Germany’s defeat were to be permanent, her military potential must be
destroyed once and for all, and the Russians would have to be party to
occupation until a new order had been imposed. Stalin appreciated all of
this and was ready to play his part where it suited Soviet interests – in
security above all. He prophesied to Djilas in 1944: “Germany will recover,
and very quickly. It is a highly developed and industrial country with an
extremely skilled and numerous working class and technical intelligentsia.
Give them twelve to fifteen years and they’ll be on their feet again.”7 But
not marching, if Stalin could help it.
On one aim at least the three Powers could agree: their coalition would
fight until it received Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender. President
Roosevelt had been the first to call for it – in 1943, at Casablanca. His
fellow leaders responded enthusiastically. All of them had lived with the
consequences of Germany’s surrender in 1918: the myth that the German
politicians had stabbed the military in the back when victory was within
sight; the constant danger that Germany would wreck the peace
negotiations by refusing to accept their terms; the tragic process through
which the Versailles peace settlement was turned into a pretext for Nazi
power and renewed war. This time, said the allies, German surrender must
be total. The victors would hold the country until it was fit for re-entry into
the community of nations.
***