The Berlin Crisis 1948: Allied Options
The British and American political leaders, however, would not even consider the option of abandoning their rights to Berlin and retreating “with their tail between their legs.” It must be stressed that this dogged determination on the part of the political leadership was equally pronounced in Washington and London. When President Truman was briefed in the White House on the results of a meeting among his senior security advisors on the Berlin Crisis, he refused even to listen to the option “abandonment.” He interrupted the briefer and stated flatly: “There is no discussion on that point. We stay in Berlin – period.”[1]
The British Cabinet was no less clear on the point. Indeed, the day before Truman made his command decision, Foreign Secretary Bevin informed American envoys that the full British cabinet had already agreed that under no circumstances would Great Britain pull out of Berlin. Just days latter before the House of Commons he announced: “His Majesty’s Government and our western allies can see no alternative between [remaining in Berlin] and surrender, and none of us can accept surrender.”[2] Thunderous applause from both sides of the aisle greeted this statement, while Harold Macmillan, speaking for the Opposition, added: “We must…face the risk of war. The alternative policy – to shrink from the issue – involves not merely the risk, but the certainty of war.”
But it was former Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill who (as so often) voiced what they were all thinking: “The issues are as grave as those … at stake in Munich tens years ago.”[3] Clearly, no one in the British government or parliament wanted to follow in Chamberlain’s footsteps. Appeasement as a policy, when facing off against a totalitarian dictatorship with military dominance on the continent, had been tried once before - completely discredited.
But there was a catch.
Neither Truman nor Attlee might be willing to consider withdrawal from Berlin, but that didn’t keep over two million German civilians from starving to death. And while the political leadership flatly refused to think about retreat, they equally emphatically refused to use armed force – as General Clay quickly discovered – to restore access to Berlin by land and water.
General Clay was fiercely committed to making a stand in Berlin. During the mini-Blockade in April, he had made his commitment crystal clear. When he was informed that a large number of requests had been made by officers in his command for permission to send their families home he announced quite simply that he felt it was “unbecoming” an American officer to “show signs of nervousness.” He then said that, of course, if anyone was uncomfortable with the situation he would arrange for their transfer home, but that he wanted no one with him in Berlin who had sent his family home.
Clay’s wife stayed with him throughout the Airlift, and Clay did not shy from confrontation. In fact, he strongly advocated sending a heavily armed convoy up the autobahn to Berlin “equipped with the engineering equipment to overcome the technical difficulties which the Soviet representatives appeared unable to solve.”[4] Clay was so determined to proceed that while awaiting the go-ahead for this measure from Washington, he started organising an Allied Task Force composed of between 5,000 and 6,000 troops including armour and artillery.
Clay was not a hot-head and he had more reason to fear the out-break of war with the Soviet Union over Berlin than anyone in London or Washington – he was sitting there. Clay knew perfectly well that the Armed Forces of the Western Allies were hopelessly out-numbered – in Berlin, in Germany, and in Europe. In Berlin, the Allies could muster at best 8,500 troops – without heavy weapons, while the Soviets had 18,000 men stationed in East Berlin alone. Furthermore, the Soviet forces in Berlin could be reinforced rapidly by the 300,000 troops in occupation of the surrounding Zone, but the U.S. did not have even 100,000 troops in all of Germany. The troops they did have were a cross between policemen and clerks, completely unsuited to the task of fighting their way to the relief of the Berlin garrison. As a 19-year-old corporal in the U.S. infantry then stationed in Berlin recalls, he was told by the his company commander: “Gentlemen…if the Russians decide to come in, we all have about two hours left to live.”[5]
The situation for the British garrison was no better. The British had demobilized almost as rapidly as the Americans, and added to the popular demand to “bring the boys home” was the acute budget crisis of the British treasury that made it quite impossible to sustain a large standing army even if someone had wanted to. What troops Britain did have in Germany at the time were hopelessly out-numbered and those who served in Germany at the time remember their apprehension vividly:
We had no idea of Russian intentions so it is not surprising that from time to time in those few moments before sleep one would reflect that within an hour Wunstorf and other airlift bases could be over-run by Soviet tank columns. [6]
As for the respective air forces, the U.S. Air Forces Europe (USAFE) controlled just 275 combat aircraft. The Royal Air Force in Germany fielded 132 combat aircraft, organised in four bomber and six fighter squadrons. The Soviet Air Force in Europe in contrast disposed over 4,000 combat aircraft, roughly two thirds of which were stationed in Germany. In short, there was no conceivable way the Western Allies could win a clash of arms with the Soviets.
But Clay defended his plan precisely because he was convinced that the Russians would not risk war over Western rights of access to and occupation of Berlin. Clay wrote in his memoirs after the war: “The care with which the Russians avoided measures which would have been resisted with force had convinced me that the Soviet Government did not want war although it believed the Western Allies would yield much of their position rather than risk war,” adding: “I shall always believe that the convoy would have reached Berlin.”[7]
No one but Clay, however, was willing to take the chance. The British rejected the idea because they believed Clay’s convoy could be stopped without the resort to war on the part of the Soviets – just by blowing up a few bridges or putting up manned barricades. This in turn would constitute a humiliating defeat for the West. The State Department agreed with the British assessment, arguing that “the Soviets would just sit up on the hillside and laugh….”[ii] Rather than challenging the Soviets in Berlin, the State Department preferred the idea of punishing the Soviets by closing the Panama Canal to Soviet shipping or blockading Vladivostok. Meanwhile, the Pentagon and White House both refused to consider Clay’s proposal because they were not prepared to risk war, even if the risk was small.
It was therefore more by default than intention that people gradually came to see an airlift as the only possible alternative to retreat. As one British participant worded it:
We were under duress, Berlin could not wait six months for a plan, no one had anything else to suggest apart from Clay’s armoured column, and RAF top brass flew the first lot of UK-based transport aircraft to Germany…on a philosophy variously described as ‘the British genius for improvisation’ or ‘Limey muddling through,’ according to one’s level of politeness.[8]
In any case, an airlift had been instituted almost immediately, but only as a stop-gap measure not as a policy. The possibility that an airlift could alone sustain the city of Berlin was dismissed out of hand as “absolutely impossible” by Clay and as “out of the question” by the British Commandant in Berlin, Major-General Herbert. While Clay’s reply was a spontaneous answer to a question put to him by a reporter, Herbert was responding to a suggestion brought to him by Air Commodore Waite, the Director of the Air Branch of the British Control Commission in Berlin, on June 23 – the day before the start of the blockade.
Fortunately, for the future of the West, Air Commodore Waite was not easily discouraged. Waite went back to his office and started working out some rough calculations of cargo requirements and priorities, aircraft load-factors and the like. He came up with a detailed proposal, and on the next day he asked for just ten minutes with the British Military Governor in Germany, General Sir Brian Robertson. It was June 24th. The Blockade had just started. The problem of supplying the city by air was no longer theoretical it was on the very top of the agenda. Robertson saw Waite. If he wasn’t entirely convinced by Waite’s proposal, he nevertheless liked what he saw and heard. After all, since the maximum capacity of an autobahn convoy was about 1,000 tons of supplies a day, this was all that an airlift need carry to make Clay’s armed convoy superfluous. At all events, Roberston decided the idea had enough merit to share it with General Clay.
Some accounts claim that Clay was enthusiastic, but that would have been out of character. Clay was not a man given to displays of emotion and some hasty calculations by an RAF officer did not warrant great leaps of joy under the grave circumstances. However, Clay was a man who took his responsibilities not only to his superiors but to the civilian population of Berlin deadly seriously. Clay was prepared to do almost anything that might help – if not to end, than at least to ease - the acute crisis.
Clay, however, was not about to do anything until he was certain that the people of Berlin were indeed prepared to suffer for the abstract rights of their former enemies – which was the way it looked to him on that first day of the Blockade. He therefore took the unprecedented step of summoning the elected major of Berlin, Ernst Reuter, to his office. Clay then asked the mayor in very blunt language if the Berliners were prepared to go without many basic necessities including electricity and fuel, while the Western Allies tried to support the city by air.
Reuter’s answer is most commonly reported as roughly: “You look after the airlift, and I’ll take care of the Berliners.” Willy Brandt, who was later to be Chancellor of West Germany, accompanied Reuter to this historic meeting. He remembers Reuter responding with more eloquence something along the lines of the Berliners being willing to die for their freedom. If Reuter did say something of the kind, Clay must have been a little baffled. After all, the immediate issue was one of Western Occupation and Access Rights to Berlin. Furthermore, all Germans were in a sense “unfree” because they were under Occupation and had no political rights. Last but not least, the American opinion of Germans was that they did not value freedom very much or they wouldn’t have elected and supported Hitler. Unfortunately for posterity, Clay makes no mention in his memoirs of the historic meeting with Reuter at all.
At all events, Reuter left the meeting impressed by Clay’s determination - but by no means convinced that the city really could be supplied from the air. After he left Clay’s office, he remarked to an aide: “Clay’s determination is wonderful, but I don’t believe it can be done.”[9]
Shortly after Mayor Reuter left his meeting with the American Governor General, Sir Brian Robertson called on Clay to tell him that the Royal Air Force was going ahead with its efforts to fly as much materiel into the city as possible. As yet, neither General had received clearance for action from their respective governments and neither disposed over significant air transport resources. (Waite had “shocked RAF headquarters in London by saying he wanted their entire worldwide fleet of transport aircraft in Germany at once.”) What they were talking about was at best a tiny contribution and at worst a mere gesture. Nevertheless, Clay reached for the phone and asked for a connection to the senior U.S. Air Force Commander in Europe, General Curtis LeMay. The conversation is reported as follows:
Clay: “Have you any planes there that can carry coal?”
LeMay: “Carry what?”
Clay: “Coal.”
LeMay: “We must have a bad connection. It sounds as if you were asking if we have planes for carrying coal.”
Clay: “Yes, that’s what I said – coal.”
LeMay: “General, the Air Force can deliver anything. How much coal do you want us to haul?”
Clay: “All you can."[10]
But in fact the U.S. Air Force did not have very many transport aircraft in theatre at the time, so it is not surprising that Clay’s order eventually worked its way down to a junior officer, who had the bright idea of asking for help from the only U.S. civil airline then operating in Germany, American Overseas Airlines. Captain Jack O. Bennett described what followed.
I was working in my U.S. airline office at the Frankfurt Airport. The U.S. Air Force telephoned from their base on the south side of the field. “Captain, do you have a DC-4 airplane that can fly coal to Berlin?”
My feet came off my desk to the floor with a bang, “Wha-- What? Coal?”
“Yes, sir, Captain,” and with a chuckle, “I said coal!”
“You’re kidding! Coal dust would ruin our passenger cabins. We’re carrying people on our airline. Doesn’t the Air Force have freighters over there?”
“No, surprisingly we don’t. We have only two DC-4s in Europe, and they’re not in Germany, sir. You could take out your seats and we could pack the coal in sacks, and …”
I cut him short, “Forget it, no way. What’s going on? Have the Russkys closed down the autobahn again?”
The Soviets had been playing cat and mouse with the autobahns, trains and waterways into Berlin, shutting them down for hours at a time.
“Yes, Captain, Helmstedt has been closed all day. Intelligence says this might be permanent. We may have to supply Berlin by air. Now how about flying potatoes in sacks?”
I thought a moment. “Well, I suppose I can, but I’ll
have to find a co-pilot and an engineer. How soon can you sack the potatoes?” [11]
But while Clay and Robertson were doing what they could to improvise and buy time for decisions to be taken at a higher level, and while the political leadership was very quick to back the spontaneous decisions of their commanders on the ground by refusing to back down, many experts and senior officials remained completely unconvinced that the Allied position in Berlin was tenable and thought that an airlift was doomed to failure.
These experts had history on their side. True, the Allies had managed to provide vitally needed supplies to the China theatre by flying them in across the Himalayas. As much as 550,000 tons of all kinds of cargo was flown over this dangerous route, and – significantly – the operation was, by the end, highly regimented and professional with aircraft taking off every two-and-a-half minutes. But it had not always been so, and the cost had been high. In the early months, casualties were so high that it was literally safer to fly a bomber deep into Germany than to fly a transport plane across “the Hump.” Furthermore, even at the peak the operation, when over 200 C-54s were flying the route, the average daily capacity was less than 2,400 tons. Yet early calculations suggested that this was only a little more than half of the daily airfreight required to sustain the city of Berlin. Furthermore, as we have seen, the USAF didn’t have two C-54s in Germany, much less 200.
Another airlift precedent with many similarities to the situation in Berlin was even more discouraging. This was the attempt by the Luftwaffe to sustain the 6th Army at Stalingrad after it had been encircled by the Red Army in November 1942. Despite a number of advantages, the largest tonnage ever delivered on a single day was 290 tons while the average was just 140 tons in December and a mere 60 tons in January. The German 6th Army gradually starved and froze to death.
It is therefore not necessarily to their discredit, that some of the greatest sceptics of the airlift were to be found among the most senior officers of the American Armed forces, men who had fought WWII. They were reinforced in their views by intelligence reports which warned that if the Soviets cut off the access routes, it would be “impossible” to supply the city by air alone. A U.S. Army General Staff study from January 1948 had come to this conclusion. So it is not surprising that the key senior officers in the Pentagon, Army Chief of Staff, General Omar Bradley, the Air Force Chief of Staff, General Hoyt Vandenberg, and the U.S. Army’s Director of Plans and Operations, General Albert Wedemeyer, all believed that no airlift could support a city of 2 million people. They were supported by America’s senior diplomats, who at this time spent more of their time bickering about who was responsible for the failure to have written agreements with the Russians about the access routes than looking for a solution to the problem.
Since both Pentagon and State Department were equally opposed to a war over Berlin, however, they were anxious to start preparing for an orderly withdrawal – in unison with our Allies, of course. Wedemeyer was, therefore, sent to London by Bradley for the purpose of discussing with the British the best means of evacuating the Western garrisons from Berlin gracefully. General Wedemeyer met with Ernst Bevin and outlined in detail all the difficulties associated with staying in Berlin and supplying it from the air. His words did not have the expected effect. The British Foreign Minister responded bluntly: “General, I am deeply disappointed. I never expected to hear the Head of the American Air Force explain that the American Air Force couldn’t do what the Royal Air Force is already doing.”[12] Sir Frank Roberts, who was Private Secretary to Ernest Bevin at the time, reports further that: “I took Wedemeyer out and he shook his head – rather like a Labrador, you know, coming out of a pond – and he said, ‘I suppose that means we’ve got to do it.’ I said, ‘That was the message.’”[13]
Sources:
[1] Michael D. Haydock, City under Siege: The Berlin Blockade and Airlift, 1948-1949, Brassey's, 1999, 152.
[2] Haydock, 156.
[3] Richard Collier, Bridge Across the Sky, MacMillan, 1978, 73.
[4] Lucius D. Clay, Decision in Germany, Heinemann, 1950, 374.
[5] Haydock, p. 142.
[6] Norman Hurst, letter to the author, Jan. 5, 2006.
[7] Clay, p. 374.
[8] Bob Needham, “Resisting Aggression without War,” The Friends Quarterly, April 2001, p. 276.
[9] Collier, p. 61
[10] Collier, 61
[11] Collier, 62
[12] Sir Frank Roberts, “The Berlin Airlift,” The Royal Air Force Historical Society Proceedings, No. 6, Sept. 1989, p. 41.
[13] Roberts, p. 41
*****
The Berlin Airlift is the subject of Bridge to Tomorrow, a trilogy of novels starting with Cold Peace and followed by Cold War and Cold Victory.
Standing up to dictators isn’t easy — but sometimes it’s necessary.
Berlin 1948. The economy is broken, the currency worthless, and the Russian bear is hungry. Next on the menu is Berlin. Here war heroes and war’s victims are struggling to come to terms with a world where unemployment is widespread and the wartime Allies are at each other’s throats. When a Russian fighter brings down a British passenger plane, and the world teeters on the brink of World War Three. The defenders of freedom must work together to save Berlin from Soviet tyranny. The first battle of the Cold War is about to begin.
Based on historical events, award-winning novelist Helena P. Schrader brings to life the backstory of the West's bloodless victory against Russian aggression via the Berlin Airlift in Cold Peace, the first book in the Bridge to Tomorrow Series.
Cold Peace is the winner of WINNER of an Independent Press Award 2025 in the category: Political Thriller, Runner-Up for BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 from the Historical Fiction Company, GOLD (1st Place) in the category Historical Fiction from the Feathered Quill Book Awards 2024, GOLD (1st Place) in the category Wartime Fiction from the Historical Fiction Company Book Awards 2023, SILVER (2nd Place) in the category Political Thriller from Readers' Favorites Book Awards 2023, a MAINCREST MEDIA Award and a BRAG Medallion.
Stopping Russian Aggression with milk, coal and candy bars….
Berlin is under siege. More than two million civilians must be supplied by air or surrender to Stalin’s oppression.
USAF Captain J.B. Baronowsky and RAF Flight Lieutenant Kit Moran once risked their lives to drop high explosives on Berlin. They are about to deliver milk, flour and children’s shoes instead. Meanwhile, two women pilots are flying an air ambulance that carries malnourished and abandoned children to freedom in the West. Until General Winter deploys on the side of Russia….
Based on historical events, award-winning novelist Helena P. Schrader delivers an insightful, exciting and moving tale about how former enemies became friends in the face of Russian aggression — and how close the Berlin Airlift came to failing.
WINNER OF BRONZE for 20th Century Historical Fiction from the Global Book Awards 2024
Buy Now!
You know you’re winning when the enemy turns to dirty tricks ….
With the Airlift gaining momentum, the Russians turn to more devious tactics to thwart the forces of democracy. Key players — or their loved ones — are targeted in unscrupulous attacks. Simultaneously, the policy of “collective guilt” has been replaced by “collective amnesty,” enabling former Nazis to worm their way back into positions of power. Yet throughout this dangerous dance with the henchmen of dictators, women are steadily rebuilding Berlin and Germany.
Award-winning novelist Helena P. Schrader takes the reader away from the limelight and into the shadow side of the Berlin Airlift to explore the social, psychological and long-term impact of this seminal event.
Based on historical events, Cold Victory reminds readers that standing up to tyrants isn’t easy — but sometimes it is necessary.
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