differences.” Bedell Smith believed that the US note was merely “a statement for the record,” but the Soviets eagerly rejoined. Molotov handed Bedell Smith a response on May 9 that found the Soviet government “in agreement with the proposal to proceed… toward a discussion and settlement of the difference existing between us.” In the next several days the Soviets released an edited text of the US note — moving it beyond denial — while Moscow radio announced that the Soviet government had accepted the US proposal. The Soviet move caught the Truman administration by surprise; the President and the Secretary of State immediately backpedaled. The
Common opinion at the upper level of the Truman administration attributed the Soviet response to propaganda. But in any case the United States no longer had any desire for a peace conference. The time for negotiation had passed; the US was preparing to establish a separate West German government, a decision approved in a meeting on May 24 that Marshall, Forrestal and Omar Bradley, among others, attended at the State Department. Marshall believed Germany was a crucial barrier to the spread of Soviet power across Western Europe, a position he had made clear as early as February, when he cabled the US ambassador to Britain that the US was determined “not to permit reestablishment of German economic and political unity under conditions which are likely to bring about effective domination of all Germany by [the] Soviets. It would regard such an eventuality as the greatest threat to [the] security of all Western nations, including [the] U.S.”
In mid-June 1948, the Senate endorsed associating the United States with “regional and other collective arrangements,” preparing the way for public negotiations toward a North Atlantic Treaty Organization to follow on from the talks of late March that the participants imagined to have been secret.
The US, Britain and France were preparing in June to reform the currency in the German zones they occupied — to stop inflation, choke off the black market, improve the banking system and promote economic recovery. “The old currency was so valueless,” noted a contemporary State Department memorandum, “that cigarettes had in practice replaced it in many areas.” If the new currency became legal tender in the Western sectors of Berlin as well, it would wreak havoc with the money supply in the Soviet zone. Lucius Clay had been attempting to negotiate some common currency for Berlin. He understood his instructions to preclude accepting Soviet currency in common unless the Soviets allowed the Western allies to participate in its control. “Since Sokolovsky offered no such participation,” Clay writes, “I knew his proposal was unacceptable to our government. Therefore I replied immediately to Sokolovsky [on June 23, 1948] that we could not accept his proposal and that I would join with my colleagues in placing West marks in circulation in the western sectors of Berlin.” The Soviets installed new currency measures that same day, twenty-four hours before the West mark was due to become legal currency.
The day of Western currency reform dawned to crisis, Clay reports:
When the order of the Soviet Military Administration to close all rail traffic from the western zones went into effect at 6:00 a.m. on the morning of June 24, 1948, the three western sectors of Berlin, with a civilian population of about 2,500,000 people, became dependent on reserve stocks and airlift replacements. It was one of the most ruthless efforts in modern times to use mass starvation for political coercion…
I called General LeMay on the telephone… and asked him to drop all other uses of our transport aircraft so that his entire fleet of C-47s could be placed on the Berlin run.
The first direct confrontation of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union had begun.
17
Getting Down to Business
When the Soviet Union blockaded Berlin on June 24,1948, the United States Air Force in Europe had at hand 102 C-47 cargo planes, each of less than three tons capacity, and two C-54s of ten tons capacity. The British Royal Air Force in Germany had a few C-47s as well. Berlin before the blockade had imported 15,500 tons of food and fuel daily to feed and warm its more than two million people. It needed a minimum of four thousand tons per day. Lucius Clay expected at the outset of his airlift to be able to supply a maximum of seven hundred tons per day. “I didn't ask Washington [for permission to initiate an airlift],” Clay remembered. “I acted first. I began the airlift with what I had, because I had to first prove to Washington that it was possible.”
For a few days, the airlift flew ad hoc. Then Clay called Curtis LeMay to a meeting in Berlin. LeMay flew a B- 17 from Wiesbaden into Tempelhof early on the afternoon of June 27, 1948, reports the daily diary that his aide maintained, “and proceeded immediately to Gen. Clay's house where a consultation was held concerning the situation in Berlin and the feasibility of supplying all of the Western Sectors (i.e., American, British and French) with all necessities.” Clay and LeMay decided to ask for more aircraft: a C-54 group, a P-51 fighter group in case the cargo planes had to be defended from Soviet fighters and several squadrons and groups of B-29s to be moved to England in case LeMay had to bomb Soviet zone airfields. “These decisions,” the LeMay diary continues, “were based on Gen. Clay's policy of remaining in Berlin at all costs, using force if necessary… to support his plan, which has the complete backing of the State Department.” Truman approved the June 27 decisions the next day. “The President… [said that] we were going to stay, period,” James Forrestal reports Truman's endorsement.
June 29, a Tuesday, LeMay flew a C-47 up to Tempelhof and back to Wiesbaden to inspect the airlift operation. In Berlin, Clay asked him about airlifting coal for electrical generation and, in the winter, for heating. “It was decided that the only means of moving sufficient quantities of coal would be by B-29,” LeMay's diary notes bizarrely, “and since Tempelhof… could not accommodate this type aircraft, the cargoes would have to be dropped from low altitude.” LeMay was a bomber man, not a transport officer. Fortunately for the people of Berlin, he was not reduced to blitzing their city with coal.
“No one in authority at the time expected that the Airlift would last very long,” observes USAF Major General William H. Tunner, who would soon play a leading role in the operation. “It was President Truman's opinion that the Airlift would serve only to stretch out the stockpile of rations in Berlin and thus gain time for negotiations.” “The Russians are convinced that they hold all the cards,” a British official reported from Moscow early in July, “and will be able to manoeuvre us into a position where… we have no choice but to withdraw from Berlin. Our current air effort may have disconcerted them. But I doubt whether they believe we can keep it up indefinitely and on a sufficient scale.”
Ten-ton capacity C-54s began arriving from the US on July 1, 1948. The airlift's limiting factor was the number of landings Templehof could handle (the British had taken over Berlin/Gatow for their parallel airlift), so the greater the carrying capacity of the aircraft, the more tons of supplies could be flown. Another request for C-54s went out on July 7 after a conference among the Western zone military governors and service commanders. (Official negotiations toward a North Atlantic Treaty Organization had begun in Washington the previous day, following upon the secret negotiations of the previous spring.) By now, the American press had swarmed to Germany to cover the unprecedented confrontation and the airlift had a name. It was formally Operation Vittles, but informally people called it LeMay's Coal and Feed Company. “Nobody regarded the enterprise very soberly at first,” LeMay comments dourly.
Truman ordered Clay back to Washington in mid-July to report. The Soviets had replied to a salvo of diplomatic notes, writes Walter Bedell Smith, “that Berlin was in the center of the Soviet zone and was part of that zone” and that “the Soviet high command had been compelled to take urgent measures to protect the interest of the German population.” Truman concluded “that the blockading of Berlin by the Russians was a major political and propaganda move… [They] were obviously determined to force us out of Berlin.”
Clay told the National Security Council, which in those days included the key military and diplomatic secretaries as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that abandoning Berlin, in Truman's words, “would have a disastrous effect upon our plans for Western Germany.” Given the planes, Clay said, they could supply Berlin indefinitely; he asked for 16 °C-54s, more than half the USAF's entire existing transport capacity. Truman remembers that USAF Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg resisted Clay's request, arguing that “an emergency would find us more exposed than we might be able to afford.” Truman says he disagreed and ordered the planes sent. “Truman realized that the
