Berlin crisis was a political war,” Clay praised the President in a late interview, “not a physical military war. I am not being critical of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because I think they visualized it as a military operation.”
Sixty B-29s had already made headlines by then, moving from Florida and Kansas to East Anglia. They were bombers of the new US Strategic Air Command and the government made a point of revealing that they were atomic-capable and hinted that they carried atomic bombs — “bringing nuclear weapons,” a newspaper man would write, “for the first time directly into the system of diplomacy and violence by which the affairs of people were henceforth to be regulated.” The implied nuclear threat, the first of the Cold War, was a bluff; none of the planes were atomic-capable Sil-verplates, nor were their crews trained in bomb assembly, nor did they carry atomic bombs. (Silverplate B-29s never left North America in those years except for one squadron that trained out of Japan during the
Truman went into the matter on July 21 in a meeting crowded with AEC commissioners and defense officials. David Lilienthal believed it was “one of the most important meetings I have ever attended.” He thought the President “looked worn and grim… and we got right down to business.” Legally, Truman could transfer atomic weapons to the military whenever he judged such transfer necessary, but in those days the weapons lacked locking mechanisms; whoever possessed them — Truman's “dashing lieutenant colonel” — could detonate them. Lilienthal argued for keeping the weapons in civilian hands. Stuart Symington, the Secretary of the Air Force, a tall, handsome loose cannon from Missouri, offered up a string of foolish rebuttals. “Our fellas… think they ought to have the bomb,” was one of Symington's lines, Lilienthal reports. “They feel they might get them when they need them and they might not work.” Have they ever failed to work? Truman responded sharply. Symington “left that one,” Lilienthal says, and went on to cite “one fellow” he had spoken to at Los Alamos who thought the law prevented the military from having the bomb, “I forgot his name… I don't believe he thought we ought to use it anyway.” Truman took up that question with remarkable candor, revealing the sense of Solomonic burden that agonized him:
I don't think we ought to use this thing unless we absolutely have to. It is a terrible thing to order the use of something like that [“Here he looked down at his desk, rather reflectively,” Lilienthal interjects] that is so terribly destructive, destructive beyond anything we have ever had. You have got to understand that this isn't a military weapon… It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. So we have got to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that… You have got to understand that I have got to think about the effect of such a thing on international relations. This is no time to be juggling an atom bomb around.
Forrestal disagreed with the President's decision. He believed atomic war with the Soviet Union was inevitable and wanted the military fully prepared. A week after the custody debate, the increasingly grim Secretary of Defense ordered the JCS to restore HALFMOON planning rather than pursue the conventional war plan alternative that Truman had demanded. As authority for this illegal action, Forrestal cited his own; he told the Joint Chiefs he would take full responsibility. He pointedly asked Truman at a presidential briefing in September if he was prepared to use the atomic bomb if Berlin came to war. “The President said that he prayed that he would never have to make such a decision, but that if it became necessary, no one need have a misgiving but what he would do so.” Forrestal found support for his belligerence over dinner the evening after the briefing at the house of the publisher of the
Truman might have been less blue had he known Stalin's conviction that blockading Berlin was a low-risk strategy. “I believe that Stalin… embarked on that affair in the certain knowledge that the conflict would not lead to nuclear war,” Andrei Gromyko, at that time the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, said later. “He reckoned that the American administration was not run by frivolous people who would start a nuclear war over such a situation.” In the first direct confrontation of the Cold War, both leaders were improvising strategies for challenging each other's commitments without escalating to full-scale conflict.
US Army Lieutenant General Albert Wedemeyer, who had commanded the China theater during the Second World War and who was now the Army's director of plans and operations, inspected LeMay's Coal and Feed Company in the first month of the operation and found it wanting. Wedemeyer had special competence for reviewing the airlift: the AAF had supplied his army in China by airlift over the Hump in the last years of the war. The Hump airlift was not LeMay's improvised early B-29 operation out of China but a major air transport operation over the Himalayas that William Tunner had commanded. From Germany, Wedemeyer sent an Eyes-Only message to Vandenberg arguing that an airlift could break the blockade or sustain Berlin during extended negotiations, but that Tunner should run it because he had run one before and knew how. Clay and LeMay resisted Wedemeyer's recommendation. The Army general met personally with Vandenberg and prevailed.
Tunner, a steady, solid man to whom Hap Arnold had offered the presidency of a civilian freight service after the war, flew to Germany in late July 1948 to take over the airlift. He found what he called “a real cowboy operation.” “Pilots were flying twice as many hours per week as they should,” he writes. “… Everything was temporary… Confusion everywhere. Planes had been scraped up from all over Europe… My chief of operations… was going to have plenty of headaches. Back on the Hump, we had thirteen bases in India feeding planes into six bases in China… But here in Berlin all planes had to land at two airfields.”
With Tunner in command, after a few false starts, the Berlin Airlift got underway in earnest. The transport expert established three unvarying rules that steadied the schedule and maximized the delivery of goods: crews would stay with their planes on the ramp at Tempelhof or Gatow while the planes were being unloaded; all missions would follow instrument flight rules (“You can fly by instruments in clear weather,” Tunner writes, “but you sure can't fly by visual rules in the North German fog”); and any pilot who missed a landing would not go around for a second attempt but would return directly to his home base without unloading. “All planes under my command,” Tunner summarizes, “would fly a never-changing flight pattern by instrument rules at all times, good weather or bad, night or day.” The airlift expert hoped to make his deliveries predictable to the point of boredom — every three minutes around the clock regardless of the weather.
Truman authorized an increase to two hundred C-54s early in September. By September 25, Clay was talking to his British counterpart about delivering eight thousand tons of supplies per day, though the airlift never achieved that capacity, building up slowly across the months ahead to a five-thousand-ton average. An aide to Admiral William Leahy, Truman's chief of staff, toured Operation Vittles in late September and reported his impressions directly to the President. “The airlift is the greatest feat of its kind in the history of air transport,” the aide wrote enthusiastically. “… The efficiency with which the operations are being conducted now, and the plans that are being made for future operations during bad weather months are outstanding.” The aide understood that the airlift would meet Clay's minimum requirement of 4,500 tons per day even “during the winter months when flying conditions will be at their worst.” He judged that “newspaper reports of Russian interference in our air corridors have been exaggerated.” These two points together argued for the airlift's eventual success.
