The Siege

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The incessant roar of the planes--that typical and terrible 20th Century sound, a voice of cold mechanized anger--filled every ear in the city. It reverberated in the bizarre stone ears of the hollow, broken houses; it throbbed in the weary ears of Berlin's people who were bitter, afraid, but far from broken; it echoed in the intently listening ear of history. The sound meant one thing: the West was standing its ground and fighting back.

"The Risk of War." Besieged Berlin was tense and tired. A chilly rain fell. U.S. and British armored cars prowled sluggishly through streets that breathed the smells peculiar to ruins in the rain--smells of wet bricks, damp dust and scorched wood. On street corners, people gathered to haggle over the exchange rate between Soviet and Western marks or to buy black market herring. At the Anhalter station, where the city's food supplies from the Western zones used to roll in, before the Russians blocked the railway, only a few forlorn figures stirred--an old man in ill-fitting Wehrmacht breeches, a pasty blonde in a threadbare dress. Between the idle, rusting tracks, wisps of grass and thin white flowers sprouted.

The crucial battle for Berlin was being fought in the hearts and minds of Berliners--but first & foremost in their bellies. The Russians were attempting to starve into submission 2 1/2 million people in the city's Western sectors. They had been driven to employ a weapon which disgraced them before the civilized world. The Americans and the British were trying to feed the two million Berliners--by air. The G.I.s called it "Operation Vittles."

At Tempelhof Airport the occasional shiny C-54s and many battered C-47s landed at the daylight rate of one every three minutes. Scores of ten-ton trucks rolled out to meet them. One hundred and fifty G.I.s and German workers labored 24 hours a day to get them unloaded. In the orange and white control tower, 13 G.I.s worked around the clock, surrounded by Coke bottles, cigarette smoke, and the brassy chattering of radios. The chaotic chorus of American voices was tense but happy; America was in its element. "Give me an ETA* on EC 84 . . . That's flour coming in on EC 72 . . . Roger . . . Ease her down . . . Where the hell has 85 gone? Oh yeah, overhead . . . Wind is now north northwest . . . The next stupid Charlie 47 has nothing on his manifest . . . Are you in charge of putting de-icer fluid in aircraft? Well, who the hell is?"

With these voices in the battle of Berlin mingled many others, in various accents, all saying essentially what the G.I.s were saying in their own way. Said Ernest Bevin in the House of Commons: "None of us can accept surrender." Replied Harold Macmillan, speaking for His Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition: "We must . . . face the risk of war . . . The alternative policy--to shrink from the issue--involves not merely the risk but the almost certainty of war." In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall said: "We intend to stay."

The man who, along with his G.I.s, had to do most of the staying was a general from Georgia with sad brown eyes, courtly manners and a steel-trap will. He was General Lucius DuBignon Clay, Commander of U.S. Forces in Europe and U.S. Military Governor in Germany, and he had already made his voice heard. When the Russian squeeze on Berlin first began, he said: "The American troops under my command will use force of arms if necessary . . . I have firmly made up my mind that I will not be bluffed . . . Anxiety or nervousness among Americans here is unbecoming."

How It Started. How had the U.S. got itself into a fix where one general and 4,000 G.I.s were supposed to hold an outpost deep inside a Red sea of Russian power? The story goes back to the era when the U.S. felt that, in dealing with Russian Communists, it might be dealing with friends. In the warm, Olympian mists of Teheran and Yalta, the Big Three decided: 1) to split Germany into four zones under an Allied Control Council, rather than run it as a single occupation; 2) similarly to divide the rule of Berlin. In one way, the arrangement worked to the West's advantage--it kept the Russians out of the Ruhr. But it made Berlin into a potential time bomb.

It might have been smarter for the U.S. not to have gone to Berlin in the first place, or to have withdrawn two years ago when Berlin had not become a spectacular issue testing the West's firmness. Today those are academic questions, for the U.S. stands committed. The U.S. stake in Berlin is faith. Withdrawal would leave to despair--and to Soviet persecution--tens of thousands of anti-Communists whom the U.S. encouraged to speak their minds against the Reds. It would mean the retreat of an army which, however small, is the symbol of America's commitment to Western European safety. It would give the Russians a chance to rally all Germans around their old capital; that might wreck America's plans for a Western German state and a healthy Ruhr, on which the Marshall Plan depends. Last week's ruthless siege of Berlin was a siege of all of Germany and Europe as well.

That is the measure of General Lucius Clay's task in Germany. He carries it out without anxiety or nervousness, despite the fact that for frequent lack of a definite U.S. policy (or agreed U.S.-British-French policy), Clay has had to make his own. Said a Frankfurt barber last week: "I feel sorry for General Clay. Every Russian from Marshal Sokolovsky down to the last sentry seems to know what his government's policy is and what he's supposed to do about it. With the American Government I sometimes wonder whether it knows itself what it's doing."

No other American at this moment has the authority and responsibility for so many on-the-spot decisions that can determine whether or not the U.S. this year finds itself in World War III. A man less sure of himself than Clay would break under such conditions. But Clay eats well, likes to take walks in his flower garden, and is mildly contemptuous of insomniacs ("If they'd work harder they could sleep all right"). Says his tall, handsome wife Marjorie: "I am appalled--absolutely appalled--by his steadfastness of purpose."

"If I ask for 50 . . ." A TIME correspondent recorded one of Clay's crucial days last week: in his vine-covered house at 43 Im Dol (in Dahlem, a pleasant Berlin suburb), the general got up at 6:30, breakfasted at 7:20 (passing out crackers to his Scotty George and Spaniel Sambo), reached the big walnut desk in his office at 8. After an hour of reading top-secret reports, teletype news, intelligence reports on everything down to a brawl between a U.S. soldier and a German civilian, he went into the grey granite courtyard to greet Washington visitors--Lieut. General Albert C. Wedemeyer, the U.S. Army's chief of operational planning, and Under Secretary of the Army William H. Draper Jr. Back in his office, for 2 1/2 hours, Clay and a platoon of experts told his visitors what he would need to hold Berlin.

Then came a review of Clay's personal Negro color guard, a half-hour lunch, a 15-minute summary of Germany's steel problem to a U.S. mission of steel experts, then two hours of routine work. He kept his telephone humming--a call to tough, taciturn Air Force General Curtis LeMay in Frankfurt for the latest on Operation Vittles ("If I ever call him for one plane for a VIP [Very Important Person], he refuses, but if I ask him for 50 for Berlin food they're on the runway in a couple of hours"); a call to Deputy Commander Lieut. General Clarence Huebner* ("What about the quartermaster side of the food lift? Are there any bottlenecks? Enough trucks on hand?").

On his ten-button intercom phone he summoned advisers for short talks. He was often crisp and curt. Though he listened to all, he usually made his own, quick decisions. Throughout the day, he kept drinking cup after cup of coffee, smoked two packs of cigarettes.

Finally he had a talk with the State Department's Robert Murphy, Clay's political adviser--this afternoon they were too busy for their customary brief gin rummy session. At the end of his twelve-hour day, he went home for dinner and more talks with visiting generals, then returned to his office at 11 p.m. to get off his last cable to the War Department.

In his three years in Germany, Clay has not missed a single day's work.

The man of whom Jimmy Byrnes once said that he could run anything--General Motors or General Eisenhower's Army--was born (1897) in Marietta, Ga., the son of a U.S. Senator and a great-greatnephew of Statesman Henry ("I'd rather be right") Clay. He worked briefly as a Senate page in Washington, went to West Point, became an engineer, married a charming New Jersey blonde, sent two sons to West Point. When World War II broke out, he was a captain of engineers who had built some good dams. As Director of Materiel for the Army Service Forces, he gave proof of a miraculous memory and an ability to read about six times as fast as the next major general. Called to Europe by Eisenhower soon after Dday, he broke the Cherbourg supply bottleneck, then served under War Mobilizer Byrnes until Eisenhower called him back as his deputy in Germany. Said Clay at the time: "This is an experiment in international cooperation. It can work because it has got to work."

Since then, he has learned some lessons about international cooperation with the Russians, has acquired along with an Order of Kutuzov (First Class) a good deal of grey hair at his temples. But so, presumably, have his Russian opposite numbers. Together with Colonel Frank Howley, a onetime Philadelphia adman and tough commander of the U.S. sector of Berlin, Clay makes a sharp foil for them.

Howley, perhaps the most flamboyant member of Clay's staff, last week issued a statement that was a hearteningly accurate advertisement of the U.S. position in Berlin: "I don't know where we can go in Europe that Russia could not cut off our supplies. You have to start somewhere with the principle that agreements must be observed. If we want to hold our heads up in Europe, we have to stand firm."

Behind the Lines. It was one of history's consummate ironies that, to stand firm, the West now had to consider the mood and mettle of the Germans. What was the state of the German nation? TIME's Berlin Bureau cabled this report:

"The life of the Soviet zone's 17 million people is most summarily indicated by Berlin's brave fight against being swallowed into Soviet zone darkness. What emerges from that darkness is a grim parade of statistics--a population decline of 85,000 between October 1947 and February 1948; a Soviet loot of capital goods (in the occupation's first year) amounting to $6 billion; reparations from current production averaging $1 billion a year. Police-state methods have 'solved' some problems that still frustrate the West. Whipped by fear, the population works hard, hoards less food, and wastes little time on political discussion. The fact is that the Russians have earned the fear and hate of all except convinced Communists. For this reason, no matter how much they talk of it, the Russians cannot possibly agree to truly free elections in a unified Germany.

"In Western Germany this week there are brighter signs of health and hope than at any time since the Third Reich's death. The new Western German currency (TIME, June 28) has brought a new spirit. Shop windows are suddenly crammed with goods--pots, pans, gay summer prints, electric irons, lawnmowers, typewriters, clocks--and clerks have become courteous. Farmers no longer hoard their food but bring it to town markets. In the midst of all this, General Clay and the other Western occupation chiefs last week submitted to German leaders the recent Six-Power London Agreement plans for a Western German constituent assembly. The Germans sat through the proceedings poker-faced, promised a reply later on.

"German politicians, afraid of being labeled 'agents of the occupation,' still do not provide leadership. It is difficult to set democratic wheels in motion within the big, necessarily authoritarian occupation machine. A similar situation exists in the economy, which is too controlled to be free and yet too free to be planned.

"The best news from Western Germany came from the Ruhr, where coal production soared to a postwar peak of 308,864 tons in one day. Unfortunately, this result was achieved only through various forms of bribery--cigarettes, fats, canned meats for the miners. At the same time, synchronized with the drive on Berlin, the well-organized Ruhr Communists started a push to disrupt Western Germany's uncertain economy. Red agitators made dire predictions of heavy unemployment in the fall which, U.S. experts concede, may come true. One of the more brilliant young Communists is Willi Agatz, vice president of the 460,000 organized Ruhr miners. Cried he last week: 'Do you want the British and French capitalists to grow rich and fat on the production made possible by the coal you sweat to shovel? . . . These mines are part of Germany. Are we going to stand for these foreigners taking whatever they want? . . .'

"In the face of that line, it would be hard to explain to Germans about the Marshall Plan and European cooperation. Before 1948 is over, the West may have as much trouble in the Ruhr as it is having in Berlin today."

"For the Last Time." Meanwhile the battle of Berlin continued in customary fashion. Sometimes, when the Russians carried on their ursine comedy of manners, it was hard to believe in the battle's reality--as when the Soviet representative last week formally announced his country's withdrawal from the four-power Kommandatura, which the Russians had formally declared nonexistent the week before. (Afterwards the Russian invited his colleagues to lunch--"for the last time.")

The West continued to hold its ground in Berlin--and its sky above Berlin. The U.S. Air Force and the R.A.F. announced that they could jointly supply the 2,000 tons a day needed by Berliners in the Western sectors. The U.S. was even experimenting with the dropping of coal (for Berlin's basic utilities) from B-29s. But it was obvious that Operation Vittles could not be carried on at summer rate when winter comes. In the long run, the siege would have to be lifted from the outside. By week's end, it boomed far beyond Berlin's battlements, and even beyond Western Germany's precarious drawbridges, to the buttresses of Washington, London and Paris.

After days of transatlantic buzzing, it was decided that the Western commanders in Berlin should try once more to reach an understanding with Russia's Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky. General Clay, Britain's General Sir Brian Robertson and France's General Pierre Koenig called on Sokolovsky, left after half an hour with nothing apparently accomplished. The Russians said that they could not tell when the "repairs" on the railroads would be finished--which officially left them in the strange position of saying that while the Western powers could supply two million people by air, the Soviet Union was too incompetent to keep a railway open.

What were the Russians after? Facing an increasingly hostile German population, their position was not much more enviable than the West's. They were simply beating against the West's weakest salient to win either its surrender--or the even bigger prize of a new conference, with Ruhr coal on the table. What could the U.S. do about it? Washington's diplomatic counterattack--which must strive not merely for present Russian withdrawal but for guarantees against future assaults--could start with a formal protest to Moscow (which was being readied this week). The next possible steps: U.N. discussion; economic sanctions, including the closing of the Suez and Panama canals to Soviet ships; a diplomatic break. Only after the failure of such steps was the U.S. likely to arm food trains which might or might not have to shoot their way through the Russian zone.

"The World So Fair." Over soggy Berlin, the roar of the planes continued. The City Assembly heard it when, led by tough little Mayoress Louise Schroeder, it defied the Russians and sent an appeal for intervention to the U.N. Communist Boss Wilhelm Pieck heard it when he told party leaders that they must fight the "infection" of diversionist elements. "In the last three weeks," cried Pieck, "you have lost all the popularity you have gained in the last three years." And the children heard the sound, and feared it, for it stirred memories of bombings not so long ago--children like twelve-year-old Max, who each night recited an English prayer he had learned in his German school:

Father, we thank Thee for the night And for the pleasant morning light, For rest and food and loving care, And all that makes the world so fair . . .

"The courage of the people of Berlin," said Lucius Clay, "is a source of great hope." To Berlin and the U.S., General Clay himself was a source of great hope. Said a U.S. observer in Berlin last week: "Two of the most important reasons why the West is still in Berlin and not at war with Russia are that Clay has forged a policy of firmness almost wholly on his own initiative, and that in so doing he has avoided making any fateful blunders into silly belligerence."

General Clay (his wife reported) "was happy as a kid" when he got reports from Washington last week that more C-54s were on their way to Berlin from Alaska and the Caribbean.

Overhead, the roar of the planes continued day & night.

*Estimated time of arrival. *Wartime chief of the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division, whose present "quartermaster" job is something of a return of his beginnings: no West Pointer, Huebner started his Army career as a cook.

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