The Word Is Liberty

Last week Germans agreed with Anthony Eden when he told them: "If ever there was a time to stand firm, it is this."

Eden was speaking to a mixed Allied and German audience in Berlin. Another speaker at the same meeting, Berlin's Social Democratic Leader Franz Neumann, noted that it was Bastille Day. The British translator, picking up Neumann's words, sentence by sentence, intoned: "And on this great French holiday in Berlin we honor the ideals of Fraternity, Equality and . . ."The audience roared as the harassed translator appealed in a whisper to Neumann for the third word. Neumann gave fire to the worn phrase by shouting in German: "We here in Berlin know what it is! Liberty!"

The fact that all over Germany men were acutely aware of liberty and of its connection with the U.S.-British air lift was the real answer to last week's Russian note. The Kremlin said flatly that they were using the blockade to pry the Western powers out of Berlin.

Where did that leave the crisis? The Western powers could go on supplying Berlin for months. Some experts in Washington now believed that the volume transported could be greatly increased and that Berlin could even be supplied with coal through the winter. The operation would be fantastically expensive, but worth it, politically. The Berlin lift was a kind of 20th Century miracle play representing both the West's humanitarian purpose and its military strength. Said a high-ranking U.S. air officer last week: "A year's supply of Berlin would be cheap compared to a day of war."

If the Russians continued intransigent, the U.S. had another possible course. It could use its meager armored forces (see cut) to blast a land route to Berlin. But that would mean that the U.S. would abandon its present morally unassailable position. As matters stood, the air lift over the blockade could go on until the Russians stopped it--but only by an act of war.

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