That the Communists do not have as one of their textbooks Dale Carnegie’s treatise on how to make friends and influence people is nowhere better shown these days than in Berlin.
These lighthearted lines, written by America’s editors in a “Current Comment” from August 1948, might have inspired a few chuckles in readers—though they were over a political crisis that was no laughing matter. Beginning in June of that year, the Soviet Union and its communist allies in Soviet-occupied Europe had initiated a blockade of the western zone of the city of Berlin. And America’s contributors and editors took that conflict very, very seriously.
A failure of negotiations between the superpowers—or a refusal of one side to blink, to use a Cold War phrase still 14 years in the future—could result in all-out war, but the editors of America wondered if peace with the Soviet Union was really the only goal. The magazine, particularly coming out of the four-year editorship of John LaFarge, S.J., from 1944-48, was rather more hawkish on anti-communist endeavors in the late 1940s than in later years. Just a week before the above was published, the Aug. 7 issue included a “Current Comment” arguing that “our agreements with the USSR in the past have uniformly proved to be no agreements at all; what assurances have we that an agreement on Berlin will be any different? The American people do not want war; but neither do they want to be misled and deluded again through more apparent ‘agreements.’”
(It is worth noting that it was not until the following August that the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, significantly changing the calculus of superpower diplomacy.)
The Berlin Blockade and ensuing Berlin Airlift (not to be confused with the 1961 crisis over the building of the Berlin Wall) took place between June 1948 and September 1949 during the creation and consolidation of the eastern and western blocs of the Cold War. Like Germany itself after World War II, Berlin had been divided into occupation zones controlled by the British, French and Americans in the western part of the city and the Soviets (who had arrived first) in the east. By 1948, no love was lost between the two sides: Two years had passed since Winston Churchill’s famous “Iron Curtain” speech, and the Korean War would begin less than a year after the airlift concluded.
After months of economic disputes over Berlin (including the introduction by the Western powers of the Deutsche Mark in the city) earlier in the year, the Soviets blocked American and Allied access by road, rail or barge to Berlin in late June of 1948 and cut electricity to the western sector to two hours a day. More than 2 million residents in the western zone—already living under severe rationing in a slowly rebuilding city—faced immediate shortages of food and medicine.
Within a day of the Soviet actions (and after rejecting the all but inevitable suggestion by an American general that the West attack immediately), British and American authorities began what the Americans called “Operation Vittles,” delivering milk, medicine, fuel and foodstuffs to West Berlin via cargo plane using three safe-passage corridors through the airspace of Soviet-controlled Germany. The frequency of the flights would eventually peak at two planes landing in West Berlin every minute, with more than 12,000 tons of supplies reaching the city each day.
Among America’s commentators on the issue was a Jesuit priest who gained a certain amount of fame in later years for, among other things, his scholarship on World War II and his rigorous academic defenses of Pope Pius XII against accusations the latter had failed to defend Jews from Nazi persecution: Robert A. Graham, S.J. As part of his analysis of the Berlin crisis, he somehow cajoled his way onto one of the U.S. cargo planes. Here is part of his report from Oct. 2, 1948:
Can the air-lift be continued into the winter? As a hitch-hiker on an Air Force four-engined C-54 from Rhein-Main airport near Frankfort to Tempelhof in Berlin, I put that question to Captain Raymond Kolman. He shared the confidence of his chief, General Hoyt Vandenberg, that the air-lift could go on indefinitely. As we swung over Tempelhof after a flight of one hour and forty minutes with a cargo of 19,000 pounds of macaroni and flour (not to mention one correspondent in clerical garb), we allowed ourselves to be the guinea pigs for students learning to guide the landing of planes through radar. When the mists close in on Tempelhof this winter, ground-controlled landing will become indispensable.
Though the airlift was an enormous financial drain on the Western powers, especially when the winter of 1948-9 proved a bitter one, the propaganda points being won by the West made it a political bonanza. Magazines featured feel-good stories of Berlin residents who took on the task of unloading arriving planes and of American pilots dropping chocolate bars via homemade parachutes to grateful Berlin children. “To a visitor returning to Berlin after an interval of one year, the most striking development is that the Berliners themselves are playing a vital role in the destiny of their own city,” wrote Father Graham. “There appears hardly any doubt that the people have thrown their lot in with the West.”
In a story from July 1948, Time described the (somewhat porous, truth be told) blockade as “The Siege,” accused the Soviets of an “ursine comedy of manners” and quoted a 12-year-old German boy 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…
More ominously for the Soviets, the war-weary population of Berlin itself began displaying more public antipathy for communism. On May 12, 1949—77 years ago today—the Soviet Union announced it was lifting the blockade. Western trains and trucks immediately set off for Berlin, where a huge crowd celebrated the event. Ongoing political tensions and the perceived need to build up a huge supply stash in case the blockade were reinstated meant that a modified airlift continued until the end of September of that year. Ultimately, more than 2.3 million tons of food and supplies were delivered to West Berlin in more than 250,000 flights over 15 months.
America’s editors applauded the lifting of the blockade but also cautioned that “Russia is probably stalling for time” (like Time and other magazines, America in the early Cold War preferred “Russian” to “Soviet”) and could not be trusted. “But, having been bitten before, we are twice shy. Whatever happens, we must keep the airlift organized and ready to resume,” they wrote in a May 7 “Current Comment” after the lifting of the blockade a week later had been confirmed. “With her sweeping victories in China, [the Soviet Union] can afford to stall in Europe. Maybe she is only distracting us from our losses in China, the full impact of which we have not yet realized. When we realize them, the Berlin blockade will seem episodic.”
Indeed, in China, Mao Zedong officially proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on Oct. 1, 1949—one day after the official end of the Berlin Airlift. While the Sino-Soviet split over the next decade would allay Western fears of close cooperation between the two, one can perhaps understand why the editors of America were seeing Red.
•••
Our poetry selection for this week is “Bad Timing” by Scott McConnaha. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
Related