Berlin on the Brink: The Blockade, the Airlift, and the Early Cold War

1. Opportunity

7 chapter 1 opportunity The agreements that divided postwar Germany into zones and Berlin into sectors seem to defy common sense. Although the Soviet zone surrounded the city, the accords did not define Western transit rights across it. This omission seemed criminal during the Cold War, and many sought explanations. The most common was that, during the war, few Westerners had given much thought to access, and those who did were overruled by others who naively trusted Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Dwight Eisenhower summed up these views when he told GOP leaders in 1952 that the problem resulted from Franklin Roosevelt’s concessions to the Russians, which he derided as “bribing a burglar.”1 As all good detectives know, opportunity alone does not result in crime; motive must accompany it. Eisenhower saw no need to explain Soviet motivations. Convinced that Stalin’s mind buzzed with larcenous thoughts, he assumed that opportunity alone was a sufficient explanation. Yet decisions made during the war did not cause the blockade; they only made it possible. A full explanation must combine opportunity and motive, the goal of this chapter and the next.2 The broad outlines of how Germany came to be divided into zones are well known. In what remains the best short introduction to the subject, State Department historian William Franklin chronicled a series of missed opportunities and assumptions disproved by time. The United States and Great Britain began discussing the postwar occupation in 1943. Planning quickly became entangled in bureaucratic quarrels between the Department of State and the Pentagon, and it was distracted by a disagreement between Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill over which country should occupy northwestern Germany. Meanwhile , a European Advisory Commission (EAC)—created at a meeting of the British , American, and Soviet foreign ministers in Moscow in October 1943—worked out a zonal plan that omitted provisions for Western access to Berlin. The Yalta conference approved this EAC plan. The French joined the EAC in November 1944, 8  Berlin on the Brink and at Yalta they were granted a zone of Germany, a sector in Berlin, and a seat on the Allied Control Council (ACC), the committee of military governors charged with overall responsibility for the occupation. Franklin described how approaches to the Soviets in 1945, culminating in a meeting among Soviet Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov, U.S. Lieutenant General Lucius D. Clay, and British Lieutenant General Ronald Weeks on June 29, 1945, left Western transit arrangements ill-defined.3 Yet Franklin did not explain why the Western powers paid so little attention to ensuring their ability to reach Berlin. Exploring Western plans and assumptions, this chapter argues that the failure to work out access arrangements had sources other than naiveté or gullibility. In sketching out what would become the boundary of the Soviet zone, British planners in 1943 simply overlooked the issue. They expected a brief occupation, assumed that zonal boundaries would merely mark where each country stationed its troops, and believed that each power’s forces would move freely in all zones. The EAC did not correct the British omission. The French joined the commission too late to affect the zonal protocol, the Soviets had no interest in expanding outsiders’ presence in their sphere, and no American alternative to the British proposal reached the commission. Roosevelt toyed with a scheme whereby the U.S. zone would abut Berlin, but he abandoned it after learning that the Russian representative in the EAC had endorsed the British plan. Shortly thereafter, American officials debated making free access to Berlin a condition of American acceptance of the boundaries in the British plan, but they later set aside the idea. Once the commission agreed on a zonal protocol, those worried about access did not push hard to resolve the issue, and those who approached the Russians about access met polite evasion. although eiseNhoWer aNd other Cold War critics blamed the Roosevelt administration for the opportunities provided to the Soviets by wartime plans, those plans originated in London. From the start, British planners believed the Allies would have to occupy all of Germany. Partial occupation after 1918 had not worked; only complete occupation had any chance of success this time. Total occupation could take one of two forms: stationing small contingents from all the occupying powers throughout Germany, in what was known as a “mixed” occupation , or dividing the country into zones, one for each occupying power. The British chose the latter.4 By mid-October 1943, the Post-Hostilities...