Berlin on the Brink: The Blockade, the Airlift, and the Early Cold War by Daniel F. Harrington (review)

This book is extensively researched in Anglophone sources and offers a more nuanced account of the Berlin emergency of 1948 and 1949 than has previously been available. Daniel Harrington argues that the Soviet Union did not plan out the blockade of the western parts of Berlin. Similarly, the U.S. and British airlift was an ad-hoc effort that turned into a heroic and successful defense of Western rights only in hindsight.

The view that President Harry Truman was a decisive and courageous leader and that the USSR was to blame for all the troubles in postwar Germany is part of a conventional set of beliefs, and few historians now accept them. Yet Harrington skillfully uses these clichés to illuminate the stutter-step and crab-like way the breakdown of cooperation among the great powers occurred after World War Two. At the heart of Harrington's analysis is the view, correct I think, that neither side in the Cold War could figure out how to make a unified Germany work. Each side feared that such a Germany could not remain neutral. To resolve this issue, Germany got divided. The blockade and airlift were the first major steps in publicly defining this partition. They were also the first steps in acknowledging a great anomaly: Western-controlled sectors of the former capital were inside the segment of Germany controlled by the USSR. These sectors developed into West Berlin, a Western metropolis within East Germany and thus contained by the Soviet bloc.

Soviet leaders perhaps underplayed their hand in the Berlin of 1948. A little more pressure might have extracted concessions or forced out the Westerners. Soviet officials probably did not realize that Great Britain and the United States undertook the airlift as a stopgap measure. Both powers felt that their enclave could not last indefinitely. At the same time the boldness, and even adventurism, of the U.S. military authority in Germany, General Lucius Clay, proved warranted in the short-term faceoff with the USSR in central Europe. The airlift was able to get supplies into the city until Iosif Stalin finally called off the blockade, and West Berlin came into existence—on the one hand, a bone in the throat of the Soviet Union and a beacon of freedom behind the Iron Curtain; on the other hand, an Achilles' heel for the West.

Harrington writes slogging prose, and some of the details of his exposition will try the patience of even the most attentive reader. He is, however, dramatically at his best in depicting the day-to-day features of the airlift—how the routes and pace of delivery were determined, where the materials were unloaded, what arrangements were made for crews. All of this is filled with excitement and interest.

The book also devotes some attention to the response of the Berliners in the western areas of the city. Here Harrington, I believe, is less persuasive. He argues that the airlift gave these Germans the chance to display their aversion to the Nazis and to embrace democratic values openly. I am more skeptical about the mood of the German population during this period.

Another facet of the book bears scrutiny. Harrington presumes that the triumph of the airlift was a great victory for the West—and primarily the United States—in the Cold War. But this is not clear. The British and the Americans were not convinced that hanging on in western Berlin, within eastern Germany, was profitable or necessary. Many officials reasoned that a portion of a city behind the lines would be more trouble than it was worth, a burden and a distraction, ultimately a source of weakness and not strength. These statesmen considered questions of prestige to be of modest importance, something that adroit diplomacy could handle. If the West had given up the city in 1948, the loss of prestige would have been much...