Cold War Hot: Alternate Decisions of the Cold War

by Tsouras, Peter

  Stalin paused, then continued: “There can be no war in Germany. Approach Marshall and see if we can get their fighters to stand down. The risk is too high.”

  Molotov, who never addressed Stalin by his new title “Generalissimo,” and got away with it, replied: “Comrade Druzhkov, it can be done. Marshall is here with his staff. We can have a corridor talk.”

  Molotov sent Valentin Zorin to make the contact. He encountered John Foster Dulles at one of the post-session cocktail hours and opened negotiations, suggesting that: “The US needed to reduce the chances of other unfortunate air incidents in the Berlin corridor, and that the Soviet Union was also sensitive to this issue.”

  Dulles recognized the initiative—he knew of the midair collision, but not the shoot-down or the subsequent air battle. He was appropriately non-committal, but carried Zorin’s approach to Marshall. Marshall had just finished a “telecon” with State, during which his Undersecretary, Robert Lovett, informed him of the shoot-down, the second fight, and the subsequent lack of additional military action.

  Marshall was relieved to hear that nothing else had transpired, because on September 13, during a meeting at the White House: “Truman said that he prayed he would not have to make such a decision, but that if it became necessary they should have no doubt” that he would use the atomic bomb against the Soviet Union in an emergency. The following evening, this determination had been conveyed to a meeting of the publishers of 19 major US newspapers at the home of Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. The publishers made clear to Marshall, Forrestal, Bradley, Lovett, and Chip Bohlen, who attended for the Truman administration, that there was a ground swell of public anger over the Soviet actions concerning Berlin.49

  Marshall sent Dulles to seek out Zorin, to ask if the Soviets meant to honor the Berlin Flight Rules once again. Zorin indicated that if the Americans and British were willing to stop their fighter patrols in the corridors, the Soviets would resume following the Flight Rules.50 Marshall then cabled Forrestal, and suggested that Clay should direct a temporary halt to the fighter patrols. Forrestal agreed, and Bradley cabled Clay to stand down the fighters.51

  Clay called LeMay and told him to put the escort mission on hold temporarily. LeMay was glad for the respite, because the fighters were going through drop tanks at a great rate and stocks in Europe were dropping to a dangerous level. He needed replenishment if the effort were to continue.52

  Clay also took the opportunity to send Colonel Frank Howley, commander of the US Berlin garrison, to talk to his Soviet counterpart at the Berlin Kommandatura, General Alexander Kotikov. Howley and Kotikov discussed the repatriation of remains. There were now six American aircrew dead in the Soviet Zone. Kotikov repeated Sokolovsky’s refusal to allow US teams into the “restricted military zone” to recover the remains, but said he would consider the request on a humanitarian basis.

  The next day, at the Gleinicke Bridge, two Soviet military ambulances appeared. US military police inquired what they wanted, and a Soviet lieutenant stated that they were there to turn over the remains of aircrew who had crashed in the Soviet Zone. Colonel Howley was immediately notified, and the surprised US commander sent US ambulances and graves registration personnel to take custody of the bodies.53

  Clay took the repatriation of remains as a positive sign, and LeMay reported no further incursions into the corridors. The peak of the crisis had been passed, but the blockade would continue for another seven months. The Soviets were hopeful that their old ally, General Winter, would win for them what diplomacy and intimidation had not. Thanks to good winter weather and steadily improving performance by the US Air Force, US Navy (two squadrons of Navy R-5Ds, the naval version of the C-54, were added to the airlift in late October), the British Royal Air Force, and civilian contractors, Soviet hopes were to be disappointed.54

  Epilog

  Stalin was a very unhappy man.

  “The Truman administration refused again to recognize Stalin’s quid pro quo in Germany. US propaganda turned the Berlin blockade into incriminating evidence of the ruthlessness and inhumanity of the Soviet regime. The US Air Force demonstrated its stunning superiority by supplying West Berlin for many months with everything it needed. Stalin never planned to start a war over Berlin, but he had to accept his defeat. In May 1949 he lifted the blockade. Khrushchev called the results of Stalin’s policy ‘a failure,’ and said that ‘an agreement was signed that made our position in West Berlin worse.’ He was right. Until then the Soviets could refer to the documents of the Allied Control Commission in Germany which stated that Berlin, although the place of residence for this temporary body, still remained the capital of the Soviet zone of occupation.

  In 1949, Stalin recognized the de facto permanent Western political rights in Berlin, and agreed, in a separate protocol, to the division of the city into West and East. Stalin’s stubborn refusal to face the failure of his German diplomacy led to an even greater defeat for Soviet foreign policy in West Berlin. The outcome of the Berlin blockade, of course, was much more disastrous to Soviet security interests than Khrushchev wanted to concede. The majority of countries in Western Europe, terrified by the ‘red menace,’ turned to the United States for protection, and thus NATO, an alliance of democratic countries that outlived the Soviet Union, came into existence—and constituted the Soviet military’s biggest problem for four decades. Stalin’s clumsy pressure put off those Germans who otherwise would have vacillated and perhaps even followed the pied piper of the Kremlin on the road toward German reunification under Soviet tutelage.”55

  Thus, first blood was drawn, but the ocean of blood a third world war would have spilled remained only a nightmare.

  The Reality

  The Soviets were more cautious. Stalin knew the Soviet atomic bomb was coming soon (first tested on August 29, 1949)56 along with an aircraft to deliver it, the Tu-4, and already had his Korean plans in train. He could see that the harder he pushed, the harder the US and the Allies pushed back. The capitalist states were not crumbling or fighting among themselves. Instead, they were uniting in an alliance. He had some insight into US war plans and atomic capabilities, thanks to Donald Maclean, a British Foreign Service officer who was also a Soviet spy and who was in a critical position in the British Embassy in Washington during this period.57 Also, it would take time for the grievous wounds World War II had inflicted on the Soviet Union to heal. 1948 was not the time, and Europe was not the place, to start World War III.

  Accordingly, there was only one Soviet incursion into the flight corridors in October, not the rising number shown in the story above. No direct attack was ever made by the Soviets against an airlift aircraft. There was no second instance of fighter cover being ordered for the transport stream. In fact, in a memorandum for the Secretary of Defense on “Military Measures Appropriate in the Event of Soviet Interruption to the Berlin Airlift” dated October 20, 1948, a time exactly contemporaneous with the situation developed in this story, the Joint Chiefs wrote:

  “At present, General Clay’s instructions restrict him from any overt action with respect to Soviet interference with the Berlin airlift operation. They also restrict him from any protective or defensive action of consequence in his effort to accomplish the operation in the safest manner possible in spite of interference. The Joint Chiefs of Staff do not believe that these instructions should yet be broadened. This belief is based on the presumption that it must, from a diplomatic viewpoint, be clear if and when serious incidents develop that American forces are in no way to blame and on the fact that the limit of what can be accomplished with our own forces in the Berlin area can so readily be reached that every effort should be made to postpone this contingency with its almost inevitable consequences.”58

  In short, the US did not want war.

  The Soviets tightened the blockade, cutting off streets and restricting the movement of people and goods from their sector to the western sectors.59 They then concentrated on political issues, building toward th
e advent of the German Democratic Republic, whose constitution was approved on March 20, 1948.60

  The Berlin Airlift itself wrote history. The Allies did not have to abandon Berlin, a course of action that many thought would seriously undermine their position in western Germany, and thus on the continent as a whole.61 Neither did they have to use armed force, a capability they possessed in enough quantity to start a war but not in enough quantity to win it, in order to supply their garrison and the city of Berlin. Instead, from June 26, 1948, through September 1, 1949, through 276,926 flights, sometimes in weather in which “even the birds walked,” the US and Britain hauled 2,323,067 tons of supplies into Berlin. Of this effort, the US carried 76.7 percent, the RAF 17.0 percent, and civilian contractors 6.3 percent. This effort was not without a human cost: 31 American and 18 British military personnel, 11 civilian aviators, and 5 Germans were killed during airlift operations.62 Thanks to the heroic sacrifices of the few, and the strenuous and often dangerous efforts of the many, the freedom of more than two million citizens of West Berlin was secured, time was bought during which the US rebuilt its military capabilities, and the West coalesced into the political, economic, and military alliance that eventually prevailed in the Cold War. In the opinion of General Omar Bradley, writing in 1983: “[the Berlin] airlift turned out to be our single greatest triumph in the Cold War.”63

  Bibliography

  Bradley, Omar N., and Blair, Clay, A General’s Life: An Autobiography by General of the Army Omar N. Bradley and Clay Blair, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1983.

  Eisenhower, Dwight D., Crusade in Europe, Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1948.

  Leebaert, Derek, The Fifty-Year Wound: The True Price of America’s Cold War Victory, Little, Brown, Boston, 2002.

  LeMay, Curtis E., and Kantor, MacKinlay, Mission with LeMay: My Story, Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1965.

  Newton, Verne W., The Cambridge Spies: The Untold Story of Maclean, Philby, and Burgess in America, Madison Books, Lanham, New York, 1991.

  Parrish, Thomas, Berlin in the Balance, 1945–1949: The Blockade, The Airlift, The First Major Battle of the Cold War, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1998.

  Pogue, Forrest C, George C. Marshall: Statesman, 1945–1959, Viking Penguin, New York, 1987.

  Radzinsky, Edvard, tr. Willetts, H.T., Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia’s Secret Archives, Doubleday, New York, 1996.

  Tusa, John, and Tusa, Ann, The Berlin Airlift, Sarpedon, New York, 1998.

  United States, Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1944, vol. 1, Washington, D.C., 1966.

  Zubok, Vladislav, and Pleshakov, Constantine, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996.

  Notes

  *1. The Air Force did remember. Brown retired as a major general in 1972.

  *2. Russell Brown, Flashpoint: Berlin, 1948 (New York, 1994), p. 28.

  3. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Statesman, p. 49.

  4. Parrish, Berlin in the Balance, p. 73.

  5. Ibid., p. 143.

  6. Ibid., pp. 134–35.

  7. Tusa and Tusa, The Berlin Airlift, pp. 107–08.

  8. Ibid., p. 115.

  9. Ibid., pp. 113–14.

  10. Parrish, Berlin in the Balance, pp. 148–49.

  11. Tusa, The Berlin Airlift, pp. 131–33, and 271.

  12. Ibid., p. 130.

  13. Parrish, Berlin in the Balance, p. 168.

  14. Ibid., p. 175.

  15. Bradley and Blair, A General’s Life, p. 474.

  16. Memorandum for General Norstad, “Preliminary Appreciation of the Defense of the Rhine River,” 26 Oct 48, signed S.E. Anderson, MG, USAF, Director Plans & Operations, RG 341, Entry 335, Box 807, National Archives.

  17. Bradley and Blair, A General’s Life, p. 488.

  18. Ibid., pp. 488–89.

  19. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Statesman, p. 304.

  20. Parrish, Berlin in the Balance, p. 182.

  21. Ibid., p. 198.

  22. Tusa, The Berlin Airlift, p. 160.

  23. Ibid., p. 176; see also Parrish, Berlin in the Balance, p. 216, and Pogue, George C. Marshall: Statesman, p. 302.

  24. Allied Control Authority, Air Directorate, Flight Rules for Aircraft Flying in Air Corridors in Germany and Berlin Control Zone, 22 Oct 48, DAIR/P(45)71-Second Revision, RG: 341 Entry: 335 Box: 806, NA.

  25. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Statesman, p. 307.

  26. Ibid., p. 238.

  *27. “Summary of Corridor Incidents,” App VII-B: “USAF and the Berlin Airlift, 1949.”

  *28. Ibid.

  29. Parrish, Berlin in the Balance, pp. 223–25.

  30. For safety, the C-54s were separated vertically by 1,000 feet in altitude as well as horizontally by 3 minutes flying distance.

  *31. Richmond, Lawrence, The Airbridge (New York, 1954), p. 354.

  *32. Metzger, Gordon, USAFE and the Airlift (New York, 1977), p. 417.

  33. Parrish, Berlin in the Balance, pp. 177, 208.

  *34. Richmond, The Airbridge, p. 405.

  *35. Metzger, USAFE and the Airlift, p. 482.

  36. Secure conference via teletype, operated like an internet chat session.

  37. Headquarters, European Command, APO 403, 30 Aug 48, “Orderly Evacuation of Berlin by Air,” Appendix C, RG 341, Entry 335, Box 806, NA.

  38. Bradley and Blair, A General’s Life, p. 481, calling lack of direction from the NSC concerning war risk “outrageous,” Bradley commented: “During the critical phase of the Berlin Blockade, when we were nose to nose with massive Soviet military power, the JCS was so poorly advised that we could not draw contingency war plans. Our exposure was enormous.”

  39. Memo for General Norstad, op. cit., para. 6.

  *40. Richmond, The Airbridge, p. 409.

  41. Leebaert, The Fifty-Year Wound, p. 68.

  42. LeMay and Kantor, Mission with LeMay, p. 414, reports a World War II Balkan incident in which US fighters shot down “three or four” Yaks.

  43. Tusa, The Berlin Airlift, pp. 246–47.

  *44. Kaberov and Anopov survived the arrests—likely because of their World War II records (both had been aces)—and stayed in the Air Force. Glinka and Petrinko were never heard of again.

  *45. Richmond, The Airbridge, p. 412.

  *46. Vassily Danilovich Sokolovsky, My Service: Stalin’s Red Army (Moscow, 1993), pp. 223–35.

  47. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Statesman, pp. 408–09.

  48. Radzinsky and Willetts, Stalin, p. 509. “Druzhkov” suggests friendliness in Russian, and was an alias Stalin used with Molotov.

  49. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Statesman, p. 315.

  *50. Martin, Roger F., Paris Corridors (New York, 1977), p. 45.

  *51. Ibid., p. 47.

  *52. Metzger, USAFE and the Airlift, p. 495.

  *53. Frank Howley, In the Berlin Hot Seat (New York, 1953), p. 335.

  54. Tusa, The Berlin Airlift, pp. 305–09.

  55. Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, p. 52.

  56. Radzinsky and Willetts, Stalin, p. 515.

  57. Newton, The Cambridge Spies, pp. 67 and 145–86.

  58. RG 341, Entry 335, Box 806, NA.

  59. Tusa, The Berlin Airlift, pp. 274–75.

  60. Ibid., p. 341.

  61. “The Secretary of State thought that the United States had the option of staying in Berlin or seeing the failure of their European policy.” Pogue, George C. Marshall: Statesman, p. 305.

  62. Parrish, Berlin in the Balance, p. 329.

  63. Bradley and Blair, A General’s Life, p. 481.

  2

  THE PUSAN DISASTER, 1950

  North Korea’s Triumph

  James R. Arnold

  Sadong, North Korea, May 1949

  The massive tanks of the 15th Tank Training Regiment halted in perfect wedge formation. Their turrets rotated in unison to point at a lin
e of hastily dug earthworks. A thudding volley split the air. The 35-ton, Russian-made tanks rocked backward as their 85mm cannons fired. The gunners quickly found the range. Their second and third shots collapsed the trenches. Drivers engaged their transmissions and the tanks advanced again.

  The riflemen defending the trenches did not run, the manacles around their ankles did not allow it. Some cowered. Others frantically worked their bolt-action Japanese Model 38 Arisaka rifles, but the 6.5mm bullets made no impression against the approaching tanks. A brave handful who were not secured with chains rose from the firing pits. The tanks responded with 7.62mm machine-gun fire from their bow and coaxial weapons. The infantry charged through the machine-gun fire to try to hurl their anti-tank grenades. The few who survived stood in hopeless disbelief when the detonations emitted thick, greasy smoke instead of the promised destructive armor-piercing explosion.

  Major Vladimir Ivanovich Orlov smiled. Five years before, the then Lieutenant Orlov had commanded a platoon of T-34/85s during the drive against the Korsun Pocket. His own tank had eliminated 11 Fascist tanks and earned him the honor Hero of the Soviet Union. Few tankers possessed Orlov’s wealth of combat experience. For the past year, Orlov’s job had required him to pass on this knowledge to the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA). He firmly believed that nothing tested a soldier’s resolve better than live hostile fire. Accordingly, for this last exercise he had asked his North Korean liaison officer for “volunteers” from the army’s punishment battalions and the nation’s prisons to serve as opponents against his well-drilled tankers. The response had been gratifying.

  From a trench 200 yards away, a camouflaged anti-tank gun fired. Its feeble pop could not be heard above the roar of the tank engines. However, a voluminous cloud of dirty smoke gave away its position. The company commander’s tank pivoted to face this new enemy and indicate the direction of advance. He barked an order to his platoon leaders: “Danger! Anti-tank gun. Bearing 0100. Advance and engage with machine-gun fire.”