The Siege

(Editor's Note: Following are excerpts from an article published in TIME magazine on July 12, 1948)

The incessant roar of the planes -- that typical and terrible 20th Century sound, a voice of cold mechanized anger -- filled every ear in the city. It reverberated in the bizarre stone ears of the hollow, broken houses; it throbbed in the weary ears of Berlin's people who were bitter, afraid, but far from broken; it echoed in the intently listening ear of history. The sound meant one thing: the West was standing its ground and fighting back.

Besieged Berlin was tense and tired. A chilly rain fell. U.S. and British armored cars prowled sluggishly through streets that breathed the smells peculiar to ruins in the rain -- smells of wet bricks, damp dust and scorched wood. On street corners, people gathered to haggle over the exchange rate between Soviet and Western marks or to buy black market herring. At the Anhalter station, where the city's food supplies from the Western zones used to roll in, before the Russians blocked the railway, only a few forlorn figures stirred -- an old man in ill-fitting Wehrmacht breeches, a pasty blonde in a threadbare dress. Between the idle, rusting tracks, wisps of grass and thin white flowers sprouted.

The crucial battle for Berlin was being fought in the hearts and minds of Berliners -- but first and foremost in their bellies. The Russians were attempting to starve into submission 2 1/2 million people in the city's Western sectors. They had been driven to employ a weapon which disgraced them before the civilized world. The Americans and the British were trying to feed the two million Berliners -- by air. The GIs called it "Operation Vittles."

At Tempelhof Airport the occasional shiny C-54s and many battered C-47s landed at the daylight rate of one every three minutes. Scores of ten-ton trucks rolled out to meet them. One hundred and fifty GIs and German workers labored 24 hours a day to get them unloaded.

In the orange and white control tower, 13 GIs worked around the clock, surrounded by Coke bottles, cigarette smoke, and the brassy chattering of radios. The chaotic chorus of American voices was tense but happy; America was in its element. "Give me an ETA on EC 84 . . . That's flour coming in on EC 72 . . . Roger . . . Ease her down . . . Where the hell has 85 gone? Oh yeah, overhead . . . Wind is now north northwest . . . The next stupid Charlie 47 has nothing on his manifest . . . Are you in charge of putting de-icer fluid in aircraft? Well, who the hell is?"

With these voices in the battle of Berlin mingled many others, in various accents, all saying essentially what the GIs were saying in their own way. Said Ernest Bevin in the House of Commons: "None of us can accept surrender." Replied Harold Macmillan, speaking for His Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition: "We must . . . face the risk of war . . . The alternative policy -- to shrink from the issue -- involves not merely the risk but the almost certainty of war." In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall said: "We intend to stay."

The man who, along with his GIs, had to do most of the staying was a general from Georgia with sad brown eyes, courtly manners and a steel-trap will. He was General Lucius DuBignon Clay, Commander of U.S. Forces in Europe and U.S. Military Governor in Germany, and he had already made his voice heard. When the Russian squeeze on Berlin first began, he said: "The American troops under my command will use force of arms if necessary . . . I have firmly made up my mind that I will not be bluffed . . . Anxiety or nervousness among Americans here is unbecoming."

How It Started

How had the U.S. got itself into a fix where one general and 4,000 GIs were supposed to hold an outpost deep inside a Red sea of Russian power? The story goes back to the era when the U.S. felt that, in dealing with Russian Communists, it might be dealing with friends. In the warm, Olympian mists of Teheran and Yalta, the Big Three decided: 1) to split Germany into four zones under an Allied Control Council, rather than run it as a single occupation 2) similarly to divide the rule of Berlin. In one way, the arrangement worked to the West's advantage -- it kept the Russians out of the Ruhr. But it made Berlin into a potential time bomb.

It might have been smarter for the U.S. not to have gone to Berlin in the first place, or to have withdrawn two years ago when Berlin had not become a spectacular issue testing the West's firmness. Today those are academic questions, for the U.S. stands committed. The U.S. stake in Berlin is faith. Withdrawal would leave to despair -- and to Soviet persecution -- tens of thousands of anti-Communists whom the U.S. encouraged to speak their minds against the Reds. It would mean the retreat of an army which, however small, is the symbol of America's commitment to Western European safety. It would give the Russians a chance to rally all Germans around their old capital, that might wreck America's plans for a Western German state and a healthy Ruhr, on which the Marshall Plan depends. Last week's ruthless siege of Berlin was a siege of all of Germany and Europe as well.