He did, and they did. On March 12 Truman asked a joint session to appropriate 400 million dollars—250 million for Greece and 120 million for Turkey. Then he, Marshall, Acheson and Vandenberg hit the sawdust trail to preach the gospel of containment before every influential group in the country, until, on May 22, the President signed the Greco-Turk aid bill into law in his temporary office in Kansas City’s Muehlebach Hotel.
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At the time, the Truman Doctrine looked like a master stroke. Its loudest critics then were right-wing mastodons who wanted to “roll” the Communists “back” to their prewar frontiers. Yet there were other dissenters whose questions, raised mildly at the time, remained unanswered a quarter-century later. Senator Taft, pointing out that the two governments were to receive American arms, suggested that Capitol Hill should be exceedingly careful about delegating its war-making powers to any chief executive, whatever the issue. General Albert C. Wedemeyer thought containment was an invitation to military folly, because the Russians could bleed America white by provoking aggression on the boundaries of its satellites, where the conflict would be “their third team opposing our first team.” Most haunting of all, Walter Lippmann adopted Wedemeyer’s arguments and added others of his own in a brilliant riposte to Kennan’s reasoning.
Lippmann’s slim volume was called The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (1947). In it he was polite—Kennan was called “Mr. X” throughout—and devastating. Quoting the article in Foreign Affairs, he noted Kennan’s view that it demanded “unalterable counterforce” to the Communists “at every point where they show signs of encroaching.” If the Soviet Union were an island like Japan, he wrote, it could be blockaded by American air and sea power. Unfortunately, it was a land power, and as such it could only be contained by trench warfare or the endless hemorrhages of guerrilla warfare. “The Eurasian continent is a big place,” he wryly commented, “and the military power of the United States has certain limitations.” Already, in Greece, partisans had carried the struggle to the hills, where sophisticated weapons were useless and infantry skills were everything. Under containment, Lippmann continued, the outcome would depend upon draftees or satellite troops. Despair lay either way. America must “disown our puppets, which would be tantamount to appeasement and defeat and the loss of face,” or must support them at an incalculable cost “on an unintended, unforeseen and perhaps undesirable issue.” Repeatedly Lippmann returned to Asia and its traps for containment-minded diplomats. To accept a challenge there would permit the Communists to choose the battlefield, the weapons, and even the nationality of the Red battalions. “I find it hard,” he concluded, “to understand how Mr. X could have recommended such a strategic monstrosity.”
In eighteen months Greece was pacified, Turkey was invulnerable, and George Kennan was a hero. Washingtonians reminded one another that Lippmann wasn’t infallible: after all, he had misjudged Roosevelt. But this time his instincts were right. While the triumph of the center in Greece would have been unlikely without American assistance, it would have been inconceivable if Tito hadn’t quarreled with the Cominform and closed the border between Yugoslavia and Greece, depriving General Markos of his sanctuary. Superficial resemblances between Greece and Korea later strengthened advocates of containment and limited war without solving this problem of asylum, thereby contributing to Vietnam. It is worth noting that professional soldiers as far apart in other ways as MacArthur and Bradley agreed that the kind of conflict Lippmann had foreseen would be a strategic nightmare.
That was one side of the containment coin. The brighter side was the Marshall Plan, which grew out of the Truman Doctrine and became its great sequel. If the Greek and Turkish debt to Kennan’s vision is less than had been supposed, western Europe’s obligation is beyond price. Eventually the Marshall Plan—formally known as the European Recovery Program (ERP)—became as noncontroversial as social security.
If ERP began with any one man, it was Undersecretary of State Will Clayton. Flying home from a six-week canvass of Europe, Clayton put it on paper as the only alternative to war in the coming decade. In every country he had visited, subversive campaigns were destroying national integrity and independence. “Feeding on hunger, economic misery, and frustration,” he wrote, “these attacks have already been successful in some of the liberated countries.” He proposed that the President and the State Department shock the American people into action. After his plane from Zurich reached Washington, Clayton handed his memorandum to Acheson, who took it to the President. Acheson reminded Truman that the President had asked him to speak for him at a small southern function on May 8. If shock was the right prescription, perhaps he should strike a few sparks there.
Truman concurred, and so it happened that the ERP concept was first presented to an American audience on the campus of the Delta State Teachers College in remote Cleveland, Mississippi. Abroad, Acheson told his listeners, the margins of survival were so narrow that the cruel winter just passed had threatened the people of northern Europe with extinction. He said: “It is one of the principal aims of foreign policy today to use our economic and financial resources to widen these margins. It is necessary if we are to preserve our own freedoms and our own democratic institutions. It is necessary for our national security. And it is our duty and privilege as human beings.”
That, in sum, was the Marshall Plan. It wasn’t Marshall’s yet, however. The Mississippians liked it, and the New York Times, forewarned, put it on page one with an analysis by James Reston, but the wire services were indifferent; economic stories were considered almost as dull as public addresses by long-winded bureaucrats. The press would listen to General Marshall, though, and so a second trial balloon was readied, to be launched by him. It is a measure of the speed with which the European economy was deteriorating that delivery of his speech was moved up from the Amherst College commencement on June 16 to Harvard’s on June 5, while Dean Acheson was drumming up support among reporters. Acheson was particularly active with British correspondents. To Leonard Miall of the British Broadcasting System, Malcolm Muggeridge of the Daily Telegraph, and René MacColl of the Daily Express he said, “Don’t waste time writing about it. As soon as you get your hands on a copy telephone the whole thing to London. And one of you must ask your editor to see that Ernie Bevin gets a full copy of the text at once. It will not matter what hour of the night it is; wake Ernie up and put a copy in his hand.”
General Marshall spoke for fifteen minutes in Harvard Yard. He first described the torn “fabric of the European economy.” The remedy lay in “breaking the vicious circle and restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole.” Aid must be continued. He was now thinking in terms of seventeen billion dollars. But UNRRA’s random spending must be replaced by a program in which there was “some agreement among the countries of Europe as to the requirements of the situation and the part those countries themselves will take to give proper effect to whatever action might be undertaken by this government.” America had made its move. Now it was Europe’s turn.
Thanks to Muggeridge, that next move was made almost at once. In England the small hours of the following day had arrived, yet a boy from the Daily Telegraph bicycled to the home of sleeping Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin with a carbon of Muggeridge’s story, dictated over a transatlantic phone, as Acheson had suggested. Almost at once Bevin and France’s Georges Bidault called an all-European conference in Paris, after which applications for economic aid reached Washington from Britain, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Ireland, Iceland, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and, later, West Germany. After six weeks of debate and the rejection of a Taft amendment which would have slashed a billion dollars from the program, Congress passed it and then voted 597 million dollars to tide over the “Marshall gap”—the months that would pass before long-term aid could take hold.
On April 14, 1948, eleven days after Preside
nt Truman had signed ERP into law, the appropriately named freighter John H. Quick left Galveston harbor with nine thousand long tons of wheat for Bordeaux. It was the first in a six-vessel fleet carrying emergency food cargoes for France. All told, the Marshall Plan was to give Europe 12.5 billion dollars, less than Marshall had thought necessary. In addition, there were such tangential programs as the Displaced Persons Plan, under which 339,000 DPs became American citizens. It was a proud page in history. The Russians were furious, of course. They announced the imminence of something called “the Molotov Plan,” which was never heard from again. Henry Wallace, now sidestepping rapidly to the left, called ERP “the Martial Plan.” In the lower house of Congress seventy-five representatives had fought it, and in the upper house freshman Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had demanded that for every dollar spent the United States should receive the equivalent of a dollar in strategic materials or foreign bases.
McCarthy notwithstanding, European leaders were both moved and exultant. This was especially true in Britain. Churchill hailed ERP as “the most unsordid act in history.” The London Economist described it as “the most straight-forward, generous thing that any country has ever done for others.” Thirty months later, when England was back on its feet, the Manchester Guardian said, “Ordinary thanks are inadequate. Here is one of the most brilliant successes in the history of international relations,” and Hugh Gaitskell, then chancellor of the exchequer, added: “We are not an emotional people… and not very articulate, but these characteristics should not… hide the real and profound sense of gratitude toward the American people.”
Across the Channel from England, the continent was transformed. Malnutrition vanished, people could dress warmly in winter, raw materials moved swiftly, pulled by new diesel locomotives on new railroad tracks; the Saar and the Ruhr sprang to life, and factories were busier than they had been before the war. In 1951 the Marshall Plan would lead directly to Jean Monnet’s Coal and Steel Community. Six years after that the Coal and Steel Community would lead to the Treaty of Rome and the European Economic Community, or Common Market, which in turn would grow in power until it could compete with the United States and the Soviet Union as an equal. But in the late 1940s America glittered on a solitary peak. No other nation could even come close to it. It could only lose its lead by some extraordinary misfortune, such as a President or Presidents who would squandor its wealth and youth on a distant, Orwellian war. At that time the possibility was too remote to be raised. Not to worry, as the English say, was the American mood. The United States was, and would continue to be, rich, chivalrous, peaceful, and Number One.
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Number Two was becoming more and more difficult. Mutilated and ravaged by the full force of the Nazi war machine, unable or unwilling to understand why their western allies had delayed the second front until 1944, the Russians were hypersensitive to any sign of life in prostrate Germany. This national apprehension, fortified by the paranoia of Joseph Stalin, had become a wretched cross borne by western soldiers and statesmen. It grew heavier as signs of European health—and, as a concomitant, German vigor—began to return. In 1948 it peaked. During those spring weeks when Congress was winding up its Marshall Plan debate, Soviet conduct became increasingly aggressive. In February Stalin had seized Czechoslovakia, and on June 24 he imposed a blockade on Berlin.
The immediate issue was currency control. To thwart German recovery, the Russians had been flooding the western zone with paper money printed with plates that had been in use since the beginning of the occupation. To suppress this inflation, the western authorities issued new money, and at the same time they signed the Brussels Defense Pact and agreed upon a constitution for awakening West Germany. Russians fought these reforms step by step. They walked out of conferences. They issued their own currency. They stopped rail traffic between Berlin and West Germany for two days, stopped traffic on a highway bridge for “repairs,” and then, by ordering a full blockade, invited a complete rupture.
The western allies decided against retaliation. If possible, Truman wanted to avoid face-to-face confrontations. The only glimmer of hope was in the sky. Air traffic was moving in and out of West Berlin’s two airports, Tempelhof in the American sector and Gatow in the British. No blockade could be built in the air. Soviet aircraft might challenge western planes, but the responsibility for an incident could easily be evaded with no loss of prestige on either side.
Still, an airlift of these dimensions brought perils of its own. West Berlin was home to two and a half million people, more than Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, or Cleveland. No one had ever tried to supply a community that large, or anything like it, by air. Just keeping Berliners alive would require 4,000 tons a day—the takeoff or landing of one C-47 every three minutes and 36 seconds around the clock. Furthermore, every eastward plane would have to be overloaded, ten tons to the flight. That was enough for bare essentials. It was a possibility, a mathematical possibility, though it would mean danger for the fliers and hardship for Berlin. Enough coal could be brought in to keep the lights on, but there would be no fuel for warmth. To function normally, the city needed 8,000 tons a day, a takeoff or landing every minute and 48 seconds. It couldn’t be done—yet.
The Germans promised a disciplined civilian response. The U.S. Air Force and the RAF worked out a carefully planned, split-second operation. To train new pilots, a duplicate of Berlin’s air corridor approach paths and navigational aids was built in Montana. They learned to fly four-engine transports blindfolded with the new GCA (Ground Control Approach) radar. Crews had to go up with very little sleep. Maintenance men, hosing out fuselages black with coal dust, developed ugly skin diseases. And the schedule didn’t always work. Twenty-eight Americans lost their lives in the Berlin airlift of 1948–49.
The fliers called it “Operation Vittles.” In the beginning it didn’t begin to bring enough victuals. During June and July 1948 the airlift averaged just 1,147 tons a day, and it looked as though the siege would succeed. The first break came on June 30, when squadrons of C-54s began arriving from Panama, Hawaii, and Alaska. These were larger ships; they could carry heavier loads and permit longer periods between landings and takeoffs. General Lucius Clay flew back to Washington to request more of them and was given 160. As winter approached the airlift began to hit 4,000 daily tons with consistency. West Berlin would survive and might do better, depending upon the young American, British and, now, French fliers.
They needed more room to land in Berlin, and now they were getting it. Two new airstrips were built at Tempelhof and a third on the British field. What they really needed was a third airdrome. In September the French offered a site at Tegel, in their occupational zone. They doubted that it would prove useful. The number of laborers needed would probably be prohibitive. Furthermore, they lacked rock crushers and other heavy equipment. The western allies were about to receive a useful lesson in what German tenacity could do when harnessed to American ingenuity. Over 20,000 Berliners, of both sexes and all ages, volunteered to work three shifts a day. Meanwhile C-54s began landing the necessary equipment. At the first planning session, Clay dryly recalls in his memoirs, his engineers advised him that the new airport would be ready in March, whereupon “I found it necessary to tell them that it would be completed in December.” They met his timetable with the help of a little audacity on the part of General Jean Ganeval, the French commander. Getting into the spirit of the project, he removed a radio transmitting tower that obstructed the new runway. The tower was in the Soviet zone. He asked the Russians to remove it, and when they refused he marched in with a demolition team and blew it up.
That third field in the French sector put Operation Vittles over the top. In December the airlift’s daily average reached 4,500 tons; in January and February, 5,500 tons. It was clear now that Berlin would make it and then some; coal rations could be doled out for homes and some industry. Clay’s C-54 fleet had grown to 224. By early spring the airlift was landing 8,050 tons a day, and one da
y it put down 13,000 tons. Besieged Berlin was fast becoming one of the most affluent cities in Europe, with warehouses crammed, just in case the Russians didn’t know they were beaten.
They knew. On May 12 the barricades came down. The airlift was now history. The impossible had been achieved. Counting the first weeks of a partial “little blockade” in early 1948, the siege had lasted fifteen months, and in it Americans and their allies had logged 277,264 flights, hauling 2,343,315 tons of food, fuel, medicine, and clothing—nearly one ton for every citizen of Berlin. Its feats had become legend, and the miracles wrought by its pilots did much to balance the loutish behavior of immature U.S. soldiers on leave. “America has saved the world,” Churchill said grandly. Not the world, surely; but certainly a vital part of central Europe. If the airlift was not typically American, it was America at its best, living up to the Seabee—Air Force boast, “The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer,” and carrying it off with grace and generosity.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 66