The Cold War: A MILITARY History (58 page)

Within Berlin, the top policy body was the Four Power Allied Control Council, attended by the four commandants, which met regularly until 20 March 1948. On that day the three Western commandants met their Soviet colleague for what promised to be a routine meeting, but, to their astonishment, as soon as the proceedings opened, Marshal Sokolovskiy, the Soviet representative, launched into a prepared statement containing a long list of charges against the Western Allies, reading them at a tremendous pace. As soon as he had finished he stormed out, and for the remainder of the Allied stay in Berlin the three Western commandants continued to meet in the Allied Kommandantura, but with the Soviet seat remaining empty.

On 1 April 1948 Red Army units stopped the regular British, French and US trains to Berlin just inside the Soviet zone. All three were shunted into a siding, where they were left engineless for some fourteen hours, after which they were pulled back into their respective Western zones. Citing the introduction of the new Deutschmark as the reason for their action,
^fn8
the Soviets increased the harassment until a total land blockade was imposed on 22 June 1948. The Western Allies decided that West Berlin must be maintained as a bastion of Western freedom, but, although it was a fundamental assumption in their responses that the Soviets would not go to war over the issue, great care was nevertheless taken not to push the Soviet leadership into a corner from which either open conflict or humiliation would be the only route out.

Soviet measures included blocking all road, rail and canal routes from the Western zones to Berlin – the Western commandants suddenly realized they had neglected to obtain written agreements for these from the Soviets – and the cessation of all direct deliveries of food, coal and electrical power from the Soviet zone. Air was left as the only means of supplying the city, and, to the surprise of the Soviets, the Western Allies organized the ‘Berlin Airlift’, which proceeded to deliver sufficient food and coal to maintain the Western garrisons and the population of West Berlin through the winter of 1948 and into the spring of 1949. The blockade lasted for 318 days, during which the Allies flew in some 2,360,000 tonnes of supplies in a total of 277,728 flights, at a cost of seventy-five American, British and German lives. The land blockade was quietly lifted on 12 May 1949, although the Allied air-resupply operation continued until the situation had stabilized at the end of September.

The Berlin Airlift was an enormous and extremely complicated operation, and when the Soviets eventually relaxed their blockade it appeared that they had lost. However, a pattern had been established which was followed throughout the years during which Berlin was divided: if there was a written agreement, the Soviets stuck to it.

The airlift also had two other, perhaps less publicized, results. First, it broke down the barriers which had existed since May 1945 between the Western troops and the German population, removing the psychological barriers between victors and defeated, and creating a mutual respect and considerable sympathy for each other. Second, it showed the French that they could not act on their own over Berlin or occupied West Germany, and from 1948 onwards they were much more co-operative.

The relationship between East Berlin and the GDR was, however, somewhat different, and in the late 1950s the eastern sector was progressively
integrated
into the GDR – a process clearly directed by the USSR. Despite this, the Western Allies were always convinced that there was a strong feeling of contempt for their East German allies among the Soviet forces, which had no parallel in the relationship between the Western Allies and the population of the Federal Republic.

WESTERN PLANS

The Western powers knew that their garrisons in West Berlin were militarily extremely vulnerable. They were some 180 km from the Inner German Border and totally surrounded by Soviet and GDR ground and air forces. Each of the three Western powers maintained a nominal brigade in the city: in 1986, for example, there were 4,300 US troops, 3,000 British and 2,700 French. It would, however, be wrong to visualize these as brigades in the normal sense, since they were tailored to their role. The combat elements of the British Berlin Infantry Brigade, for example, consisted of a company of eighteen tanks,
^fn9
three lorry-borne infantry battalions (with just six armoured personnel carriers each), a company of engineers and (from 1977) a platoon of helicopters. A ‘normal’ infantry brigade based in Western Germany, however, had a battalion of tanks, three infantry battalions mounted in armoured personnel carriers, a battalion of helicopters, a battalion of artillery and a company of engineers.

The Berlin brigades did, however, have a strong representation of combat-support elements, including an intelligence company, a signal company, a military-police company and administrative assets such as a transport company. It was also widely reported that the large antennas on a hill named the Babelsburg, all of which pointed into East Germany, were for SIGINT purposes.

Command

The chain of command for the Western garrisons was complex, since it reflected both national and allied requirements, and covered political and civil matters as well as military. In addition, it differed between peace and war. Within Berlin the four Allied commandants worked together as the Allied Kommandantura, although after the walkout by the Soviet commandant in 1948 it was left to the three Western commandants to correlate their plans and responses to Soviet pressures, with the chairmanship revolving between the three on a monthly basis. The chairman had specific duties, which included making the co-ordinated response to Soviet or East German
initiatives
, as well as co-ordinating action during the early stages of a military confrontation. It was, however, appreciated that in war the three Western Allies would have to work even more closely together, and so it was agreed from early during the occupation of the city that in a crisis and conflict the US commandant would become the single commander.

In January 1951 the Allied Staff Berlin was established, with the tasks of preparing tripartite plans for the defence of West Berlin, setting up the command posts and communications necessary to control such plans, and establishing ‘Force B’. This was a new section of the West Berlin Police, organized and equipped as light infantry, with one battalion in each of the three Western sectors. The force eventually numbered some 1,850 men, but it was disbanded in the early 1960s.

In 1961, however, the Allied commandants proposed that the arrangement for the single commander should become more formal. In particular, they wanted it to be implemented earlier in a crisis, especially in a situation where communications between Berlin and the zones in West Germany had either broken down or were (much more likely) blocked by the Soviets.

The three Western commandants had civil as well as military responsibilities, and to help with the political side they were supported by a senior diplomat, who served as ‘deputy commandant and minister’. Each of the Western commandants reported politically to the appropriate ambassador in Bonn, and militarily direct to their defence ministry in their national capital, but keeping their national commander-in-chief in the Federal Republic (i.e. CINCFFA for France, CINCBAOR for the UK, and CINCEUR for the USA) informed. Overall co-ordination was the responsibility of the Washington Ambassadors Group in Washington DC, chaired by the US secretary of state and comprising the British, the French and (informally) the West German ambassadors.

Military Command and Live Oak

Any military help for the Western garrisons would have had to come from the three national contingents in West Germany, but, since Berlin was an Allied responsibility, NATO was not involved in the military command chain for the city during peacetime and the early stages of a crisis. The overall military commander of Berlin was therefore Commander-in-Chief US Forces Europe (CINCEUR),
^fn10
whose peacetime planning function with regard to Berlin was exercised through a tripartite headquarters.

This headquarters, known as Live Oak, was formed on 4 April 1959 and
was
originally situated in the US forces’ HQ European Command (HQ EUCOM) barracks at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, some 32 km south-west of Paris. The British detached a major-general from commanding a division to become the first chief-of-staff – a step which underlined the extreme importance attached to the task – and he began the process of preparing reinforcement and defence plans, assisted by three teams of officers, one each from France, the UK and the USA, with each team comprising one officer (at colonel level) from the navy, army and air force. By mid-1960, however, draft plans were ready and the HQ was allowed to run down in numbers and prestige, until the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall brought it back into the limelight, where it stayed for the rest of the Cold War.

The HQ moved from HQ EUCOM to SHAPE at Fontainebleau in October 1960, to be closer to the main operational headquarters; then it moved to Belgium, where it took up residence in a separate building within the SHAPE compound at Mons.
^fn11
It continued to be headed by a British major-general (Chief-of-Staff Live Oak), with a small staff from the US, France and the UK, who were responsible for keeping the contingency plans up to date and for conducting the regular exercises. Live Oak was not, however, a command headquarters, and in war it was planned to form a small headquarters run by a senior US officer on SACEUR’s staff and under the personal command of SACEUR.

Maritime operations associated with a Berlin crisis were co-ordinated by a naval headquarters designated Deep Sea, collocated with SACLANT at Norfolk, Virginia. Air operations were controlled by another headquarters, designated Jack Pine, which was located at Headquarters USAF Europe (USAFE) at Ramstein in southern Germany.

It was natural that the West Germans should have taken an intense interest in everything to do with Berlin, and in particular with the Western sector. As a result, a
Bundeswehr
liaison team was located with Headquarters Live Oak, and the West German authorities were aware of the contingency plans. They did not, however, take part in any of the operations or exercises, and right up to the end no
Bundeswehr
personnel were allowed into West Berlin in uniform.

A constant preoccupation among the Western commandants was the need to react promptly and firmly to any action which might imperil the status or well-being of the Western garrisons in Berlin. The most serious threats came from actions by the Soviets, which ranged over the years from relatively short delays to road traffic, trains or canal barges (usually blamed on ‘difficulties over paperwork’), through temporary closure of the routes, to total blockade, although the ultimate threat – a direct attack – never
materialized
. There were also less direct threats, particularly from uprisings by the discontented population of East Germany, either within East Berlin or in East Germany as a whole. Such uprisings were considered to be particularly worrying, since they would attract intense media attention and could unintentionally threaten the Western garrisons, while lacking an identifiable leadership to negotiate with, as happened in 1953, and as nearly happened again in 1989.

The more likely threat, however, was of action by the Soviets to restrict access to Berlin, and the Western commandants identified a requirement to discover Soviet intentions and, where necessary, to deliver a warning that the Western powers were determined to resist. Throughout, however, there was a firm desire to keep the situation under control and to avoid provoking the Soviets into further action.

During the build-up to the closure of the land routes in March 1948, General Lucius Clay, the first US commandant in Berlin, proposed that each of the Western Allies should bring a division to Helmstedt and that the force should then advance to Berlin. By July he had recast his proposal so that the force consisted of a more realistic 200 trucks, escorted by a US contingent consisting of a constabulary regiment, some infantry and an engineer battalion, while the British were to provide an infantry battalion and the French a detachment of anti-tank troops.

The plans were slowly refined over the years, and by the early 1960s there were four phases of reaction. In Phase 1, reconnaissances (known colloquially as ‘probes’) were carried out to determine the seriousness of Soviet intentions. If these failed to achieve the desired result, Phase 2 consisted of a pause on the ground while political action took place, either at the United Nations or between the three Western Allies and the Soviet leadership. If this failed and access was still being denied, then Phase 3 was implemented, which involved stronger military action. If that too failed, then Phase 4, nuclear action, was considered.