THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR --- Episode 16

      SEEDS OF THE GREAT COLD WAR WERE PLANTED IN
      THE 1940s 

While Arabs and Israelis fought in the Middle East, the United States and the Soviet Union almost came to blows over Germany. In spring 1948, the United States and Britain took preliminary steps toward carving out a separate West German government, overcoming the reluctance of France and other Western European nations that feared a powerful, potentially remilitarized nation. Many German politicians in the western zones were also resistant to this development, fearing the severance of economic, political, and personal ties to eastern Germany. 

In late June, the United States boldly and provocatively instituted currency reform in the three western sectors  of occupied Berlin, which was a hundred miles inside the Soviet zone. Seeing this as not only a major step in establishing an independent, remilitarized West German state only three years after the defeat of Hitler but as a portrayal of the U.S promise to provide desperately needed reparations from the more prosperous western zones, the Soviets cut off rail and road access to Berlin. Stalin maintained that western access had been based on wartime agreements establishing a quadripartite Allied Control Commission as the supreme authority for a unified Germany. Because the Western powers were now shattering that framework, he reasoned, they had forfeited access rights.  Western observers decried the savage cruelty of the Soviets' "Berlin blockade." The commandant of the American sector of Berlin, Fran Howley, described it as a "comprehensive criminal plan to shut off the Eastern Zone of Germany from the West and to isolate completely the three Western Sectors of Berlin." It was, Howley charged, a wicked decision, the most barbarous in history since Genghis Khan." The Soviets, Western leaders screamed, were trying to starve West Berliners into submission. Images of Soviet cruelty would be seared into global consciousness --- a perception of the crisis that still persists today. 

But, contrary to this widely held view, the Soviets, for all their faults, attempted nothing of the sort. They had, in fact, gone out of their way to guarantee West Berliners access to food and coal from the eastern zone or from direct Soviet provisions. In October 1948, U.S. military government intelligence analysts reported, the "road, rail and water blockade of Berlin by no means constitutes a complete economic blockade either by intent or in fact." 

What people do remember, however, is that over the next eleven months, the United States airlifted 1.6 million tons of food and fuel into West Berlin to feed 2.2 million people. Truman also sent sixty presumably atomic-capable B-29s to British and German bases. He assured Forrestal that if conditions warranted it, he would approve the use of atomic weapons. "We are very close to war," he wrote in September. When Forrestal asked Kennan for his analysis of the Soviet blockade, Kennan offered the most alarming assessment : "Communist ideology and Soviet behavior clearly demonstrate that the ultimate objective of the leaders of the USSR is the domination of the world." And despite knowing the risks, the United States prolonged the crisis until it achieved both a basic law outlining the West German state and the creation in April 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [ NATO ], which committed the United States, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ITS HISTORY to a peacetime military alliance with Western Europe. In May 1949, having won its objectives, the United States agreed to talks over the future of Germany, and it was only then that the Soviet Union lifted the blockade, ending the most dangerous postwar confrontation to date. The United States had gambled that its atomic monopoly would enable it to achieve its goals without having to go to war, and it won.