Manna from the West

...Although the Bonn government is the cement of the Western Alliance, the key to European security, the engine powering the Common Market, no one is quite certain what direction it will take from one year to the next...

...Nobody intended or expected partition...

...Just ho w a city can unravel is traced by the Tusas with their usual thoroughness through the development of separate police forces, trash and fire services, currencies, and court systems, down to the decisive moment on October 22 when the Soviets restricted free movement into and out of their zone...

...The annual negotiations over the exact sums of money involved were inevitably difficult and drawn-out...

...Stalin preferred a unified Germany under Soviet hegemony...

...Churchill wanted a buffer country against the Communists...

...You simply can't get there from here, not without a political earthquake that would reshape the face of Europe and overturn a situation that, for better or worse, has successfully maintained the peace through four decades...

...By August the airlift was bringing in 3,000 tons of food and materials a day, an enormous improvement over the dire predictions of a few weeks before, but far short of the 5,500 tons that would be needed when winter arrived...

...policy wasto "tie Germany firmly to the West within the framework of a united Europe...

...Those who feel they don't know enough about how the figures were arrived at will appreciate this book...

...The numbers did not add up...

...Birds, a potential hazard to low-flying aircraft, were scared off by a team of RAF-trained falcons...

...The Americans and the British had not even bothered to get guarantees on access across the Soviet zone...

...it carried a few passengers and a little mail...

...Now it was working with the British and the Americans to build the North Atlantic Treaty Organization...

...With the aircraft available these needs could just about be met, assuming good weather conditions and no breakdowns...

...The U.S...

...Military Governor in Germany, was itching to force his way into Berlin with an armed convoy, but Truman was not willing to risk World War III ? ver the issue...

...A conservative Catholic, dourly suspicious not only of the Communists in the East but of his political rivals, the Social Democrats, he represented the alternative for those Germans who did not yearn for reunification...

...Modern Germany was the unintended consequence of a failed power play and a warm December...

...Aircraft were taking off and landing every three minutes for 24 hours a day, while crews on the ground scrambled for scarce spare parts to repair old or overused equipment...

...In April harassment of road and rail transport began, and two months later a full blockade was imposed...

...Negotiations following the War were slow and grudging, with Moscow constantly breaking its promises...

...No one imagined then that its role could be expanded...

...A year earlier France, fearful of a resurgent Germany, had been as recalcitrant as the Russians, resisting any efforts that appeared to strengthen or stabilize its neighbor...

...Whenever West Germans look east with hope and longing in their eyes—as Gorbachev' sglasnost is currently encouraging them to do—alarm bells go off around the world...

...Most important, the crisis united the West...

...Moscow was attempting to exert its will through all measures this side of war, and the West was obliged to respond in kind...

...Yet the city endured...

...Coal, the "irreplaceable commodity" in winter, had to be bagged, another potential bottleneck...

...Pessimism was still the appropriate mood...

...The father of the new nation, guiding it through its infancy, was Konrad Adenauer, the Chancellor from 1949 until his retirement at age 87 in 1963...

...The number of details to be taken into account was extraordinary...

...It proceeds day by day, giving us a sense of the participants' outlook at the time—and in June 1948 that outlook was pretty grim...

...State Department toyed with schemes for dismemberment before dropping the idea as impractical, and likely to feed German nationalism...

...The blockade produced the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and a divided Berlin, the entities that exist today...

...Yet it would be inaccurate to call this volume abook...

...Ambassador to Bonn just as the Old Man was ending his career...

...As the Soviet Ambassador to Bonn recently confessed, the USSR is happy to see West Germany remain firmly linked to its NATO allies Everything about Germany's division is ambiguous because ambiguity was built in from the beginning...

...Stalin had gambled and had lost big...

...On one page, he notes that Ludwig Erhard, Adenauer'ssuccessor, strongly warned against the United States appearing to go slow on the reunification issue...

...Unfortunately, At the Creation of a New Germany reflects the fact that most of McGhee's time was spent on such sleep-inducing matters as the offset arrangement, whereby Bonn agreed to balance American military expenditures in Germany by purchasing an equivalent amount of U. S. military goods and services...

...Saccharine had to be shipped for diabetics, kosher meat for Orthodox Jews...

...The weather was always unpredictable, and the Soviets tried to interfere whenever they could, though stopping short of anything that might be construed as an act of war...

...A divided city deep inthe Russian sector, Berlin was insanity on a map, the product of haste and improvisation as the Allied armies closed in on the Third Reich for the kill...

...The divided nation officially considers the status quo unacceptable—its constitution, the "BasicLaw," treats the present arrangement as merely temporary—yet reunification is at best a distant dream...

...Tothisend, and sometimes to the chagrin of his American allies, Adenauer worked closely with that inveterate Anglo-baiter, Charles de Gaulle...

...That event is dramatically and scrupulously recounted in The Berlin Airlift (Atheneum, 445 pp., $24.95), an excellent study by Ann and John Tusa...

...In August, a passenger arriving from Berlin was found to have polio, forcing an entire shift into quarantine and causing several days' disruption...

...A few more degrees of cold at the end of 1948, with extended periods of sharp frost to bind aircraft to the ground and surely the Western sectors would have perished...

...At 1:23 a.m., a British military train moved east through the Russian zone, its occupants merrily singing "It's a Long Way to Tipperary.' A great deal had changed since the previous train had followed the same route 11 months earlier...

...West Berliners required a minimum of 2,000 tons of food a day...

...Supply lines had to be carefully coordinated, so that the nine dispatching airfields could receive dried vegetables from 11 different companies, flour from 13 separate mills, smoothly and without delay...

...Certainly, as the Tusas stress, theuseof atomic weapons was never considered, despite the U.S...

...The statistics supported the Cassandras —4,761 tons a day in October, 3,786 in November, 4,563 in December...

...Washington and Moscow awaken to the fact that their foreign policies have more in common than they care to admit...

...General Lucius D. Clay, the gung-ho U.S...

...Whatsavedit, saythe Tusas, was the "sheer meteorological freak" of an unusually warm winter that allowed the planes to land and the Berliners to conserve fuel...

...The perceptions he records here are invariably right-minded...

...His memoir, At the Creation of a New Germany: From Adenauer to Brandt, An Ambassador's Account (Yale, 289 pp., $25.00), covers the five years that he watched the FRG adjust to life without Adenauer...

...A collection, apparently, of gleanings from McGhee's files, it does not stand on its own, and despite a friendly Foreword by John J. McCloy will find few readers beyond specialists in the field or aspiring PhD candidates...

...monopoly...

...By early 1948, rumors were circulating everywhere that the Russians were preparing to take over the city...

...At Yalta, the Big Three ratified an agreement that split the enemy and its capital, Berlin, into zones until a new nationstate could be established, and at Potsdam, Truman, Attlee and Stalin endorsed the goal of unification...

...Ironically in the light of what was to come, agreement was easiest on air corridors, since "air transport seemed insignificant in 1945...

...The only option was an airlift...

...The horrible thought that Berlin might soon fall to the Russians or that the Western allies would be forced to withdraw throbbed more and more painfully as winter approached...

...By January and February the airlift was exceeding the crucial 5,500 tons aday, assuring survival, and on May 12 the blockade was lifted...

...But animosities, not agreements, drove the allies after victory was achieved, and one of the momentous events of the Cold War ultimately determined Germany's fate...

...Idon'tknowwhatwill become of Germany," he once remarked, "if we don't manage to create Europe in time...

...Left out of these calculations, however, were all the other materials that had to be delivered to the city, especially coal...

...Even after the necessary planes and personnel were found, the logistics remained awesome...

...On another, he relates Undersecretary of State George W. Ball's antinationalist declaration that a principal objective of U.S...

...Still, there was always something that could not be foreseen...

...His dream wasaunitedEurope...

...Whatever their rhetoric, neither is uncomfortable with two Germanies instead of one...

...Though we know, after the fact, that this decision succeeded brilliantly, oneof the great virtues of the Tusas' bookisthatit does not engage in hindsight...

...Newsprint required special handling to avoid folding its edges...

...McGheedoes offer suggestions of thetensions deep within the German-American alliance...

...Quite the opposite...

...As years passed and the prospects of German reunification dimmed, Berlin became an increasingly tempting target for Stalin...

...He seems to have performed his duties competently and professionally...

...George McGhee arrived in Germany as U.S...