Authors: Frederick Taylor
Moreover, Britain had problems elsewhere in the world. In the Middle East the British faced confrontation with the newly radicalised republic of Iraq under its fiery strongman, Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qassem. Qassem had laid claim to the small, British-protected (and oil-rich) sheikhdom of Kuwait, and had spent most of June massing his army in the arid border zone. London had hastily withdrawn substantial forces from Germany, Cyprus and the Home Command to defend the Kuwait flashpoint. The cost of such a major, if temporary, movement of personnel and equipment, including ships and aircraft, was extremely painful for the British treasury.
Macmillan’s diplomats were still frantically occupied with arranging for peacekeeping forces from the Arab League to take over the long-term protection of Kuwait, while British conscripts sweated in temperatures of 50 degrees centigrade (120 Fahrenheit) opposite Iraq’s putative military might in the desert south of Basra.
Before 13 August, Berlin was therefore not high on London’s priorities list. This seemed, in any case, to be dictated by financial considerations rather than global strategy. For the past several years, Britain had been
locked in a wrangle with West Germany. London wanted Bonn to share more of the cost of the British presence there, formerly an army of occupation but now part of the first line of defence against attack from the East. This had become a touchy point. In mid-July, during discussions about contingency plans in case of another Soviet blockade of Berlin, Macmillan had declared rather sourly that Britain ‘should make it clear that we will pay
nothing
’ toward the expenses of any new airlift.
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So trouble in Berlin was the last thing the British wanted. Even in the aftermath of the Wall, another personal communication to Macmillan from his Minister of Defence stated that
from our own domestic point of view, I am now convinced that we can no longer afford either from a military or from a foreign exchange point of view to keep anything like the present level of forces in Europe. A measure of disengagement or détente would, therefore, serve not only the cause of peace but our own special and urgent needs.
A scribbled comment on the memo by Macmillan declared ‘agreement with your thesis’ and added, ‘I think For Sec [presumably Foreign Secretary] is also in sympathy.’
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As for that other overstretched former imperial power, France still had several hundred thousand troops, mostly young conscripts, tied up in a vicious guerrilla war in Algeria. Talks to end the bloody Algerian struggle for independence from France had just begun in the spa town of Evian—a concession by de Gaullle that had already brought sections of his army and the Algerian white settlers out in open rebellion. It would be late the following spring before a cease-fire resulted. With France’s largest ‘overseas province’ in bloody uproar, diverting serious reinforcements to join the 45,000 French troops already in Germany (of which 3,000 were based at the Quartier Napoléon military complex in Berlin) was out of the question.
Although, unlike Macmillan’s hard-headed (and hard-up) Britain, de Gaulle’s France was prepared to make considerable sacrifices for ‘greatness’, this readiness did not apply, as would soon become clear, when it came to the unity of Berlin. When the American President passed through Paris on his way to meet Khrushchev in May 1961, General de
Gaulle, playing the experienced father-figure, told Kennedy to ‘remain firm on Berlin’ and not let Khrushchev hoodwink him. De Gaulle tended to advocate a tough line over Berlin, both because he wanted to court the West Germans and because this was, in his experience, how one best dealt with the Russians and their puppets (he had a particular contempt for the East German regime). None the less, the French Defence Minister, Pierre Messmer, informed his British counterpart just weeks later that Frenchmen were not prepared to ‘die for Berlin’.
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Privately, the French élite still found the existing division of Berlin, and of Germany, perfectly satisfactory, although (in the delicate words of a recent French official publication) de Gaulle thought that ‘it was important to avoid dashing the hopes of the Germans’.
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Another great Frenchman, the Nobel Prize-winning author and biographer of de Gaulle, François Mauriac, would later make the classic quip that ‘I like Germany so much, I want two of her’.
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Only an attempt to encroach on existing Allied, and especially French, occupation rights would therefore provoke de Gaulle into unsheathing his sword.
Guarded remarks over the telephone line to and from Hyannis Port that August Sunday were therefore not just an expression of timidity on the part of Kennedy and his aides. The administration was walking a diplomatic tightrope-act. Its caution reflected the complexity not just of dealing with the Soviet Union and its puppets, but also, and simultaneously, with the Western Allies, whose needs, capabilities and national ambitions varied. Unlike Khrushchev’s satellites, the European democracies could not simply be browbeaten into place to suit their dominant superpower’s needs. They had to be persuaded into unanimity, and were not yet so convinced.
The administration and its advisers had sensed these problems in the period before the building of the Wall. Walt Rostow summed it up in a memorandum to the President on 22 July, which may have influenced the carefully calculated toughness of Kennedy’s television broadcast about Berlin three days later. The advice, self-consciously entitled ‘A
High Noon
Stance on Berlin’, argued that while the US should carry its allies with it into a firm position if possible (especially the Germans and the French—the British are not mentioned), it must be prepared, if necessary, to go the distance alone. Hence the
High Noon
stance. As
Rostow added dryly: ‘You recall Gary Cooper dealt with the bandits alone’.
While understanding why the Europeans, after two costly wars, would be less willing to risk conflict, Rostow also declared the unquestionable but unpalatable truth that‘…it is on the United States—its will and its power—that the Russians will ultimately focus…the final formula will be heavily determined by what we will take or not take’. He continued:
I may be quite wrong. It may be that the importance of Atlantic unity and the inescapable moral commitment to the West Berliners will see us all together, right down to the final test. (And, of course, the crisis may abort at a relatively early stage.) But I do believe we must be prepared in our minds for the possibility of a relatively lonely stage; and we should accept it without throwing our sheriff’s badge in the dust when the crisis subsides.
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And it wasn’t just the big Western Allies that America had to deal with. Washington also had to consider smaller NATO members such as Italy, Belgium, Holland, Norway, and so on down to tiny Luxembourg, who had no military presence in Berlin or West Germany, but who voted in the alliance’s councils.
The smaller NATO powers could reasonably argue that, in a war waged over Berlin with atomic weapons, they would suffer as much as those who were directly involved. Therefore they should have a say in America’s and NATO’s response to the Communist provocation of 13 August. The White House was acutely aware of this fact. It also was forced to ask a related question: having relied throughout the 1950s on the deterrent effect of America’s atomic arsenal to keep the Soviets from launching an all-out invasion of Western Europe, what role did the atomic arsenal have in handling the more insidious salami-slicing tactics that Khrushchev and his minions now tended to adopt?
Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, was a systems man, who had come to the administration straight from running Ford Motors. He liked to know where he stood. On assuming office, he was horrified to discover that the Eisenhower administration had not developed a coherent escalation policy, or at least not one that gave
an acceptable flexibility of response. Previous policy seemed as follows: basically, you fought with inadequate conventional forces until it looked like you would lose (which, because NATO’s armies were no match for Soviet might, would probably be pretty soon), after which nuclear weapons would be unleashed, with terrible consequences for the world.
This policy, such as it was, was tailored to handling a situation like the North Korean invasion of South Korea; that is, a direct war between Eastern and Western client states. It fell into confusion when faced with Khrushchev’s and Ulbricht’s subtle and unpredictable tricks in Berlin. McNamara had already ordered a rethink. Escalation would be carefully calibrated in order to delay the use of nuclear weapons for as long as possible, thus giving time for a conflict resolution that might avoid nuclear war. Essential to this was an expansion of conventional American forces, so that the West would not be immediately overrun. It represented a partial reversal of the policy of ‘nuclearisation’ that had been generally accepted since 1945.
The Secretary of Defense’s ideas had already got him into trouble with senior commanders, especially US Air Force General Lauris Norstad. Since 1956, Norstad had been both commander of American forces in Europe and Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR). The tall, chiselled-featured general, son of a Lutheran pastor from Red Wing, Minnesota, had been appointed as SACEUR by his wartime superior, Eisenhower. In 1961 he was fifty-three years old, an experienced soldier-diplomat. He believed that the Kennedy/McNamara axis was making a mistake by reasserting the importance of conventional weapons. Only, went the general’s reasoning, if the enemy knew that nuclear weapons would be used, first tactically and then strategically, if necessary at an early stage, would he be reliably deterred.
Nevertheless, Norstad also tended to agree with those European members of NATO who saw the use of nuclear weapons as a joint responsibility—a view that met with little favour in Washington. No one said any of these calculations were easy.
For all these reasons, as Rostow had surmised, the solitary ‘
High Noon
Stance’ might well be the position that America was forced to take over Berlin in the days and weeks that followed.
Depending, of course, on what the Russians and their East German comrades did next.
The Communists’ initial gambit, extreme and catastrophic as it appeared to the ordinary people of Berlin, was, in fact, carefully judged.
At least initially, East/West traffic in Berlin remained possible; or to be more precise, not specifically forbidden. For GDR citizens, it was simply made subject, from 13 August onward, to the issue of a visa by the East German authorities. The fact that those permits would not be granted to all but a handful of East German
apparatchiks
was in international-legal terms a technicality. The important thing was, the West could not say that its rights had been fatally infringed; only those of East Germans attempting to enter West Berlin from the Soviet sector were affected.
This point was picked up immediately and gratefully by the Western governments, just as the Communists had calculated. Also important to the Western governments’ perceptions were the observations made by their military missions operating in East Berlin and the wider GDR.
Staffed by trained intelligence officers, the military missions had been set up as liaison groups between the Allied military governments towards the end of the war. The missions’ notional headquarters were housed in grand villas at Potsdam, just outside East Berlin, but most operatives attached to them lived in and operated out of West Berlin. Soviet missions were likewise attached to individual headquarters in the three Allied zones. The missions’ chief role became to act as ‘mobile on-site inspection teams’
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. They neither ‘ran’ agents in the East nor conducted active subversion. They simply looked over the other side’s territory, often in places where the other side would rather they didn’t look, and reported back to their own superiors.
The missions’ activities over the several decades of their existence included raiding Soviet and East German army waste-disposal areas, where careless army clerks might have left scrap documents, technicians broken equipment, and sanitary and medical staff (as the account delicately put it) ‘medical waste’. All these could be taken back to West Berlin and analysed to gain clues as to the fitness and well-being or otherwise of the Cold War enemy.
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Even unsurfaced roads and tracks used by military traffic could be examined to ascertain the weight of the
vehicles that had passed over them and the nature of the tracks fitted, giving clues as to the extent and make-up of troop movements. The missions even kept an eye on the
Stasi
’s repressive activities, conducting regular forays into the ‘forbidden area’ in Hohenschönhausen.
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The military-mission officers and their drivers played a constant game of cat-and-mouse with the Soviet and East German military authorities, who tried, often illegally, to keep certain areas off limits and to intimidate mission representatives to keep away. It should be added that Soviet military missions attached to Allied military headquarters in the three Western zones of Germany played out a similar charade, and to the same purpose. East and West tolerated each other’s official spies because each gained advantage from the agreement.
The three Western missions were very busy during the night of 12/13 and the day of 13 August, using their privileged access to the East to track movements of security forces and military units, to photograph units and military buildings and vehicles, and to subject these to a certain amount of preliminary analysis.