I agree with this poster. The Berlin Airlift was an unnecessary overreaction on the part of the Truman Administration. In fact, it was one of three hyped "crises" of the year 1948. The three manufactured cold war crises of 1948 were the Czechoslovakian coup, the Berlin Blockade and the issue of recognizing the state of Israel. These three crises were played to the hilt by men like Truman, Clark Clifford, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman and George Kennan.
The Berlin Airlift was unnecessary because the Soviets never intended to threaten West Berlin. Colonel Robert B. Landry, Truman’s air aide, reported in 1948 that the Soviet zone in Eastern Germany was undergoing demilitarization. Landry recorded that the Soviets had dismantled hundreds of mile of railroad track. This track would be necessary to attack Western Europe or even West Berlin. Bernard Montgomery reported to Dwight Eisenhower in 1947 that the Soviets were “very very tired. Devastation in Russia is appalling and the country is in no fit state to go to war.”
Despite these facts General Lucius Clay was well stage managed by the administration in forming his “red scare” letter of March 5, 1948. In this letter Clay stated that Soviet movements in Berlin indicated that war “may come with dramatic suddenness.” Senator Robert Taft, campaigning for the 1948 Republican presidential nomination, took great offense to this alarming statement. “I know of no indication of Russian intention to undertake military aggression beyond the sphere of influence that was originally assigned to them [at Yalta],” Taft stated. He also commented that if Truman and Marshall had any private intelligence which pointed towards the Berlin issue as the step for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe: “They ought to tell the American people about it.”
General Marshall was a great alarmist who is chiefly responsible for the fall of Nationalist China. He obviously had no “private intelligence” pointing towards a Soviet invasion. Truman, Kennan and Marshall needed a crisis to push through the reinstitution of the draft. Truman laughingly renamed this scheme universal military training (UMT) and claimed that it was a necessary public service. This was simply another power grab on behalf of the haberdasher from Pendergrast. General Clay himself told his biographer that he sent General Stephen J, Chamberlain the March 5 cable talking about impending war because: “Chamberlain…told me that the Army was having trouble getting the draft reinstituted and they needed a strong message from me that they could use in congressional testimony. So I wrote this cable.”
The Berlin Airlift itself was just a Western show in response to a nonexistent threat. It was one of the worst steps of the West in the cold war because it solidified in the minds of most citizens the idea that the Soviets were a great threat. Averell Harriman even pulled the Hitler card by stating that the Soviets “are a greater menace than Hitler was.” A pro-statist media, led by Henry Luce, painted men like Senator Taft as “Kremlin assets” for opposing the airlift and the Red war scare. Republicans decided that if they couldn’t beat Truman than to join him Okayed the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, NATO and eventually the Korean War. The Berlin Airlift scare of 1948 also empowered Truman to request that U.S. soldiers be stationed in Germany and that military appropriations be made for NATO.
In short, the Berlin Airlift is what started the Cold War policy of the arms race. Despite the fact that the Rand Corporation and Team B cooked the books on the “missile gap” between the U.S. and the starving Soviet Union this idea was carried on through the years. All of the madness of MAD and the arms race began with the Berlin Airlift.
