Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

As we have seen, through the neglect of General Lucius Clay, as Eisenhower’s deputy in 1945, the Western Powers had obtained no Soviet recognition of their access rights to Berlin from the western occupation zones of Germany. Rail, canal, road, and air traffic to the west were under Soviet control and were constantly harassed by shifting regulations, delays, and open obstacles. By the early months of 1948, rail and road routes were tied in knots, and air traffic along the recognized corridor was jeopardized by trespassing Soviet fighter planes, intruding barrage balloons, and unannounced aircraft gunfire. On May 5th a Russian fighter pilot, buzzing a British transport plane as it approached Berlin, collided with it and killed himself and the fifteen persons on the British plane. On June 24th all traffic by ground to Berlin from the west was closed, on a variety of excuses, and only the harassed air corridor was open. Hopes of supplying the 2,000,000 persons in the western sectors of the city by air were dim, as the population’s need for food was over 2,000 tons a day and the need for coal for power would be about 5,000 tons a day, excluding home heating. Nevertheless, the attempt began.

Day after day the operation became more intense and more efficient, with planes landing, originally at two, later at three, airports, as fast as they could get in. This continued night and day, reached 3,000 tons in 362 planes on July 5th and erratically crept upward, in spite of deteriorating weather conditions and lengthening darkness, through the winter.

In September the city government, broken up by Communist mobs, moved from the Soviet sector to the western part of the city, but was replaced by a new, completely Communist city government in the eastern sector. The Western Powers stopped all goods flowing between zones to the east and began to merge the three zones of the Western Powers and took steps to create a Western German government to rule over them in succession to the military occupation regime. To indicate the temporary nature of the new system, until the reunion of eastern Germany could permit establishment of a permanent government, the new regulations were called a Basic Law rather than a constitution, and were drawn up by a council of delegates from the provincial assemblies rather than by an elected constituent assembly. The new West German regime began to operate in May 1949, in the same month as the ending of the Berlin blockade.

The Berlin blockade was won by the West because of the tireless efficiency of the airlift and the resolute determination of the Berliners themselves to undergo any personal hardships or death rather than to submit to another despotic government. Food was scarce, other supplies nonexistent, and heat almost totally lacking through the winter of 1948-1949. Some starved, and many froze, but the resistance did not waver, and the airlift went on. Night and day, in spite of weather, weariness, and accidents (which killed 61 airmen), the planes roared in and out again. Soviet harassment of the airlift, by night flying on instrument in the air corridor, was never sufficient to stop it, as the Soviet clearly feared to push the dispute to open conflict. By September, planes were landing, around the clock, every three minutes. Daily tonnage crept slowly upward, passed 5,000 tons a day as the New Year opened, and by April passed 8,000 tons a day. One day that month, 1,398 planes, landing every 62 seconds, delivered 12,941 tons of supplies. The Soviet blockade had been defeated.

On May 12th, after elaborate negotiations, the ground routes to the city were reopened. In eleven months the American airlift had landed more than 1.6 million tons of freight in about 200,000 flights, a demonstration which undoubtedly awed even the Russians. And, in the interval, West Germany had been united from three zones to one and had obtained its own German government. The West German elections of August 14, 1949, gave the Christian Democrats 31 percent of the vote, with 139 seats in the Parliament. The chief opposition party, the Social Democratic, had 29 percent, with 131 seats. The Communists, with 5 percent and 15 seats, were in fifth place, after two other minority groups, the conservative, centralist Free Democrats with 52 seats, and the moderate, anti-Prussian, federalist German Party with 17 seats. Though the first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, an anti-Nazi who had been imprisoned by Hitler, won his post by only a single vote, he kept it until 1963.

The Crisis in China, 1945-1950

The critical year 1949, which showed so clearly that the Kremlin’s influence in Europe was severely limited within the area of control of the Soviet armies, saw also a shift of Stalin’s activity to the Far East, where he tried new tactics in new circumstances. In Europe, outside the area of Soviet military occupation, even in West Berlin, Stalin had met a series of defeats in Austria, Germany, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Iran, and even Finland. In the Far East, where there was no extensive area of Soviet military control, different tactics were both necessary and possible. There also Stalin was largely defeated, although it took many years to demonstrate this fact. His defeat arose from his failure to recognize that Communism could advance in backward areas only so long as it was anticolonial rather than Communist and worked to further local interests rather than those of Moscow. Stalin did not recognize these truths, and Soviet success in adopting tactics based on them was largely reserved for his successors after 1953.

At first glance the Communist success in ejecting the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek from China does not seem to support these remarks, but it must be recognized that the Communist victory in China was not a victory for Stalin and was not regarded as one by Stalin himself. In fact, the victory of Mao Tse-tung in China was not encouraged, expected, or notably assisted by Moscow.

Stalin was like a shrewd old wolf of the north Siberian forest. Understanding nothing outside his own experience, he never forgot what had happened to himself. Stalin had been involved once before, in 1927, in an effort to communize China, and had failed disastrously in the attempt. Now, in the wake of World War II, he had no desire to repeat that fiasco. What he wanted in the Far East is not clear, but it seems evident that he wanted a weak China surrounded by small states in which American influence was minimal. Such a weak China could be guaranteed by continued rule under the Nationalist government, possibly with the Communists playing a role in a coalition, as the United States seemed to wish. Through such a weak and divided China, Stalin could anticipate no threat to himself either from American efforts or from China itself. To reduce the danger of either of these alternatives, Stalin would have welcomed Communist or largely Communist regimes in Japan, Korea, southeast Asia, and Indonesia, with an autonomous or independent Communist Chinese regime in control of northwestern China, and possibly even Manchuria, as a buffer to the Soviet Union’s own territory.

At the end of the war in the Far East in 1945, it was clear to most observers that Roosevelt’s pretense that Nationalist China was a great Power, like his equally confused pretense that France was not a significant Power, was mistaken. China’s war effort against Japan weakened fairly steadily from Pearl Harbor to the end. This decline resulted, very largely, from the almost total corruption of the regime, which left the Chinese peasant in sullen discontent and roused open disfavor among many urban groups, notably students. Many portions of the huge area of China were only nominally subject to Chiang Kai-shek’s rule, and a very considerable extent in the western and northwestern far interior were subjected to the Communist regime of Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, operating out of Yenan, in barren northern Shensi Province.