Dan Snow's History Hit - Berlin and the Dawn of the Cold War

Episode Date: June 27, 2021

In the aftermath of World War II, amongst the shattered ruins of Berlin a new conflict was born, the Cold War. With the common purpose of defeating Nazi Germany gone the allied powers were soon no longer allies. Berlin had been divided before the end of the war at the Yalta Conference between the British, French, United States and Soviets. However, Berlin was deep in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany and Stalin wished to wrest control of it from the other allied powers. The situation became so tense that it almost sparked another world war and the allies remained steadfast in their determination to hold onto their sectors of the city. This culminated in the Berlin Airlift where many thousands of tons of supplies were flown into the city daily to defy the Soviet blockade and keep its residents from starvation. The fantastic historian and writer Giles Milton is today's guest to discuss his new book Checkmate in Berlin which explores the history of Berlin in the immediate post-war period. Giles and Dan discuss how tensions between the former allies flared, the flourishing black market in Berlin at the time, how the British and Americans were able to pull off the extraordinary feat of the airlift and its consequences.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I am Dan Snow and today I'm joined by Giles Milton. He's a hell of a writer, he's a hell of a writer. He's been on the podcast before. He's the guy who helped, among others, in the 1990s to turn narrative history into this bonkers global publishing phenomenon. He wrote Nathaniel's Nutmeg, a historical account of the terrible struggle between the Dutch and the English for control of the world's nutmeg in the early 17th century. He has written loads of other books, several known from Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, and a couple years ago he wrote D-Day, The Soldier's Story, which is so good it reads like a novel. I'm currently

rereading it at the moment because as members of the History Hit Book Club know, Charles Milton is on talking about his D-Day book this month. If you wish to join the History Hit Book Club, you can join all of us who like to read these books and talk about them. If you are subscribed to historyhit.tv, just go to historyhit.tv, subscribe and check your emails because the invitation to join the book club is in there. We've been a bit oversubscribed, to be honest, with book club applications. So we're only allowing existing members of historyhit.tv to join the book club initially. And we managed to sell out Amazon's entire back catalogue of D-Day, A Soldier's Story. They ran out thanks to book club demand. So we're taking things slowly. So please go to

historyhit.tv, subscribe to the world's best history channel, watch all the documentaries, listen to all the podcasts, our ads, and you can also therefore join the book club. So please check your inbox or your junk mail for that invitation. It goes out to all subscribers, so please check there. But it's great to have Giles Milton on this podcast because we are talking about his new book called Checkmate in Berlin. It's about Berlin after the Second World War. The hours, the days, the months after the Second World War culminating in the Berlin Airlift. It is a brilliant bit of history.

Absolutely fascinating. Extraordinary characters. Everything you expect from a Giles Milton masterpiece. So head over to history.tv, join our book club. It's fun. We've got Lindsay Fitzharris coming on to talk about 18th and 19th century medicine, her wonderful book, next month. And after that, we're going for the Tudors. We're going for a good old Tudor session with Tracy Borman. So we've got lots of exciting things coming up, all sorts of different periods. So please head over and join the book club. In the meantime, everyone, enjoy this wonderful podcast with Giles Melton. Giles, great to have you back on the pod.

Thank you for having me on. You are prolific and you dash around history. I mean, God, how do you decide where your glance lands? So many books are written and published each year about the Second World War. And then I was looking at the post-war period and realised that almost nothing is written about the period sort of immediately post-war, 1945 to 49. And I began to look at the story of Berlin and I just thought, this is an absolutely cracking yarn.

Because not only is geopolitics gone mad, it's got huge characters in it. And it completely changed the shape and destiny of both Europe and the world in those four short years. So I just thought this has got to be the next subject. And what is the subject? Because as you say, we talk about Berlin 45 so often, but you delve into the post-war history. It's so fascinating. It is fascinating. A lot of what was going to happen was decided at the Yalta conference in February 1945, when, of course, Churchill and Roosevelt flew into the Crimea to Yalta to meet with Stalin and really sort of thrash out a new global order. And part of that was their decision to divide Germany into two, with the Soviets taking the East and the Americans and British and later the

French taking the west. And that was mirrored in Berlin as well. So the Soviets were going to get the east of the city, the Americans and the British were going to get the west. But you only have to look at a map to realise that there's a potential problem here, a major problem, which is that Berlin lay in the very heart of what was to be Soviet-occupied Germany, which meant that the Western sectors, the British and American sectors of Berlin, to get supplies and food into their garrisons, etc., they would have to cross Soviet-occupied Germany using one rail link and one road link. Now, as long as things went well with the Soviets, all that was all fine and dandy, no problems at all. But where relations to turn sour was something to go wrong. The Soviets could cut the road and rail

link and the Allies would be left high and dry. They'd be left in Berlin with no possibility of getting any supplies in at all. And you point out, I'd never really thought about before, but the Allies were basically guaranteeing that Berlin would therefore become a kind of nightmare of gangsterism and black marketeering. And you put a border between people in this life, someone's going to take advantage of it. Berlin post-war was the Wild West. It was full of gangsters, spies, ex-Nazis, British and American troops who just want to have fun. There was a thriving black market, and there was tons of alcohol. So this was a kind of recipe for disaster, really. And on top of that, you have the beginnings of a very uneasy relationship between the Soviets and the Western allies. So Berlin became this sort

of microcosm for the absolute turmoil that was going to follow the Second World War. And you also point out, as you always do in your books, there's this lovely split between the grand strategy and the choices of individuals, because the people really seem to matter in this book. They really do, because the guys on the ground, they wielded immense power. I mean, one person likened them to Roman pro-consuls.

You know, they held people's lives in their hands. And so to look at two of them, the American commandant was Colonel Frank Howling Mad Howley, who was this kind of red blooded cowboy who was sent in to run the American sector. And his British opposite number was Brigadier Robert Looney Hind, who was going to run the British sector. They had very different approaches. What Colonel Frank Howley, from the very day really he arrived in Berlin, and he writes in his memoirs, he said, I realise that the Germans were no longer the enemy. It was the Russians who are now the enemy.

From June, July 1945, the minute he arrives in Berlin, he almost declares war on the Soviets. And this puts him way out of step from the official policy in both Washington and London, who wanted to remain on good terms with the Soviets. So we've got this cowboy running the American sector, and it's all going to go downhill from there, really. Tell me, how does it go downhill? What was the ambition? How all these sectors might work with each other? And what's the reality within weeks and months? Well, the idea is that the city is going to be run, there's this body is set up called the Kommandatura, and this has the representatives of the four powers, Soviet, British, American, and French. And this is where they're going to fight over, squabble over how the city is run,

because a city as big as Berlin, you can't run it in artificial sectors. There are citywide problems, electricity, gas, feeding the population. And all of these are going to cause immense problems. Because for example, Berlin was traditionally fed by the farmland to the east of the city. That is controlled by the Soviets. And if they want to cut off the food supplies to the western sectors, which is exactly what's going to happen within a couple of years, this causes immense logistical problems for the Western allies. And I think Frank Howley realises right from the outset that the Soviets cannot be trusted, that Stalin's goal is not only to kick the Western allies out of Berlin, but ultimately to kick them out of Germany as well. He's the only one that realises this in 1945,

and it takes another sort of 16, 18 months before suddenly this realisation hits Washington, hits London, and there is a dramatic shift in policy, and the Soviets are no longer seen as allies, they are seen as the enemy. Can we just put a word in here for the Berliners themselves? We know they suffered unimaginable trauma at the hands of Allied bombing and then Soviet ground troops. What was life like for the people? Yeah, well, when I was sort of researching this book, I found quite a lot of memoirs and testimonies of Berliners living in the city through these years. And my God, they make for really harrowing reading. As you say, when the Red Army came in, there was uncontrolled rape, looting, drunkenness,

violence, just appalling for the women of Berlin. Some 60,000 asked for medical help, having been raped, but it's believed the number of rapes is probably 10 times that. And then when the Western Allies come into the city, things get slightly better for Berliners, but they're on the brink of starvation the whole time. There's simply not enough food. There's no electricity or gas. They have maybe electricity for two hours a day and often in the middle of the night. So if you wanted to cook a meal, you'd have to get up at two in the morning and quickly use the available electricity. And then, of course, there's no heating, there's no glass in the windows. And the winter of 1946-1947 is one of the coldest on record. In Berlin, it's minus 26, and you've got no glass in your windows. It's pretty miserable. And tens of thousands of

Berliners died of hypothermia, of starvation, or committed suicide. And do things improve, or does it very much depend what sector they're in? Yeah, I think it does depend on what sector they're in. And the Soviets started playing games in about 1946, 1947. They start cutting off the electricity supply to the western sectors because the generators are in the east. They cut down on the food available in the western sectors, meaning the Americans and British have to bring in everything. They've got 2.4 million Berliners in their sectors that they have to keep alive. And they have a minimum ration of 1,300 calories a day. This is not a lot of food when it's minus 26 and you've not got no glass in your windows. And there's a constant wrangling between who

should get what food. So both the Soviets and the Western Allies agree that food must be rationed, but it's not clear who should get the most food. So Frank Howley, the American commandant, argues that it's the elderly, the sick and the infirm who should get the most food. The Soviets say, no, it's the political classes and the journalists. These are the most important people. We need to give them the biggest rations. And Frank Howley, there's a memorable phrase at one of his meetings with the Soviet commandant. He says, you can't kick a lady when she's down. And the Soviet commandant replies, why, my dear Colonel Howley, that is exactly when you should kick them. So it's so interesting in your book, these face-to-face meetings. I mean, we all think

of Cold War Berlin as literally divided by a high wall, but they're still the organs of collaboration at this point between all the former allies of World War II. That's right. You can move freely between the sectors. I mean, many people listening will remember seeing photos of those, you are now leaving the American sector, or you're now leaving the British sector. But at the time, in 45, 46, 47, you could still move between the sectors. And this was one major problem for the British and American was the Soviet troops crossing into the Western sectors, where there were almost immediately bars and nightclubs had sprung up, and they rather liked coming to these nightclubs. And this was a disaster, basically, because they got drunk, everyone got drunk, and it ended in violence. There were shootouts, you know, on the streets between Soviet troops

and Brits and Americans, absolutely crazy sort of Wild West stuff. And then the great turning point happens in 1946, when three major things happen, which change everything. Because up until 1946, the Western Allies have been dealing with the Soviets as if they're still an allied power as if the wartime allowance is going to continue in 1946 winston churchill no longer prime minister makes his famous iron curtain speech he goes to missouri in america he's introduced by president truman and he talks about the Iron Curtain descending over Europe, that the Soviets are trying to take over half of the European continent. And this is a sort of wake-up call to everyone, a realisation that Stalin is not

a benign ally. He's actually trying to take over half of Europe. It's an interesting example of kind of distant rhetoric on a political stage somewhere. Did that change things on the ground in Berlin almost straight away? Well, it has to be said that there were three things that happened in the spring of 46, which transformed everything. The first was Churchill's Iron Curtain speech, which, by the way, was very badly received in America and Britain at the time. But hot on its heels came the defection of Igor Gozenko. He was a Soviet diplomat who worked in the embassy in Canada. He defected, and he defected with an absolutely extraordinary

story of espionage, namely that the Soviets had infiltrated the Western Allies' attempts to develop more nuclear weapons. And he revealed this, and this sent really shockwaves through the capitals of both North America and of Europe. And suddenly there was this realisation, my God, these Soviet allies are not allies at all. And then there was a third thing, which was incredibly important as well, which was that George Kennan, who was an immensely brilliant sort of intellectual working at the American embassy in Moscow, he was asked to give an appraisal of how he read the situation. And he wrote his famous long telegram, which really set things down as they were. He said, there's absolutely no way the Soviets can be trusted. This was a man who knew Stalin well, who'd been in Russia for years. His long telegram was really

a wake up call to Capitol Hill and to Whitehall that there had to be a massive and dramatic shift in policy, that they could no longer try to work alongside the Soviets as allies, that these were now the enemy. You listen to Dan Snow's history, everyone. We're talking to Giles Milton about Berlin after World War II. More after this. Romans, gods, Spartans, the wars of Alexander the Great's successors in incredible, entirely necessary detail. The Ancients podcast, it's kind of like Dan's show, except it's just ancient history. We've got the leading experts. We've got the big topics, from ancient Vietnam to the fall

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or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. And what was the immediate impact on the streets of Berlin, the practical effect of seeing the Soviets as enemies? The fallout happened, first of all, in the Kommandantur, where it turned into a bear pit, really. I mean, this just became endless slanging matches between the Americans and British on one side and the French and the Soviets on the other. And the Soviets could really wield immense control because they controlled the

power and the food going into Berlin. They had a lot of leverage there and they were more than happy to use it. And then, of course, on the back of everything that happened in 1946, I mentioned the Churchill speech and the defection of Guzenko. Then you have in the capitals of Washington and in London, a dramatic shift and formal shift in foreign policy. This is marked by two sort of great things, really. There was the Truman Doctrine, and there was the Marshall Plan. The Truman Doctrine said that any country threatened by Soviet communism would be given the backing of the United States. And the Marshall Plan was a decision to pour billions of dollars into the reconstruction of Western Europe. And these two things really set alight the Cold War. The Soviets

obviously were absolutely furious about these things. But for America, there was a realisation that Europe had to be rebuilt and that it was essential to have a revived Germany at the heart of Europe, or else Europe was going to fail. Obviously, they had one eye on the idea of exporting American goods to a revived German economy as well. But these were really the big shifts, the sort of after effects of these played out on the streets of Berlin. And the people that you chart in this book, on an individual level, on the streets, how does it start to play out? Well, I suppose the rupture happens in the spring of 1948, where the Kommandatura, where you've got Frank Howley and Brigadier Hine fighting it out with their Soviet opposite number, who's General Alexander Kotikoff, who's been sent in by Stalin to try and wrest control of the whole of Berlin. And matters reach an absolute crisis

point in June of 1948, when the Soviets do what everyone feared they would do. They cut the road and rail links from the western sectors of Germany into Berlin. Overnight, 2.4 million Berliners in the western sectors and the garrison troops, the Americans and British garrisons there, have absolutely no means of getting food and supplies into the city except by air. And thus begins the famous Berlin Airlift, which has got to be one of the most extraordinary humanitarian operations ever undertaken. The Airlift is now a thing of legend. The Brits and Americans kind of accepted the Soviet challenge, just decided to bring everything by air.

How close were they driving a fully armoured convoy down the road from the West and just fighting their way into Berlin? Very interesting, because Lucius Clay, who was the American military governor of the American occupied zone of Germany, he wanted to do exactly that. He wanted to send an armoured battalion down the motorway and just fight any Soviet forces that came their way. But wiser heads prevailed. Truman just thought this was going to lead to the Third World War. And many others were saying, we're so close to war. So the airlift was put in motion. And it's quite interesting that if you read any American book

on the airlift, the Americans, rather like with the Second World War, actually, they claim all the credit for it. In fact, the airlift was the invention or the idea of a rather brilliant British boffin named Reginald Waite. He was never seen without his slide rule and his book of logarithms. And he worked out that there were eight airfields in Western Germany that could be used and two airfields in the western sectors of Berlin. And he did this complex calculation and worked out that if a plane landed every 90 seconds into Berlin, it would just about be possible to keep the city alive. As I said, there were 2.4 million Berliners in the Western sectors.

They required an absolute daily minimum, subsistence level minimum of four and a half thousand tons every single day. And so this was going to require planes flying in at five different levels, a few hundred feet apart from each other and landing every 90 seconds, an immediate turnaround on the ground, back to Western Germany, and then back into Berlin again. Extraordinary operation. Reginald Waite presented his idea to the British Commandant of Berlin, who said it wasn't possible. He took it to the British military governor of Western occupied Germany, and he said it was absolutely impossible. He took it to the Americans, and they looked at it and they said, this is possible. We're going to bring in every plane that we can. And you have this amazing moment in June 1948, when planes from everywhere across the world, from Honolulu, from Hawaii, from Alaska, and from all the British colonies and dominions, they're all brought into Western Germany in order to try and pull off this airlift

spectacular. What were the Soviets thinking and doing? The Soviets are absolutely convinced that this will not work. They'd seen an airlift attempted at Stalingrad and they realised that the Luftwaffe, who were after all pretty organised, had not managed to save the German troops in Stalingrad. They believed that the West had pulled off more than it could chew. But the Americans, rather brilliantly, they had this chap called General Tunnage Tunner. And he had spent his Second World War running guns over the Himalayas to Chiang Kai-shek's forces in China. And he had perfected the art of running an airlift. And so he was brought in to run the American end of the Berlin Airlift. And in fact, ultimately, he'd run the whole show,

the British end as well. He said that no, an airlift was feasible. It had to be run like clockwork. It had to be run using only instruments. So it's entirely dependent on plane instruments, which were not always reliable in the late 1940s. And he set this in motion. And he also realised he needed help on repairing the planes. The planes were getting a hell of a battering. They'd already been through the Second World War. They were full of dents and bullet holes. Now they were being run 24 hours a day. What did he do? He turned to the only person who could help him, which was General von Röden, a senior member of the Luftwaffe, who had an entire team of mechanics at his disposal. And he used them to repair the planes.

They were brilliant engineers, as we know Germans are, and they kept the show on the road as well. So General Tunner was prepared to take help from wherever it could come. And the Soviets were, I think they were quite taken aback at just how efficiently the airlift was being run. They did everything they could to disturb it. They had Yak fighters flying in the flight paths of the Allied planes. They put searchlights on the ground to try and blind pilots as they came into land as well.

But none of that worked. The planes continued to get through. Was this the first trial of arms in the Cold War? And what was its legacy? Yeah, it was the first trial of arms. And also the first trial of hefty propaganda as well, I think, that General Tunner realised that this was a huge propaganda coup if he could win the Battle of the Airlift. And what he achieved, I said the daily minimum they required in Berlin was four and a half thousand tonnes of supplies every day. By Easter 49, he was bringing in 12,000 tonnes of supplies a day. He was bringing in more food for the Western sectors that the Soviets could feed their own people in East Berlin. So Stalin realized that he had lost this gamble that he'd taken. And he quietly decides to open negotiations in America between

Soviet diplomats and American diplomats. And he climbs down. He ends up calling off the blockade. and American diplomats. And he climbs down. He ends up calling off the blockade. And the Americans and the British have won the airlift. And they've kept their sectors of Berlin supplied. They have won this first showdown of the Cold War and an immensely important one too. Let's finish up with the people of Berlin. What were their views on being suddenly the battlefield of this new superpower war? Yeah, the Berliners, there was a real fear with the Western commandants as to how the Berliners were going to react to a prolonged siege where they have even less food than they were used to. And food very nearly ran out, especially wintertime when many planes couldn't get through the fog and the snow and the ice and

what have you. But Berliners were led by this famous mayor of Berlin, Ernst Reuter, who would give speeches in front of, you know, half a million, a million people. Berliners would turn out to hear him give these speeches at these vast public rallies in the western sectors of Berlin. And some of these, they're immensely moving. If you listen to them, even in German, he's calling on the world not to abandon Berlin. And he really lifted the spirits of Berliners and kept hope alive. And his role in all of this was, I think, immensely important. He's sort of Germany's Churchill, if you like. He certainly saw himself in that sort of role. And he saw Berlin, a little bit like Britain in 1940,

as standing alone, as defying the forces, the powers that be. And so he kept morale up and alive. And when the airlift finally came to an end, Berlin has just poured onto the streets. And Ernst Reuter gave this great victory speech. It was a real triumph. And they realised that this had changed everything, that the West had won the first battle of the Cold War, and the West was never going to abandon Berlin. Giles Milton, congratulations on a smash hit and thank you very much for coming on the podcast and telling me all about it. Thank you so much for having me on.

Thank you. What's the book called? Checkmate in Berlin. And the subtitle is The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World. Boom. Nice one. I feel we have the history upon our shoulders.

All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks, for being on the episode. Congratulations. Well done, you. I hope you're not fast asleep. If you did fancy supporting everything we do at History Hit, we'd love it if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give a little rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great. Thank you very much indeed. That really does make

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