Dan Snow's History Hit - Tank Standoff at Checkpoint Charlie

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

For 16 hours between the 27 to 28 October 1961, the world held its breath as Soviet and US tanks faced each other down at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin and came very close to turning the Cold War hot. However, one of the most dramatic and dangerous showdowns of the cold war has been largely overshadowed by the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later which saw the two superpowers go head to head once more. To discuss how it was that tanks came to be deployed ready for battle at one of the most sensitive locations along the Iron Curtain Dan is joined by Iain MacGregor, author of Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth. Iain and Dan discuss how the confrontation was brought about by a trip to the opera, the political miscalculations that led the world to the brink of war and how the crisis was averted. 

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History as I'm standing on the south shore of the city of Venice. I'm looking out, the sun is setting southwesterly, turning the sky crimson over a series of churches, cathedrals, basilica that I cannot pronounce and will embarrass myself if I attempt to do so. It's my first foreign trip since Covid so I decided to come to a place where there's a greater concentration of history than almost anywhere else in the world. You'll be hearing more about it on the pod, on the TV channel, over the next few weeks and months. But in the meantime, I've got a podcast now that has nothing whatsoever to do with Venice. It's about the Berlin Wall. All this year, we've been talking about the anniversary of the Berlin Wall going up. We've been looking at

people trying to get under it. We've been looking at wars that were about to be fought over it. And now we're going to talk to Ian McGregor, author of Checkpoint Charlie, talking about the most dangerous place on earth. He's going to be telling us about the Berlin Wall, what it was like for Berliners, what it was like for the rest of the world as they watch this extraordinary place, the membrane between East and West. If you want to listen to other podcasts about the Berlin Wall, the Cold War, please get a History Hit TV. It's a digital digital history channel it's where we've got all of our documentaries all of our podcasts it's all kicking off we've got tens of thousands of people watching stuff now everyone watching the trafalgar content from last week i'm very proud of that

documentary i made on nelson's navy so i'm glad everyone's enjoying that lots of people also watching our history of the north of england starting with William the Conqueror harrowing the north. That's doing very, very well in our charts as well. So congratulations to the team behind that. But for the moment, before you go to historyhit.tv and subscribe, get 30 days free if you subscribe today, all you've got to do is listen to this brilliant pod. Here's Ian McGregor. Enjoy. listen to this brilliant pod. Here's Ian McGregor. Enjoy. Ian, thanks very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me.

Well, let's start with Checkpoint Charlie. For people my age and older, it was one of the great touch points of culture and history and politics of the second half of the 20th century. What was Checkpoint Charlie? It was the designated official crossing point that the Allies agreed with the Soviets, and I suppose these Germans too, after the first barriers of the Berlin Wall had gone up after August 13th. So there'd always been an open crossing point, as there had been. There was over 80 of them throughout the city before the barriers went up. But once the barrier had gone up, there had to be a crossing point that the Allies would still have their rights of access into East Berlin. And it's just phonetically, it was Checkpoint Charlie, because Checkpoint Alpha was the crossing point that got you from

West Germany through into East Germany. Then either by train or on the autobahn, you'd be going into the hinterland of West Berlin and the Allied sectors. That crossing point was Checkpoint Bravo. And then the final crossing point would be Checkpoint Charlie, which would take you from Friedrichstrasse across into East Berlin, if you were in the Allied military garrison or you were an international diplomat. Yes, I mean, who was allowed to cross? Just those people. I mean, I think my dad, he would have been a journalist at the time. He probably would have been allowed in that way would he or the other routes the media were i'm

just talking about those first few weeks after august 13th once the wall had gone up and then it became much more fluid and that was basically the international crossing point so there would be another over 10 crossing points that would be allowed through the center of berlin each of them had different rules and accesses, depending on who you were, whether you were a West German that had come into West Berlin and wanted to go and visit into East Berlin, whether you were a West Berliner who was going into East Berlin,

and so forth. There were different crossing points that allowed you access, depending on who you were. And the weird thing about it wasn't the East German side was you were immediately straight into the communist government, HQ kind of sector of the city. The West Berlin side was all kind were immediately straight into a communist government HQ sector of the city. The West Berlin side was all kind of cool and countercultural, right? So it was mad going from one to the other.

It depended which side you were coming from. So if you were going from the West into the East, I wish I'd done it beforehand, but I only did it once the wall had come down. Yeah, you're going into a very, very drab, dilapidated eastern half of Berlin. very, very drab, dilapidated eastern half of Berlin. Obviously, the East Germans and the Soviets, to a degree, had restructured various aspects of the city to showcase the new government or the new people that were in charge. And that developed, obviously, over the years once the Berlin Wall had gone up. But if you're coming from the east going into the west, it'd be like going to Disneyland, to a degree. If you were used to a lack of consumer goods, a lack of what to wear, what to eat, etc. Bright Lights, big city, it literally was that. And obviously,

it was a very exciting city on the Western side because it was an international garrison. Okay, let's talk about October 1961, 50 years ago. It's a big anniversary. We've got Kennedy in the White House. We've got Khrushchev in the Kremlin. First of all, what were relations like in the early 60s? We forget Kennedy had banged the old drum. He'd been a Cold War warrior during the campaign to succeed Eisenhower, hadn't he? Yeah, but that's when things changed because obviously Kennedy, very charismatic, young. Well, we thought he was at the time. We didn't know what was going on behind closed doors. But yeah, he thought his charm and the zest for life as a young politician would be able to find this solution that had defeated his predecessor, Eisenhower.

What to do with this problem of Berlin that's situated over 100 kilometers inside the Soviet sector with Allied access. It's a thorn in their side. And the leader, Khrushchev, obviously a Stalinist. He might be liberalising the country to a degree, but he still had the same ambitions Stalin had had, as in he wanted to completely neutralise Germany, demilitarise, I should say, if they're going to unify the country. Last thing he wanted was an Allied garrison of, say, 10,000 troops with tanks and armoured cars 100 miles behind his front line. So he was constantly waging belligerent war against Eisenhower to solve this problem, which wasn't being solved.

You've got the mass of people escaping through this loophole of Berlin. So when he met Kennedy, Kennedy thought, I'll sit down, I'll talk to this guy, we can find some kind of solution to both our problems. Because he obviously, he didn't want a war in Europe either. He had the Allies telling him, you have to solve this problem. And he was just badgered, belittled, bullied by Khrushchev over this two-day conference in Vienna, which was in June 61, a couple of months before the war went up. And from that meeting, obviously, both men came away with diverging opinions of the other. Kennedy came away thinking, I can't relate to this guy. He's hell-bent on an aggressive,

obviously possibly military solution to Berlin if we don't come up with something. We better batten down the hatches and see what can be done in strengthening what troops and relationships we have in Europe. Khrushchev came away thinking, this is a young pup. He had no answer to anything I said. I can push him around as I please to a degree.

I think we can get away with this other solution that the East Germans are pushing on me, which is we build a wall in the city. And that's where the plans, which have been just conversations between Albrecht, the East German leader, and Khrushchev, finally took shape. And that's where you get this kind of, they motored towards August when they were going to do this,

splitting a part of the city. Yeah, I remember in that conference, Christoph shouted about communism and Leninism. And Kennedy, who was supposed to have studied the LSE, was kind of bullied off the ball a bit, wasn't he? I remember all the observers were a bit disappointed. Kennedy was trying to find a political solution and have a more strategic kind of conversation with his opposite number to see what could be done. And every avenue he tried to go down to try and start some kind of debate where they could possibly have some kind of solution or reach some kind of compromise, Khrushchev was having none of it. I mean, he literally was, this is my line in the sand. And he famously said, if it's a war you want, it's a war you're going to

get if we don't find this problem of Berlin, to the point where, you know, it seemed obvious that he wanted the Allies out of the city by hook or by crook, and they were going to find some way to do it. Kennedy came away, obviously, with the hawks in his administration to think, well, we have to increase the draft, we have to call up the reservists, we have to get Congress to pass much more expenditure to actually arm these reservists we're going to call up. So it just ramped up the situation very quickly over the space of just two days. And obviously, both sides are now heavily armed with nuclear missiles. So the capacity for mistakes is pretty scary.

Well, yeah, because the Russians had always been scared of the fact that, and this had been going on throughout the 50s, they were scared of a strong West German state that would be armed and not just armed conventionally, but armed with nuclear weapons. That was the nightmare for any Russian leader sat in the Kremlin. They didn't want history repeating itself. And that was the kind of thing. It wasn't just Khrushchev. You've got to remember that. Khrushchev was literally the tip of the spear. There's a lot of hardliners behind him in the central committee in the Politburo all saying the same thing we have to push back and show them that we mean business whereas on the other side in Washington I've just said about the hawks in Kennedy's administration

that were pushing him to do likewise and show that they meant business but he also had a big group of people that were European based to a degree that were saying, you have to find a solution to work with this man. They don't mean what they say. They're not going to go to war over Berlin. You have to see past that and find a solution. But ultimately, for Kennedy in the White House, the Hawks won the argument. You listen to Dan Snow's history. I'm talking about the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie,

and all that drama now thankfully consigned to history. More coming up. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows 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 that's the background what about the actual incident itself so it begins as a classic kind of almost machismo doesn't it kind of badge waving and diplomatic ego driven incident it seems like it's what i talk about my book is what i'm saying that Kennedy, one of his solutions, other than sending up a battle group up the autobahn from West Germany through East German territory to get to West Berlin, a couple of weeks after the barriers had gone up, obviously to be met by his Vice President Lyndon Johnson. That was a morale booster for the West Berliners who obviously felt a little bit marooned, a little bit left by the Allies, who they expected to actually have pushed the barriers down. They hadn't.

So this was one of their kind of solutions to restoring morale in Berlin. Another one was Kennedy to appoint a special advisor in the form of General Lucius Clay, who had been the first Allied commandant of Berlin after the war, and then had organised and seen through the famous Berlin airlift. And he was a Cold War warrior. You were talking about that with Khrushchev earlier on. He was on the other side. He was a complete, you don't take a backward step with these guys. Kennedy parachuted him into the Allied sector. He wasn't within the Allied chain of command, much to the annoyance and chagrin of the Allies who were in the city.

He had the Kennedy's ear. So that gave him some leeway to make decisions on the spot. And that's where this famous tank standoff occurred. So this is mid-late October, obviously a couple of months after the barriers have gone up, slightly settled down, but you've already had the East German border guards shooting people that are trying to escape and obviously killing them in some instances. That had already gone on. In several instances over those weeks, the electricity and gas supplies had been cut off just to really ramp up the pressure too. This is all about tightening the pressure on the Allies because they've accepted the barrier. Now, would they accept not being allowed access into East Berlin, which had been agreed in 1945. This is the crux of the problem for this tank standoff. So what happened was a junior diplomat at the US mission, Alan

Leitner, was taking his wife in the car across Checkpoint Charlie to go to the theatre to see some opera, which is what a lot of the Allied diplomats did. The theatre district was in the eastern half of the city, and it was very cheap because of the ratio disparity of the currencies as well. And instead of being allowed to pass through because he had diplomatic plates, he was stopped by an East German officer and his papers were demanded, which he rightly refused. Then he wouldn't budge. He said, I'm not leaving.

You're not going to move me. There was a standoff. Clay got involved once he heard about this and immediately ordered armed MPs. There's about four jeeps of them with fixed bayonets. And we should say here, by the way, military police, not members of the British Parliament. So they were sent over and it wasn't only just to rescue him and pull him back from the Soviet control zone. It was to then take him through the zone, unmolested, and take him on a tour, a grand tour of central East Berlin, just to put one up to the East Germans and say, well, we're here. So that happened on the first time.

Then it happened on the second night. And on the second night, the commander on the ground, a major, Thomas Tyree of the US military police, he'd ordered up 10 tanks to come up to... So on the second night, sorry, is the guy still in his car or has he gone home and then... No, no, he'd gone home, but this happened three or four times. He wants to go to the theatre again.

By then it was just a case of who blinks first, which is what I call it in the book. I just say, who was going to blink first? This was Clay, obviously trying to push the envelope to see how far will these guys go. If they really mean business, then I've really got to do what I really want to do, which is put the tanks in and really press their buttons it kind of mushroomed into this big standoff where the world's press came down to checkpoint Charlie to see what was going on and what Clay underestimated was yes he could push the East Germans around but he wasn't going to push the Soviets around

and it took probably about 36 hours for the Kremlin to respond, because obviously this is way before 24-hour news, way before the internet, mobile phones, et cetera, et cetera. The news was filtering to the Kremlin. So they ordered their general on the ground there, General Kornheb, who was in charge of Soviet forces in East Germany. Big, big fish, big hero of the Second World War. And the Allies knew who they were dealing with.

This was a very, very serious operator who'd proven himself in battle. He simply matched Clay tank for tank. So Clay brought up 10 tanks. The Russians brought up 10 tanks. And on the third day when this was happening, once Clay brought up his tanks, the Russians were thinking, well, we need to kind of show them we're serious now. This is getting silly. silly connor brought up another 20 tanks and so this is the message that clay then passed up to the white house and to kennedy saying well mr president they've now brought up another 20 t-54s which is pretty much if we match them that's every single tank we've got in berlin so what are we going to do never getting into a tank waving standoff with the Soviet Union.

The one thing they've got plenty of is goddamn tanks. Yeah, exactly. There's about three Soviet armies surrounding the city. You're talking about 3,000 tanks and probably half a million men in East Germany altogether. And that's before you even get to the motorised divisions East Germans have got. So he called his bluff.

And the problem was his men on the ground, the US military police that were looking through the binoculars, looking at these T-54s with their guns, their barrels pointing right at them, while they're standing behind their APC, three APCs and 10 M48 pattern tanks, thinking, what are we going to do? They can't see the insignia on these tanks, so they don't know whether they're Russian or it's German, and they can't see the insignia of the tank crews. So Konev was clever. They masked out the markings so they didn't know what unit they were from. And he'd instructed his tankers to wear black uniforms. You just didn't know who they were. That was the issue because to the Allies, they knew this. If they were facing Russian tanks, then it's a problem of the four powers. And that can be solved. That can just go up the chain and they can talk about it and it can be talked down eventually, I suppose. But if they're East German tanks, then that breaks a fundamental rule of the four power agreement.

The East Germans were not allowed at that point to act like they were a sovereign country. The Allies didn't recognise them as a sovereign country at that point by October 61. That's the whole point of Checkpoint Charlie just being a simple wooden shed. It was to thumb their noses at these Germans who were still building the barriers and eventually would build this multi-million pound complex for travelling through their capital city. We had a very basic shed to say, well, we don't recognise you. So that's why we've got this shed, because it means nothing. So that's the situation. And so Kennedy's saying to Clay down the phone, well, I hope we're going to have cool heads and firm decisions at Checkpoint Charlie, to which

Clay famously joked, well, I hope you guys are going to do the same in the White House, Mr. President, because he just wanted to be backed. That's the whole thing that he wanted. So what I talk about and the people that I was really interested in were not the main players. I was more interested in meeting the guys that are still alive, that were the basic grunts on the ground, who were in the US military police, who had their binoculars and were looking at these Russians. They didn't know at the time they were Russians, but those guys in the tanks that were 200, 300 yards away. So those are the guys I interviewed. Great, great bunch of people.

I mean, fearless is underused when you talk about these guys. And one specific guy, Lieutenant Werner Pike, and he's the man who's famously sent across by his colonel, Colonel Sabalik of the 287th US Military Police, ordered Pike because he was a linguist. He was a trained linguist anyway. He spoke fluent German fluent Russian and he says I need someone to go over there and find out ascertain who's those

tanks belong to and who's in them and then we'll know what we're dealing with Pike off you go so Pike and his driver managed to get through a different part of the city to skirt their way around Checkpoint Charlie in an unmarked jeep and then they discovered like I was saying before not only were there 10 Russian tanks T-54s at the checkpoint facing the Americans there were a lot more tanks in the side streets just idling their engines and that's what Pike and his driver discovered so what they did was they found five tanks in formation that were parked on one street around the corner. All the tankers had got out and they were sitting in a nearby park having a cigarette, talking to each other, just chilling out basically until things

got, I suppose, a bit more crazy and the action started. He managed to scramble into the top of one of these T-54s and went inside and then he could automatically see, well, these are Russian tanks. There was Cyrillic instructions all around the equipment. He found a Russian magazine. He found the cigarettes that the Russians normally smoked. So to him, that told him everything that he needed to know. They're Russians. These are Russian tanks. Then he heard some of them speaking further along the street. Again, they're speaking Russian. So they hot-tailed it back, gave the report to his major, who then went up to Colonel Sabalik, who then went to General Clay, then Clay went up to Washington, and the news was they're Russian tanks. This sounds a great story,

which is what I've said. But the thing was, I then heard from an ex-Stasi man that I was speaking to in the course of interviewing people for my book, he agreed with that story. He said, well, yeah, it did happen. We know it happened. But another story that the Americans won't tell you is they had undercover CIA operatives in East Berlin at the time, too. And they instructed them to find out what was going on also. And what they did was they threw stones at a tanker parked in the street until the soldier or the tank commander popped his head out of the tank, swore at them in Russian, and then they immediately hot-tailed it back to Checkpoint Charlie to say, they're Russians.

Love that. And was there danger of an accident here? What were the rules of engagement that would have been handed down? If someone had opened fire by mistake, what might have happened? It's like what we would have right now if North Korean and South Korean tanks were at a checkpoint right this minute facing each other with a few hundred yards apart. They were locked and loaded. Communications were still very basic back then. The famous hot line between the Kremlin and Washington still had to be set up. So it was just the commanders on the ground trying to solve this issue of this had kind of escalated very quickly out of their control and not only that they got the world's press watching their every move what was going to happen and obviously they've got tens of thousands of Berliners anxiously thinking what

the hell's going on so this was I would argue the nadir of east-west relations in Berlin pretty much through the whole period of the Berlin Wall, I mean, there was still a lot of people to be shot while they're trying to escape. But in terms of military units, actual military units with the hardware facing each other, and not just in Berlin, because obviously, yes, the tanks were there face to face, but the warning signs and signals had gone out across Europe, across the world, really. So whatever DEFCON points the American military had gone to, the Russians had too. So aircraft were being launched, missiles and ships were being readied at sea.

There was a lot of things that went on outside of Berlin that caused this to be a big international incident. Obviously, Cuba then took its part later on, but this was the big one at the time. Big powder keg, lots of potential for a spark. The Kennedy brothers then did some of their classic de-escalation, didn't they? How'd they get out of this, wriggle out of this? Well, that was Kennedy getting his brother, the Attorney General Robert Kennedy. They already had, obviously, a few back channels through double agents and diplomats that worked for the Kremlin as well. And he just put in train very lengthy phone calls via them to the Kremlin. You could argue that did they sell clay out? I suppose they did. They just said, we've got a Maverick commander down there. He's not following

orders completely to what we wanted him to do. This has mushroomed out of control, but we both need to find a solution. Now we know it's you in those tanks. We both need to climb down, but save face at the same time. How are we going to do this? Let's work out a kind of chess move for each other. That means we both come away from this without any further embarrassment. So how's that choreography of de-escalation work on the ground? So how's that choreography of de-escalation work on the ground? It was literally, you move two tanks, we'll move two tanks. You move another two tanks, we'll move another two tanks.

And that's how it worked until they cleared the area. I mean, they literally just backed them off step by step. Because I suppose if they'd moved them en masse, both sides, that would create panic too, because you've got to think of the local population. So that's what they did. It was like a two-step with the Russians. And it was fine. And the main thing I found when I talked to the ordinary GIs on the ground that witnessed all this was they were super frustrated because they had been massively frustrated two months before that when they'd watched the barriers go up and they were thinking, why haven't we been given the command to push through these barriers?

I was talking to you about Werner Pike, the lieutenant who found out they're Russian tankers. Again, one of my conversations with him, he'd said that when he was watching these German construction workers put up the barriers in the first place on August 13th, some of these German guards guarding the workers to make sure they didn't escape and the East Germans themselves didn't escape through the barriers. We're shouting over to them saying we have no bullets in our Russian-made submachine guns. Why aren't you doing something? We're not going to do anything. And this was reported back to the Allied command as well. But again, nothing was done because the decision was taken, let them have their barrier because it's better than further confrontation that might lead to an escalation of conflict. So by the time you get to the tank standoff, yeah, I mean, these guys are

thinking, well, we're just backing off yet again. Why are we doing this? We should be giving a stronger message. So ultimately, it cost Clay his job. He was recalled. I haven't found any of that in the archives, as in anything written by the Russians, but it must have been part of the deal. The Russians were saying, you need to get rid of this guy out of the city because he's just going to cause more trouble if you have him here. And he was put on the plane very quickly back to America. Not a disgrace, but he was withdrawn. And again, a lot of the GIs on the ground were thinking,

well, he's our hero. Why are we taking this guy out? He's the only guy prepared to take the Russians on. God, the world was just on the point of nuclear meltdown, wasn't it, constantly? And these individuals, these characters made all the difference. Thanks so much, Ian.

That was amazing. Thank you for coming to the podcast. What's your book called? Everyone can learn a bit more about the Berlin Wall more generally. It's called Checkpoint Charlie, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth. Well, it sounds about right. Thanks very much indeed.

Thanks, Dan. 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. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career.

It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project if you did feel like doing me a favor if you go to wherever you get your podcast and give it a review give a rating obviously a good one ideally then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it we obviously depend on listeners depend on more and more people finding out about it depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you.