Truman(49)

Thereafter events proceeded with an extraordinary momentum. Bevin got his Western union   treaty signed by March 17th. Six days earlier he had used the occasion of Soviet pressure on Norway to lay before the American Government an aide-memoire going considerably beyond the note of January 13th. ‘Mr Bevin considers,’ it ran, ‘that the most effective course would be to take very early steps, before Norway goes under, to conclude under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations3 a regional Atlantic Approaches Pact of Mutual Assistance, in which all the countries directly threatened by a Russian move to the Atlantic could participate …’Within 24 hours on March 12th Marshall responded with another of the handful of momentous statements in American diplomatic history: ‘Please inform Mr Bevin that … we are prepared to proceed at once in the joint discussions on the establishment of an Atlantic security system.’

The rapid authority of this response would not have been possible without the coincidence of three factors. First there was the Secretary of State’s confidence in the President’s capacity for robust decision making. Second there was solid bipartisan support in the Senate for a forward position in Europe. When the ‘Vandenberg Resolution’, which gave general endorsement to the idea of an Article 51 military engagement, was put to the vote in April it was carried by 64 votes to 4. Third, and this made speed necessary as well as possible, there was a background of mounting menace in Europe. On February 25th there had been the Communist takeover of the Czech Government. On March 10th Jan Masaryk had been found dead on the flagstones of the Prague Foreign Ministry. During the same weeks, as plans developed for the setting-up of a West German government, there came the first sporadic signs of Soviet interference with Western military rail traffic to Berlin.

These events helped to concentrate many minds in Washington. Even so, the speed and firmness of decision making was prodigious by any standards. That spring the Marshall Aid appropriations were obtained from Congress. Truman came out with a demand for compulsory selective service accompanied by universal military training on a part-time basis. A clear decision was made within the administration that even though the Nationalist régime in China was declining into defeat, a strict limit should be set to the amount of bolstering support which it would receive from the United States. ‘… the costs of an all-out effort to see Communist forces resisted and destroyed in China would … be impossible to estimate,’ Marshall stated. ‘But the magnitude of the task and the probable costs thereof would clearly be out of all proportion to the results to be achieved.’10 Europe was to have priority, even though this was to involve a lot of trouble for Truman with the China lobby. The ‘bipartisanship’ which lubricated US foreign policy in Europe did not extend to the Far East.

This priority expressed itself in the momentum with which the creation of NATO was carried forward; and the need for it was demonstrated when the sporadic harassment of the spring turned into the full Berlin blockade of the summer. On June 20th the new currency that was to be at once a cause and symbol of the wirtschaftswünder was bestowed by the allies upon West Germany. At first the deutschmark was not intended for Berlin. But when the Russians retaliated by introducing a new currency of their own into all sectors of the city, the allies re-retaliated by extending the D-mark to the three Western sectors. The next day, June 24th, a full blockade was imposed by the Russians.

Truman responded with a mixture of firmness and restraint. There were three possible courses. One was to give in, to allow Berlin to be strangled into the Soviet zone. The second was to send an armoured train up the railway track, or perhaps more plausibly, a fighting column up the autobahn, with orders that if necessary it should try to shoot its way through. The wisdom of this course depended upon a calculation that the Russians would climb down when confronted with the challenge of war. In the days when the Americans still, just, had a nuclear monopoly, it was not an obviously foolish course. It was advocated by General Clay, the American military commandant in Berlin, and some Air Force opinion (although not by the Joint Chiefs of Staff), as well as by Aneurin Bevan from within the British Cabinet. It clearly had its risks but it also offered the chance of a quick victory, attractive at any time but particularly so in an election year.

It was not however the course which Truman chose. He preferred the third option of the airlift. That carried the risk that it might not work and the near certainty that it would involve months of hard slog. But it offered less of a flash-point of danger, it was in accordance with the weight of advice which he received, and it was best calculated to hold the allies together. The fact that Truman chose it is another example of his happy capacity to act more wisely than he often spoke or wrote.