FOREIGN RELATIONS: Light in the Tunnel

The two men best qualified to measure Europe’s progress toward peace and economic health reported their finding to the U.S. last week in a glow of confidence. One was ECAdministrator Paul Hoffman, who was off on another round of talks in Europe, announcing “spectacular” results. Said Hoffman: “The complete recovery of Western Europe can be expected by 1952 even if the Soviet satellites continue to block trade between Eastern and Western Europe.” The other report came from General Lucius Clay, home on a 27-hour visit from his headquarters in Germany to make his first direct report to the U.S. people on the Battle for Berlin.

Facts & Figures. Brisk and beaming at an early morning press conference, General Clay scattered the good news like bird shot. In Western Germany, he said, “there has been an almost unbelievable recovery.” The airlift into beleaguered Berlin, he said, now carried 5,000 tons of food and fuel a day during good weather and 3,000 “under very bad conditions.” This would be enough to keep Berlin supplied through the winter; besides, he had wangled 66 additional C-54s for the airlift (see Armed Forces).

That night, in a speech broadcast from Manhattan, General Clay supplied more facts & figures to explain his confidence. In the four months since the Allied currency reform was put into effect, he reported, the total production of Western Germany had risen a staggering 35%. Steel production was up from an annual rate of 2,500,000 to 7,000,000 tons; coal, from 275,000 tons to more than 300,000 tons a day. Said Clay: “Everywhere labor and management have new hope, and soon Germany’s recovery will be felt in filling the trade vacuum which has existed in Western Europe.”

Stability & Peace. Though Russia had attempted to snuff out these gains by clamping down on Berlin, “the Soviet planners,” said Clay, “failed to recognize our strength in the air . . . The airlift to Berlin is not a makeshift operation. It is a well organized, efficient and precisely timed operation which can provide the minimum essentials for the people of Berlin indefinitely . . . Our airmen . . . have not wavered in bad weather; nor in the face of contemptible threats . . .

“It is true that the airlift is expensive in terms of dollars. Measured in terms of prestige, measured in the courage which it has brought to millions of people who desire freedom, measured indeed in comparison to our expenditures for European assistance and to our expenditures for national defense, its cost is insignificant. It can, it must, be continued until there is a stability in Europe which assures peace.” General Clay did not try to guess when that time would come. But last week he thought he could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Said he: “There is no easy road to lasting peace. It cannot come overnight. Nor can it be obtained by written agreements left to be interpreted by each participant in his own way. It can only come about when the free peoples of the world are strong and thus able to defend their own freedoms; and that day is approaching rapidly.”

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This week the Air Force totted up some statistics on the first 17 weeks of the Berlin airlift. Up till last week, the airmen had flown a total of 20 million miles, carrying 307,000 tons of cargo from the Western occupation zones to Berlin. By the first of October, the Navy had delivered 40 million gallons of aviation gasoline to Germany, was now laying down 12 million gallons a month.

In cold cash, the cost of Operation Vittles had already risen to well over $400,000 a day for the Air Force alone. The cost in lives: 13 Americans.