THE NATIONS: Operation Bird Dog

Night after night in Frankfurt, U.S. Army trucks had been backing up to the Reichsbank, then driving off with loads of heavy wooden cases cryptically marked “Clay” and “Bird Dog.” Officially, what was in the cases was a secret. Said one G.I. truckman to another after a week of it: “They can’t fool me. Know what we’re carrying in them boxes? Ammunition for the Israelites!” His companion replied: “It’s ammo all right, but something tells me it’s going to the A-rabs.”

Both were wrong, though the Western powers hoped that it was “ammo” of a sort. The cases contained crisp new blue-backed currency notes (printed in the U.S.) which the Western powers started issuing last week in place of the billions of marks now clogging Western Germany’s inflated, paralyzed economy. The rate of exchange would be announced later, but the Germans would probably get only one new mark for ten old ones. Anticipation of the currency reform started Germans on a frantic buying spree to get rid of their old money.

They bought everything from racetrack tickets to cemetery plots; they even started paying old doctors’ bills. Some people, like the oldster who lit his pipe with a 50-mark note last week, literally burned their money. Black-market prices soared: probably for the last time, one U.S. cigarette sold for 50 marks. After the reform, it was hoped, the cigarette—for three years Germany’s generally accepted exchange medium—would again be something you smoked.

“Operation Bird Dog” represented one more Western decision to get Western Germany on its feet for the good of Europe.*

The Russians, of course, had refused to go along with the reform in their own zone. They put the event to their own use by halting all road and rail traffic into their zone, then set up the most rigid inspection yet for supply trains intended for western Berlin. At week’s end the U.S. Army stopped supplying Berlin by rail rather than submit to the inspection. More clearly than ever before, Germany was partitioned.

*Another notable decision of the week: the reluctant French National Assembly voted, 297 to 289, to join (with reservations) the U.S., Britain and the Benelux countries in the Six-Power London program for Germany.