The Berlin Wall (39 page)

In the morning, Bohlen returned to Ambassador Dowling’s house to rejoin the Vice-President, who had breakfasted on oatmeal and melon. Then Brandt arrived for a private meeting. Now real conversations could be had. Business could be got down to.

Johnson and Bohlen’s first duty was to deliver President Kennedy’s letter to the Mayor. It is clear that Johnson, a renowned political bruiser, used this occasion to give Brandt a severe dressing-down. Johnson’s own report after his return to Washington merely indicates that the Mayor was ‘chastened’:

He was somewhat apologetic about his letter to the President and regretted that its contents had been given unauthorized publication in the Federal Republic, a disclosure for which he said he was not responsible. I said it did not add lustre to our cause to have our own allies writing critical letters to the President of the United States and putting him to the public question. I then remarked that I had not come to Berlin to debate the past but to reason together with him in quiet co-operation.

Mayor Brandt responded quickly to this approach and I got the clear impression that he was a chastened person, subject to one important exception; he seemed convinced that his letter, with all its faults, had at least moved American policy off dead centre.

I told Mayor Brandt that all the points in his letter had been most carefully and sympathetically considered in Washington, even when it had proved impossible to agree with them, and the American policy was set forth clearly and candidly in the President’s reply. He appreciated this candour.
¹¹

Johnson’s onslaught was perhaps even fiercer than indicated in his official report. The British ambassador to Washington sent a dispatch to London, following a dinner with Secretary Rusk. During the meal, the latter confirmed that

the Vice President had spoken very severely to Willy Brandt, upbraiding him for reacting so impulsively to the East German move and for firing off in public impractical proposals and unwarranted criticisms of the Western Allies. Brandt was apparently very shamefaced, made no attempt to justify his behaviour…
¹²

It was true that Brandt had not been responsible for the leaking of the text of his letter to the press. This indiscretion had most likely been a ploy by Adenauer.
¹³
Brandt was also right that the offending letter had helped to push Kennedy into a somewhat firmer commitment than the President would otherwise have wanted to make. From that standpoint alone, Brandt had probably been right to risk sending it—and to accept the consequences.

Later Brandt confessed that the effect of Kennedy’s letter was to ‘tear
back the curtain and reveal an empty stage’.
¹⁴
Only many years later would Brandt also be able to express his understanding of America’s problem. To Berliners and West Germans, the barrier that was now becoming a Wall meant everything. To the West’s superpower, however, whose resources and risks extended throughout the world, it was, of course, important, but just one among several actual or potential flashpoints.

At the time, the hugely stressed West Berlin Mayor had an election to fight and a population to protect. There was no point in biting the hand that (in some ways quite literally) fed him and his city, and without whose protection West Berlin would be defenceless. Brandt had to grin and bear whatever the Allies thrust upon him, and if necessary show contrition to ward off their displeasure. And that was precisely what he did on that tense morning at the ambassador’s residence in Dahlem.

Fortunately, there was better to come. The public naturally knew nothing of the tensions behind the scenes. Locals pinned a sign to the US guard post at Checkpoint Charlie that read touchingly if a little shakily: ‘Kennedy—Johnsen (
sic
)—Clay / alle drei o.k.’ (all three OK). The vice-presidential visit was an enormous propaganda success. Putting the second-most powerful man in America in harness with the legendary Clay was a stroke of genius. It also served to underline the fact that, whatever Clay’s prestige and popularity, the civilians were ultimately in charge.

The Vice-President was, however, a restless man. At the end of the meeting with Brandt, he was eager to get on. Johnson had two things to do today in his official capacity: first, pressing some more Berlin flesh in trips to a housing project in Charlottenburg and to the refugee camp at Marienfelde; and second, receiving the American reinforcements that were supposed to be arriving via the 110-mile autobahn transit-route from West Germany later that morning. Their arrival time was unpredictable. In fact, there was even a small but unnerving suspicion that the force might not arrive at all, if the Soviets decided to block the access route.

All the same, as the Vice-President’s motorcade set off once more at eleven on Sunday, heading towards Charlottenburg, everyone seemed cheerful enough. Vast crowds of Berliners packed the route into the
centre of West Berlin. His six-feet-three-inch frame folded into an open-topped West Berlin municipal Mercedes, with a TV camera truck keeping just ahead to record his entire triumphal progress, Johnson was back in his element. He smiled and waved to the West Berliners like a man possessed, as his personality inclined him and his mission compelled him to do.

Again, the Vice-President repeatedly tested his anxious security people by stopping the car and striding among the crowd like a big friendly giant. Today he had an aide behind him with a bag. As Johnson pressed the warm, seething flesh with one spade-like hand, with the other he would reach behind to this bag and grab large fistfuls of goodies. Here a bundle of special ball-point pens, there a cascade of cards providing access to the visitors’ area of the US Senate, complete with the vice-presidential seal and facsimile signature. They were snapped up by delighted fans.

That’s what West Berliners wanted to see: a big, smiling Texan, units of whose big, serious army were heading up the autobahn towards their threatened city.
¹⁵

The First Battle Group of the 8th Infantry Division, 1,500 men in all, had left base near Mannheim at just after four a.m. It was commanded by Colonel Glover Johns. He was, like the Vice-President, a Texan. The Soviets had been informed the previous day by General Bruce Clark, commander of the 7th Army, that the group was due to be transferred to Berlin. They had not replied. Some informal patrols of the transit-autobahn between Helmstedt and Berlin, including a sweep by Colonel von Pawel of the military mission, betrayed no special Soviet presence, but it was hard to know what the Russians would be holding up their sleeve.

It was a pretty conspicuous movement of military force. There had been TV crews filming as the group pulled out, and the long, strung-out column set off in the direction of the border with the Soviet Zone/GDR, more than two hours’ travel to the north-east. The column included mess trailers and fuel and ammunition trucks, several rifle companies, and a 105mm. Howitzer battery, a clear signal that this was more than the simple reinforcement of a peacetime garrison. There were no problems
except right at the beginning, when one of the mess vehicles got bogged down and held up the brigade’s departure by five minutes.

They had lost another three minutes by the time they arrived at Helmstedt, meaning the column was eight minutes later than planned, but they had some time built in and were greeted, in the dawn light, by the peaceful sight of German civilian cars being checked through by a Soviet border unit. Again, no sign of the kind of large Red Army presence, armoured or otherwise, that might indicate a determination on the Communists’ part to block the Berlin autobahn.
¹⁶

Colonel Johns had never been to Berlin before. He was assigned a Military Police officer, Major Luce, who acted as guide and adviser. At 6.30 a.m., the first section of the American column rumbled forward into no man’s land and stopped. It consisted of 276 men, and sixty trucks and trailers, some filled with high-explosive ammunition. Johns was astonished when the Soviets advanced on the trucks, to count the soldiers inside. He was not aware that this was normal procedure. Luce, who knew the routine, calmed him down.

In fact, the regulations said that Soviet border personnel were allowed to look into American military vehicles but not to climb on to them. And, once they had passed the Soviet barrier, American military personnel could not be made to dismount. This meant that if the American force was to be counted, it had to be done from a point outside the trucks. Colonel Johns rapidly realised that it would take, even at an average of one truckload per minute, an hour for the advance group to be counted, and three hours or so for the entire column of 200 vehicles.

Johns tried to help by getting his men to dismount so that they could be counted on the road outside their vehicles. The Soviets seemed puzzled, but eventually they agreed. The count then fell down on the fact that the figure arrived at failed to correspond to the US Army Movement Order in the Soviet’s possession. It was far too few. This was, of course, because only part of the column was involved. The advance guard had to move several hundred yards into East Germany and allow the rest of the column to pass through the checkpoint and line up behind it on the autobahn. The counting began again…

An hour had passed. And yet again, the count did not fit the figures in the Soviets’ possession. Johns tried to suggest that all the men simply be
lined up in a single large column for easy counting, but the Soviets would not have it. Another count. Again no tally…

Johns, exhausted and infuriated, now wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. He insisted that all the men move away from their trucks and line up in single file, all 1,500 or so. Then, dragging the Soviet checkpoint officer with him, Johns strode along, counting them off with a touch in each man’s chest and, after every ten or fifteen, turning to the Russian and saying, ‘Right?’ At which point, the Red Army man would confirm the running total in Russian.

They made it through and, miraculously, agreed on a figure. Less miraculously, this figure exceeded by one the number on the list the Russians had been given. The world’s security—or at least the colonel’s sanity—hung in the balance until someone gently pointed out that the name of Johns himself was not included in the paper total but stood in splendid isolation above it. But he had included himself this morning during the head count, as had his Russian counterpart.

John’s battle group could now move off down the autobahn towards Berlin. There were no more hold-ups, though at various times during the hundred-mile trip, Soviet jets swooped down to take a look. One descended to about 500 feet, its bomb doors open to reveal a camera trained on the American column. East German
Vopos
were stationed everywhere, a pair for each highway bridge and access road. Others lurked in bushes by the verges, or stood in plain sight until, on the column’s approach, they made for the woods or for the far side of the embankment. That shy creature, the
Vopo
, caught in one of its more unusual habitats.

There were not many civilians about, probably due to the
Vopo
patrols, but the few East German farmers in the fields and the oncoming motorists seemed, according to Johns, quite friendly. They waved, even smiled demonstratively at the Americans.

Bumbling Soviet border patrols, bashful
Vopos
, cheery collective farmers. Who could be thinking of a Third World War?

Nikita Khrushchev, for one. According to his son, Sergei, after he had been informed of the American reinforcements heading for Berlin, he became surprisingly nervous. Later, father and son were taking a walk
when a bodyguard rushed up—an unusual occurrence when the Kremlin boss was taking his leisure—and for a moment Khrushchev seemed jittery. However, it was a false alarm. Khrushchev soon realised that Kennedy did not intend to undertake aggressive military action, and that the reinforcement of the Berlin garrison was a symbolic move.

In Berlin, there was a great surge in the popular mood when the Vice-President’s and the mayor’s triumphal progress towards the North Charlottenburg municipal housing project and Marienfelde was interrupted at around 12.30. Momentous news had been received. The battle group from West Germany was approaching the border between the GDR and Berlin. The VIPs must get ready to receive it. The limo turned south-west, weaving its way through back streets cleared by police cars with their sirens wailing and by skilful motorcycle outriders. The car was heading for the Avus highway, which would speed it down to the Dreilinden checkpoint. This was where the battle group would cross back into Western territory.

This moment, shortly after noon in Berlin on Sunday 20 August, was a potential turning-point in the West Berlin crisis. Nevertheless, by Brandt’s account, as they roared towards Dreilinden in the open car, his Texan guest’s mind seems to have wandered to other matters. To shopping, in fact.

Johnson chose this dramatic juncture make an enquiry of the mayor, not about Brandt’s views on the crisis, or on the European scene, but about places where the Vice-President might be able to pick up some stuff to take home for the folks there. You know…what about the place where they did the wonderful china? Ah yes, Brandt responded helpfully. The former Prussian Royal Porcelain Manufactory, now the State Porcelain Factory. This was famous for its pale-blue chinaware, which had adorned the dinner table of Frederick the Great and was still produced for the international luxury market. They had an outlet, but of course, it being Sunday, the place was unfortunately closed. Johnson’s reaction reflected his position as leader of a nation that lived to shop, forced to endure the privations of a nation that still, at that point in its history, shopped to live.