"They Can't Drive Us Out"

The Russians last week threw practically everything they had against besieged Berlin--everything except five well-equipped Red army divisions hovering under the chestnuts of Potsdam ten miles away. Never before had a city of three million people, in time of "peace," been summoned to surrender before the threat of starvation, civil war within, or a bigger war without. It seemed clear by last week that, in the Communist Baedeker, Berlin was listed right after Prague.

"Show Your Courage." As "economic and administrative sanctions" against the Western powers, the Russians last week stopped all food trains from the Western zones on which Berlin depends for survival; cut the Western sectors' electricity in half (by halting their own contribution to it); blocked all coal shipments for Berlin industries; forbade the city government to distribute any food outside the Soviet sector; cut off all milk supplies from the Soviet zone. They even cut medicine supplies, but yielded under an American threat to withhold penicillin.

The U.S. commandant, Colonel Frank Howley--a rock-jawed Irishman--issued a bold appeal: "Berliners, show your courage . . . There are evil forces at work . . . whose sworn and ordered mission is to create chaos . . . The people of Berlin will not be permitted to starve." Unfortunately, Howley could not tell them exactly how they would be fed. Western Berlin depends for the most part on 2,000 tons of food a day brought in by rail from Bizonia, 100 miles away--more than could be supplied by the cargo planes which the U.S. and Britain were able to press into immediate service last week.* At week's end, Berlin had only enough bread left for 25 days, enough meat for 33.

Even that might be a long time for the Russians to wait; so swifter means were tested this week. In retaliation against the Western powers' new German currency (TIME, June 28), Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky proclaimed that the Russians alone had the right to determine what currency should be used in Berlin, issued "new" money of his own by pasting stickers on old reichsmarks. (Berliners preferred crisp U.S.-printed bills, called the Russian currency "Tapetenmark"--wallpaper money.)

On the day of Sokolovsky's proclamation, a "spontaneous" demonstration took place in front of Berlin's City Assembly. It was like a dry run for a Putsch. A cursing mob stormed into the building. When a U.S. official came up, the mob yelled "Let the dollar prince pass!"

Then entered Jeanette Wolff, a former governess whom her friends call "The Trumpet" because she has become one of Berlin's toughest, most vocal anti-Communist delegates. A resolution defying Sokolovsky's order was passed; but below, the mob was waiting for the "traitors." While Red army men and Russian policemen watched, Communist thugs closed in. They pounded the stomach and back of Socialist Otto Bach until he had a hemorrhage. Said Jeanette, who had been put in a concentration camp by the Nazis for being Jewish: "They are mad. This is 1933 all over again." She, too, was beaten, but got away.

"We Shall Not Bend." Next day, leaning on a cane, Jeanette told a rally of 60,000 antiCommunists: "None of us can be kicked down for long . . . This is not Prague, this is Berlin. We shall not bend till freedom is secure!"

Cabled TIME Bureau Chief Emmet Hughes: "On the face of it, no one knows how the Western powers are going to hold Berlin. In a deeper sense, the Russians have already lost it. A great power that is reduced to the savage expedient of trying to starve a city into submission has confessed its abject defeat in trying to win the people's allegiance. The battle has fallen from the level of the brain to the level of the belly; above the belly, the Russians no longer pretend to offer anything.

"From General Lucius Clay down, the Americans in Berlin are calm. A few American families fly their sets of silver and their Steinway pianos to Frankfurt in the U.S. zone, but there is not the shadow of a panic nor any flight of dependents, but an impressive community awareness of what it is all about. We have only 4,000 soldiers in Berlin, but their morale is topnotch, and many are spoiling for a fight. They are tired of feeling pushed around."

General Clay last week summed up the U.S. attitude. Said he: "They can't drive us out by any action short of war."

* With added planes, however, and ideal weather conditions, it would not be impossible to lay down 2,000 tons of food a day on Berlin's Tempelhof and Gatow airfields. In July 1945, the U.S. Air Transport Command flew 71,000 tons of cargo over the Hump into China.

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