Ring Around Berlin

W7est Berlin, an island of freedom in Soviet East Germany, lost a little of its opportunity to strike back if another Berlin airlift is ever necessary. Because nearly all of Germany's trunk railroads converge like spokes into the hub of Berlin, the Allies have always wielded a sort of railroad veto over Red Germany. Last week the Russians canceled out the veto by completing the last link of a 100-mile bypass railroad circling Berlin, all in Soviet territory. Their 15-mile link to a long-planned loop took nearly a year, required 5,000 laborers, and was made possible only "by applying Soviet working methods," said the East Germans.

For the Russians, the circular bypass would 1) make it easier to blockade Berlin again, and to escape being humiliated as they were in the 1948 blockade, when the West forced them to reroute trains far out into the poky single-track hinterlands; 2) make it possible to build up its armored line on the Elbe without advertising the fact by sending trainloads of troops and tanks through Berlin.

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