BERLIN:

OUTLOOK

Before Russia's May 27 deadline on Berlin, diplomats may find a way to sidestep or postpone a repetition of the 1948-49 Berlin blockade. But U.S. military planners can risk no false hopes. They are ready with alternate sets of operations orders, have plans for every predictable contingency save one: evacuation of U.S. troops. The omission is not an oversight or a gamble. U.S., British and French forces are set to hold the city against all Communist pressures save an all-out attack, which, the Russians well know, would start World War III. In the cold logistics of a military exercise, this is the Berlin blockade problem in 1959:

THE U.S. occupation force in West Berlin totals about 4,000 men, mainly of the 6th Infantry Regiment, and the British and French account for the rest of an Allied garrison of about 11,000 troops. To supply them, the U.S. runs two to three convoys per week--three to ten trucks in each convoy--over the 110-mile, four-lane Autobahn between the border check point of Helmstedt, and Berlin (see map). The British send in about one convoy a week, and the French about one a month. The West Germans, in a thriving trade with 2,300,000 West Berliners and West Berlin industries, send some 14,000 truckloads over the road monthly, plus some 600 barges through the Mittelland Canal, and a dozen freight cars daily by rail.

The U.S. well knows that it would be relatively easy for the Communists to throttle this traffic by blandly claiming that any or all of the routes are under repair and impassable. This prospect has led to loose talk in Western capitals about spearheading a supply column through the roadblocks with U.S. tanks. No such plan gets serious consideration in the Pentagon. Reason: an armored column or train would be not only a diplomatic fiasco --in that the U.S. would seem to make the first warlike move--but a military absurdity as well. The four-lane Autobahn snakes along over no fewer than 29 vulnerable bridges, among them the quartermile span over the Elbe River, still only half replaced since its total destruction by Allied bombers in World War II; the railroad has 49 bridges. Destruction of a single bridge or a short stretch of rail or highway would halt a column or train in country commanded by superior forces*

The U.S. Army's entire strength in Europe (three pentomic infantry divisions and two armored divisions, armed with M48 Patton tanks, atomic cannon. Honest John and Redstone missiles) would be outmatched against the 22 Russian divisions in East Germany (4,000 new T-54 tanks) and the 125,000 to 150.000 Red-impressed German militiamen. NATO's 21 combat-ready divisions, organized for defense, would not likely be committed to road-opening chores.

So the landlocked island of Berlin could, under Red siege, be reached reliably only by air, as during the historic "Operation Vittles" airlift of 1948-49. And this time, thanks to lessons learned in the first Berlin blockade, the U.S. has a vastly expanded capacity and know-how in the airlifting business.

A 1959 Berlin airlift would lean heaviest upon the big C124 Globemaster ("the Aluminum Cloud"), which carries 25 tons, or nearly three times the payload of 1948-49's workhorse C-54-Pentagon orders are drawn and ready to muster up to 700 four-engined transports for the 255-mile run from Rhein-Main Air Base in Western Germany to Tempelhof Air Base in Berlin's U.S. sector.

While there has been much talk that the Russians could jam U.S. electronic homing and landing systems, the U.S. Air Force is relatively unconcerned. For one thing, Air Force navigators have some technical secrets of their own up their flight jacket sleeves. Second, the May 27 deadline falls in what is normally good flying weather, which would allow planes to come and go on contact flight. Moreover, thanks to some 20 Air Force flights in and out of Berlin daily, the U.S. has a pilot corps that knows the route well. In a pinch, it could also muster dozens of commercial airline pilots who fly daily into Berlin. For their part. U.S. pilots rate the Air Force's ground-approach-control and landing crews in Berlin as the finest in the world. Airmen are confident that the U.S. and Britain could substantially improve upon the average. 600-flight-a-day lift that even through 1948-49s foulest weather delivered an average 5.000 tons of food and fuel to beleaguered Berliners.

From its previous siege. West Berlin itself learned how to store away supplies and make itself independent of the -.outlying Communist countryside. Stored now are some 800 million marks. ($192 million) worth of necessities: a year's supply of coal (air-haul cost in 1948-49: $100 per ton), a six-months' store of clothes and other needs, several months' inventory of raw materials to keep the electronic equipment industry busy, a 20-day supply of perishables such as meat and milk. West Berlin now operates its own electric power, telephone, transport and water systems, would not again have to wait for planes to fly in heavy equipment to replace Red-stopped services.

In the eyes of U.S. military men, there is only one thing that could effectively interfere with an indefinite supply of West Berlin by airlift: attacks by Red fighters and interceptors. Conceivably, the Reds could attack under a legal stratagem in which the Russians would turn complete sovereignty over to the East Germans, and the East Germans, challenging the Allied right to use the air corridors, open up with antiaircraft fire or borrowed Russian MIGs. Or without bothering with subterfuge, the Russians might decide to challenge the transports with any or all of the 5,000 to 6.000 fighter and interceptor planes that they keep on several hundred fighter strips within range of the Allied air corridors.

The Pentagon is confident that the best protection against armed attack lies in clear understanding that such attack would be an act of open, total war. And U.S. military planners, knowing well the atomic odds that the Strategic Air Command holds over Nikita Khrushchev despite his big talk, doubt that he will provoke World War III over Berlin.

*By his own account last December, Harry Truman was ready to try armored convoys in 1948. "There were those in the Air Force who were hesitant," he wrote. "The Army said it was prepared to send armored convoys and armored trains at once into Berlin. I turned to the staff of the Air Command and said: 'If you don't think you can handle this task, I will turn the job over to the Army.' Whereupon the air chiefs came to a quick resolution and said that they would take full responsibility for supplying West Berlin by air."

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