13 August 1961

Such things always happen on Sunday mornings, and there’s a reason; young Army guys are sleeping off their Saturday night parties.

My phone rang about three that morning. A coded message from division headquarters had arrived, and the code clerk had a three-day pass. Would I come in and decipher it? I quickly dressed and drove three kilometers to the former Nazi airfield that was home to my assigned unit, a medium tank battalion. The message was simple; our unit was on alert. Some seventy-five tank engines wrecked the pre-dawn silence, the radio networks crackled, and we awaited further orders. At four in the afternoon the alert ended, the radios were switched off, and therein—as they say—lies the tale.

We didn’t know why we were alerted or why we stood down, but within hours the whole world knew. In Berlin East German troops had begun tearing up streets and erecting barbed wire barriers that would become the infamous Berlin Wall. While we waited, thinking of swarms of Warsaw Pact tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap, President Kennedy was deciding not to take military action, a decision that determined a generation of Cold War relations.

Frederick Kempe’s book Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the World’s Most Dangerous Place is being released today by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. I’ll be eager to read it and to share with you some thoughts.