Berlin Showdown: So who won?

Throughout the Cold War there was only one direct confrontation between Soviet and U.S. soldiers. It could hardly have been more dangerous. In the fall of 1961 ten Soviet tanks and ten American tanks faced each other in a narrow shopping street at a distance of 100 paces across the white line dividing East and West Berlin. For eighteen hours their crews awaited further orders with nervous trigger fingers, sighting gun targets and revving their engines.

When the orders came, they withdrew, Soviets first, then the Americans. It isn’t known what the agreement included, but the four-power right of access to all of Berlin ended on that day. The United States never again challenged the right of East Germany to control Berlin’s crossing points, even though under the four-power agreement the East German government had no authority in the city. War—which could have become nuclear—was avoided at the cost of the agreed principle of free access. Berliners, like Hungarians five years earlier, were abandoned. The tension of Berlin, and Cuba a year later, shaped American policy for the next thirty years.

Frederick Kempe, in his new book Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the World’s Most Dangerous Place, offers a detailed and well researched account of the politics, personalities, and events that contributed to this crisis. He lays much of the responsibility for it on the doorstep of the new and inexperienced American president John Kennedy.  

Allied leaders and the entrenched American establishment distrusted the young president. The disaster at the Bay of Pigs and Kennedy's rebuff of Nikita Khrushchev’s initial gestures of rapprochement contributed to Khrushchev’s distrust of him. Khrushchev sharply changed course and ambushed Kennedy at their summit meeting in Vienna. Shortly thereafter the Russian gave in to domestic and East German pressure to stop the westward flow of East Germany’s intelligentsia through Berlin by agreeing to close the border and let the East German leader Walter Ulbricht precipitate a confrontation. 

I experienced this crisis some distance away as a member of a medium tank battalion whose assigned duty in the event of war was to slow the advance of a vastly larger Soviet Bloc tank force that was expected to pour through the Fulda Gap. Our 50-ton M48A1 tanks, consuming gasoline at the rate of three gallons per mile, hadn’t enough capacity to reach the battlefield and then to fight. The solution to this problem was four external 55-gallon steel drums of gasoline fitted aft of the back deck about two feet from the usually red-hot exhaust ports. The driver was meant to jettison the drums at the critical moment by pulling a lever. Mercifully, we never went into combat with this arrangement or any other.

Kempe’s account corrected the date of my experience, related in a post last month. Though the other facts of that account are correct to the best of my memory, Kempe’s work makes it clear that our battalion was not called to alert in August because ranking Americans, both military and civilian in Berlin and Washington, saw no urgency in the first closure of the border on August 13, 1961. It wasn’t until October 27 that American officials insisted, with military preparation to enforce it, upon their right to enter East Berlin freely. When the East German guards stood fast, the crisis began. So it was early in the morning of October 28, a Saturday, that our unit was called to alert 300 miles southwest of Berlin. To our good fortune and the world’s, nothing violent happened.