He was a highly decorated General, who had never fought in combat. A man who didn't like Germans, yet was viewed as a hero by the Germans. And although the Berlin Airlift was a British idea and the RAF flew the first sorties, he was the man whose support enabled the Airlift to succeed:
General Lucius D. Clay
Lucius Clay was the son of a U.S. Senator from Georgia. Born in 1898, he was just a fraction too young to fight in WWI, graduating from West Point in 1918. An engineer, he was heavily involved in major engineering projects during the interwar years, particularly dams and -- strikingly -- airfields. Probably due to his father's position in the U.S. Senate, he developed close working relationships with key politicians such as the Speaker of the House, Representative Sam Rayburn, President Roosevelt's close advisor Harry Hopkins, and the Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau.
By March 1942, Clay was the youngest brigadier general in the U.S. army, and had taken charge of military procurement. "For three long years, Clay kept millions of soldiers supplied with everything they needed." [1] He had a reputation as a "workaholic" who substituted two packs of cigarettes and two dozen cups of coffee for lunch. His genius for creating order of of chaos as demonstrated dramatically at Cherbourg after the landings in Normandy, an intervention for which he received the Bronze Star. By 1945, he was General Eisenhower's deputy, the logistical genius behind the strategist as the Allied armies moved into Germany and secured victory.
When the war ended, Clay remained Eisenhower's deputy as the later transitioned into the role of Military Governor of the American zone of occupation. As such, he was from the start Eisenhower's representative on the Allied Control Council (ACC), which met in Berlin. He moved into a mansion with a staff of 12. His instructions were to apply U.S. policy as defined in "JCS-1067." These defined Germany as an enemy state that must be prevented from ever initiating another war, and called for strict "non-fraternization," this is no friendly relations of any sort with any Germans. American's post-war policy in Germany can and has been summed up as "de-militariztion, de-nazification, and de-industrialization," while the non-fraternization policy effectively made all Germans equally guilty of Nazi war crimes. This policy was known as "Collective Guilt."
Clay arrived in Germany without speaking any German and without any particular knowledge of German culture or history. He saw the Germans as "the enemy" while he firmly believed that he would be able to work with the Soviets -- just as the U.S. and Britain had worked with them during the war. His powers were almost unlimited, and some described him as the modern equivalent of a Roman proconsul. He was expected to be severe and uncompromising -- just what the American public wanted as their representative in Germany with the mandate to "teach the Germans a lesson they won't forget."
Yet Clay was also an engineer and logician with an understanding of economics. It took him almost no time at all to realize that if Germany was ever to become self-sufficient again it would have to be allowed to restore its industrial capacity and to export industrial goods and finished products. The alternative was for Germany to become permanently dependent on U.S. handouts -- or for the population to literally starve to death. Clay may not have liked Germans, but he didn't like the idea of American being permanently responsible for Germany either. He was instrumental in getting American policy changed from one of turning Germany into an agricultural country (the so-called Morganthau plan) to a policy of economic reconstruction. He understood the need for ending the policy of non-fraternization, for introducing currency reforms and for working toward the re-establishment of an independent and sovereign Germany state. Dramatically, he told the U.S. Congress that the U.S. flag should not fly over territory where children are starving.
Clay took his duties to "de-Nazify" Germany extremely seriously and signed over 200 death sentences. However, he was also criticized for occasionally commuting death sentences to imprisonment, because he was read the court documents meticulously and commuted sentences in trials where there was no or little evidence. More importantly, he turned over the burden of trying war criminals to the German as early as 1946, convinced that it was important for the Germans to take responsibility for judging their countrymen. This underlined that the convictions were no "victor's justice" but based on clearly defined legal principles.
By March 1947 his influence was acknowledged by eliminating the figure-head "Governor" (by then Joseph McNarny) and elevating Clay from Deputy to Governor. Clay was increasingly involved in the process of creating a new German government and advocating for both Marshall Plan and its extension to Germany. Meanwhile, Clay had become disillusioned with the Soviets and their leadership. He no longer expected cooperation and reluctantly recognized that Soviet objectives in Germany were contrary to U.S. and British aims. He saw that the Soviets wanted to establish Communist rule in Germany -- or at a minimum to undermine the new West German State and take control in Berlin. Clay was intensely frustrated by Washington's slowness in acknowledging the problem with the Soviet Union. Andrei Cherny in his work focusing on American politics leading up to and during the blockade and Airlift, catalogues the many times that Clay had to badger the army leadership, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department into taking action. [Andrei Cherny, The Candy Bombers, Putnam, 2008.] Clay notoriously offer his resignation time and again in order to highlight the seriousness of the situation.
When the crisis came in the form of a blockade, Clay was already slated for replacement. His initial response, to advocate an armed convoy to solve the "technical difficulties" that had closed the access routes to Berlin triggered alarm -- both in Washington and London. He flatly denied that the city could be supplied from the air in a press conference on the first day of the blockade. But once he had listened to Air Commodore Waite and received Reuter's assurances that the Berliners could take the hardship, he gave orders to start an airlift without awaiting permission from Washington. Furthermore, once he had committed himself to the Airlift, he became one of its most dogged supporters. Twice he flew to Washington to advocate for it and press for more resources. Fortunately for history, President Truman sided with Clay rather than the Pentagon and State Department.
Just three days after the blockade was lifted, Clay left Berlin never to return. As he traveled from U.S. Military HQ to Tempelhof, the road was lined by millions of Berliners standing in the rain to pay their respects to him. They understood that a different military governor might have panicked, might have compromised with Soviets or might have "sold them" as Ernst Reuter had so eloquently feared.
Clay had come to Berlin with an understandable and then widespread dislike and mistrust of Germans, but by 15 May 1945 he had changed his mind. As he wrote in his memoirs:
[The people of Berlin] were proud to carry their burden as the price of their freedom, and though the price was high it had brought them something in return that had become dear. They had earned their right to freedom; they had atoned for the failure to repudiate Hitler when such repudiation on their part might have stopped his rise to power. [2]
[1] Giles Milton, Checkmate in Berlin, Henry Holt, 2021, 143.]
[2] Lucius D. Clay, Decision in Germany, Heinemann, 1950, 388.
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