General Lucius D. Clay died in 1978. At his gravesite at West Point you’ll see a memorial. It was erected by the people of West Berlin and reads: Wir danken dem Bewahrer unserer Freiheit (We thank the defender of our freedom). Those words were spoken from the heart because General Clay literally saved West Berlin from starvation during the Berlin Blockade. I was only three years old when the blockade started in 1948, but I am keenly aware that I would not write about it today, had it not been for the actions of General Lucius D. Clay. Years later, when President John F. Kennedy dispatched Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson together with Lucius D. Clay to Berlin to shore up the spirits of Berliners during the Berlin Wall crisis, it was Clay whom we went to see. It was Clay whom we trusted.
General Lucius D. Clay and the Berlin Blockade
So how did the Berlin Blockade come about and what did General Lucius D. Clay do to earn the respect and the hearts of West Berlin’s population? Following World War II, Germany and the city of Berlin were divided into four sectors and occupied by British, French, American, and Soviet forces. On 23 June 1948, in an attempt to revive the German economy, the three western Allies issued a new currency, the Deutsche Mark. The Soviets vehemently opposed this action and in return blockaded all land and water access routes to West Berlin. With this move, they hoped to force the Western Allies take back the new currency and subsequently hand West Berlin to the Soviets. By blocking all deliveries of food and electricity they hoped to starve West Berliners into submitting to Soviet control.
At that time, Clay was military governor of the American section of occupied Germany. He decided to supply Berlin by air. Lucius D. Clay gave orders even before having received authorization from President Harry S. Truman. Within three days of the start of the Berlin Blockade, the Berlin Airlift started. It was an incredible logistical feat because never before had a population of 2 million been supplied from the air. But with the help of a man by the name of William H. Tunner, Clay fine-tuned the Airlift until planes landed every three minutes, twenty-four hours a day. Over the course of the next eleven months, General Clay directed some 277,800 flights, carrying 2.3 million tons of food and fuel to West Berlin. http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1793.html.
The Berlin Airlift lasted 324 days. When the Soviets realized that the Western Allies could supply West Berlin indefinitely, they threw in the towel. The Berlin Blockade ended on 12 May 1949. It was Clay’s decisiveness and tenacity that saved Berliners from starvation.
General Lucius D. Clay (1898 to 1978)
Who was this man, General Lucius D. Clay?
Born in 1898 in Georgia to U.S. Senator Alexander Stephens Clay and Sarah Francis, Lucius DuBignon Clay was the youngest of six children. He graduated from West Point in 1918, became a military engineer and held various civil and military engineering posts during the 1920s and 1930s. During that time, he earned the reputation of being a hard-charging, chain-smoking, tireless and decisive worker who could turn chaos into order.
From 1947 to 1949, Clay was commander in chief of the U.S. Force in Europe and the military governor of war-torn Germany’s American Zone. General Lucius D. Clay also directed “A Report on Germany,” which became one of the source documents for The Marshall Plan. After retiring as a four-star general in 1949, Clay went into the private sector and became a successful business executive. Over time, he served on 18 corporate boards and became the principal architect of our Interstate highway system.
For a sneak peek at the first 20+ pages of my memoir, Walled-In: A West Berlin Girl’s Journey to Freedom, click “Download a free excerpt” on my home page and feel free to follow my blog about anything German: historic and current events, people, places and food.
Walled-In is my story of growing up in Berlin during the Cold War. Juxtaposing the events that engulfed Berlin during the Berlin Blockade, the Berlin Airlift, the Berlin Wall and Kennedy’s Berlin visit with the struggle against my equally insurmountable parental walls, Walled-In is about freedom vs. conformity, conflict vs. harmony, domination vs. submission, loyalty vs. betrayal.
