CHECKMATE IN BERLIN

An account of the stormy Allied-Soviet relations in Berlin after Germany’s 1945 surrender.

Most histories of this period emphasize Allied leaders (Truman, Churchill, Stalin) or generals (Eisenhower, Montgomery). In his latest World War II history, however, Milton moves down the hierarchy to focus on Berlin’s four military governors, especially American colonel Frank Howley and his bitter rival, Soviet general Alexander Kotikov. A civil affairs specialist, Howley impressed superiors in governing and feeding Cherbourg and then Paris before he was promoted to command the American sector of Berlin. On June 17, 1945, his unit moved toward Berlin only to be stopped and harassed at the border of Soviet-occupied Germany. It was not until July 1 that he entered a city stripped bare after two months of Soviet looting, with communists in control of the police as well as road and rail traffic. Howley arrived with written orders to cooperate; however, confronted with Soviet policy aimed at expelling the three Western occupiers, he disobeyed. It helped that, unlike his British and French colleagues, he was both pugnacious and enterprising. Milton devotes two-thirds of the book to shouting matches, political skulduggery, and violent confrontation that might be called “comic-opera” if it weren’t for the Soviet willingness to engage in kidnapping, sabotage, and murder. Perhaps the high note was the 1946 Berlin city council election. Free elections were never a Soviet strength, but they deluged the electorate with food, privileges, propaganda, and promises only to be horrified at their landslide defeat with less than 20% of the vote. Finally exasperated, in 1948 they cut off all supplies, resulting in the iconic Berlin airlift. Many popular histories treat that operation as a dazzling triumph, but Milton’s detailed account reveals that Berliners starved and suffered intensely before Stalin called off the Soviet blockade. The author ends in 1949, with Berlin firmly divided, an outcome acceptable to the West but a persistent drain on the Soviet Union that ultimately contributed to its collapse.

Entertaining if unedifying fireworks in postwar Berlin.