Category Archives: Americans

Operation Unthinkable

30 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Allies, Americans, British, postwar

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Sometimes I wonder about the people who think up names for military and espionage operations. Sometimes those names are perfect.

Like Unthinkable.

It’s April 1945. The Allies sweep into Germany on two fronts, racing toward Berlin. The German capitol could’ve been the scene of a catastrophic clash of west and east if both sides had insisted on the prestige of taking the city. But the Americans wanted to avoid a confrontation with Moscow, and the Red Army was the first to raise its flag over Berlin.

This seemed to form part of a rude awakening for Winston Churchill. He’d assumed the Soviets would end the war weaker than American and British forces. But the Red Army had rolled over eastern territories, greatly expanding its sphere of influence. Above all, Poland had slipped into this Russian net. Britain’s responsibility for defending Poland’s sovereignty was a basis for entering the war to begin with. How could Britain stand by and let the Russians finish what the Germans started?

Mix this with Churchill’s anticommunism, and the unthinkable — a third world war directly after the second — was actually considered.

Churchill asked the Chiefs of Staff to draw up a plan to advance forces east against their old ally, the Soviet Union. It would have to be a surprise attack, because the staff recognized this would be the West’s only advantage in the face of Soviet strength.

Even more unthinkable, the plan called for German Wehrmacht troops to fight alongside the West. About 2 million Germans had surrendered to British custody. Some units weren’t disbanded; they were renamed Dienstgruppen (service groups) and used for labor. Confiscated weapons weren’t immediately destroyed. Some were stockpiled, while others were destroyed after a lag time that puzzled German soldiers held prisoner but with full kits and equipment. As one ex-soldier recalled, they could have started another war.

British planners concluded the whole idea was too big a risk. The Red Army was too strong, and the political fall out of an offensive war was too large. With a few exceptions such as the notoriously bellicose General Patton, the Americans weren’t interested in continuing a military advance into eastern Europe (at that time). In Britain, public opinion wouldn’t be on Churchill’s side. The Russians were still considered an ally that fought heroically against a common enemy.

So Operation Unthinkable never got off the ground. An active, hot war between west and east was discarded for a cold one that might not be as finished as we thought it was.

If you understand German, check out this video that summarizes Operation Unthinkable. The British historian Dr. Christopher Knowles (congrats on the PhD!) summarized the operation a few years ago on his excellent blog.

 

“An American is just a Russian with his trousers pressed.”

18 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Allies, Americans, postwar

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In February 1946, the U.S. Strategic Services Unit (SSU) released the report “Rumors in Russian Zone” that described the opinion Berliners held about American occupation troops. It was a year full of intelligence and US government reports on American activities in Germany, and much of it wasn’t flattering. Not even a year after the war, the GIs earned a reputation as “men who drink to excess; have no respect for the uniform they wear; are prone to rowdyism and to beat civilians with no regard for human rights; and benefit themselves through the black market.”

Truth or exaggeration? Was a GI in the early postwar years little better than a “Russian with his trousers pressed?” (The Russians were notorious for violence and corruption, especially in the months directly after the war). How much American corruption existed on the ground in Berlin?

An intelligence officer’s testimony before a Senate Special Committee in 1946 started an avalanche of investigations and bad press for US occupation forces. Col. Francis P. Miller, ex-executive officer with the Office of the Director of Intelligence at the US government headquarters (OMGUS) in Berlin, complained about illegal activities that reached the highest offices. They were, he said, swept under the rug by none other than Lt. General Lucius Clay, deputy military governor and director of OMGUS in Berlin. CIA historian Kevin Conley Ruffner describes the affair in his excellent article The Black Market in Postwar Berlin; Colonel Miller and an Army Scandal (Prologue Magazine Vol. 34, No. 3, Fall 2002).

Miller’s accusations focused on the “moral disintegration” of American officers and enlisted men. Sexual excess and the venereal disease that came with it was just one side of the coin. The other was money. Miller pointed out that troops sent home a lot more money than was being paid out to them. In July 1945 the army’s finance office in Berlin paid troops one million dollars, “yet soldiers sent some three million dollars to addresses in America,” Ruffner says.

For Americans, Germany and Berlin in particular, was a get-rich-quick opportunity. A soldier could buy 10 packs of cigarettes for 50 cents at the PX and sell them for $100. Russians paid exorbitant amounts for watches, a status symbol. Even after the army cracked down on some of this activity, the damage to its reputation was done. Ruffner quotes the official army historian in Germany, who said the gigantic fraud “gave many Germans the impression that Americans are fundamentally dishonest and weak.”

Back in the States, Miller’s accusations were picked up by Republicans looking to damage the Truman administration ahead of the next elections. The Senate special committee appointed counsel George Meader to launch a preliminary investigation. After interviewing dozens of witnesses in the US and Germany, he recommended an even deeper investigation into the goings-on in the US occupation areas.

Even before Meader’s report was made public, the stuff hit the fan. Branches of the US government bickered over who should investigate what, and to what extent. The Truman administration opposed an investigation. It didn’t want scandal to disrupt talks with the British on economically uniting their German zones. General Clay opposed an investigation because of the propaganda capital the Soviet press would get from it.  The major US press reported on allegations of fraud, failure and incompetence in the military government. The Senate special committee’s chair Senator Kilgore (D- West Virginia) criticized Meader — his committee’s counsel — for succumbing to “hearsay, rumors and gossip.”

At one time, four army and government investigations were under way at the same time. But by 1948, the issue had blown over. The Soviet threat and the Berlin Airlift were more important than raking up accusations about corruption.

I highly recommend Ruffner’s article, as well as a close read of his excellent footnotes. The scandal may be forgotten in the general postwar/Cold War narrative, but it gives a fascinating glimpse into the early US occupation of Germany.