Word: berlin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Pearl Harbor 6½ years ago, the provocation was simple, swift and beyond recall: Japanese bombs hit U.S. battleships in a matter of seconds. In Berlin last week provocation had a longer fuse. By blocking the normal food supply of some 2,500,000 people in Berlin's western zones (see col. 2), the Russians were betting that they could force the Western Allies out in a matter of days or weeks...
...West could abandon Berlin. If so, it would surrender the most critical outpost in Europe, and the Russians would organize another satellite state. Even more important, hesitant millions of Europeans would be treated to the spectacle of the great Western powers backing down in the face of naked Soviet force. Austrians, Italians, Turks, and Swedes-among others -would draw their reluctant conclusions...
...Warsaw last week, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov (who was in high good humor) pointed out one. At the end of his brisk three-day session with satellite diplomats, he issued a "new" offer to the West which, in gist, proposed that all four occupying powers get out of Berlin -set up a "democratic" German government for all of Germany, and withdraw their troops. (The Warsaw communique added, however, that Russia would still want a hand in running the Ruhr.) This alternative had considerable attractions for the Kremlin: they had experience in setting up governments like that. And getting Allied...
...Russians last week threw practically everything they had against besieged Berlin-everything except five well-equipped Red army divisions hovering under the chestnuts of Potsdam ten miles away. Never before had a city of three million people, in time of "peace," been summoned to surrender before the threat of starvation, civil war within, or a bigger war without. It seemed clear by last week that, in the Communist Baedeker, Berlin was listed right after Prague...
...Show Your Courage." As "economic and administrative sanctions" against the Western powers, the Russians last week stopped all food trains from the Western zones on which Berlin depends for survival; cut the Western sectors' electricity in half (by halting their own contribution to it); blocked all coal shipments for Berlin industries; forbade the city government to distribute any food outside the Soviet sector; cut off all milk supplies from the Soviet zone. They even cut medicine supplies, but yielded under an American threat to withhold penicillin...