C U R T A I N U P
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Sunday, August 3, 2025
Saturday, August 2, 2025
Time Marches On
Berlin Blockade Broken
May, 1949
After 320 days the roads and tracks supplying the people
of West Berlin were once again open to traffic from the
NATO allies. The attempt to heat and feed two and
a half million residents with supplies airlifted into the
city involved an unprecedented number of cargo planes.
A plane flew into the airport, unloaded its cargo, then
it was off on its return to West Germany to pick up
another load. All this in the space of seven minutes.
Organization and relentless effort beat Stalin
in Berlin.
Adenauer Elected German Chancellor
August, 1949
Konrad Adenauer ran as a conservative, anticommunist
in this first democratic election of the newly formed
West Germany. He wanted reunification for Germany
but he realized this goal could not be met without
first, developing a close personal relationship with France.
Second, Germany becomes an equal partner among
the members of NATO.
Adenauer had a clear idea of what he wanted.
Communists Topple Czech Government
February, 1948
Fearing an election loss in May, Communist forces
overthrew the democratic Czech government and
replaced it with a leadership that took their orders
directly from Stalin.
Political opponents were rounded up. Voices
opposed to the new government were silenced.
Jan Masaryk was the son of a national hero,
Tomas Masaryk. He was also his nation's current
foreign minister. The communist coup left him
feeling betrayed. People said he was bitter.
Depressed maybe. But Suicidal?
One way or another he sailed out the window
to a pavement a couple of floors below.
Strategic Bomber Takes to Sky
August, 1946
The mission of the B-36 was to deliver a nuclear weapon
from its base in the United States to a target in Russia,
thousands of miles away; nonstop. It was state-of-the-art,
hi-tech expensive, but these planes saved taxpayers the
cost of stationing tens of thousands of more American
troops in Europe. They just had to appear a credible
threat to the Soviets.
The Pentagon built 380 of these bombers before
Russia's jet powered MiG-15 made them all scrapheap
obsolete by 1950, just 4 years later. The U.S.
countered with the all jet B-52. The Soviets
came back with surface-to-air missiles: SAMs.
These systems required ever changing engineering.
First in weapons was key. You win with the edge
in innovation. It's a victory that is fleeting.
Don't let up.
China Falls to Communists
October, 1949
A Communist led, peasant-based army has defeated
the American supplied Nationalist army of General
Chiang Kai-shek. The General fled with his army
to the nearby island of Taiwan while Mao Zedong,
his political nemesis, took control of the new
People's Republic of China.
Mao's peasant-oriented revolutionary strategy
became the model for Third World political movements
through Asia, Africa and South America - all nations
oppressed by colonialism.
U.S. Stands with Taiwan
October, 1949
Chiang Kai-shek's government was a model of
corruption and incompetence. Ask the Americans
assigned to advise him. But that wasn't the story
being told back home. Chiang was a staunch ally of
America. He fought beside us against the Japanese
in WW2. He was a lifelong anticommunist.
And everyone knew the Chinese loved Americans.
The loss of China was a stunner,
bigger than the Russians exploding an A-Bomb
that same year. People got the feeling
the forces of democracy were suddenly losing
the battle. It made no sense.
Something underhanded was going on here.
* * * * *
© Tom Taylor
OVER EASY
Friday, August 1, 2025
Sunday, July 27, 2025
Saturday, July 26, 2025
Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss fit comfortably into a role one would expect
coming from an East Coast, Ivy League background.
A graduate of both John Hopkins and Harvard Law,
he was chosen by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
to be his legal secretary at the Supreme Court .
Hiss was a successful New York lawyer before trading
it all in for doing public service in Roosevelt's New Deal.
By 1945 he worked his way up to be an assistant
to the President, personally briefing Roosevelt
at Yalta.
Who would have thought this man to be a communist?
Whittaker Chambers.
What a character. Appearing before the
House Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC,
Chambers looked like he had slept in his clothes
the night before. Everything about him was wrinkled
and out of order. And yet, here was Time magazine's
Senior Editor, a former communist, fingering Hiss as
part of his DC spy ring that was active during the war.
Hiss was the group's contact man with Colonel Bykov,
a Soviet spymaster.
Committee members were stunned.
That was unexpected. Hiss had powerful friends
in Washington, on both sides of the aisles.
Could Chambers be trusted?
Hiss demanded a retraction.
Prior to the war Stalin was a villainous dictator. Then,
as an ally against Hitler, he became good old Uncle Joe.
Now he was, once again, the treacherous thug he had
always been. Communists everywhere were Stalin's
subversive agents, preaching an alien gospel that
would bring an end to individual freedom.
It was up to the Congressional members of the HUAC
to prevent the government from harboring such communists.
Members of HUAC did not limit themselves to
overseeing government employment. Their
investigations ventured out into the general public,
checking on private citizens, who only appeared
to be going about their usual daily business.
Everyone enjoys a good motion picture.
In the 1940s there was nothing more popular
than going to the movies. And that was causing
concern among members of the Un-American
Activities Committee. The evidence grew daily
that communists in Hollywood were inserting
Leftist themes into American films.
A group of motion picture writers, producers and
actors called to testify before the committee,
became known as the Hollywood Ten.
They were found guilty of contempt of Congress
for not naming names of communists they knew.
They each served sentences and were subsequently
blacklisted from the entertainment industry.
Show biz was always sensitive to public opinion.
The case against Alger Hiss had stalled...
boiled down to Hiss denying Chamber's accusations
and Chambers calling him a liar. That is where the
story was likely to end, inconclusive and forgotten.
But Alger Hiss was stopped short of slipping away
by Richard Nixon, a first term congressman from
California. It took dogged hours of Nixon's cajoling
of members individually before the committee was
persuaded to continue its pursuit of branding Hiss
a spy.
The Hiss saga ends in a manner fit for a mystery
drama heard over the radio. It involved a long lost
spool of microfilm that was hidden by Chambers
in a pumpkin patch growing on a Maryland farm.
This evidence provided enough proof to convince
a jury of Hiss's guilt. He would spend the next
four years in prison for perjury, as the time allowed by
the statute of limitations for charging Hiss with spying
had passed
Nixon was suddenly a household name.
Here was a national hero.
Richard Nixon was a man in a hurry.
Elected to Congress in 1946 at age 33.
Four years later Nixon was elected a Senator of
California. Now in 1952 he was Eisenhower's
running mate in the General's campaign
for the presidency.
Everything was happening so fast.
* * * * *
© Tom Taylor
OVER EASY
Sunday, July 20, 2025
Saturday, July 19, 2025
Berlin Air Lift
Berlin was the first East-West flash point of the
Cold War. For the first time a dispute between
Washington and Moscow became a high stakes
faceoff between their opposing militaries.
Life had yet to return to its normal, humdrum existence.
Three years following the end of one colossal war
and the world was suddenly threatened with another.
Once again, it was all about Germany.
Berlin became a pawn in superpower strategy
when the West combined their occupied zones
into a new German nation and created a new threat
for Stalin. The Kremlin responded by blockading
all land routes feeding West Berlin, a city of over
two million people. It was an island of western
democracy within a sea of the Soviet Army.
Here was a vulnerable outpost a hundred miles
on the inside of the communist Iron Curtain.
The ten thousand troop garrison assigned to defend the
city was but a pittance, a token force, for the Red Army
to quickly dispatch. Their mission was to demonstrate
their resolve in the face of certain defeat. There was
no other recourse. Imagine Europe's reaction if America
abandoned Berlin without a fight. Washington's promise
was mere talk.
Western Europe would be lost.
The Potsdam agreement gave the West occupied zones
in Berlin, much as it had with all of Germany. The contract
gave France, Britain and the U.S. a piece of Berlin
real estate, but that didn't guarantee these capitalists
access to their properties; all so isolated.
So terribly far out of reach.
Stalin posed Washington with the dilemma of either
surrendering the city or watching these Berliners starve.
A third option was to call Stalin's bluff. Uncle Sam
could run an armed convoy through the blockade,
daring Soviet forces to open fire.
Did the Kremlin really want to start a war with the U.S.?
Recently, a flight of sixty B-29 bombers from the States
landed in the U.K. They were all capable of carrying
atomic bombs.
General Clay was the highly regarded administrator
of American policy in Germany. He provided the solution
to Berlin's supply problem with an audacious plan to airlift
thousands of tons of food and coal daily to meet the city's
needs.
Clay also lobbied the President to call Stalin's bluff
and send an armed convoy to Berlin. Truman said no.
It was an unnecessary risk. Also, Truman was up for
reelection and voters were in no mood to take on war.
And Truman had his own bluff. Not one of the sixty
B-29 bombers contained an atomic bomb.
This was something Stalin also knew.
West Berlin relied on twelve thousand tons of food, coal and
the like to get through the day. They could get by, though,
on four thousand tons. There were about a hundred C-47s
available to transport necessities into the city. The planes
were worn leftovers from the Second World War, but
they could each transport up to three tons.
100 x 3 = 300 tons.
Even deliveries twice daily didn't begin to fill the need.
It was an all hands on deck moment. Where were
the resources necessary to save Berlin?
Failure was not an option.
Stalin created NATO.
The NATO treaty was signed in Washington as
this first Berlin crisis would come to a conclusion.
The U.S. had just agreed to come to the defense
of Western Europe. Clearly, Stalin's aggressive
behavior had spooked isolationist Americans
into fearing a threat beyond the water's edge.
About this time an American reconnaissance plane
discovered a dramatic leap in radiation levels while
flying the Pacific rim route along the coast of Russia.
America's atomic monopoly was over.
Stalin had the bomb.
* * * * *
© Tom Taylor
OVER EASY
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