Was General Clay a Revisionist? Strategic Aspects of the United States Occupation of Germany

Abstract

General Lucius D. Clay, the 'tough-minded officer who defied the Soviet Union's attempt... to force the Allied occupying powers out of Berlin', the 'hero of Berlin', l hardly appears to be a fit candidate to become a witness in support of the revisionist interpretation of the origins of the cold war. After all, this hard-nosed West Point engineer infuriated the Russians by his reparations stop of May 1946 and by welding together the British and American occupation zones, thereby paving the road to the anti-communist West German state. And yet, Clay has recently been presented as a sort of anti-cold war hero by scholars who set out from the assumption that the east-west confrontation over Germany (and beyond) could somehow have been avoided if the United States had been more flexible or as the more radical theories would have it if the United States had not forced the Soviet Union into the cold war. To illustrate this trend let us briefly look at two studies by John H. Backer and by Jean E. Smith. 2 Backer dismisses both 'cold war' and revisionist theories of a grand design for the division of Germany. In his view the split arose from 'a series of small, incremental decisions',3 with reparations taking the pride of place in a cluster of points of conflict. In the final analysis he blames the Americans for stalling on reparations deliveries to Russia from current production. He quotes Clay as principal witness testifying that the US had neglected to come to a formal decision on this critical issue and that they had instead drifted away gradually from a more conciliatory position. Backer calls this 'an understandable, though unwise reaction to the aggressive policies of the Soviet Union'.4