General Lucius Clay, under pressure from the United States, had banned the use of all kinds of food grains -- rye, barley, wheat, corn, oats, and rice -- for making beer. He had closed down all breweries except two or three taken over by the military to provide beer for the American occupation forces. This was probably the hardest blow of all against the civilian population, and was a subject of great debate and concern, not only among Germans, but among the allies who felt that this was taking about the last shred of respectability away from the German people. However, the order was not rescinded until late in 1946 when limited quantities of barley were allocated to produce a very weak beer.
On the evening of December 18, my 51st birthday, I met General Clay at a cocktail party and got into the usual argument with the General over occupation policy; saying in effect that unless trade and traffic was opened up with the Scandinavian countries so normal sales and distribution of food in exchange for industrial products could resume, economic conditions in Europe would deteriorate further and set off a chain reaction that would create even further distress and a depression throughout Europe. The General, blunt as always, said: "Colonel, you are as wrong as hell."
On December 24th a Chicago Times correspondent dropped into my office for material for a Christmas story for his paper. "I have orders," he said, "to file 800 words to my paper tonight for a Christmas story on how we are babying these damn Germans."
I told him that I supposed "they were damn Germans" but that so far as babying them was concerned I would give him the facts if he would listen. Then for the next hour I took maps, statistics, production figures of past years, and the current situation in Germany as a whole to show that we could not possibly be babying the civilian population. I cited actual reports where a whole shop full of workers in the rail line fell at their lathes and stations in a sort of a mass collapse; showed him the statistics on the high rise of deaths from complications of undernourishment; and finally I pointed out the windows to a lineup of fifty or more people standing in a howling wind behind an army mess waiting for the scaps of food from the evening meal to be thrown out.
He sat awhile, grim and thoughtful, then picking up his pad and pencil, he said, "Hell, Colonel, you have ruined my story" and walked away.
Some months later I met this correspondent again at a press gathering and he told me that he had filed a "different" story than had been planned, but his paper did not use it. However, some of it got out, and I learned that I was quoted in Newsweek magazine as saying "the situation in Germany was going to get desperate before the winter was out and that I did not think the American people, no matter how bitter we were about the war, would want to see several million Germans starve."
Because of this, I was taken to task pretty sharply by some members of Congress who were still vindictive and revengeful; and I expected some repercussions from the top. But if General Clay ever knew of the interview, he said nothing about it.
At breakfast on Christmas day we ate with a young Lieutenant who was in the Bulge last Christmas day; and the fellow we walked to the office with was in Hurfgen Forest -- with, as he stated, "not even a hint of hope" that he would not die before the day ended in that icy ordeal of flesh against steel.
This writer remembered, too, the little shack of a building at the foot of the Appenines last Christmas day where a Christmas service was held to the clanking of tanks and the shivering of the ground as gray monsters of the 1st Armored Division dashed 95 miles in three hours across Italy to stem the "little bulge" operation that started in Italy but fizzled in the first few miles of advance.
To most of the American, British, Russian, and French lads we saw around Berlin that day, life this time last year had been a very simple matter of trying to stay alive.
Today, with peace of a kind in Europe -- with millions of soldiers of every land and nation going home -- even for those who stay behind and spend Christmas in this land of a former enemy, the problems which seem important now were not so simple.
A soldier behind a gun, in war time has a fairly definite and relatively simple objective and the matter can be settled in rather sharp relief and quickly. Not so with peace and the problems ahead for the soldier and civilian alike.
On the side of our problem in Germany in 1945 and 1946, as the looming food crisis becaome more and more evident, Mr. Truman turned to former President Hoover who had made an outstanding contribution to the reconstruction of Europe and feeding people after World War I. Mr. Hoover had been completely ignored by the Roosevelt administration during the war. Mr. Truman asked Mr. Hoover to head a mission around the world to survey the food situation and report with recommendations on what to do about Germany. This delighted Mr. Hoover, who was anxious to help in any way possible. He assembled some of his old World War I staff, picked some new people -- principally Dr. Dennis Fitzgerald, an outstanding agricultural economist, then with the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, who coordinated the information gathered by Mr. Hoover's group.
When the Hoover party arrived in a country in a DC-4 (with another DC-4 with extra engines and spare parts in case of a breakdown) there was first a general conference with heads of government for an official view. The party then split up. One group would seek out data on food supplies and local resources; another would visit hospitals and orphanages; another would talk to people on the street. In a matter of hours, Mr. Hoover would have a rather complete and overall appreciation of the situation.
His party came out of the Scandinavian countries into Berlin in mid-January. In Scandinavia, tons of fish were being transformed into cow feed and fish meal because the normal markets for fish had not been allowed yet to open in Germany. Distribution problems in France and other countries prevented utilization of what surplus food was available there. Mr. Hoover was obviously shocked at the situation in Germany and the journalists in his party -- Mr. Henry Luce of the Time-Life Publications, a former Berlin correspondent of the New York Times, two or three orther top reporters -- filed stories back to the States, which for the first time, began to reflect the true situation.
The German area was still operating under the famed JCS/1067 and the Morgenthau Plan. The UNRRA Organization was looking after food needs for most of the world, including the Eastern European nations and Russia. These countries had been badly treated by Germany during their occupation of these territories. The people, while hungry and ill housed, were out for revenge more than anything else.
Mr. Hoover and his party toured Eastern Europe as well as Western Europe and found far more food available in Eastern Europe than the UNRRA requirements reflected. Accordingly, we in the occupied areas had a little better argument for better treatment at our end of the line. Except in the Pentagon, no one in Washington seemed to sense what was ahead for Europe and Germany. Later, in the fall of 1946, I was asked to head a Pentagon mission into Eastern Europe and try to put some of the pieces together which Mr. Hoover and his party had discovered.
Mr. Truman again came to our rescue with an entire change of policy toward beaten and destroyed Germany. He sent his Secretary of State, then the Honorable James Byrnes of South Carolina, to Stuttgart with a major speech which, in effect, abolished the Morgenthau Plan and modified to the extent then possible JCS/1067. One year later 1067 was completely abolished and the United States pledged to help Germans reconstruct their demolished country.
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