I did not believe U.S. Military Government officials were responsible for the situation. The blame was clearly at the door of those in Washington who laid down policy and who had done the planning -- if one could say there had been any planning. By the 18th day of March we had been forced to cut rations again, and to prohibit all beer, except for the American troops, under penalty of military justice. What little wheat we found in the various areas was moving slowly for the lack of transport. The situation looked bleak indeed and I left for a visit to the British zone to see what the situation was there.
My trip through the highly industrialized British zone, Dusseldorf, Kassel, Cologne, Bremen, Hamburg, Bonn and the cluster of smaller towns around these great iron, steel and shipping centers, revealed the massive destruction that U.S. and British bombers had rained on this area. The irony of all this, as studies by a distinguished group of Americans revealed after the war, was the fact that industrial production continued almost at the normal rate despite all of the efforts to "destroy Germany's ability to make war." There were vast underground factories and, with battalions of construction workers available, the industrial plants were usually back in production within hours or days after a destructive raid.
So far as food stocks were concerned, I found about the same conditions everywhere in the British zone that we were experiencing in the American zone.
Bremen was the port of entry for U.S. personnel and supplies for the American zone, a corridor the British zone had been providing with the port of Bremen as outlet. Bremen was one of the great ports on the North Sea and was a Hansa League city in the early 16th and 17th centuries. The harbor and docks were smashed flat as a prairie. Bremen had been the home port of the German submarine fleet and bombers had continually hit in the area day and night.
As I surveyed the docks and observed the first ships of U.S. grain arriving from the United States, I ran across a young man casually surveying the dock area as if planning some future rebuilding. As I approached, he spoke in English and in a short conversation I learned that he was a member of the Krupp family. Krupp holdings had been taken over by the Military Government and were in the process of being dismantled. He had been a student in engineering at Texas A & M College and was out looking over the destroyed dock system of Bremen. He foresaw the time when a unified truck system would augment the ancient rail system and was visualizing the rebuilding of the docks to accomodate a major truck transport system. Hitler's autobahns had opened up new vistas of transportation for goods as well as people.
Whether this young man found a niche in the Krupp empire when it was turned back to the Krupp family, and whether he had any part in the rebuilding of Bremen docks with a connecting road system, I do not know. His vision, however, of a gigantic complex of transport based on trucking has come about.
Hamburg, another great Hansa League city was almost completely obliterated so far as the inner city was concerned. But everywhere bricks were being salvaged, and men and women were working in droves, rebuilding that city. From Hamburg I went to Hannover, visited the nearby research facility at Volkenrode, then dropped by jeep at Hannover and boarded the British Berlin Express from Hamburg to Berlin for an Allied High Commission staff meeting the next day. That meeting, as I recall, was routine -- that is, we agricultural people sat and listened while the Generals debated what was then more important matters -- namely how to dismantle the industrial might and war potential of Germany. There were vast differences of opinion on just what the Potsdam agreement specified on this score. The French were inclined to take only those plants and industries out which they could use at home. The British were reluctant to completely destroy the integrated industries of coal, steel, and manufacturing which characterized their zone. The Americans were more rigidly applying the policies outlined, and the Russians were for taking everything out that they could get their hands on.
The U.S. did not move out much equipment, but did seize certain patents and were adamant about breaking up the great chemical combines, like I.G. Farben, into small independent units. These cases were to bat around in international courts for years and while all of this was going on, the cold war came, policies changed. Germany again was respectable in international markets, and some of these separate units of chemical, iron, and steel manufacturers became larger than the original combine. Such are the whims of history and war.
Germany and Japan today are good examples of what countries literally flattened and destroyed by war can do when their people decide to rebuild and survive. It is something to think about that two of the powers which Americans helped to defeat are now challenging, economically, the very power which defeated them.
In line with policy, most of the civilian machinery which the Germans had used in producing and controlling food supplies was abolished. It was hot quite a free market, but it certainly was chaotic and confusing. Germany, under Hitler, had set up an integrated system of planning, production, distribution, and rationing which started with minute planning of every item of land, seed, and inputs down to the village level and the individual farmer. This had been pretty well dismantled, first by general orders, next by the arrest and jailing of many of the officials responsible for operating the system, and finally because anything or any system which Hitler had used to achieve his aims was repugnant to the occupying power. There was a further illusion that a "free democratic system was best for everybody."
Late in March 1946 a meeting of all of the chiefs of the various sections of military government in the American zone was called for a discussion of our problems and policies. Everybody was there -- agriculture, transport, industry, government, law, decartelization, trade, timber, raw materials, the works. The meeting was chaired by a Mr. Fred Deveraux, deputy to General William Draper of the Economic Section of Military Government in Berlin. Deveraux was a civilian, a former vice-president of AT&T and one of the crack administrators of that great international organization. Each division chief made his pitch either on his problems or his solution to problems. I was the last of the list, and, since I was pretty fed up with the whole business, I decided to give that crowd the works. I began by describing, in some detail, just what the Reichnastrand was and how it worked, ending up by saying that the whole thing might sound pretty reprehensible but that it worked for the Nazis and that what we were doing had not worked and would not work. The thing to do, I said, was to simply take under control part of the distribution system which the Germans had used under Hitler and put Germans in charge of using it in our zone.
This thunderclap got varied response from my colleagues, but after the meeting Deveraux called me in and said "you made more sense in your talk than any I have heard yet. Keep on talking like that. With that much horse sense you ought to run for President." Whether that was all in jest or serious, it did boost my ego, which is usually high but was pretty low at that time.
Without any official orders, what eventually evolved in the food area was just what I had advocated. We let the Germans do it, and the system was followed with very considerable reduction in the food-distribution problem. This system was in effect until well after the currency reform which returned Germany back to conditions in which economic forces and money moved good.
Just how chaotic a completely controlled economy can be when it is suddenly shut down and allowed to revive only in pieces is well illustrated by a situation which developed in the Ruhr coal mines. Under Allied policy the mines of the Ruhr and the smaller mines in Alsace-Lorraine were put into production on a forced basis very early in the occupation. Mines have to have pit props, posts which hold up the roofs of the tunnels as the miners work the coal veins beneath. These pit props traditionally came from Bavaria, the southern section of Germany. But no matter how much huffing and puffing the Allies did, the pit props were simply not coming out of Bavaria as they should, and a critical situation in the mines developed. We had on our staff a distinguished member of the U.S. Forest Service, and he went out and discovered the trouble. Traditionally, the props were cut in late summer and fall and left in the woods until winter, when Bavarian farmers picked them up and moved them on sleds drawn by heavy draft horses, to rail heads in the valley below. In winter, ice and snow covered the ground in that area. These heavy draft animals had to have heavily cleated horseshoes in order to keep traction on the ice and snow and pine needles. There were no horseshoes or horsenails to be had in Bavaria that winter and the animals simply could not perform the task expected of them.
Our forester's report caused the usual flurry. It was very reminiscent of my experience two years earlier in Sicily. Those horseshoe nails ordered in Sicily in the summer of 1943 were two years getting to Italy. "Order from the states was out." But now it developed that there was a very modern iron and steel plant with electric furnaces in the American zone near Stuttgart which had been closed down tight by the occupation authorities. What I needed was authority to open it and then someone to push a button turning on the electricity.
To accomplish this, our industrial section had to be consulted and convinced that such aciton was needed. This took a little time, due largely to lack of communication and the location of our offices in different areas. Next, General McNary, then commander in the American zone, had to be convinced, and finally General Clay and the Allied Commission. This was all achieved in time and the factory duly began to turn out horseshoes and horseshoe nails. By then it was nearly Spring, but the hills in Bavaria were still slick with ice and wet pine needles.
Horseshoes and nails are traditionally shipped in stave barrels to facilitate handling and distribution; but when it came time to ship the shoes and nails, not a single wood staved barrel could be found. The products were eventually loaded in bulk in trucks and taken to the small shops and hardware centers throughout Bavaria. But meanwhile new problems continued to surface with no apparent end in sight.
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