The Germans responded by threatening to challenge the air blockade. On the first day of the blockade, the Germans did indeed send in two military transport aircraft with fighter escort. The last flight was attacked by Soviet fighters, and the transport was lost. The Bundeswehr was mobilized and units began moving out of their kasernes toward the inter-German frontier. The Germans began to concentrate their forces opposite the two main roads into Berlin. They felt that their response would force NATO, and especially the U.S., to take a stronger line against Soviet actions, but the United States was extremely critical of the German move. Surprisingly, France backed Germany. Europeans were outraged by Soviet brutality in East Germany, and only fear of another European war led to restraint.
Although the U.S. refused to back the German actions, there was considerable fear in NATO that war was possible. The Soviets seemed unable to control the German situation. Demonstrations had begun in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Soviet control over the vital three Northern Tier Warsaw Pact states was being seriously questioned. The U.S. and NATO leadership was split on how to respond to threats of unilateral West German military action. It was unthinkable that the Germans could engage in military operations in East Germany without dragging in NATO. The Bundeswehr, although a very capable force, was significantly inferior in size and strength to Soviet forces in East Germany, to say nothing of reinforcements. The U.S. hard-liners argued that it was time to back the Germans and try to extract concession out of the Soviets as the price for forcing the Germans back away from the brink. A UN peacekeeping force in East Germany was suggested as an alternative to heavy infusion of more Soviet forces.
The battle for the Berlin air corridor began in earnest on 27 August, when the Germans resumed air flights due to food shortages in the embattled city. A Soviet attempt to shoot down two more transports was met by heavy German fighter activity and the loss of several Soviet fighter aircraft. One of the transports was shot down on the outskirts of Berlin by a surface-to-air missile (SAM). The Germans responded by bombing the SAM site, as well as several others that had been firing. Air battles continued for four days. On 1 September, a German Hawk missile battery shot down a Soviet MiG-29 Fulcrum fighter that had followed a flight of returning German fighters into West German airspace. The Soviets responded by sending a squadron of Su-24 Fencers strike aircraft to attack the Hawk site. They mistook an American Hawk site for the nearby German site. The forces of U.S. Army-Europe were put on war alert. France announced that it would abide by its NATO obligations, and in the spirit of the 1991 Franco-German military pact, would begin moving its forces forward into the Federal Republic.
The critical issue for the Kremlin leadership was the attitude of the U.S. The Americans were discouraged by the German crisis, especially in the wake of improving USSR-USA relations following the MBFR treaty in 1991. But the new Democratic U.S. president was an unknown quantity.
The Soviet ambassador in Washington requested an urgent meeting in the last days of August. The Soviets came back from the meeting deeply troubled and uncertain of U.S. intentions. The president had spent much of the meeting in monologues about how a new treaty was needed to prevent the use of tactical nuclear arms or chemical weapons in a European context. The Soviets had expected a certain amount of discussion about this, due to the current treaty negotiations on these issues. And they knew that these subjects were a personal hobbyhorse of the new president since the election. But they were bothered by the amount of attention given them. They were concerned that this indicated that the Americans viewed the war as being inevitable, and that the Americans were hinting that they would not go nuclear if the Soviets did not.
This is not what the U.S. government had intended to say, but the new president, not at all experienced in international diplomacy, had conveyed the wrong impression. State Department officials visited the embassy the following day in the hope of clarifying the U.S. position. But by this time, a special Kremlin adviser was on his way back to the USSR with a firsthand report for the General Secretary. He was not optimistic. The American position was that the Soviet Union should withdraw all but four divisions from East Germany in return for U.S. withdrawal of all its ground forces from continental Europe.
The Kremlin meeting of 9 September brought together the top party and military leadership. The situation in Germany had not improved, and the Polish situation continued to deteriorate. The Polish Army was nearly useless, and the Czechoslovak Army was little better. There was considerable concern on the part of the top military leadership that NATO planned to exploit the Warsaw Pact dissension in an operation aimed at severing East Germany from Soviet control.
The U.S. proposal about joint U.S.-Soviet troop reductions was taken as a sly American attempt to further weaken Soviet control in East Germany and to pave the way for a German reunification.
Although the U.S. had not yet mobilized, most European NATO states were either at or near war alert. Furthermore, the KGB indicated that the U.S. was beginning clandestine efforts to recall American-owned merchant shipping under flags of convenience, and reestablish them under U.S. control. Most American warships were behaving as though it were peacetime, but there seemed to be an attempt to get a large number of ships to sea. The Americans were making very conspicuous efforts to keep their strategic forces at low readiness levels, and were curtailing their bomber flights. Some of the more astute Communist party officials became concerned that the KGB was "cooking" the intelligence to suit the biases of hard-liners in the KGB leadership.
Another European war seemed quite possible. What concerned the Kremlin leadership was that NATO was growing in strength while the USSR was weakening. Warsaw Pact strength continued to drain away in the infuriating string of disturbances, hooliganism, and anti-Soviet actions of the Germans and Poles. The Soviet Army had never placed great reliance on the Warsaw Pact armies. But Soviet logistics lines ran through Poland and Germany, and the growth of Central European anti-Soviet terrorist groups threatened these vital links.
The Soviet Defense Minister was instructed to present a list of military options. The suggestion that Berlin be seized was dismissed. Such an action would certainly lead to U.S. mobilization and increase the likelihood of a European war with NATO at full strength. Regional options were discussed, but were discarded as being too byzantine and inconclusive. Marshal Ogarkov finally described the most obvious choice: a conventional attack aimed at seizing West Germany before NATO was fully mobilized. The Soviet General Staff expressed their measured belief that the Soviet forces now available in Germany and Czechoslovakia could push to the Franco-German border in seven days. The war would inevitably lead to involvement of American, British, and French troops.
The plan lacked any real strategic rationale. The main impetus was concern over NATO mobilization and the growing pessimism of the Soviet leadership over whether there could be any solution to the current crisis short of war. The gradual U.S. withdrawal from leadership in NATO over the past few years, while long sought by the USSR, was now seen as a major problem. The Europeans, and especially the new Franco-German coalition, was pushing for panEuropean goals at the expense of both the U.S. and the USSR. If the Soviet Union hesitated while NATO gradually mobilized its strength, by early winter NATO might have enough force to seize East Germany. A lightning war before NATO was fully prepared seemed like a lesser evil than waiting until NATO inevitably struck across the German border.