Lucius Dubignon Clay (23 April 1898 – 16 April 1978) was a senior officer of the United States Army who was known for his administration of occupied Germany after World War II. He served as the deputy to General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1945; deputy military governor, Germany, in 1946; Commander in Chief, United States Forces in Europe and military governor of the United States Zone, Germany, from 1947 to 1949. Clay orchestrated the Berlin Airlift (1948–1949) when the USSR blockaded West Berlin.
Early life
Clay was born on April 23, 1898,When he entered West Point, Clay stated the birth year as 1897 because he thought that he was too young. The incorrect year became part of his military record, and his biographer Jean Edward Smith discovered the discrepancy only in 1970. in Marietta, Georgia, the sixth and last child of Alexander S. Clay, who served in the United States Senate from 1897 to 1910. In 1918 Clay graduated from West Point, where he later taught.
Early career Clay held various civil and military engineering posts in the 1920s and 1930s, such as directing the construction of dams and civilian airports. Because Clay's work involved large government projects, he became closely acquainted with the people and workings of the federal agencies and Congress. He achieved close working relationships with an associate of President Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, and with House Majority Leader and Speaker Sam Rayburn. In Rayburn's state of Texas, Clay supervised the building of the Denison Dam. At the time of its completion, in 1943, it was the largest earthen dam in the world. From 1940 to the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Clay selected and supervised the construction of 450 airports, which were the foundation of America's civil aviation network.Lucius D. Clay: An American Life by Jean Edward Smith, New York: Henry, Holt & Company, 1990. This initiative was, however, criticised for pork barrel spending, as Clay's home state of Georgia was granted 33 airports, a number that overstated the state's importance economically, militarily, and demographically.
World War II By March 1942, Clay had risen to the position of being the youngest brigadier general in the army, a month short of his 44th birthday. All the while, he had acquired a reputation for bringing order and operational efficiency out of chaos, and for being an exceptionally hard and disciplined worker, who went long hours and "considered lunch a waste of time".
Clay did not see actual combat but was awarded the Legion of Merit in 1942 and the Army Distinguished Service Medal in 1944 and received the Bronze Star Medal for his action in stabilizing the French harbor of Cherbourg, which was critical to the flow of war matériel. In 1945, he served as deputy to General Dwight Eisenhower. The following year, he was made Deputy Governor of Germany during the Allied Military Government.
Clay would later remark regarding the occupation directive guiding his and Eisenhower's actions that "there was no doubt that JCS 1067 contemplated the Carthaginian peace which dominated our operations in Germany during the early months of occupation."A Nation at War in an Era of Strategic Change, p. 129 (Google Books)
OMGUS and Cold War
Clay was promoted to lieutenant general on 17 April 1945 and to general on 17 March 1947.
Clay heavily influenced US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes' September 1946 speech in Stuttgart, Germany. The speech, "Restatement of Policy on Germany," marked the formal transition in American occupation policy away from the Morgenthau Plan of economic dismantlement to one of economic reconstruction.Curtis Franklin Morgan Jr, James F. Byrnes, Lucius Clay and American Policy in Germany, 1945–1947 (Edwin Mellen Press, 2002).
On 15 March 1947, Clay succeeded Joseph T. McNarney as military governor (or "high commissioner") of the US zone of occupied Germany—the head of the OMGUS, the "Office of Military Government, United States." Clay's responsibilities covered a wide spectrum of social issues related to Germany's recovery from the war in addition to strictly military issues. He commissioned Lewis H. Brown to research and write "A Report on Germany", which served as a detailed recommendation for the reconstruction of postwar Germany and served as a basis for the Marshall Plan. Clay promoted democratic federalism in Germany and resisted US politicians who sought to undo a constitution that a Constituent Assembly in Bavaria had adopted on 26 October 1946. He also closed the borders of the American Zone in 1947 to stem the tide of Jewish refugees that was generating tension with the local populations.
Treatment of Nazis during governorship Clay was responsible for the controversial commuting of some death sentences, such as convicted Nazi war criminals Erwin Metz and his superior, Hauptmann Ludwig Merz. Metz and Merz were two notorious figures of the Berga concentration camp in which 350 U.S. POWs had been beaten, tortured, starved, and forced to work for the German government during World War II. The soldiers were singled out for looking or sounding Jewish. At least 70 U.S. POWs soldiers died in the camp and on a death march near the end of the war. The commutation was partly due to the military botching the case. Prosecutors did not summon a single witness, despite dozens of witnesses saying they were willing to testify.
Clay also reduced the sentence of Ilse Koch, the "Beast of Buchenwald", who had been convicted of murder at the Nuremberg trials, and who had been accused of having gloves and lampshades made from prisoners' skin. Clay later said he commuted Koch's sentence since none of the documents about Koch actually mentioned the fact or included any evidence of her committing murder. The reductions in sentences were based on the hasty convictions of some Buchenwald personnel following the end of the war. Evidence was sometimes questionable, and many witnesses claimed to have been beaten by Allied interrogators. Clay confirmed several death sentences as valid, commuted several, and had some like Koch released after they had served a reduced sentence because of questionable evidence. Under the pressure of public opinion, Koch was rearrested in 1949, tried before a West German court, and, on 15 January 1951, sentenced to life imprisonment.
According to BBC journalist Tom Bower, despite Clay's mixed record, he was one of only two prominent American and British officials, the other being British diplomat Patrick Dean, who were both competent and showed some level of genuine commitment to denazification. According to Donald Bloxham, Clay's influence was crucial to American occupation authorities prosecuting major Nazi war criminals on their own in the Subsequent Nuremberg trials.
In 1946, Clay announced to western German officials that he was disappointed with their results from denazification tribunals:"I do not see how you can demonstrate your ability for self-government nor your will for democracy if you are going to evade or shirk the first unpleasant and difficult task that falls upon you. Unless there is real and rapid improvement, I can only assume that German administration is unwilling to accept this responsibility."The results temporarily improved after Clay ordered them to make improvements within 60 days. In late 1948, Clay admitted he did not enjoy, in his position as Military Governor, having to regularly "sign many death warrants and to approve many life imprisonments." Nevertheless, he was willing to and did approve most death sentences imposed by American military tribunals. He also approved all but one of the sentences imposed in the Subsequent Nuremberg trials.
Near the end of the occupation, Clay openly admitted his hopes for denazification were failing. In early 1948, a blanket stay of execution had been granted to all of the Nazi war criminals on death row in the U.S. occupation zone, with the exception of the seven defendants condemned at the Doctors' Trial. This came after false allegations of torture were propagated by several politicians in the United States, notably Senator Joseph McCarthy. In October 1948, however, the stay was removed for nearly everyone, excluding those convicted in the Malmedy massacre trial. Upon the lifting of the stay, Clay embarked on a spate of last-minute mass executions, believing that as time passed, pressure would increase for the death sentences to be commuted. In response, the German Catholic priests started objecting to not only the executions, but the prosecutions of war criminals outright. However, their pleas failed to convince Clay to halt the executions. Between October 1948 and March 1949, over 100 Nazi war criminals convicted by U.S. military tribunals were hanged at Landsberg Prison.
Berlin Airlift
On 25 June 1948, one day after the Soviets imposed the Berlin Blockade, Clay gave the order for the Berlin Airlift, which was only later authorized by President Harry Truman.
Clay is remembered for ordering and maintaining the airlift, which would ultimately last 324 days and ended on 30 September 1949. He resigned his post days after the blockade had been lifted on 12 May 1949.
Later career On 15 May 1949, Clay left Germany and was replaced by John McCloy as civilian high commissioner for Germany. Clay retired from the Army at the end of the month. In the same year, he was elected as an honorary member of the North Carolina Society of the Cincinnati. In 1950, he became the chairman of the Continental Can Company for 12 consecutive years."The Papers of Lucius DuBignon Clay – Biographical and Subject Summary" George C. Marchall Research FoundationKisatsky, Deborah: The United States and the European Right, 1945–1955. p.11 Ohio State University Press, 2005 He retired from Continental Can in 1962 to become a senior partner in Lehman Brothers investment banking house until his retirement in 1973.
Cultural cold war Meanwhile, Clay hired the American intellectual and former Army combat historian Melvin J. Lasky. Both developed the concept of a "cultural cold war" through which the Soviets would be fought at a psychological and intellectual level. Clay was instrumental in creating, funding, and promoting Der Monat, a journal intended to support US foreign policy and win over German intellectuals. Copies of Der Monat were delivered along with supplies during the airlift.Saunders, Cultural Cold War (1999), pp. 30, 140.
Clay also studied television propaganda and suggested that in Europe "you get this constant repeated propaganda without advertising and without break," but in the United States, "the advertising gives you a direct feeling of assurance that you haven't got propaganda in the program being thrown at you."Anna McCarthy, The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America, New York: The New Press, 2010, p. 23.
Eisenhower administration and Crusade for Freedom
After OMGUS ended, Clay served the United States in other capacities. He had previous experience in 1933 with managing and organizing projects under the New Deal and later became one of Dwight Eisenhower's closest advisers and assisted him in securing the 1952 Republican nomination and helping him select members of his cabinet upon ascension to the presidency. When Eisenhower was in office, Clay served as his unofficial emissary in Europe. One of his first duties as Eisenhower's emissary and, as the national chairman of the Crusade for Freedom, was to dedicate the city of Berlin's Liberty Bell.Bennett, Lowell. Freedom Bell Tolls Message of Hope and Faith, in: Information Bulletin, High Commission of Germany, November 1950. In 1954, he was called upon by Eisenhower to help forge a plan for financing the proposed Interstate highway system.