When it came to the Russians and the looming Cold War, Luther Gulick could be amazingly insightful — a virtual clairvoyant  (if not always a perfect typist). Less than three months after the Nazi surrender and three years before the Berlin Airlift, he  foresaw the coming struggle over four-power Berlin, deep in the Soviet zone of occupation.

Gulick was a member of the mission under Edwin W. Pauley that accompanied President Truman to the Potsdam Conference with Stalin and Churchill to plan the peace.  In a memo for Pauley dated July 25, 1945, Gulick noted that “the draft agreement as it now stands makes no provision for access of the US Command to the US Sector of Berlin.”

He recommended “That you insist on a land corridor, along a rail line, if possible, connecting the western sector with our Berlin sector.”

No protected overland link from occupied West Germany to the former German capital with its American, British, French and Soviet sectors was ever agreed upon. In 1948, to squeeze the West, Stalin cut off road access to Berlin. The besieged city had to be supplied by air — one of the most stirring chapters of the fight for freedom in the postwar world.

But if they had only listened to Gulick…

P.S. right after we found the memo, we found another curious document that helps explain the “Berling”: