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The diplomats in Paris last week called it—using the words in a technical sense—"a simple question."
The simple question was Austria: a country of 32,000 square miles and 7,000,000 inhabitants, stretching from the edge of the Slav lands across the heart of Europe to within a hundred miles of the French frontier. It was a country whose life was drawn & quartered by four jealously sealed occupation zones, whose economy was nearly dead, whose hungry, tired people were nearly hopeless. To a world heavy with sorrow, it was a country whose very misery seemed unimportant, except in terms of the great struggle between Russia and the West.
In Vienna last week, the simple question took strange forms. The Russians promised that their exuberant flyers would stop using U.S. passenger planes for target practice; next day, they used U.S. airfield installations instead. The Red Army had seized the head offices of the Danube Shipping Co., while the U.S. still held on tightly to the company's barges in the U.S. zone. Meanwhile the Russians presented to the Austrian Government a 43 million schilling bill for "food supplied to Vienna"; most of which Austria's peasants had taken from Austria's own soil.
Blessings of Liberation. Toward this chaos of simplicity, a tall, gangling officer was speeding back last week, after a brief breathing spell in Italy. General Mark Wayne Clark, commander of the U.S. occupation forces, found nothing unusual in these alarms and confusions. It was just an average week, and Clark could still claim with justice that Big Four relations in Vienna were better (or less visibly bad) than anywhere else in Europe.
When Clark came to Vienna ten months ago, from the Italian front, he found the Russians already in full and resolute control. They had got over their wild initial spell of raping and looting, and were engaged in the orderly transport to Russia of $100 million worth of factory equipment and raw materials. They had swathed Vienna in red flags (mostly Nazi flags with swastikas removed), were feeding the Viennese less than 1,000 calories a day, flooding the country with worthless occupation marks, and were rapidly gaining an iron grip on Austrian economy.
Clark picked out a large, comfortable office in Vienna's massive National Bank Building for indispensable paper work, and a large, comfortable villa on the outskirts of the U.S. zone for no less indispensable banquets; then he started to see what could be done about the Russians.
Clark's first concern was food. He informed Marshal Ivan S. Konev that he intended to raise the daily calorie level to 1,550 as soon as possible. But, he added, "I know how I would feel if we had been in here first and you came in and immediately raised the food level. It would seem like a deliberate slap in the face. For that reason, I intend to do it gradually." Ever since then, Clark has hammered away at the Russians to maintain decent rations.