Earlier this summer, the world focused its attention on Germany, host to the 2006 World Cup Soccer Tournament - the globe's largest sporting event. Asked to share his impression of the host nation, Germany, Sepp Blatter the head of FIFA (Fdration Internationale de Football Association) stated "this is the best World Cup of all time ... Never before has an event been presented in such an emotional and global manner." This sentiment was shared by millions of soccer fans worldwide who watched the matches on television, and those who were fortunate enough to get tickets to any one of the 64 games.

Hours before the final match between Italy and France, Berlin was home to one of the largest public gatherings of Germans in the nation's history with well over half a million fans gathered in an emotional outpouring of support for their team, which placed third in the global tournament. The scene of lan and national pride in Berlin was a far cry from the war ravaged city that, 58 years earlier, was in a struggle for its very existence.

In June 1948, the Soviet Union, angered at Allied attempts to create a single economic zone, blocked access to the three Western-held sectors of Berlin. Berlin, like the rest of Germany was divided between the West - occupied by British, French and American soldiers, and the East which was occupied by the Russians. As a result of this act of aggression, on June 24 the U.S. government began the Berlin Airlift, in which 278,000 flights ferried 2.3 million tons of food, coal for fuel, medicine, clothes and even candy into the occupied city of Berlin.

YET, LITTLE remembered today is the man credited for saving this city, and country, during one of its darkest hours: Gen. Lucius D. Clay, a son of Georgia who, as military governor of Occupied Germany, made the crucial decision to begin one the world's greatest humanitarian achievements, thereby changing the course of modern European history.

Lucius D. Clay was a native of Marietta and a graduate of West Point, class of 1918. During the Great Depression, Clay worked with the Corps of Engineers, and when war was declared in 1941, he was assigned to the Office of War Mobilization In November 1944, on personal orders from his friend Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Clay was sent to repair the vital port of Cherbourg, France, needed to supply the advancing Allied armies. Upon Germany's surrender, Gen. Clay was appointed military governor of the U.S. Zone of Occupation, where he served from 1945 to 1949.

Clay, more than any other leader during that time, was responsible for bringing war-torn Germany into the community of nations, and thereby laying the foundation of the modern German state. Presidents Roosevelt and Truman had enormous respect for Clay, and granted him near autonomy to make all decisions regarding Germany as he saw fit.

As a result of the trust placed in him, Clay was responsible for the day-to-day operation of feeding, housing and clothing millions of starving Germans, war refugees and Holocaust survivors - all the while having to bargain with a hostile Soviet government occupying the country's east.

IN HIS ROLE as military governor, Clay pressed hard for a change in Allied policy, rejecting French and Soviet plans that called for Germany to be stripped of its heavy industry and factories. He understood the intentions of the Russians who, as a general practice, pillaged their zone of occupation. Rather, Clay instituted a program of political and economic reform in Germany which supported democratic values and de-Nazification on the one hand, and the adoption of free-market principles on the other.

As a Southerner growing up in the years following the Civil War and Reconstruction, Clay understood the humiliation of defeat by an occupying Army and his decision to treat the subjugated Germans humanely led to the legacy of German-American friendship enjoyed today. In his own words Clay stated "I was going to be damned sure that there weren't any carpetbaggers in the military government."

Clay's tenure as military governor and his leadership during the Berlin crisis were turning points in the early days of the Cold War. Looking back on this critical time period, had Clay not lent his support and vision to the goal of German reconstruction, Germany most certainly would have fallen to the Russians, and soon thereafter all of Europe.

As a symbol of a grateful nation engraved on a plaque at the foot of his grave at West Point are the following words: Wir Danken dem Bewahrer unserer Freiheit - We thank the defender of our freedom.

(Editors Note: The author is an associate professor of political science at Augusta State University and a Fulbright Scholar to Germany in 1994-1995.)