States would now be called upon to protect Western Europe against a Soviet invasion on the one hand, and to protect all of Europe against a possible resurgent Germany on the other.20 Furthermore, faced with a fait accompli, the United States’ pledge to retain an open-ended commitment of military forces was made in order to regain its lost initiative and leadership of the Alliance. The NATO treaty imposed no requirement on any member nation to station troops either on the continent or in Germany; therefore (discounting altruism as a motive), the US commitment was made to balance its military imperatives with political realities. Regaining the initiative in and leadership of the Alliance would do just that.21
Conventional wisdom attributes the arming of the FRG to the Korean War. Robert McGeehan writes that “the German rearmament question was among the most important, and frustrating, concerns of American diplomacy during the postwar period” and that rearmament was the result of a unilateral US decision in the summer of 1950 following the outbreak of the Korean War.22 While this statement is true in regard to the timing of the decision and that it was unilateral, one cannot deny that in reality the issue of rearming the Germans had roots going back as early as 1948 and possibly even 1947.23 That said, there can be no question but that the hostilities in Korea, seen by the West as blatant Soviet-backed aggression, gave a greater urgency to the issue of rearming Germany and caused West European nations to make a U-turn regarding their own rearmament thoughts and view the use of German manpower and resources as imperative.24
In this book, I document US Army plans to rearm West Germany that began as early as 1947 as well as discussions that took place between the departments of state and defense prior to the formal presentation of the US decision on 12 September 1950. As alluded to above, many of the existing histories have failed to fully indicate that in some instances, particularly in the early period of the Cold War, military-diplomatic actions were taken without strategic guidance or even a strategic consensus. One key purpose of this history is to draw together these heretofore ignored or underemphasized aspects of this issue, such as the delaying tactics used by the British and the French to slow the German rearming process down. This provides a more detailed and nuanced picture of this key episode in the first decade of the Cold War.
In the view of US political and military leaders, the Soviet threat had been growing since 1944 and took on greater urgency following the 1948 Czech coup, the Berlin Blockade that same year, and the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb in the late summer of 1949.25 For these reasons, five years after the war’s end, US policy, which had initially supported disarming and demilitarizing Germany, changed direction. Prior to these events, President Harry S. Truman had stated on record that he planned to reduce the US military presence overseas and wanted to cut an additional $5–$7 billion from the $13.7 billion defense budget. These events, however, intervened and led to the promulgation of NSC 68 and a massive US rearmament program, and caused the president and Secretary of State Acheson, both disposed to keeping Germany disarmed, to bend to the fear in Europe resulting from the Korean War and the urgings of the Joint Staff to strengthen the defense of Western Europe. They reversed course and began to favor a German contribution to that defense.26
In addition, before 1950, the desire to arm the FRG was deeply imbedded in an international, politico-military conundrum that followed two separate but related paths from 1948 until the late summer of 1950. The differences were not in the fundamental goals but in the tactical approaches to the same goal.27 The State Department saw the threat and sought to strengthen Western Europe by unifying it politically and economically, thereby creating a mechanism by which a rehabilitated Germany could be reintegrated into Western Europe without posing a threat to the peace and stability of its neighbors. As mentioned above, the State Department wanted Western Europe to be a third power, capable of saying no to the United States and the USSR. Only once that was accomplished, some State Department officials thought, could one raise the question of arming Germany. It was not that the leading officials of the State Department were adamantly against seeing Germany armed; they just wanted to decouple this issue from other issues they deemed more important and less risky.28 They believed that in this manner, the Soviet threat could be held at bay.
Defense officials likewise believed that the reconstruction of Western Europe and the need to strengthen its economy took precedence over rearmament and preparing for a possible war against the Soviet Union. Because strategic planners believed the Soviet Union would not risk a war with the United States, their planning was more of a theoretical exercise.29 Nonetheless, the Department of Defense faced a number of challenges to that assumption during this period. The first Soviet nuclear bomb test and the Communist takeover of China, for example, provided reason to suspect that a powerful coalition might be forming that could threaten US national security. Furthermore, the USSR army outnumbered the US Army in terms of manpower due to the United States’ postwar demobilization, caused by a limited budget. The army was also dealing with the threat of additional reductions, caught in an interservice rivalry with the air force and the navy for money and resources as well as roles and missions, and associated with the relatively weak West European powers, who were still recovering from the ravages of World War II. In light of these circumstances, and because they needed to rapidly devise a strategy to defend Western Europe, the War Department chose the path advocated by the JCS and sought a solution that would utilize the manpower and highly regarded fighting expertise that the recently defeated Germany could provide, placing German boots on the ground as quickly as possible.30
In addressing these issues, US policymakers and the administration were confronted with several difficulties. First, gaining popular approval for this decision would require reversing American attitudes that had been held throughout the war years about the Soviet Union (erstwhile ally) and
Germany (erstwhile enemy). Second, US policymakers needed to find a way to rearm Germany in a manner that would “deter the Russians but not scare the Belgians” while at the same time ensuring that the new German army would not be able to act independently and threaten the peace of Europe again.31 Third, the United States had to convince its European allies to strengthen their own defensive capabilities. Finally, the American public had to be convinced that the preservation of democracy and the “American way of life” required the long-term presence of US military forces on the European continent.
The situation with the USSR worsened, causing the United States to make two major decisions that, as Acheson said, “took a step never before taken in [US] history.”32 The first, in 1949, was to end an almost two-hundred-year-old isolationist tradition and become part of an entangling foreign alliance, NATO; the second was to reverse a key World War II policy by formally deciding in 1950 to rearm West Germany. This latter decision ran up against strong French opposition, which succeeded in getting the initiative for German rearmament handed to the French, who introduced the Pleven Plan for an integrated European army and used it as a tool to arm the Germans without arming Germany. The Pleven Plan metamorphosed into the ill-fated EDC. The EDC was based on the principle of supranationality and, despite strong support from the Eisenhower administration to the exclusion of all other alternatives, failed, leaving only one alternative that was successfully brought to conclusion by the British.33
Several months later, on 9 May 1955, exactly ten years after the armed forces of Germany’s Third Reich surrendered unconditionally and ended World War II in Europe, the black, red, and gold flag of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was raised at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Rocquencourt, France, alongside those of the fourteen other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), most of whom had been Germany’s enemies just ten years earlier.34 Six months later, on 12 November 1955, the two hundredth birthday of General Gerhard von Scharnhorst, Prussian reformer and father of the German general staff, the first 101 German soldiers—2 generals, 18 lieutenant colonels, 30 majors, 40 captains and naval lieutenants, 5 first lieutenants, 5 sergeants first class, and 1 master sergeant—received their appointments to the new German armed forces (Bundeswehr) in Bonn’s Ermekeilkaserne from newly appointed Defense Minister Theodor Blank.35
How
