When NATO was founded in 1949, West Germany was not a member, France was the most important American ally on the European continent, and the alliance had no military command structures and very little by way of armed force. Just four months after the original twelve members signed the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington, the Soviets broke the Americans’ monopoly on atomic weapons and in short succession China fell to Communism and war broke out in Korea. Whatever NATO was supposed to be, it was no longer sufficient in 1950, and leaders of the alliance readily agreed to install General Dwight Eisenhower as the first supreme allied commander, Europe. They built a headquarters in France as well as regional ones in Norway and Italy, and armed themselves for World War III or, better, the deterrence thereof. In that context, as the United States ramped up its direct investment from just one to six combat divisions in southwestern Germany, and with French and British forces distracted by wars of empire in Southeast Asia, it became clear that a realistic defense posture and credible deterrent could only be attained with a West German army.
This evolutionary, albeit sometimes stumbling process of building an alliance marked a departure from peacetime policies of the United States that had largely adhered to the advice of the Founding Fathers and avoided entangling alliances. Until World War II, Americans had been safely ensconced on the North American continent and in the Western Hemisphere, protected by the expanses of two oceans. With the advent of new enemies and long-range bombers, that sense of security vanished and the advent of atomic weapons made outright military preparedness necessary. The new strategic environment required the United States to project power across those oceans east and west. Containment of Communism and the Soviet Union became the new strategic objective and the NATO alliance one of its means. Sheldon Goldberg’s book tells an important piece of that larger story.
Just half a decade after the end of the Second World War, rearming Germany was an almost unthinkable proposition. Strategic calculus was one thing, but political sentiments and intensely fresh and raw memory of the brutality of the recent war were quite another. Germany had occupied seven of the original twelve NATO nations, either entirely or in part, and German air, sea, and ground forces had done much harm to almost all of Europe, Canada, and the United States. Sheldon Goldberg carefully traces the politics, diplomacy, and military decisions on both sides of the Atlantic that made it possible for deep-seated fears and hostility to take a back seat to military necessity. This was not simply a story of the interests of entire nations pitted against one another, but one in which there were deep divisions in the United States (especially between the state and defense departments), France (where leading generals favored German rearmament), Britain, and Germany (where the majority of the people were opposed to taking up arms again so soon after the war). Skillful diplomats, blunt military men, and cagey politicians ultimately worked out a solution, albeit one that took five years to implement from the fundamental decision in autumn 1950 to rearm West Germany to that country’s accession into NATO and the standing up of the first postwar German armed forces.
NATO could have taken a very different turn in 1954. For some time, the US government supported French plans for an integrated European Defence Community (EDC), an organization that would have included a close intertwining of armies. The point behind EDC was to prevent a German national army but take advantage all the same of the manpower pool and of the military expertise that generations of Germans had gained in the world wars. It was perhaps never realistic, from a military and cultural perspective, to expect small units from one country to perform well under commanders of entirely different nations. But it seemed in the early 1950s a feasible political compromise, and the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, with the active work of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, threw its weight behind these plans. For Eisenhower, who had seen the American commitment to NATO grow firsthand, this offered a way to balance fiscally responsible defense expenditures with the need to stand tall in Europe. When it did not come to pass, when the national assembly in Paris voted down the EDC, Eisenhower and Dulles reluctantly lined up behind the proposal of a more conventional alliance structure by Anthony Eden’s administration in London. West Germany got its own army and a greater degree of sovereignty, and national autonomy in military matters became a core principle of the alliance for better or worse. The US military would be deployed in Europe in much greater numbers and for much longer than Eisenhower had hoped.
Dr. Goldberg’s study blends military, diplomatic, and political history. The dividing lines between these three fields are somewhat arbitrary, and, particularly when we consider strategy in the twentieth or twenty-first century, it is not advisable to emphasize one over the other. Sheldon Goldberg strikes the right balance in his book. From Disarmament to Rearmament reminds us how much of recent American history has played out overseas. It provides great insights into the inner workings of alliance building and showcases the expertise of bureaucrats and military officers as well as diplomats and statesmen. Goldberg demonstrates how unlikely that central axis of the NATO alliance, the relationship of the United States and Germany, really was. In 1948, when the first military officers in the United States—as well as, rather surprisingly, in France—raised the specter of German rearmament, it seemed unlikely that a resulting alliance of recent enemies could last. One may ascribe what followed entirely to perceived Soviet aggression, but, somehow, the NATO alliance has persisted well past a time when Europeans assumed the Soviet Union had hostile intentions. And it has now outlived its supposed sole raison d’être by over twenty-five years. In the process, NATO has reinvented itself more than once. Goldberg’s study considers the first such transformation as being caused and affected by the United States: the practical military and diplomatic workings of the shift from a political pact to a military alliance.
Ingo Trauschweizer
Cincinnati, Ohio
December 2016
Acknowledgments
This work is the result of a significant amount of research I completed at the ripe young age of seventy-two after finally retiring from forty-six years of military and civil service. I am fortunate to have had the true and constant support of a number of scholars and others who were and remain very important to me. First of all, I need to acknowledge my wife, Waltraud, who like so many other dedicated military wives spent many years accompanying me and moving our family from base to base and country to country throughout my US Air Force career. She then tolerated my long hours and other absences while working for the federal government following my retirement from the air force and then, when I finally retired and we entered our “golden years,” stood by as I embarked upon my quest for greater knowledge of military and political history. Next in line is Dr. Jeffrey Herf, who took me under his wing and opened up to me the world of modern European history, especially archival research. His challenge led me on a journey that continues to hold me in awe. Dr. Jon Tetsuro Sumida, a naval historian of renown, made military history more relevant and understandable to me than it had ever been, even after my thirty years of military service, and showed me that it was much more than just generals and battles. He, too, was a most valuable critic and supporter. I also need to thank Dr. Melvyn Leffler for the time he spent with me over a long lunch in Washington, DC, and for the insights he shared regarding US-European policy during the period covered by this book.
Outside of the University of Maryland, where much of my research took place, my thanks go to the archivists of the Modern Military Records Branch, especially Mr. Richard Boylan, and the archivists of the Diplomatic Branch at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. All of them were instrumental in teaching me how to use the archive’s resources to find those records upon which the majority of this work is based.
Further afield, I must thank Dr. Randy Sowell of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, who made my short stay very productive, and Dr. Christopher Abraham at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, who prepared my visit and made my research of pertinent records of the president and his advisors both easy and rewarding. Both of these gentlemen were also extremely helpful in answering questions and providing other information