Aside from the several texts that inform us that President Eisenhower was a strong supporter of the European Defence Community (EDC), as was his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, little is really known about Eisenhower’s initial opposition to EDC and his subsequent conversion to favor of it when he was Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), or how deeply he became committed to it as president. Nor has much been written about how his support impacted US policy to make the success of the EDC a cornerstone of US European policy. Similarly, while the literature underscores Dulles’s threats of an “agonizing reappraisal” of US policy toward Europe should the EDC fail, there is no real narrative in the literature of his everyday thoughts about the EDC or of his discussions with Eisenhower about the EDC or German rearmament.12
One reason there are so few details on the process of disarming and demilitarizing Germany is that when most of the history covering that period was written and documented, many of the key State Department and Defense Department papers had not been declassified and were simply not available to researchers. Since their declassification, both time and interest have passed, so a number of documents that can add depth and detail to the narrative are now available but remain largely untouched.
Discussions on rearming West Germany can be broken into two chronological periods, the first from the end of the war on 8–9 May 1945 until 12 September 1950, the day Secretary of State Dean Acheson presented the US demand that West Germany be rearmed to the British and French foreign ministers, and the second from 13 September 1950 until 9 May 1955, when the FRG was admitted to NATO as a fully sovereign nation following its earlier admission to the WEU (along with Italy), an expanded Brussels Treaty Organization. For the first of these periods, archival research is necessary because until 1948, with the exception of rumors and innuendo published in a number of American and European newspapers, there is no mention of arming West Germany in the literature covering that period.13 For the second period, archival research is still necessary to fill in the gaps that remain in the large number of books on German rearmament published after 1950.
The various agencies in Washington responsible for formulating presurrender and posthostilities policies for Germany were slow to act on the need for posthostilities planning. They were plagued by serious divisions and fundamental differences in outlook. In addition, the State Department and the War Department were greatly at odds with one another over the role Allied military forces should have during the occupation. The resulting US posthostilities planning process, albeit thorough and extremely broad in its coverage, was overly bureaucratic, cumbersome, and to some degree duplicative. Much of this can be understood by realizing that posthostilities thinking was, aside from the obvious task of disarming German forces, focused on establishing military government there to restore law and order initially, eventually establishing civil government in the liberated areas, and enforcing the terms of Germany’s surrender.14
From the end of the war until the September 1950 unilateral US demand that West Germany be armed (despite the outbreak of the Korean War), the official US position regarding Germany was that it should remain disarmed and demilitarized. The September 1949 Occupation Statute stated explicitly that not only would the newly created Federal Republic of Germany remain disarmed and demilitarized but that all military-related areas of scientific research, industry, and even civil aviation would remain circumscribed, if not totally forbidden. In this regard, the Tripartite Military Security Board was created to ensure that the demilitarization of Germany continued.15 This Allied position was actually welcomed in many quarters of Germany. For example, in the fall of 1950, before German interior minister Gustav Heinemann resigned from the cabinet, he told Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that “since one of the noblest Allied war aims was to disarm us and keep us disarmed into the future, and the Allies have done everything during five years of occupation to make the German military despicable . . . and to educate the German people about military attitudes, it is therefore not for us to either search for or offer military measures.”16 Heinemann also invoked God, opining that “after God had twice dashed the weapons from the hands of the Germans they should not reach for them a third time.”17
However, as early as 1946, it was becoming clear to both the United States and Great Britain that a defeated, apathetic, and virtually prostrate Germany was no longer to be feared, while their erstwhile ally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was changing into a potential threat. The changes taking place in that relationship spawned fears that unless the USSR were contained (an effort that could only be successful with a rearmed Germany), a third world war would erupt. This created quite a dilemma, however, as the act of rearming Germany might instigate the very aggression it was meant to prevent.18
While the initiative to arm the FRG in 1950 came from the United States, the plan was not conceived in a vacuum. Both Great Britain and France, the United States’ main NATO allies, had also been considering the matter. But while the objectives of the NATO allies were the same (containment of possible German revanchism and deterrence of Soviet advances), the means were not. Each nation found itself at times working at cross-purposes to the others and even resorting to deception as the perceptions of political realities and strategic imperatives demanded. As a result, the United States lost both the initiative and control of the process of rearming West Germany.
The United States’ objectives for the 1950 decision to arm the Federal Republic, aside from the goal of strengthening the defense of Western Europe against the perceived Soviet strength, were twofold: to bind the western half of the divided German nation to the West by forming a West German army within an integrated West European edifice, and to withdraw US occupation forces from the European continent. The actual outcomes of the 1950 decision to rearm—a West German “national” army and US commitment to a virtually permanent presence in Western Europe—were completely at odds with those objectives. While the United States wanted a rearmed Germany, it did not as a matter of national policy want a national German army. Despite long-held plans to remove US forces from Europe—to build down as the Germans built up—the United States was forced to assuage European fears of a resurgent Germany by promising an open-ended commitment to keep significant US forces on the continent.19 The subsequent failure of the EDC in 1954 forced the United States into a “double containment” situation, where the United 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