Engineer Memoirs
and the other in my own office. Both of them rose to become chiefs of their
respective services in the German armed forces. It was a time when we were
branching out and bringing officers of other nationalities into key positions in
SHARE. Up until this time, most of the key jobs had gone to Anglo-Americans.
Now we started to bring in officers of other nationalities. For example, the
logistics division went to an Italian. We brought in several French officers and
arranged for other key spots to be filled by officers from the Low Countries.
On the substantive side, it was also a fascinating time, largely because we were
redoing the basic strategy of NATO, MC 14/2. MC 14/2 was the document
outlining the basic strategy of NATO for the 1950s, the strategy of massive re-
taliation. When he became SACEUR in 1955, General Norstad began to study the
strategy of forward defense and flexible response. It later became MC 14/3.
In addition to changing NATO strategy, we were also faced with international
crises. One was the Suez Canal crisis, which involved all of NATO but
particularly the British and French.
A second crisis was the invasion of Hungary by the Soviets. I recall that quite
distinctly because General Gruenther was called hourly by Clare Booth Luce, our
ambassador to Italy. She was highly disturbed and wanted him to do something to
help Hungary. Her main idea was to have U.S. troops move into Hungary to
reinforce the Hungarian resistance. Failing that, she wanted U.S. troops to move
to the Hungarian border. And, at the very least, she wanted Gruenther to have Red
Cross supplies flown into Hungary. But Gruenther was unable to get Washington
to move on any of these ideas. At first, they said it wasn't a NATO responsibility.
And later they said the U.S. should not interfere in Hungary's internal affairs.
A third crisis at NATO was General de Gaulle's return to power in France. We
worked very closely with our French contacts and wondered how things would sort
out. It was fortunate that we had a French officer, General Allard, at the head of
our operations division. He was a personal friend of General de Gaulle's who had
served with him in Algeria. Through Allard we were able to keep in close touch
with what was going on politically in France. This paved the way for amicable
relations with General de Gaulle when he came back into power.
Q ..
What was General Gruenther's background?
A
I had come to know General Gruenther in Italy during World War II when he was
chief of staff to General Mark Clark in the Fifth Army. After the war, General
Gruenther went back to Washington on the War Department staff. He was in on
the ground floor to set up NATO. He took Colonels Goodpaster and Robert Wood
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