Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
A:
There was nothing in my recall concerning the Hungarian affair. I guess that it was all over
by my arrival.
Q:
That's okay.
A:
We were all very cognizant of the fact that we might have to fight, and the Soviet military
mission was always around. We would see them continuously going around checking our
training. So, we were very attuned that we were at the forward edge of freedom, and
operations security and preparations were paramount. We practiced the general defense plan
all the time. We had target folders for all of our targets; we did terrain walks with our
supported maneuver units, as I mentioned before, on the actual terrain. The exercises were all
oriented toward the same kind of mobility and combined-arms action. So, the threat was
something that we all anticipated. We were proud the 3d Armored Division was astride the
Fulda Gap, and that was drummed into us all the time, and we knew we'd be ready.
Another thing that happened during one particular period of tension, there was an alert for the
division to be prepared to move up and move along the Helmsted Corridor to Berlin, a forced
entry. The Russians had threatened to close all access to Berlin. Bridging was required, and I
was detailed as the commander of the bridge unit. I was the executive officer of the bridge
company at that time, and I was going to go as the commander of this bridge element, which
had more than a platoon. We never moved north, but we were within what we thought might
be hours of a mission to move with one of the battalion's line companies to go along with a
division maneuver element in a show of force to Berlin. So, we were all very cognizant of
our mission at the "frontier of freedom"--always.
Q:
Did you have the feeling when you were there in the late '50s that there was more a sense
that war might be imminent than there was when you were back in the '70s? Was the Army
in Germany more finely honed, more on edge in terms of the possibility of war than when
you went back later?
A:
No, I don't think so. I think that kind of mission cognizance was present throughout the
Army's whole time in Europe. One of the great things about that is--as a leader you can
point to the Soviet threat as a real raison d'etre for our being there, for our training.
Because USAREUR got the dollars, you could go out and train, and train the mission and use
the general defense plan for the mission training. It gave training a real credibility and reality
that my battalion's Army training test at another time at Fort Leonard Wood never had.
When I was in the 82d Airborne Division later, the 307 Engineers, Vietnam was current and
provided that same emphasis. We went out to Camp McCall and took an exercise where we
were training the counterinsurgency Vietnam mode kind of thing. There was a raison d'etre
too. Certainly whenever you're in Germany that realistic threat and mission has always been
a paramount thing to drive your training.
Now, I think there were some years in Germany--at the end of the Vietnam period and
before I arrived in '76, the downtime in Germany--in which there were a lot of problems, a
lot of leadership and discipline problems. With this low ebb of the Army in the early '70s,
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