Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
responsibilities. These are a little different than your other two hats that you were wearing. In
general terms, what role does the community commander play?
A:
Within the U.S. forces in Germany context of that time and existing today, the community
commander really operated as the mayor or city manager of the town or group of villages that
made up what was called a community--a jurisdiction in terms of our civilian populace,
where we have counties and cities. It was a geographical jurisdiction that brought together all
of the--I'll use the term "support relationships"--having to do with taking care of our forces,
soldiers, civilians, and dependents in Germany.
In other words, we put a division there to fight, but that division has to live in barracks and
have motor pools. Then we bring the families over and so you need housing, both bachelor
and family housing. Then you need recreation services and also logistic services to provide
necessary supplies and services. That means you need POL tank farms and ammunition
depots and pretty soon you have a very large infrastructure and a very large component of
people in addition to those in the infantry division.
We, of course, were living within the German populace and Germany, and the U.S. Army in
Europe had some 800 different installations and was organized into 39 communities. Those
39 communities, then, were the way the organization was geographically organized and
provided the jurisdictions to manage the support tail that goes with the fighting force.
To run that, then, were a lot of staff people of many different kinds of talents. Back when I
first served in Germany in the '50s, there were organizations called the Northern Area
Command, Southern Area Command, et cetera. I guess there was somebody who was the
installation commander, in the terms of, if I were using the United States, say Fort Knox. The
commander of Fort Knox is the installation commander. In Germany, the difference was that
it was not just one place with a fenced community around it of many different parts like Fort
Knox. So, back in the '50s there was an installation commander who worked for that area
commander, but that commander and support elements were completely separate from V
Corps, VII Corps, the divisions, and all of the fighting forces. There were two separate chains
of command.
Somewhere after that, it was decided to merge the two chains. I think it was in the Blanchard
era that the senior tactical commander in one of those geographical jurisdictions was made
the community commander. The idea was that now the same person was responsible for
support of the families, the logistics, and for his units and his troops. He was the right one to
interact with the populace; he was the right one to balance the priorities of time, effort, and
resources between different missions; and they would work out better than separate
commanders.
So, the community commander then was in charge of a jurisdiction that had some
geographical boundaries to it. The job varied because the size of the communities varied.
Some were small communities; some were very large. I happened to be part of a very large
community, the Stuttgart greater military community. The Corps commander, General Ott,
was the community commander. I was really a subcommunity commander. In the greater
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