Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
had not picked sites for the other two division sets. So, very quickly this became a major
personal effort for me. I spent the next year in that office, and it was the most intense year of
my career. Another major item, of course, was the master restationing plan. Both of these had
major Chief of Staff and command interest. A third major one was the collocation of
CENTAG [Central Army Group, Central Europe] headquarters and Fourth Allied Tactical
Air Force headquarters with USAREUR headquarters in Campbell Barracks.
Both Fourth Allied Tactical Air Force and CENTAG were NATO commands. Of course,
General Blanchard then was the CENTAG commander. The two commands were located
nearby, but not within Campbell Barracks. His thought was, "If we're going to have this
greater cooperation and interaction, we ought to have the three headquarters living together
in Campbell Barracks." As part of the USAREUR staff reorganization, discussed earlier,
people were moved out of Campbell Barracks, and the new space was to provide for the two
headquarters. There was a relocation plan that had been drawn up to relocate different
USAREUR staff people from one barracks to another, rehabilitate the buildings, and then at
the end of all of that, Headquarters, CENTAG, and Fourth Allied Tactical Air Force would
move in. That program was also my responsibility in the Installations and Construction
Division.
So, over and above the annual construction program, I found myself with those three major
initiatives that I was the point of contact on, or, really, the division chief responsible to
deliver the results.
Q:
What were the problems with the POMCUS storage program? Was it new technology, new
design principles? What had slowed the program?
A:
There weren't great new technologies. There were just a mass of things involved and a lot of
different people across international boundaries that had to be involved, and they all had to
be driven through to conclusion. There were a lot of players; I mean, it got so that I spent
most of my time networking. The networking included people in SHAPE headquarters, in the
Office of the Secretary of Defense, people in the Army Staff, and people in EUCOM
headquarters. There were people contacts and phone calls trying to smooth the way so that
papers got addressed in three days, not two weeks. We were dealing across so many lines.
We didn't have, as I mentioned, the sites for the fifth and sixth POMCUS sites. General
Groves called me in and said, "Well, what are you going to do about it?"
I asked, "Where are we?"
He said, "Nobody's even decided where they should be. There's been one thought that they
should all be in Germany, but the Germans say the impact should be shared, probably."
I asked, "Well, has anybody figured that out? Has somebody made a decision?"
"No, nobody has made a decision."
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