Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
DCSENGR where we had to fit them to facilities, determine where we wanted those
facilities, and come up with a game plan to do that.
That year we also put together a strategy for how we wanted to relocate and position Europe
in terms of facilities. We derived that in my shop. Steve Rutz put it all together and
recommended it to CINCUSAREUR. The strategy concept was to build a new brigade
encampment at Vilseck, one at Wildflecken, and one at Giessen. We could then start the
master restationing by moving a brigade forward to each of those new areas, thus releasing
some space to the rear. We could then move some folks about, thus freeing other space.
General Groves was the catalyst for this and all the thought processes that brought this
together, based on his experience before as the DCSENGR in Garlstedt, as I mentioned
before.
Through the trickle-down we would free up some space, say in the middle of my community
in Ludwigsburg when I was at 7th Brigade, where in the middle of town we had old
warehouses and old beat-up facilities that weren't very good. We could then turn those back
to the Germans, where they had some value because they were downtown. The Germans
could put something commercial in that location, some kind of a hotel or something of value.
The sites certainly had more value to them than us. The Germans should then be willing to
put up funds for that, and we would then get approval through the system back to Congress to
use those funds to build yet another new installation. Then we could move some more U.S.
troops out--that was why it was called the master restationing plan. It was not conceived as a
quick fix. It was conceived as working over time so we would move forward, closer to the
border, out in the rural areas away from the towns. Thus, our forces would be in better
locations where we wanted to be. We could improve our war-fighting posture at the same
time we were improving our location with the Germans posture. We would give up facilities
that they would take and use the money back in the loop.
It was a rotating cost concept. That year we fixed locations where we would like to have
major brigade areas. We wanted to start the process, and so we picked the first three. Those
were, as I mentioned, Vilseck, Wildflecken, and Giessen. That became, then, the USAREUR
program.
Jumping ahead to my next year, I went back in the Office of the ACE. There, I'm receiving
military construction programs that I sent from USAREUR the year before, and we had the
master restationing plan presented by Europe to the Department of the Army for action. We
also had General Groves, the architect of the plan, who's graduated up to the Office of the
Secretary of Defense, who wants it pulled up to him. During this second year--and I'm really
ahead of myself now--General Groves arranged to brief congressional staffers. I was the
briefer, now from the ACE's shop, that in the Pentagon briefed staffers from the House and
Senate Armed Services and Appropriations Committees, under General Groves' sponsorship
from the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy.
A lot of effort went into all that, with a lot of interaction, and we engaged in a lot of dialogue
with the Germans. Eventually Congress approved Vilseck as a new brigade location without
committing to the master restationing plan. So, the new brigade location in Vilseck is that
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