Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
A:
Well, the ones I had just mentioned were at the federal level.
Q:
The federal level. The lawsuits may have been brought by local people, though.
A:
Well, they were, but it was the federal level that we dealt with in the accommodations
process. The people who went to court to defend us were really the Defense Ministry. So, Dr.
Korte would go to their Supreme Court to make the case for us because it was really the
German government who'd invited us over there who were responsible for "accommodating"
us. The German government would then say, "Yes, U.S. forces are here for our purpose:
NATO, defend freedom. We want them here, and therefore we have to accommodate certain
things. These are the rules we're putting out and have agreed to, and thereby we, the German
nation, need to uphold those rules."
The next interesting thing that took place a bit while I was engineer, and carried over when I
became Chief of Staff, was the caper on bringing the AH64 Apache helicopters into Europe.
The big confrontation took place in Wiesbaden, and it was a similar saga, involving all the
same players. The mayor objected to our having aircraft there, and the people did not want
the Apache helicopters to come. Apaches had come over for REFORGER in the fall of '87
with General Saint when he commanded III Corps and had been very successful in the FTX
up in the north.
So, we wanted to accelerate their arrival down in the south because they were just a
tremendous tank killer and such a great addition to our capabilities in NATO. We had a
stationing plan that we worked out. We were to get, I remember, ten battalions and place
them one in each division and three in each Corps.
The first place we desired to put them was in Wiesbaden, for V Corps, opposite the Fulda
Gap. We already had the airfield there in Wiesbaden. We'd taken that over from the Air
Force, and it had a lot of hardstands and aprons.
Now, the other thing that had happened in this time frame, technologywise and trainingwise,
was the advent of the helicopter flight trainer. The Army has rather sophisticated trainers for
Army aviators to use. So, we had wanted to build a flight simulator at Wiesbaden. We had
one in Hanau, and we wanted to build one at Wiesbaden because that was going to be a
major location for Apache helicopters.
This was being fought by the locals, and we were trying to get that construction under way.
We were to the point where EUD was trying to get on with the ability to construct. So, again,
I met several times with Dr. Korte and tried to get them to go on, and we were basically
enjoined from proceeding. There were something like eighteen trees, mostly scrub ash, that
had to come down, and people were using that as a reason not to do the project. These were
the same people who didn't want any more helicopters there. They thought if the simulator
arrived, then we'd have a reason to put more aircraft there.
The complexity of it was all the interaction with the state, federal, and locals. The Lnder
president--state president--was reluctant to commit. He waited on the fence. The mayor was
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