Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
It changed at that meeting. It must have changed that they lost their willingness to stand up
and say to their citizens, "Yes, it is right. They're here as our partners and we're doing a
common thing, and for that, they need to do certain things, and we need to try to
accommodate that."
I'd seen that changing over--they weren't now always quite so eager to be out front
explaining why it was right for Americans to do this for the common cause. Now, here in
March, we were being told, "You do it our way or we're going to get your masters to make
you change."
I don't know what prompted that. Eberhard Stoltenberg was, at that time, the finance
minister, and he told Fischer to go and tell us this. I guess they felt from the political climate
that they could obtain that kind of fix on us.
So, I really felt a change in atmosphere at that point in time. Of course, I left soon thereafter
and started looking on from afar. Things became more difficult in terms of getting things
done. They wanted us to knock off all firing at night with our artillery at Grafenwhr. We
wanted to fire at night because our purpose is to train in peace like we're going to fight in
war. You fire at night in war. So, we wanted opportunities to fire at night.
The United States made a rather formidable investment in Europe with these forces in the
number of units and artillery battalions. If you just ran the math of trying to rotate our
artillery battalions through the training area, they wouldn't make it adhering to Bundeswehr
timetables. You couldn't get them around through there in a year's time.
So, we told them we were developing concrete warheads and things to reduce the noise and
that sort of thing. Basically, they just didn't want to hear it. They just wanted us to change.
That was a very, very controversial and bitter meeting--a watershed meeting, I thought.
Q:
So, did this lead, then, to a whole series of exchanges back and forth, or did they pull in the
political authorities?
A:
Well, we told all of our own political authorities beforehand, "Stand fast. Don't let them do
this." During the time I was there--this is March, and I left the beginning of August--there
wasn't much time left for me in this. We had a new ambassador. Vernon "Dick" Walters
came in and took over. There were several meetings with him, and they were quite open. We
didn't feel any, any of the political pressure from our side during the time I was there.
Q:
So, possibly another example of the hardening attitude on the Germans' part--given the
events that are beginning to go on all over Eastern Europe and Germany as well--was the
dramatic change in atmosphere over the last two or three years.
A:
I think that was a watershed meeting and marked a change in attitude.
Q:
Well, you were there--talking about a watershed--for the end of the Pershing IIs as well.
Would you talk about that, and the INF [intermediate nuclear forces] treaty?
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