Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
With NORTHAG--when I was DCSENGR, I have not mentioned that--we used to have
home and home meetings with the BAOR [British Army of the Rhine] engineer where our
staffs would get together.
As Chief of Staff, I went up at least once and hosted once the BAOR Chief of Staff to
coordinate and have meetings on various kinds of issues and to keep each other up to date on
things. We did not have a lot of that kind of activity. I think General Saint had much more
interaction in the ways he traveled.
Now, one thing while I was Chief of Staff, we had a number of interchanges with the French
Forces in Germany, located in BadenBaden, and also with the French First Army, in
Strasbourg. I took a delegation from USAREUR--our deputy chiefs: DCSOPS, DCSLOG,
and so forth--down, and we met with the French First Army general staff in some briefings
at their headquarters. That was very interesting. They very much wanted to establish a
professional working relationship, even though they weren't participating in the military part
of NATO. The probabilities were that, in case of conflict, a Warsaw Pact attack, that they
would then join with us. So, we had that kind of interaction and common interest. They also
participated in some of our exercises. Not every one, but on their choice.
The Chief of Staff of the French First Army was Brigadier General Quesnot, an engineer that
had commanded the parachute regiment in Montauban that I had visited as commandant of
the Engineer School at Belvoir when I went over to visit their engineer school in Angers. We
had flown down to Montauban and visited them, so we had a little reunion in Strasbourg.
There was a liaison officer from the headquarters of the French Forces in Germany, at
USAREUR in Heidelberg.
General Quesnot mentioned the fact that this was a great combination because it was the
French First Army and the U.S. Seventh Army that had fought up through the southern part
of France and southern Germany during the war.
Q:
Yes.
A:
Then we had the previous common personal bond.
Q:
Yes. That's interesting. Did you have a sense, and this is still fairly early, by the summer of
'89, a sense that there were such dramatic changes coming in Europe, or going on? Or was
this too early?
A:
No, we could not sense how far and how fast it was going to go. Gorbachev was there. He
was just starting to make changes. He was talking glasnost and perestroika at that time.
We need to swing to that arena, the interactions we had with the Group of Soviet Forces,
Germany.
I need to go back and say one other thing because this ties both to the Soviets and the
Germans. When we had the French visits and talked with the commander of the French
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