ABSTRACT

The European Defence Community never came into existence, so why bother to consider it? There are two reasons for doing so. The EDC and the ECSC plans were in fact closely linked. The team that drafted the ECSC scheme also devised the EDC. In the summer of 1950 the prospect of German rearmament in NATO offered an alternative route than the ECSC for Germany to regain full control over its industry. The EDC was intended to stop this and so protect the ECSC until signed and in force. The EDC scheme of civil and military integration was contrived to protect

economic integration in the ECSC, a device for delaying West Germany’s rearmament and its complete control of national and foreign affairs. The issue of rearming the West Germans first arose in 1949 when the

USSR exploded its first atomic device. This was much sooner than the US expected, and was partly as a result of Soviet spies at the Los Alamos research laboratories and KGB scientists interviewing the theoretical physicist Niels Bohr in Denmark after the war. Some consideration was given then, by the US, to the question of West German rearmament and strengthening ground defence. There was, however, no urgency despite Soviet conventional military superiority – the Russians had 22 divisions out of 175 in Eastern Europe as a whole, compared with two each for the US and UK in West Germany out of a total of 14 NATO divisions (Kirby, 1977, p. 100; Dockrill, 1991, p. 10). The American nuclear umbrella over Europe was still a credible deterrent – the US had an effective monopoly of atomic weapons, as the USSR had no delivery system until 1955, when a long-range Tupolev bomber came into service. The US was also developing ‘the super’ fusion H-bomb from 1950, testing a device in 1952 and the weapon in 1954. Yet it was clearly recognised that once US nuclear superiority started to fade in the mid-to-late 1950s, so the deterrent effect of American nuclear retaliation to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe would also decline. Then the US would be keen to improve conventional forces, including a West German contribution by the late 1950s. West German rearmament only became an issue in 1950 because of the

Korean War. This war made German rearmament a predominant theme of US policy in Western Europe. On 25 June 1950 the North Korean army

equipped with Russian-built tanks and supported by Soviet Yak fighters crossed the 38th Parallel into South Korea, sweeping aside lightly armed South Korean troops. News of this Soviet-backed communist invasion of South Korea caused a wave of panic in West Berlin and Dr Konrad Adenauer wanted immediate reinforcements to be sent (Dockrill, 1991, p. 22). Why? What relevance did Korea have? The fear was that the Elbe could become another ‘38th Parallel’, the worst possible scenario being a Soviet-East German invasion of West Germany. Although, unlike South Korea, the presence of American, British and French forces in West Berlin and West Germany made this less probable as it would trigger a Soviet-American conflict, it remained a possibility, especially as the East Germans already had a 60,000-strong paramilitary ‘people’s police’ organised into ‘alert units’. Stalin was testing President Truman’s resolve to contain communism

behind its 1945 frontiers and the strength of its commitment to allies. If the US had not taken the initiative for a United Nations resistance to North Korea and sent US forces, then it would have appeared weak and timid compared with the USSR and undermined NATO, only created the year before in 1949, as West Europeans would feel they too would be abandoned in a crisis. American intelligence sources had warned Washington of an impending invasion yet it became the ‘Pearl Harbor’ of the Cold War because the intelligence was discounted (as in December 1941) for not fitting the Pentagon’s preconceived notion that Stalin would only launch an invasion when he wanted to start World War III. Accordingly the Pentagon had no plans for sending troops to South Korea, no plans for a ‘flexible response’ in a ‘limited war’, only plans for dropping atom bombs. American soldiers were rushed to South Korea from bases in the US and Japan. Stalin meant Korea to undermine NATO and the US position in Europe by

diverting US attention and troops away from Europe to Asia. In fact it had the opposite effect. The Korean War globalised Truman’s containment policy and militarised containment in Europe. In June 1950 the Americans wanted a stronger local defence of Western Europe to deter the USSR, including a West German contribution organised in a NATO integrated force under centralised command with a supreme commander. Seventy-five per cent of US military aid went to Europe even after the Korean War started. In 1950 there were only 14 runways from which jets could operate in Western Europe and only 800 jets to put on them: by 1954 there were 120 runways and 4,000 jets. American military aid helped re-equip the French air force and the RAF via ‘off shore sales’ (as opposed to ‘legitimate off shore sales’). Some of the jet aircraft built in British and French factories were bought with US military aid and given to the air forces. These planes, paid for with dollars, were exports of a sort. Clement Attlee had announced a £3.6bn rearmament programme for 1951-54. By 1952 UK arms production exceeded all her European NATO partners combined – a fact that predisposed the US to give UK additional financial aid in 1952.