ABSTRACT
What was known within the Pentagon in 1946 wasn’t good. Th e US military knew that America’s great army of liberation was an army of occupation in Germany, Austria, and Japan, eff ectively reduced to a policing function “stripped of most armor and air power and assigned only maintenance of public order and denazifi cation duties.”3 Th e rest of America’s army was back home in “civies” waiting on the GI Bill. Large forces of British and French troops were nonexistent. “In the chaotic fi rst two years aft er World War II, the pressing question on the minds of most Western European policymakers was how to survive the economic collapse the war had created, rather than how to maintain or build eff ective fi ghting forces.”4
