All Quiet on the Western Front.

AuthorWilliams, J. Edgar

While some may be nostalgic for the relative simplicity of the Cold War, we should not forget what the stakes were then and how close the world was to catastrophe.--Ed.

For six years, 1955-60 inclusive, I was stationed first at the U. S. Embassy in London and then at the Embassy at Madrid. As an Army Active Reserve Officer, I went each year to a different Army base in Germany for my two weeks of annual active duty training. In 1958, we were seeing indications from intelligence sources of a Soviet army build-up in their occupied East Germany, which indicated a possible intention to invade West Germany. However, time passed with continuing build-up but no clear evidence of intent to invade.

In the early summer of 1960, I was transferred from Madrid to Washington, and I went to Germany for my two weeks training just before traveling back to the U. S. I spent those two weeks with a field artillery battalion at our base at Baumholder, in Rheinland-Pfalz, west of the Rhine River, between Trier and Kaiserslautern. Our weapons were self-propelled 155mm cannons, with long tubes (barrels), which we called "guns" to distinguish them from the short-tube howitzers. In addition to the normal kinds of high-explosive ammunition, we had a stock of nuclear projectiles.

There was a lot of apprehension about the continuing Soviet build-up in the part of East Germany, which bulged towards the west. This was in Thuringia, between Gotha and Erfurt. Clearly, the best invasion route would be through the Fulda Gap, a gap between two small mountain ranges, leading directly into river valleys down which Soviet armored divisions could move straight towards Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Mainz, Mannheim, etc. Our base was 100 miles from the Fulda Gap, and our plans were to move there very fast when we first heard of Soviet troops heading for the border. We had planned specific locations where we would set up our guns to blast the Soviet tanks with nuclear shells as they came through the gap. I don't recall any doubts about our being able to use the nuclear shells, nor any discussion about how...

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