Rhine? White Elephants on the
BAOR
By SIMON CLEMENTS
MBE future of the British Army of the Rhine I is ooe of the most obscure mysteries in British politics today. Ever since the last Defence Review the leaden clouds have been massing over the War Office, convincing the more prescient soldiers that the army was the next target for one of Mr Healey's thunderbolts. When, therefore, the first sheets of the July financial lightning began to flash, high-ranking officers in the Ministry of Defence crouched under their desks with their fingers in their ears shrinking from what seemed a blow as inevitable as it would be severe. Now, six weeks later, they are emerging, and looking at each other with silent surprise. The thunder pealed but no bolts descended. The menace of total, or at best significant, withdrawal has faded into the anticlimax of a rundown of the stocks at Antwerp, and a few restrictions on duty-free cars and other swinging fun in the Rhine Army boarding-houses.
But if the soldiers are surprised at the apparent reprieve, how much more the thinking public. Long accustomed to the unpopular defence forces taking the principal and publicised cuts at each recurring crisis, and familiar with a section of the daily press which has often campaigned to 'Bring the boys home' (remember the Express. headline 'British soldier killed in German thunder- storm), the public must have expected the first and most dramatic cut to be made in the Army of the Rhine. Still, here we are, more than six weeks after Mr. Wilson's announcement of new financial measures, with ICI _declaring redund- ancies and motor-car firms putting workers on short time, in fact with Mr. Wilson's government. taking the exact action which would discredit it rather than the simole Slash at the military which would save plenty of money. and lose no votes, and still the officers from BAOR, on holiday, in Italy, are lying undisturbed in the sun. The soldiers may be shrptised and' relieved, but; like Mr' George Robey, the public is more than Surprised —it is amazed. One might at first ignorant sight suppose that • a responsible government would be unwilling to lower its guard on the frontiers, even though the soldiers manning the wall are longing to be home. In our world turned upside-down the exact reverse is the case. The present Govern- ment is totally out of sympathy with the existence of large military forces on the Rhine. The soldiers, on the other hand, are living in conditions far more luxurious and comfortable than they would find in this country, surrounded by their families, and admirably housed. The last thing the boys want to do is to leave their duty-free privileges and came home to frozen Britain. But even if this paradox in attitude exists, surely the Wilson government is not going to be prevented from saving foreign currency by the soldier's plea for continuing comfort. What are the real reasons for the reprieve and the substitution of a mild fine for summary execution?
Like the British Army in France in 1916, the BAOR in Germany can sing 'We're here because we're here.' They have been there for a long time. Established east of the Rhine in 1948 as part of Western Union, the reasons for BAOR's' continued presence have changed with changing policies. First, in pre-nuclear days, it was a con- tribution to an allied army facing a possible conventional Russian invasion. Then its function was to act as a trip-wire, to sound an alarm not only in the west but in the Kremlin, to be the glass which had to be broken before the ultimate fire brigade was summoned. Now, in the missile age, the function of a conventional army on the Continent grows more and more doubtful and obscure.
But doubtful or not, the army is there, and in eighteen years it has become more than an army on foreign soil. Some 51,800 soldiers, 19,300 wives and 33,000 children with their barracks and depots, and leave centres and shops, and housing estates and training areas, not to mention a supporting civilian army, 43,000 strong, of foreign workers. There is now in existence a flourishing and deep-rooted British colony in Germany. And if this colony is uprooted, where does it go? Leaving aside the delights of life in Germany, are there enough married quarters in this country to house the returning exiles and enough areas to train the units withdrawn? From kites flown in the press, the answer is plainly no lit theory, the soldiers can all go under canvas at Aldershot, and the wives can go home to mum. That, how- ever, is a rough way to treat a volunteer army, especially if you wish to attract further volun- teers. The Government has to face the facts, therefore, that the soldiers can't come home be- cause there's nowhere for them to go.
The country must not expect Mr Wilson's government, which from its earliest youth has not had a strict regard for truth, to admit the facts publicly. Instead, the financial crisis has opened their eyes to the discovery that the thirty- day European war, which was planned as a pre- lude to or even a substitute for the nuclear exchange, can now, according to government spokesmen, be shortened to fourteen or possibly even five days, and that military stocks can be reduced accordingly.
Here then is the new raison d'être for the British Army of the Rhine—it is to fight a five-day holding action. The question now must be answered: is this military sense? Let us assume a highly unlikely situation, in which the Russians make a conventional military feint into Western Europe to test the defences. Ability to resist for thirty days makes some sense. That is time enough for a stubborn resistance to be manifest, and to ponder and perhaps reconsider the ultimate de- cision to press the button. But five days? Is that time enough for either? And is it a way of de- terring the Russians to announce that you will only resist them conventionally for under two weeks, or possibly even five days? Is that a way to convince your allies that your contribution is valuable?
The fact is that the latest measures may have turned BAOR from a force just on the right side of military sense to one deprived of the means to fulfil its mission.
It may, of course, be that the present Govern- ment is cleverer than us all, and that NATO's conventional forces no longer have a place in European strategy. The Socialists may be the first —apart from General de Gaulle— to realise this. Maybe they are prepared to allow our military colony to go through its ritual gyrations until our allies wake up to the fact that the Russians' attention is wholly concentrated in the east, and find that their forces in Europe are as devoid of meaning as our own. Perhaps this decision is intelligent, far-sighted and will even- tually be proved right. There are plenty a argu- ments against bringing home troops in the present state of foreign and domestic politics. To main- tain abroad at lowered cost a force which might prove more expensive to bring home may well be the proper as well as the desirable course, with plenty of agreeable side-effects, such as soothing our own military staffs and our allies in NATO.
The decision, like so many of this govern- ment's decisions, is a gamble, and may Or may not pay off. One thing, however, is clear. If the Rus- sians play according to our rules, we cannot lose. But if, however, they are so ill-mannered as to attempt exactly those manoeuvres which the British Army of the Rhine, until a month ago, was designed to play a part in frustrating, then the new decisions may deprive it of the ability to do so, and we may even now be planning to nurture a large herd of costly white elephants on the Rhine.
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