Regards, Ivan
Posted on 08/21/2004 5:44:43 PM PDT by MadIvan
Many Germans will find it hard to say goodbye to the slice of American pie they've had for 50 years when US army bases close, writes Alex Duval Smith
It was probably a German road planners' joke. The road sweeping through the beautiful, pine-wooded valleys of southern Germany towards Baumholder - the largest US army base outside the United States - is called the B52.
Last week President George Bush threw the lives of the town's 4,000 German residents into disarray when he announced a major restructuring exercise that will see 70,000 US troops sent home from Europe and Asia - 30,000 of them from Germany.
Baumholder - a place where Americans outnumber Germans three to one - will be transformed by the redeployment that aims, from 2007, to cleanse the last of the Cold War spirit from the US fighting mentality and introduce a sleeker system of rapid intervention from bases chiefly in the US.
'The decision was overdue,' said Sergeant Dale Rosler of the First Armoured Division Artillery as he chewed on a hamburger in Baumholder's high street. 'The Germans can take care of themselves, so can the South Koreans. We are the only superpower left and Russia is not a problem any more.'
Rasler, 49, has recently returned from 15 months in Iraq. His German wife, Petra, said she was looking forward to settling down in Washington: 'This will be a ghost town, there is no doubt about it. The Americans are the ones who make us live.'
The 41-year-old, who has a son, Ruben, 17, married Rasler in April last year. She said every woman in Baumholder wants her own GI. 'Let's be honest, it means no need to work, free accommodation, free schooling and all the perks you can get from an American passport.'
Rasler, who has four children from previous relationships, intends to retire and become a salesman when the couple leave. 'Ruben will get a US army scholarship to put him through college and then he will have to give three years back as an officer in the US army,' he said proudly.
In Baumholder, off-duty soldiers cruise around in American cars with tinted windows and German plates. In the centre of town at Roland's Bar, only the Bavarian-style pine furniture and the German spoken by the staff offer a hint that this is not middle America. The hills around the town are lined with six-storey blocks of flats - troop accommodation - and local businesses advertise with bilingual signs.
Baumholder has been a garrison town for nearly a century and there is no industry in the area. The town, in the Rhineland-Palatinate, just an hour from the borders with France and Luxembourg, does not even have the cachet of being a former steel works town.
Everything changed in this farming area in 1937 when the Nazis evacuated 13 villages and 4,000 people to create the Wehrmacht's biggest training zone. After the war, French troops occupied the military installations until 1951, when they were turned over to the Americans.
'There's not a single person alive in Baumholder who remembers what this place was like before it began living from the leisure spending of soldiers,' said 77-year-old Manfred Müller, who was enlisted at 16 and spent a year in a British PoW camp in the Netherlands.
Müller, a retired textile representative, said the Americans could not be blamed for leaving. 'This place will be a desert. We had a taste of it when they all went off to Iraq. But times have changed. We are lucky they stayed this long,' he said.
German trade union Verdi says Baumholder and two other towns, Birkenfeld and Idar-Oberstein, will be worst hit by the US plans which, across the country, will lead to an estimated 80,000 German job losses.
Bruno Zim mer, the union's district representative, said: 'We are hoping to keep some American units, but there's no doubt that Baumholder is going. A US private soldier - who has no expenses, no rent to pay - receives $1,000 a month and spends at least 30 per cent of that in Germany.'
Baumholder's 13,000 US troops and their families have instilled a powerful pro-American culture in the town.
At Roland's Bar, regulars speculated that it was German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's stance against the war in Iraq that led to the country being punished by the US. Others said this was nonsense, but added that, had the German government been more supportive of the war, perhaps the pill would have been sweetened.
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
It makes sense to move the troops regardless, but the pill of US spending in Deutschland soured when Schroeder, and his ilk, became Saddam's lawyer.
Stuff happens. Things change.
Ah come on. The Krauts didn't see this coming? The Cold War's been over for nearly a generation. I go to technical college with kids who are too young to remember the Berlin Wall.
This troop reduction is LONNNNNNNNNG overdue, if you ask me.
I was there at the start in Austria from the bombed Salzburg to the untouched mountain ski resorts. BTW in spite of the revisionist comparisons to Iraq, there were no Nazi Werewolfs killing us. We had plenty of GIs to completely occupy and control the American Zones in Austria and Germany.
I remember Baumholder. There was nothing there but American GIs and a few kamerads. GI towns such as Baumholder had no economy at all other than that which was gained from what the Americans contributed. I hated that place. K-Town (Kaiserslautern) was much more cool!
This is probably true. There is Army value in the training center at Graf/Hohenfels. There is ZERO value in Heidelberg. It's expensive, traffic-bound, and shortly out-of-the-way.
Ramstein/Landstuhl should stay because of the security and usefulness of this air base/hospital complex. The AF doesn't need to be as close to the action.
They shouldn't have hit us in the face with it.
"She said every woman in Baumholder wants her own GI..."
...or as they used to say: "Just give me Texas and a swimming pool."
If the Europeans would simply follow the leadership of President Bush and the American Heartland, Texas and a swimming pool would come to them.
Precisely.
It is also time for NATO to be dissolved. This realignment should just be the beginning.
I was in the 293rd Combat Heavy Engineers stationed at Baumholder from May 1981 through August 1983. I also lived in Grafenwohr, Schwartzenborn, St. Wendel, Berlin and Furth for varying periods of time. We were perfoming construction activities and got to travel a lot. The week end trips to near by countries was great too.
One of these days I'm going to have to go back and visit Hahn and see what was done with Hahn AFB. I doubt that the locals miss me, but I sure miss the Mosel river valley and the fine wine.
I was stationed in Pirmasens (sp) back in the 1950's and remember K-town well, drove there once a week for supplies and we pulled maneuvers there sometimes.
It was strange, back then the GI's loved the Germans & detested the Frogs. We had to go to France on maneuvers also and couldn't wait after a month or so to get back home to Germany.
My Batallion had 3 Companies in K-Town, and 1 in Pirmasens. The 76th (now that is the spirit) Transportation Company was the Pirmasens unit.
Pirmasens was famous for bad weather as they were more up in the hills it was said. There were few places in Germany that I recall which could more be relied upon for inclement weather than Pirmasens, Wildflecken was another red road area. It seemed to me that it was always raining in Pirmasens, and snowing in Wildflecken.
My favorite experience was a bottle of Blue Nun consumed in a vinyard overlooking the Mein river in Summer.
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