Tales from the Cold War: The U.S. Army in West Germany 1960-1975. Michael D. Mahler. Dahlonega, Georgia: University Press of North Georgia, 2021.

Nuclear missiles, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War are the best-remembered among the martial past of the Cold War.[1] However, retired U.S. Army Colonel Michael D. Mahler recounts stories of the U.S. Army in West Germany from 1960 to 1975 in his recently published memoir, Tales from the Cold War. First-hand narratives of the organizational insiders reveal the past occurrence and understandings that otherwise might be unknown or unintelligible for historians in the ivory tower. Mahler's anecdotes reflect this throughout the book. Like all memoirs from military leaders, writing decades after their experiences, accurate recollection is often difficult but incredibly crucial.[2]

Knowing the Cold War historical context, namely the necessity of, and the paradoxical relations between the deterrence mission in Europe and the mission of fighting limited wars around the globe is indispensable for understanding Mahler and his comrades’ experiences in U.S. Army Europe (USAREUR). USAREUR was a designated part of the deterrent; however, limited wars inevitably contributed to the rise and fall of this fighting force.[3] Putting Mahler’s service into the broader context of the evolution of the Cold War-era U.S. Army, he graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point during the height of the Pentomic Army in 1959, as the Department of Defense was modernizing for an imagined nuclear battlefield.[4] When Mahler finished his final command in 1975, the Army was in transition from the Reorganization Objective Army Division (ROAD) era to the Army of Excellence, driven by Training and Doctrinal Command.[5] It was in this “ROAD era” when limited wars first became more necessary because of Khrushchev’s nuclear buildup, then became more viable after Kennedy’s conventional reassessment, buildup, and reforms, but eventually exacerbated the tension between deterrence and limited war due to American quagmire in Vietnam.[6] This tension is reflected in one of the three major themes I distilled from Mahler's account.

The first major theme that I identified from Tales from the Cold War is a rise-decline-revival trajectory.

To make historical understanding out of what historian Bruce Kuklick called “actor’s knowledge” in primary sources like this memoir, a historian must distill major themes from those primary sources to construct a structure of history.[7] The first major theme that I identified from Tales from the Cold War is a rise-decline-revival trajectory. At the beginning of this trajectory in Mahler’s story, “President Eisenhower was intent on reducing the size and the budget of the Army, and fuel was at a premium.”[8] In one anecdotal account, Mahler's entire scout platoon practiced “walking in the positions they would be sitting in if they were in their scout jeeps while we practiced moving our pretend vehicles into various tactical formations.”[9] With the 1961 Berlin Crisis, a buildup was initiated. In Mahler’s personal experiences, he notes that soldiers “found themselves on order back to USAREUR...and limitations on tracked vehicle movement that had been based on funding for fuel and repair parts were lifted.”[10] “The bad years” followed the burgeoning years: “I quickly came to see how degraded USAREUR had become in the eight years that I had been away because of the drain of Vietnam.”[11] Then the trajectory of history bends toward revival as “stability of tour increased, problems decreased, and our effectiveness and skills continue to improve...I have gotten to play a part in its resurgence.”[12] Although this rise-decline-revival grand historical narrative is often negatively viewed by professional historians as a classic teleological and cyclical trope in the field of history, Mahler’s rise-decline-revival experiences are credible and sensible according to historian Ingo Trauschweizer’s authoritative scholarly account of the evolution of the Cold War U.S. Army.[13]

The second theme in Tales from the Cold War intrigues me the most, the complex management of readiness and endurance. Deterrence is a never-ending mission that requires high endurance, defined by the recently updated Army field manual on operations as “the ability to persevere over time throughout the depth of an operational environment.”[14] Mahler draws parallels between the Cold War USAREUR performing forward deterrence to the “old frontier Army” in the 19th century. The old frontier Army and their families “manned those remote garrisons before the western frontier passed into history.” Similarly, roughly three generations of American soldiers manned those small kasernes four thousand miles away from their hometown until "the wall separating East and West had finally fallen of its own weight.”[15] However, both deterrence and limited war require a high degree of military readiness to signal resolve and respond to multi-theater contingencies. In this sense, the Cold War was much more demanding on organizational management than Westward Expansion in the United States, although Mahler seems to ignore this in his historical analogy. Mahler devotes a bulk of the book to the training of personnel and maintenance of machines, the two pillars of readiness. The remainder of the book focuses on the elements of military cohesion, a critical source of endurance. Mahler laments that the extraordinary demand for readiness during the Vietnam war eroded the cohesiveness of not only USAREUR but also the broader American population.[16]

The second theme in Tales from the Cold War intrigues me the most, the complex management of readiness and endurance.

On the small unit and individual levels, Mahler notes that readiness could contribute to cohesion through non-commissioned officers’ (NCO) initiatives in training. He complained about Project VOLAR (Volunteer Army) which intended to make the service more attractive to young Americans after the termination of the draft in 1973, claiming that recruits lacked motivation, which often led to disciplinary actions. The NCOs felt VOLAR gave more power to the soldiers to act on their own, impacting their ability to train and lead soldiers. Mahler comments that “if you leave your group to their own devices in cold weather, you will find over a half of them in the PX cafeteria in short order.”[17] According to Mahler, it was in those places like the mess hall and the enlisted club where the divisive and destabilizing factors including alcohol, race, and drugs played themselves out in knife fights and near-riots.[18] My research tells me that the relations between training, small unit leadership, and military cohesion are well-surveyed in the existing scholarly literature on military effectiveness.[19] Mahler's accounts contribute to the understanding of this issue by taking into account the impact of military families on cohesion and readiness: “My wife and I believed that the social side of our squadron was as important to the morale and cohesiveness as the other purely military aspects.”[20] Mahler recounts both positive and negative experiences with families, spouses, and absent garrison services during his command of the 3-12 Armored Cavalry Regiment. Highlighting the ad hoc nature of family support services at the time, typically provided by a network of spouse volunteers, he highlights how families directly impacted cohesion and readiness in the Cold War-era Army in Germany.[21] Fortunately, a robust Army wives’ volunteer support system led by Mrs. Mahler “generated a sense of community” and “held together the social fabric” for the roughly 2000 service personnel and their families in Mahler’s post.[22]

The third major theme in the book is the stable but complicated relationship between the American forces and their West German hosts. In 1960, CINCUSAREUR, General Bruce Clarke, announced the requirement that “all United States soldiers behave as Good Neighbors to their German neighbors.” USAREUR instituted many civic and cultural programs in local communities across Western Europe.[23] Mahler recalls that one of the most popular activities that the USASEUR Headquarters sponsored was the American Volkfest, or county fair: “Many, including our family, made life-long friends as a result of sitting next to a German family with whom you just hit it off [on Volkfest benches].”[24] Even the legendary General Creighton Abrams vividly remembered and was deeply concerned about maintaining positive local relationships, specifically correcting the maneuver damages caused by Army units to local roads and lands. In early 1974, when Abrams visited Mahler's garrison, having “good neighbor” in mind, he asked Mahler if the factory personnel were still complaining about Army trucks leaving mud on the road in front of their factory.[25]

The third major theme in the book is the stable but complicated relationship between the American forces and their West German hosts.

However, the good neighbor policy and practices did not prevent anti-American sentiments which were increasingly salient in the late 1960s. The Baader-Meinhof (Red Army Faction) gang, linked to countless bomb threats and several deadly bombings across USAREUR's footprint, was active throughout Mahler's assignment in Germany. Mahler notes discovering close connections between his “good neighbors” and radical student groups following one such bombing.[26] Nor was Mahler blind about the legacies of the Nazi past of Germany. Mahler grapples with Germany’s past in concentration camp sites he visited at Bergen-Belsen. Meeting fellow NATO comrades who cherished their services in Wehrmacht and watching the exercises commanded by the son of Colonel Clause von Staffenberg at the Bundeswehr Tank Training Center, Mahler struggled to come to terms with the endurance of Nazi legacies among the “good neighbors” he met throughout his assignments[27]

Not all the claims Mahler makes in the book are consistent with credible accounts of the Army of this period. For example, Mahler recounts his experience in the early 1960s of “a close-knit, very professional non-commissioned officer corps.”[28] The actual record may be mixed. Historian Brian McAllister Linn writes regarding the same period that “the best had experience, impressive leadership skills, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the soldier’s trade. But, like their prewar counterparts, these craftsmen served alongside other noncoms who were poorly educated, brutal, unimaginative, and resistant to change.”[29]

Tales from the Cold War has a fair place in general military history and Cold War American military history in particular. From the perspective of general military histories, the “old military histories” are often battle-centric works written by professional soldiers, while “new military histories” focus more on organizational and societal aspects of military affairs are now written by detached, professional historians.[30] Mahler's book on the Cold War NATO Central Front, where battles didn’t happen, complements the missing part in the organizational and societal military histories: the perspective of professional soldiers with first-hand experiences. From the perspective of Cold War American military history, this book reveals an insider episode, unknown in the previous works on the 1961 Berlin Crisis. The revelation is that the Commander in Chief of USAREUR directly issued the top-secret order to the 1st Battlegroup, 18th Infantry to reinforce the Berlin garrison as a direct response to the construction of the Berlin Wall, which caused a massive communication breakdown that left the Seventh Army, V Corps, and 8th Division totally out of the loop.[31]

Engaging and informative, Mahler puts together a memoir telling the insider stories of the Cold War USAREUR and its soldiers. I would recommend it to everyone interested in Cold War military affairs.

Kevin Deye Li is an undergraduate student at The George Washington University, he has two previous publications on Cold War military history and has completed an honor thesis for the history major titled “Soldiers, The City, and The State: The Berlin Problem and The US Military, 1960-1965.”  

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Header Image: Berlin Wall Potsdamer Platz November 1975 Looking East, Berlin, Germany 1975 (Edward Valachovic).

Notes:

[1] Even professional historians often could not escape this intellectual paradigm, see: Jonathan M House, A Military History of the Cold War, 1944–1962 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014). Jonathan M House, A Military History of the Cold War, 1962–1991 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020).

[2] Michael D Mahler, Tales from the Cold War: The U.S. Army in West Germany 1960-1975 (Dahlonega, Georgia: University Press of North Georgia, 2021), Table of Contents.

[3] Ingo Trauschweizer, The Cold War U.S. Army: Building Deterrence for Limited War, Modern War Studies (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2008).

[4] Mahler, Tales from the Cold War, xiii. Andrew J Bacevich, The Pentomic Era: The U. S. Army between Korea and Vietnam (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1986).

[5] Mahler, Tales from the Cold War, chapter 13. John Romjue, The Army of Excellence: The Development of the 1980s Army (Washington D.C.: Office of the Command Historian, United States Army Training and Doctrine Command, 1997).

[6] Deye Li, “Soldiers, the City, and the State: The Berlin Problem and the US Military, 1960-1965” (Undergraduate Honor Thesis, 2022). For a glimpse of the surging tension between deterrence and limited war following the Vietnam War, see: Eric Michael Burke, “Ignoring Failure General DePuy and the Dangers of Interwar Escapism,” Military Review, 2023, 42-57.

[7] The consensus in contemporary philosophy of history is that historical understanding is impossible without a process of creative interpretation. Hayden V White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015). Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 156-9. Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), chapter 1, 3.

[8] Mahler, Tales from the Cold War, 45.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid, 72.

[11] Ibid, 88.

[12] Ibid, 155.

[13] Ingo Trauschweizer, The Cold War U.S. Army.

[14] FM 3-0 Operations (Washington, DC: Headquarters, Department of the Army, 2022), 3–6.

[15] Mahler, Tales from the Cold War, x, 157.

[16] Ibid, 87-96.

[17] Ibid, 132-33.

[18] Ibid, 133, 144-45.

[19] Jasen J Castillo, Endurance and War: The National Sources of Military Cohesion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), chapter 2. Edward A. Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,” Public Opinion Quarterly 12, no. 2 (1948): 280, https://doi.org/10.1086/265951.

[20] Mahler, Tales from the Cold War, 149. This also contributes to the study of gender equality and military effectiveness from the lens of familial relations.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid, 139.

[23] Rex Childers, “Cold Warriors, Good Neighbors, Smart Power: US Army, Berlin, 1961-1994” (Ph.D. dissertation, 2015), 6.

[24] Mahler, Tales from the Cold War, 97-98.

[25] Ibid, 153.

[26] Ibid, 118-20.

[27] Ibid, 116.

[28] Ibid, xii.

[29] Brian McAllister Linn, Elvis’s Army: Cold War GIs and the Atomic Battlefield (Harvard University Press, 2016), 158-59.

[30] Stephen Morillo and Michael F Pavkovic, What Is Military History?, Third Edition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Polity Press, 2018), 39–44.

[31] Mahler, Tales from the Cold War, 64-8.