Word: bundeswehr
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Near Giessen in Hesse, the first West German battalions equipped with Honest John missiles were in training last week, one impressive indication that the slow-starting Bundeswehr is at last getting going. A new urgency in the planning suggests that dynamic Defense Minister Franz-Josef Strauss (now on an inspection tour of the U.S.) is well aware that any summit agreement to freeze armaments in central Europe would leave West Germany in the cold...
...West Germany is scheduled to have the West's toughest and most modern fighting force in Europe. The 350,000-man Bundeswehr will include a twelve-division army, a small navy, and a 1,300-plane air force built around the speedy (Mach 2) Lockheed F-104 Starfighter...
Slow Start. At the moment, such a Bundeswehr is still a long way off. The twelve divisions exist largely on paper. Even the seven "combat ready'' divisions transferred to NATO during the past two years are training groups through which thousands of raw recruits pass annually, later to be peeled off as cadres for other divisions. Of the total planned strength of 200,000 men, the army today has only 123,000. Of the 2,500 pilots the new Luftwaffe will need, only 650 are trained, and new pilots are qualifying at the rate of only...
...week, laying the cornerstone of a German West Point in Hamburg to train future officers of the leadership staff, Defense Minister Strauss decided to put in a good word for the old blood-and-iron ways. "Free of false prejudice and erroneous ideas of collective guilt," said he, "our Bundeswehr can now assume a new attitude toward the tradition. German soldiers need not be ashamed of this tradition. Follow the ageless tradition and the old ideals-selfless service, honor and bravery, linked to the needs of our time...
...thin, balding man who walked into the Defense Ministry at Bonn was exactly what the new Bundeswehr wanted. He introduced himself as Herr Doktor Robert Schneider with degrees in medicine, philosophy, psychiatry and law. Unmarried and with a lucrative psychiatric practice in the city of Goslar, Schneider nevertheless wanted to become an army medical officer. "This will mean a personal sacri fice, but money has never been a part of my life," he said nobly. "One must have ideals...