American Rifle - Alexander Rose [169]
The M14
Chapter 10
THE GREAT
BLUNDERBUSS BUNGLE
Following Nazi Germany’s surrender in the spring of 1945 Europe was a wasteland, a madhouse, a morgue. Aside from the tens of millions dead, 60 million people belonging to fifty-five different ethnic groups had been either uprooted or turned into refugees; coal production was less than half its prewar level; and a quarter of Europe’s farmland lay fallow. Entire cities had been firebombed, and whole communities annihilated. Almost every country, from Albania to Norway, had been invaded and occupied, some twice. Their harbors were jammed with sunken vessels, their bridges sundered, their roads cratered.
Europe was no longer “Europe.” It had been divided between the United States and Stalin’s Soviet Union and was counted as either ours or theirs. Europeans swore to heal forever the bitter divisions that had caused the war—France and Germany alone had fought each other three times in less than a century. Never again must that happen, they resolved, especially in a nuclear age, when the consequences of a fourth war would be devastating.
The seeds of European union, of what Churchill called in 1946 “a kind of United States of Europe,” were sown in the immediate postwar years. In 1949 the Council of Europe came into being, followed a year later by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights, and then came the pooling of coal and steel production, the European Economic Community, and the European Atomic Energy Community.
All these efforts to bind together former adversaries were taken with Washington’s blessing and encouragement. As guarantor of European peace, the United States’ interest lay in unifying the Western nations to blunt Communist expansion. To that end, it created the Marshall Plan in June 1947. The concept was simple: send sufficient supplies and donate enough money to allow Europe to recover and stand on her own two feet. Greece at the time was suffering a Communist insurgency, and the Soviets were pressuring Turkey to allow them free passage through the Dardanelles; if Europe remained bankrupt and stricken, the likelihood of Red gains, be they electoral, military, or terroristic, increased. On July 12 the representatives of sixteen European nations convened to accept the Americans’ generosity. Amounting to five percent of the U.S. national income, some $13.5 billion in grants and credits, plus another $500 million in private gifts, flowed across the Atlantic from 1948 onward. The Marshall Plan was such a success that by 1951 European industrial production was 43 percent higher than it had been before the war. The recipients of the largesse mostly abjured the extremes of free-market capitalism and state-controlled Communism in favor of a regulated form of economic “planning” in which private enterprise coexisted with public welfarism. As the European economies stabilized, popular support for aggressively radical leftist and rightist parties subsided, and Continental voters turned instead to the consensus-seeking, moderate politics exemplified by Christian Democrat (for the conservatively inclined) and Social Democrat (for the liberally inclined) parties.
Just as trans-European politics and economics centered on the common middle, so too did the shibboleth of “commonality” affect the military. The term referred to the international standardization of armaments, so that a Soviet thrust into West Germany could be parried without having to worry about whether one country’s weaponry would be compatible with the others’.
On April 4, 1949, when twelve countries (eventually joined by Greece, Turkey, West Germany, and Spain) signed the collective defense agreement known as the North Atlantic Treaty, arms standardization was high on the agenda. Owing to wartime commitments, geography, imperial obligations, and long-standing historical tradition, cooperation was particularly close between the English-speaking,