In the spring of 2016, news broke in Japanese politics that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wanted to amend the Japanese Constitution, that is, to change the skin of the so-called "peace constitution". Abe is not trying to overthrow the Constitution, but to erase Chapter II, Article 9, which reads, "Japan renounces its war power and right to belligerency." Abe said this was to make Japan a "normal country," not to wage war.
Since the end of World War II, the Japanese right has been seeking to normalize the military, and the Japanese are very dissatisfied with the double standards of the Americans, because the German Wehrmacht in Europe was revived in the 1950s and became the hegemon of Western Europe, while the Japanese army could only exist as a self-defense force.
Speaking of the destructive power of The Second World War, the Wehrmacht was no less powerful than the Japanese army, and after the end of the Second World War, some of the German army entered the prisoner-of-war camp, some were disbanded in situ, and the generals were also tried, either in prison or retired. But just 10 years after the end of World War II, West Germany established the "Bundeswehr" to provide Americans with a full range of weapons from rifles to aircraft tanks, turning the German army into one of the most powerful armies in Western Europe.
Japan and Germany abolished the army as stipulated in the "Potsdam Proclamation" that year, and the five major powers jointly decided to abolish the German army. Is the reborn Wehrmacht an embroidered pillow or is it really powerful? How many of its combat effectiveness can it rank in Europe?
Chinese said that "the general trend of the world, the combination of long-term will be divided, the division of long-term will be united", in fact, this sentence is not only in China, but also in the whole world is very accurate.
During World War II, the Allied Forces were an organization of more than a dozen countries, with the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union being the backbone, with armies fighting side by side and supplies and weapons shared together. But after the end of World War II, the enemy was gone, and this alliance lost its value of existence, although there was a higher level of United Nations existence, but the ideological confrontation represented by the United States and the Soviet Union could not be avoided.
Just after the end of World War II, US Secretary of State Marshall judged that "the biggest opponent of the United States in the future is the Soviet Union", and the contradiction between capitalism and socialism is difficult to reconcile. At that time, the Soviet Union had occupied Eastern Europe and begun to transform the socialist system, while China and North Korea in Asia had established communist states, and if they were not contained, the Soviet Union would affect the whole world and crush the social systems of Western Europe and North America.
Britain and France were firmly on the side of the United States, and in the late 1940s, the Cold War began. In 1948, East and West Germany were formally separated, and the following year the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed, and the United States began armed confrontation with the Soviet Union.
The front line of the confrontation between the East and the West was in Germany, and the United States wanted the French to serve as the representative of Europe and establish a "NATO army" stationed in Germany to confront the Soviet occupation of East Germany. As soon as the news spread to NATO, astute German politicians sensed that this was an opportunity to loosen Germany's stranglehold, German Chancellor Adenauer expressed support for NATO troops and lobbied between the United States and Britain for West Germany to join the army as an independent.
West Germany itself had a large number of Nazi veterans, and Britain and the United States released many Nazi officers in the 50s, who were able to serve as the backbone of the army after hundreds of battles.
Politicians in Europe quarreled over whether to restore the German army, and many feared a resurgence of Nazi power. But NATO is not a democratic organization, but a military alliance with the United States as the core, Western European countries pointed to the "Marshall Plan" reconstruction, the United States decided that the German army was revived, and the protests of other countries became smaller and smaller.
In 1955, in the midst of the surprise of the world, the Bundeswehr was established. The West German government considered the Wehrmacht to be the name of the German armed forces and did not have a Nazi atmosphere, while many politicians in Europe still believed that West Germany was reviving the Nazis.
After the resurrection of the Wehrmacht, the Soviet Union did not show weakness, the Soviet Union first attacked the United States and Germany through diplomatic means to summon the Nazis, destroyed the Potsdam Proclamation, and then immediately turned around and immediately established the "Warsaw Pact" and established an army in East Germany. The East German army established by the Soviet Union also let Nazi officers lead the retired soldiers, and in the late 50s it pulled up a team of 100,000 people, enough to deal with border conflicts.
But the Soviets did not know that West Germany's ambitions were far greater than they had imagined.
In 1955, the United States formulated military assistance to Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States paid for guns, armed the German army, the initial plan to build an army of 500,000 people, divided into 30 divisions, with the army as the mainstay, the air force as a supplement, and the navy as a temporary stand. The United States is rich and powerful, Marshall has a big hand to allocate $10 billion as military spending, and planes and ships loaded with food, uniforms, weapons and ammunition continue to sail to Europe.
In the 1950s, the Wehrmacht looked almost like the U.S. army, they wore American military uniforms, the main weapons were garland semi-automatic rifles and M1 carbines, if it were not for the Military hat on the head was German-style, outsiders would think it was a U.S. army. In the Air Force, the Americans were very righteous, and the F-2 Banshee fighter, which had just entered service, was deployed in Germany, which was the most advanced jet in the world, in addition to a large number of World War II fighters, bombers, and reconnaissance aircraft entering service in West Germany.
With the money in place and the weapons in place, the expansion of the West German Defense Army was not so smooth, and it was not until 1960 that there were only 250,000 people, only half of the planned number.
The West German government was enthusiastic and confident about the expansion of the army, but they ran into a problem – no one in Germany was a soldier. In World War II, Germany suffered 28 million casualties and lost 8 million lives, of which more than 5 million were soldiers. By the end of the war, the old people and children of Germany had gone to the battlefield, and the strong domestic labor force had been hollowed out.
There were only 50 million people left in Post-War Germany, only 35 million in West Germany after the division of Germany, only one or two million young men aged 20-30, and the number of 500,000 troops was close to wartime level, which was obviously a bit harsh. West Germany had already used policies to promote fertility, but it could not be immediately effective, and later West Germany relaxed the age of conscription, began to implement conscription system in the country, and it took 5 years to complete the original military expansion plan.
In 1966, the Wehrmacht of the Federal Republic of Germany had 440,000 men, almost the same as France to the west, and France expressed disappointment, and de Gaulle believed that the Americans were intent on letting Germany balance themselves. So the following year, de Gaulle decided to withdraw France from NATO's military integration and went it alone. As soon as France left, the West German army had more room to develop, britain was at this time worried about itself, and Germany became the second largest military force in NATO after the United States.
The Army of the West German Army grew in size while growing, reaching its peak in the mid-1970s.
In 1975, the wehrmacht numbered to 500,000, the pinnacle of the West German era.
The German army was mainly based on the Army Field Army, and the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Field Armies were all deployed on the border with East Germany, and the radar was vigilant against East Germany's movements day and night. Each field army of the German army was divided into 5 divisions, 2 of which were armored divisions, equipped with American M47 tanks and M48A2 tanks, with a total of nearly 2,000 vehicles. The field army in the south also had mountain troops and paratrooper units, which were the traditional elite of the Wehrmacht.
The West German Army's fists were not only tank units, they also had more than 7,000 armored vehicles to form a mechanized mobile corps, which could transport tens of thousands of troops to the battlefield in a short period of time and intersperse the enemy when attacking. The tactic was learned by West Germany from East Germany, and as a result, Blue outlined Blue, and West Germany later far outperformed East Germany in the Army.
The Wehrmacht's air force is not as large as the Army, but it is "small and lean". The West German Air Force in the 1970s had more than 500 fighter jets, the main force being the Banshee fighters that entered service in the 50s, and later the latest F4 Ghost fighters and F14 Tomcat fighters in the United States were also equipped. During the Cold War, the air forces of The East and the West and Germany collided many times in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, winning and losing each other. Outside the Germans, the U.S. Air Force had multiple bases in Germany, and American warplanes dominated German airspace as if they were in Japan.
The West German Navy, on the other hand, was lackluster, working only under the NATO framework, equipped with minesweepers, torpedo boats, and submarines to patrol the coastal areas to defend and monitor the movements of the Warsaw Pact Navy.
If only according to the strength of paper, in addition to the right to actively fight, West Germany's army was the hegemon of Europe in the 70s, surpassing France in size, and the level of weapons and equipment and military industry was second only to the United States. But this army was not tested in real war, and no one could answer who was stronger than the West German army compared to East Germany or France.
The West German army took a turning point after the merger of the two Germans in 1989, when hundreds of thousands of KPA troops in East Germany were disbanded on the spot, and the Bundeswehr became Germany's national armed forces. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the Cold War changed Germany's fortunes. Thirty-six years ago, the United States risked the pressure to revive the Wehrmacht in order to use it to defend the Soviet Union, and now that the Soviet Union is gone and Germany is unified, there is no need for a strong German army.
In the 1990s, the German army was directly cut by 370,000 people, leaving more than 100,000 people, and later maintained this size.
Germany's Basic Law stipulates that the German army can only engage in defensive and rescue operations, but the German army is involved in many NATO international operations and is active in various disputed areas of the world. As Germany's central position in Europe strengthens, the German government has been seeking to build an army commensurate with its national strength, which shows that the future German army may further develop and once again stand on the top of Europe.
Text/Shogakuno
Resources: 1. "Did the Normandy landings hit white?" "The Road to West German Army Building in the Shadow of the Nazis," Yan Bin said 2. "How the Federal Republic of Germany Solves the Problem of Shortage of Soldiers in the Army", Xu Jianping