Foreign News: Smoke & No Fire

Military men and politicians had known all along that plans for Western Europe's defense made no sense unless they included a West German army. By last week Winston Churchill, Dean Acheson, U.S. High Commissioner John McCloy and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had publicly indicated that some degree of German rearmament was in the cards. But despite all these wisps of smoke, there was no fire.

The North Atlantic Treaty deputies in London (see above) carefully avoided the subject. The Allied high commissioners in Germany had also kept it off their agenda. Result: when the Big Three Foreign Ministers meet in New York this month, they will not even have joint preliminary studies on which to base their discussions. While U.S. authorities in Germany avoid all talk about a German army, the more realistic British and French have wined & dined German generals.

Last week German Socialist Leader Kurt Schumacher, who in the past had been loudly against rearmament, came out for it "in principle," but added some whopping conditions. Chief among them: more U.S. and British troops in Germany or, as he put it, "a monumental Western military might along the Elbe."

For the present and, apparently, for a long time to come, the only Western forces on the Elbe would be seven Allied divisions on occupation duty and about 100,000 state and local German policemen armed with clubs and non-automatic revolvers.