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IN 1945, the navy (Kriegsmarine) of the Third Reich was completely destroyed or dismantled by the victorious Allies. Just ten years later, however, a new navy, the Bundesmarine, rose from the ashes in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). Naval rearmament in West Germany was financed largely by the United States, a leading member of the Allied coalition that had emerged from the war committed to the elimination of Germany as a naval power. The story of this about face and of the United States's crucial role in the Bundesmarine's origin and early development is not well known. In Germany, most historians who have written about the Bundesmarine have chosen, mainly for patriotic reasons, to portray it as a largely German creation. In the United States, meanwhile, interest in the Bundesmarine has been almost completely overshadowed by the controversy surrounding the formation of the West German army, or Bundeswehr.1 The aims of this essay are, first, to restore balance to the scholarship on the foundation of the Bundesmarine by highlighting the key contribution of the United States, and second, to use the establishment of the West German navy as a window onto America's immediate postwar strategic and global security concerns.
The perceived threat presented by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics preoccupied western civilian and military chiefs in the immediate postwar period, and by the end of the 1940s the line between East and West had been drawn. From the West's perspective, the conventional military balance heavily favored the communist Soviet Union.2 U.S. atomic superiority, however, seemed an adequate deterrent to Soviet aggression. Shattering the West's faith in the U.S. nuclear shield, communist North Korean forces crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and attacked South Korea on 25 June 1950. The idea of a West German contribution to the defense of Western Europe had been bandied about since 1947, but the "hot war" in Asia proved pivotal to the Federal Republic's remilitarization. Fearing the Soviet Union would exploit the diversion of U.S. manpower and resources to the Korean peninsula to launch an offensive against Western Europe (or to utilize East Germany's nascent People's Police to occupy the Federal Republic by proxy), the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and Allied military experts concurred that the...