Introduction

Abstract

The Paris Agreements of October 1954 saw Britain’s ‘formal acceptance of a large-scale, peacetime military presence on the Continent’.² Four army divisions and one tactical air force were committed to NATO’s conventional defence of West Germany and Europe. For almost forty years, until the end of the Cold War, the peacetime deployment in Germany, and the prospect of conventional war on the Central Front, dominated operational and tactical thinking and equipment procurement, in both the British Army and the Royal Air Force (RAF). Britain’s 1954 commitment figures prominently in writing on the development of the West’s strategy during the Cold War, as a means both to counter-balance German rearmament and to allay French fears, and to ensure that NATO became the West’s main defence institution. The 1954 commitment also has some celebrity in the history of British strategy. The commitment was untypically bold and unequivocal, earning its description as ‘the one really substantial, firm contractual commitment in Britain’s postwar defence experience’.³ The 1954 decision also represents, for some, a departure from a largely naval strategic tradition in Britain, a tradition which meant detachment from the Continent in peacetime and reluctance to become involved in wars there. Yet British strategy has never been a clear choice between discrete options — ‘naval’ versus ‘continental’.

‘We should be mad to entangle ourselves in a continental strife on land. Our medium is the ocean way.’

Eshert¹