Найти книгу: "An Inoffensive Rearmament"

Colonel Frank Kowalski served as the Chief of Staff of the American military advisory group that helped establish the National Police Reserve, the predecessor to the Japan Self-Defense Forces, and provided daily guidance to it during its first two years of existence. In this book, Kowalski provides, with great care, a detailed account of the manning, logistics, and personalities involved in standing up, on short notice, of a force of approximately 75,000, while sharing insights about the diplomatic, political, legal, and constitutional challenges his headquarters and his Japanese counterparts faced in navigating this new course for Japan in the wake of the sudden outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula in June 1950. In light of these limitations, the path for rearmament had to be slow and “inoffensive” while psychologically and materially contributing to Japan’s defense. His account is balanced, a blend of both criticism and praise, of all of those involved, including himself. Kowalski, who later served in Congress, was a highly intelligent Army officer who was expecting to be deployed to Korea in the summer of 1950, after serving in local military governments in western Japan, when he was tapped for the above secret mission to make a new Japanese army while having to call it a police reserve. An honorable man, he was pained by the subterfuge he and his government, working hand in hand with the Japanese government, had to play in order to establish this needed organization and believes many things were mishandled, but also viewed the “quiet and reasonable approach” of the rearmament program as successful and allowing the NPR to “adequately and effectively” provide for the urgent defense needs of the Japan and the United States, with its quarter million dependents left to fend for themselves in Japan in 1950. Kowalski notes that there has always been a tension in the postwar U.S.-Japan relationship over Japan not doing enough to contribute to the bilateral alliance and international security. This book will not end that debate, but it provides greater context and historical understanding of what factors existed at the time. This is a particularly important topic as Japan is re-examining its defense posture today, both for its own needs as well as to strengthen its still complicated relationship with the United States, its only alliance partner. Written in the mid-1960s, and published in Japanese in 1969, this is the first time this edited book has appeared in English.

At the end of World War II, the Allies were unanimous in their determination to disarm the former aggressor Germany. As the Cold War intensified, however, the decision whether to reverse that policy and to rearm West Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet threat led to disagreements both within the US government and among members of the nascent NATO alliance. The US military took the practical view that a substantial number of German troops would be required to deter any potential Soviet assault. The State Department, on the other hand, initially advocated an alternative strategy of strengthening European institutions but eventually came around to the military’s position that an armed West Germany was preferable to a weak state on the dividing line between the Western democracies and the Soviet satellite states. Sheldon A. Goldberg traces the military, diplomatic, and political threads of postwar policy toward West Germany and provides insights into the inner workings of alliance building and the roles of bureaucrats and military officers as well as those of diplomats and statesmen. He draws on previously unexamined primary sources to construct a cogent account of the political and diplomatic negotiations that led to West Germany’s accession to NATO and the shaping of European order for the next forty years.