British Army of the Rhine

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The term British Army of the Rhine (English: British Army of the Rhine , BAOR for short) was used for the British occupation forces in Germany after the First and Second World Wars . Especially after the Second World War, the term Rhine Garrison ( Rhine garrison) was used.

history

After the First World War

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From 1919 to 1930, British occupation troops were in the Rhineland according to the provisions of the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919 .

The Rhine Army established in March 1919 under Field Marshal William Robertson, 1st Baronet , was formed from the following units:

II. Corps : Lieutenant General Claud Jacob

IV. Corps : Lieutenant General Alexander Godley

  • Lowland Division (formed from the 9th Division)
  • Highland Division (formed from the 62nd Division)

VI. Corps : Lieutenant General Aylmer Haldane

  • Northern Division (formed from the 3rd Division )
  • London Division (formed from the 41st Division)

IX. Corps : Lieutenant General Walter Braithwaite , later Ivor Maxse

  • Western Division (formed from the 1st Division)
  • Midland Division (formed from the 6th Division)

X. Corps : Lieutenant General Thomas Morland

  • Lancashire Division (formed from the 32nd Division)
  • Eastern Division (formed from the 34th Division)
  • Cavalry Division (formed from the 1st Cavalry Division)

Commander-in-Chief of the Rhine Army 1919–1930

Commander-in-Chief

After the Second World War

The BAOR, which was formed from the 21st Army Group in the British occupation zone from August 1945 , was dissolved after the end of the Cold War on March 31, 1994 and parts of the troop units were renamed British Forces Germany (BFG). It had its headquarters from May 1945 to 1954 in Bad Oeynhausen , then in JHQ Rheindahlen in the west of Mönchengladbach .

The original tasks of the BAOR included the support of the British military government in the British occupation zone as well as the control and administration of the other British units stationed in Germany.

The Norwegian Germany Brigade , which existed from 1947 to 1953, was assigned to the British Army of the Rhine.

Until the establishment of the German Bundeswehr at the end of the 1950s (“ rearmament ”), the BAOR formed the main pillar of the transatlantic defense organization against the Warsaw Pact in northern Germany within NATO . In 1954, the BAOR, in which conscripts under the National Service served until 1960, comprised 102,000 soldiers. In the fall of 1954, the preparation of the British armed forces for a possible nuclear war began with the NATO maneuver Battle Royal . In a time of great British budget and currency problems, the strength of the BAOR leveled off by the early 1960s to a long-term target strength of around 50,000 men, which was aimed at in the deployment obligation of 1954 .

In 1971 the Federal Republic of Germany and Great Britain signed a five-year contract on financial aid for the British Army on the Rhine. According to this, the Federal Republic paid about 100 million DM annually within the framework of the foreign exchange equalization agreement .

From the ranks of the later BFG were u. a. also deployed units for KFOR , SFOR , ISAF as well as the Second Gulf War , the Iraq War and Northern Ireland .

Towards the end of the Cold War in 1989/90, the BAOR comprised the following associations:

In 1994 the British Army on the Rhine was transferred to the British Armed Forces in Germany .

Commander-in-chief of the Rhine Army 1945–1994

Trivia

As early as July 29, 1945, the British armed forces started their own radio program in Germany as the British Forces Network (BFN), which - from 1964 as the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS) - is still on the air today.

Between 1952 and 2002, the Rhine Army Summer Show (RASS) took place at Bad Lippspringe airfield, usually over Whitsun . The result of a horse show developed into a large German-British summer festival with military demonstrations by the British Army and the Royal Air Force , in particular their Red Arrows , a German fair, a trade exhibition with German and British exhibitors, both commercial and non-profit, and Open air concerts.

The children of BFG members who were born in Germany are counted as immigrants when they return to the United Kingdom, as British statistics are based on the characteristic foreign-born (born abroad) and not their British citizenship.

See also

literature

  • Olaf Mager: The stationing of the British Army on the Rhine - Great Britain's EVG alternative (= Nomos university publications. Politics. Vol. 3). Nomos-Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 1990, ISBN 3-7890-1970-4 (also: Konstanz, University, dissertation, 1989).
  • Michael Foley: The British Army of the Rhine after the First World War . Fonthill Media 2017, ISBN 978-1-78155-564-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Der Spiegel 9/1971: Paid in cash
  2. ↑ BAOR July 1989 ( memento from December 19, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) accessed on December 19, 2014
  3. ↑ Jürgen Balke: History of the Rhine Army Summer Show (RASS) [1]