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The Army, during my whole exposure to it, was particularly fond of acronyms, especially three-letter acronyms. My first battery commander once told me to do something with an acronym-filled sentence. Then he paused, grinned, and said, "You know, Lieutenant Forrest, if it weren't for acronyms, it would have taken me five minutes to say that!" One such acronym that has never failed to evoke strong memories in me is GDP.
GDP stands for "general defensive plan". In and of itself, that is not a particularly descriptive phrase, but one whose connotations encompassed life and death for the several tens of thousands of soldiers in USAREUR - U. S. Army Europe. The GDP was, in this context, the plan by which the forward-deployed forces of NATO would absorb the blow of an invasion of West Germany by Warsaw Pact forces. They would gradually fall back from the East-West German Border, commonly referred to as the IZB, or Inter-Zonal Border, to the Rhine River. At this point, we were to hold our position, and would later be reinforced by forces arriving from the United States. This type of maneuver was a large-scale version of what is called a "delay". In a delay, when dealing with small units, a unit trades space for time, attempting to avoid becoming committed to large-scale combat. But, when you are dealing with two Corps, and tens of thousands of soldiers (outnumbered at least three to one by the attackers) avoidance of commitment is impossible and it becomes a grim struggle to avoid annihilation.
Each unit had a precisely designated piece of ground on which it would deploy when an attack appeared imminent. It would then conduct a defense, fall back to a successive position, (and so on) until the stateside units arrived. Armored cavalry regiments, the eyes and ears of the corps, were deployed furthest forward, right on the border. Immediately behind them were the mechanized infantry and armor units, the heavy maneuver forces whose job it was to "close with the enemy and destroy him with fire, maneuver, and shock effect." These units were backed up by field
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