![]() ![]() ![]() Other crisis of the Cold War, now mainly forgotten, included the shooting down or the unarmed American U-2 long range reconnaissance aircraft flown by Gary Powers, and the 1983 shooting down of a South Korean airliner with over 240 passengers aboard which, according to the Soviets, violated their air space in the North Pacific. Luckily, they did, for the United States had contingency plans to strike Cuba, an act which could have lit the fuse of global war. President Kennedy ordered Soviet ships carrying missiles on their decks to turn back. The World watched with fear as American and allied forces, including Canadians, moved to high alert status. In 1962, the Soviet Union attempted to deliver and install medium range ballistic missiles in Cuba, resulting in the well known "Cuban Missile Crisis". ![]() The same year, 1961, in order to stop embarrassing defections, the East Germans started to build the Berlin Wall. This resulted in the Western Allies going to maximum readiness. Later, in 1960, the Soviets and East Germans attempted to squeeze off allied air access to Berlin. The two million people of West Berlin nearly starved and froze, but they determinedly survived until the Bloc backed down. This resulted in the Berlin Airlift where hundreds of American transport aircraft flew round the clock, in good and bad weather, delivering food and heating coal to three airfields located behind the Iron Curtain in West Berlin. In 1948, to test the determination of the Western Allies, the Soviets, with East German support, blockaded road, railway and canal access to Berlin. The Soviet Navy was no match for the combined capability of the USA, UK and France, but it had the world's largest fleet of long range submarines, most nuclear powered, and many with ballistic and cruise missiles aimed at targets in North America.Ĭhurchill's "Cold War," as he called it in 1946, soon heated up. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the World's first intercontinental ballistic missiles, later, hardening their launch sites and equipping them with multiple war heads. In the other satellite countries, initially, there were only indigenous armed forces, but in several cases the Soviets moved in, distrusting an increasingly reluctant ally.įurther east in Russia, Belorussia and the Ukraine the Soviet Long Range Air Force was activated, first with four engine piston aircraft, copies of the US B-29 Super Fortress, and later with modern jet engine long range bombers capable of launching thermal nuclear bombs and missiles against targets in North America. Behind the border, 47 airfields were established, equipped, first with MIG-15 and MIG-17s, and later with supersonic MIG-21s and other aircraft presumed capable of carrying nuclear bombs. In East Germany the Group of Soviet Forces numbered some 340,000 troops its strongest formation, the First Guards Army, dug in its modernized tanks and artillery just a few kilometres from the border with West Germany. Instead of de-mobilizing, like the allied powers, the Soviet Union and its partners maintained conscription, establishing large, strong armies and air forces which threatened Western Europe and North America. ![]() In 1945, as the war was ending, the Soviet Union gained control over the Baltic States, already occupied East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, creating what was first known as the "Soviet Bloc" and later "the Warsaw Pact". As Winston Churchill said in 1946, just as the World was looking for lasting peace at the end of the Second World War, "An Iron Curtain has fallen across Central Europe." The communist Soviet Union, which had been an ally of Great Britain, the United States, Canada and other nations as they fought against Nazi Germany, had ulterior motives. ![]()
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