COLD WAR STORIES
AN AMERICAN B-47 PILOT’S FIRST EXPERIENCE OF ENGLAND: 1958
This was my first morning on ‘Alert’ in Reflex. We all trooped into the briefing room, cold and shocked at our first experience of English winter frost. We sat shivering, with the one coke heater pushing out no heat at all.
After the briefing, when we left the hut, we gasped. The clear, fresh, freezing morning had been replaced by a dark, damp, thick fog. Disembodied trees hung in the air and strangely unfocused voices floated from somewhere.
We started out in search of our ‘plane. But we couldn’t find it. We hadn’t counted the turn-off lines, had no idea where she was, waiting.
We stopped our van to listen. Only the blood in our ears. No other sound. It was as though the earth had been swallowed up, leaving us hanging in space. We called out, but our voices were swallowed by the thick air.
Then, out of the dimness, came a shape. A moving van. Another crew lost in the gloom.
We, who commanded the lightning, couldn't even find ourselves......
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A BRITISH SERVICEMAN DESCRIBES WITNESSES A NUCLEAR TEST: Christmas Island, 1957
While we are waiting for the explosion, no-one knows what to expect. Then the tannoy begins counting down the time. 20 minutes.We talk loudly. 10 minutes. The talking grows louder. Five minutes....
Then we spot her. "There she is!" A lone Valiant picks her way across the expectant sky. The tannoy tells us "The bomb has left the aircraft".
Suddenly it seems as though she is right above us. My God....has she dropped the bomb right over us? My heart lurches.
3 minutes. Then we see it: a little poisoned dart floating downwards, banking away from us. Thank God.
One minute.......suddenly everyone is cracking hysterical jokes....... 30 seconds....We are told, three times, our backs must be turned and our glasses worn.
20 seconds. One of our officers--the strongest man I know--suddenly begins gasping for breath. I tear off my glasses. Don’t trust their flimsy lenses. Put my hands over my eyes. Sudden silence now.
Three, two, one. Hot iron on my neck. My body feels as though it’s burning. I see the bones in my hands.
Two, three, four....The blast shakes the island. Then another roar, like God sucking his breath back in.
"Attention all personnel. You may now turn around. Your glasses must be worn...." I turn round and see....a second sun, hanging in the sky, and then the mushroom cloud climbs towards the real sun and blots it out.
Two little pinpricks thread their way into the cloud. Aircraft recording the radiation. The sea is boiling.
After a while I turn away from this cloud and look at the sea, now white with fish, burned and boiled, some still half-alive.
Then I look up. The frigate birds, whose island this was, are crying, screaming, blinded. One falls screaming at my feet. I have to kill it. But my heart rises in pity for this poor craving creature.
When the final war comes, as I now believe it must, will someone stamp the life from me?
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THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS, 1962: A Soviet sailor on board one of the ships carrying materials heading towards Cuba and the naval blockade set up by the USA........
Despite the secrecy of the whole exercise, one morning I managed to get up on deck. The air was silent, and the sun was just rising above a purple mist. Everything was peaceful. It was paradise. And yet here we were, approaching the cordon of ships set up by the Americans. We had no idea what was going to happen. Would we sail on and try to run the blockade? What would the orders from Moscow be?
If we sailed on, I was sure the Americans would try to stop us. And if they fired on us we would fire back. My greatest fear was that they would try to board us. We could not allow that. We would fight, all of us, to defend our county’s honour. And if we fought, we knew there would be war.
I looked towards the sparkling horizon. I knew that our fate lay there, in the place where we would meet with the Americans. And, despite the silence of the morning, that place tried to speak to me. I tried so hard to hear what it was saying to me. But I could not hear. Was it warning me that this day, despite the silent beauty of this golden morning, the end of the world would come?
Suddenly I had a tremendous feeling of being at the central moment in the history of the world. This was the day when the answer would come, whatever that answer was.
I couldn’t help thinking: if there is a world war, and if any people survive it, how will their children, in the distant future, think of us? And how much will they understand of why we are doing this? Is there any way in which they will ever understand what we are about to do? Suddenly my heart grew cold, I shivered and went below deck.
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Here an Englishman who was 11 at the time of the Crisis recalls how he felt......
I liked my teacher, and because I knew her well, I could read the tension in everything she did. Like most of the other adults I knew, she was putting a brave face on things. I knew she was afraid but trying to keep her fear from us.
I remember looking out of the window where I was sitting. Outside a red bus splashed through a shower of rain. It is fixed in my memory: I knew it was heading into the town. But the thought came to me: would it even get there? I watched the boys from the secondary school, which finished earlier than we did, walking past. One of them pulled his blazer around him. He was cold. So was I....
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These are just four of the many recollections of the Cold War in our book, COLD WAR VOICES.
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