Cold War Experiences

[RN7]

Has anybody ever had any real Cold War experiences, either through the military or by travelling across the Iron Curtain?

My only claim to one was when I travelled as part of my highschool on a ten day trip to the Soviet Union in the mid-1980's. We travelled from Shannon Airport in Ireland to Leningrad, then down to the Crimean Peninsula and back up to Moscow over those ten days. It was an amazing experience for a 17 year old, and I saw all the best and worst of the Soviets when I was there.

Saw all the major attractions and met some genuinely nice Russians, as well as the dodgy ones who wanted to sell you booze or buy your clothes or any western gizmos you had on the street or in the hotel. Seen plenty of military parades and men in uniform, even black African soldiers on training seminars. I saw tanks, fighter jets and bombers lined up by the dozen at airports and in the air bases that we passed over in our airplane. I seen the ballet, food queues, propaganda posters, minders who were paid to follow westerners around, and women window cleaners ten stories up in the middle of winter. I saw very friendly looking young soldiers who didn't seem to want to be in the army, and nasty customs officials who liked to throw their weight around to both western and east block tourists to the USSR. I also found out very quickly that the Russian Rouble was worthless to the Russians who wanted Dollars, Deutchmarks or Sterling for everything you bought, and that the Russians were fundamentally very un-communist.

Two experiences really unnerved me however. The first was on the Aeroflot airliner that we boarded in Ireland which had come from Cuba and had to refuel at the time in Ireland as their airliners hadn't the range to fly trans-Atlantic at the time. As we flew to Leningrad we kept flying over NATO airbases. The first was over the east coast of England were we flew over an RAF base, and shortly afterwards over the North Sea an RAF Tornado buzzed us so closely that I could see the pilot and missiles on its wings before it tailed off at high speed. We flew over another air base in Germany or Denmark and the same thing happed as we began to cross the Baltic, although the fighter jet didn't come as close as the RAF Tornado had so I wasn't sure if it was German, Danish or American.

The second experience was when we landed in Moscow towards the end of our trip. As we disembarked we saw that our aircraft was surrounded by hundreds of armed and ferocious looking soldiers lined up on the tarmac. I think they were paratroops and I could see transport aircraft nearbye and I suppose they were on their way to Afghanistan. It was fairly intimidating and sort of put our easy life in the west into perspective.

[Adm.Lee]

Neat idea, I'll share. I studied Russian in high school and college (where I found out that I hadn't learned all that much in high school), and our high-school class took a package tour of the Soviet Union in April 1986. I think we flew in from Helsinki, (after dark?) so I didn't get to see anything in the air. I remember we had to fly out through Turku, thanks to an airport strike in Helsinki.

We saw lots of sights in Moscow and Leningrad, taking the night train between the two of them. Hardly any were military, mostly historical. I thought briefly about jumping out of the bus when I saw we were passing the Red Army Artillery Museum in Leningrad. I think I only saw uniforms (other than the street cops and passport-stampers) when we wandered Gorky(?) Park on a Sunday.

I didn't talk to hardly any Russians, as we were sticking to our tour group like glue, and I'm naturally shy. Quite a few hit up one of my pals to buy his blue jeans, but they ignored me. At some museum in Leningrad, we were shown a song & dance by a high school, with some chance to mingle. I couldn't/didn't, as the the music was far too loud and I had to flee the room with a splitting headache.

We saw new buildings and old. We noted that there weren't many pretty girls-- we were 17 or 18, from an all-boys' school, believe me, we were looking for them! Nearly everyone on the street seemed serious and their clothes were drab-colored.

I don't remember seeing any minders, or really looking for them. We did aim some comments at the "sprinkler heads" in our hotel rooms.

****
After that, one of my pals (different school, not on that trip) joined the Army, trained in MI, and went to Berlin. My then-fiancee and I visited him and his wife in January 1991. This was after the Wall came down, so we got to wander the East some days. I saw some memorials (the Soviet WW2 memorial, for instance), some ruins, and one last piece of the Wall. It was also during the air half of the Gulf War, so there was a lot of jumpy security and we stayed away from the Berlin Brigade posts. I bought a Soviet-style helmet at an open-air market, as a souvenir.

I guess my big memory there was getting sloshed at Green Week, sort of a European-wide State Fair to display agricultural products. Like beer, beer, more beer, Calvados, wine, schnapps and some orange-based stuff from Israel.

[Rainbow Six]

Whilst this isn't a Cold War experience per se, a mate and I went on a trip to mainland China from Hong Kong a few years ago. There were eight of us on the tour and by the time we'd got halfway through we had six "guides" - we started with three and the others joined as we went along (and were introduced as "trainees". Two were legit (one had come with us all the way from HK) but I'm pretty sure the other four were minders (although I never did work out whether they were to stop the locals bothering us or stop us talking to them - I suspect it was probably a bit of both).

I can only recall seeing one person in uniform (other than the border officials). He looked like some sort of policeman and was standing guard outside some sort of public building. He was wearing a green uniform that looked to be at least one size too big for him and he was armed with some sort of pistol in a large brown leather holster.

We did see plenty of propaganda posters, especially in and around Shenzen. Quite a lot of them were in English - I wish I could remember the slogans.

[jturfitt]

Back in 1977-78 when I was working Air Evac out of the Phillipines, we used to fly into Taiwan on a regular basis. When you landed the plane was parked in a red circle along with every other plane at the airfield. A guard with a rifle would come out and stand guard at the circle. We were warned to walk around all the circles because the guard would give you one warning in chinese and then was allowed to open fire.

[RN7]

Hi Admiral Lee, you seem to have had similar experiences to me and I was also there in 1986, just a bit later in the year in October.

I also remember the drab clothing people wore and how grey everything looked. The food was also awful, I'm amazed at how healthy some Russians looked if they had to eat what we got served in our hotel every day. It was realy like being in a time warp and there were also no shops in our sence of the word, just the odd building with queues outside and I think they still had rations.

I actually saw quite a few pretty girls, one was our tour guide in Leningrad who looked like a model, and some of the uniformed women we saw were very pleasant on the eye. I never got to speak with any of them however as almost everyone in the hotels we stayed in were either western or foreign in some fashion. I found most Russians to be very polite and well mannered, except for the odd dodgy one trying to hussle us. Some were also very shy and even fightened of us. In Moscow we got a bit lost and tried to ask peope for directions and a lot of people would just shun us or even run from us. I guess 80's fahsion was a bit scary

There were a few Russian people who stand out in my mind from then. The first was a friendly school teacher from somewhere in Central Asia who with her party struck up a conversation with us at Lenin's Tomb. She tought we were from Britain, which amused all us Irish and then she gave us some Soviet friendship badges. We later met two deaf teenage Russian boys on the Moscow underground who wanted to know were we came from. So we wrote it down but their alphabet is different to ours so I don't know if they ever found out.

Another was the 70 year old war veteran we met at some big war memorial park in the Crimea. He had more medals on his chest than most generals and let us take our picture with him. He thought we were Americans and kept laughing and talking about cowboys and 20's gangsters from Chicago!

The tour guide we had in the Crimea was very memorable. He was very chique and well dressed and could speak five languages and looked the spitting image of the English actor Michael York. Some of us thought he was gay, but he was far from it as he kept going on about all the different girlfiends he had in many different countries. Amazingly for a Russian at that time he seemed to have visited almost every country in Western Europe as well as America and parts of Latin America. I think he had a colourful and not entirely legitimate past.

Our minders that we noticed in the Crimea were also fairly memorable. They were Middle Eastern looking with Sadam Hussain moustaches and they kept popping up were ever we went. On the coach back to the airport we saw them following us in a car behind, so after getting mooned a half dozen times they overtook us and we never saw them again.

The best of all though was the Soviet officer who got his hat knocked off with a snowball as he was walking across Red Square towards the Kremlin. I don't know what rank he was but it was certainly close to a general. He went absolutely ballistic and although it wasn't me who threw the snowball I felt very worried. Luckly the younger officer with him saw the funny side of it and calmed him down.

[dvyws]

Hmmm, had a birthday on a cargo ship in Gydinia, Poland, back in 1978, loading bags of cement for the Persian Gulf. We should have sailed the day before, but the Poles had managed to lose a train load, and t didn't turn up for a week...

Anyway, the ship was the comnpany's cadet training ship, and therewere 24 of us on board. Being a Glasgow based company, with a primarily Scottish crew, my job for the day was to stay in the cadets bar and strive for oblivion. The other 23 were rotated throughthe bar all day, cos "ye cannae drink alone, laddie". So by mid afternoon, I was feeling no pain, or much of anything else, to be honest.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, my parents had sent me a happy birthday telegram. As the ship was in port, this couldn't be picked up by the ships radio equipment, so it was sent via the local agent. They obviously were under instructions to have all communications vetted by the local police, and "Happy Birthday, son, have a great day" is obviously a code, right?

So, two tough looking guys came onboard, demanding to see the ship's Master, and, on being introduced to him produced the message and asked to interview me. They were brought down to the cadet's bar and I was pointed out (I have no memory of this, I believe I had slid under a table at the time...). They more or less accepted that there was no secret code at this point, I was subsequently told.

Being a Scottish crewed ship,they were offered a drink, which of course they accepted. I'm told they left around 9pm (ish) - but they took my telegram with them, so a uniformed policeman re-delivered it to the ship the next day...

We were in Gydinia for a month, and it was a nice place - we had a trip round to Gdansk va Sopot, and I vaguely remember an impressive cathedral, whose organ was apparently of some note. Everyone was very friendly, and it was one of not too many places I've been where you were welcomed simply for being British.

I went back a couple of times, on other ships - the visits were less memorable, but I can actually remember them!

[Rainbow Six]

LOL...dvyws, you're surely not suggesting that we Scots like a wee tipple?

[mikeo80]

I was 9 yrs old in 1962. I remember President Kennedy's speech on Cuba. My parents started to build a small shelter in the basement of our house. We lived about 15+/- miles from Philadelphia, Pa.

The worst never happened, of course. Which is for the best, the shelter was never more than 30 - 50 % complete. (Depends on definition of complete )

But we always maintained about two - three weeks of canned food at all times.

SO I didn't need TMP or T2K to help me on the way to prepairedness. I was corrupted (?) at an early age.

Mike

[jester]

We were operating on an island in the Pacific/Indian Ocean. While on patrol we found a trail and followed it. We found batteries in cyrilic far from the ocean <not that batteries float> The area was noted and reported to intel.

We were on convoy from point A to point B and saw Soviet aircraft tracking us.

On patrol in an Asian area we were being followed and disapeared into the darkness of the jungle. We formed a perimeter and prepared for engagement with KABARs and E-tools, we had no rounds and the area was known for insurgent activity. Needless to say, we aquired a magazines worth of ammo on the blackmarket later for future operations.

While conducting training exercises while off loading from ship and swimming ashore we observed guerillas observing us complete with AKs. We landed with assorted cutlery ready to defend. It was our only operational weapon at the time.

While on convoy we spotted and watched a unknown submarine periscope track our convoy taking turns watching it from the deck until it got boring and we watched the ships movie of the night...the same one that had been playing all week.

I'm sure I will remember more later.

[pmulcahy11b]

I remember in Kindergarten, 1st Grade, and 2nd Grade doing nuclear weapon drills. You just duck under your desk or against a wall, and cover your head and keep your mouth open. Lewis Black does a great bit about these types of drills; if you ever get to hear his "analysis" of these drills, it's priceless.

And, of course, in Korea we practiced reactions to an attack from the North, though the procedures we used were not really the procedures we would have used in real life. 1-4 drills per month. Working at G-3, I always knew when the drills were scheduled, unless they were called by 8th Army. In reality, the first sign of attack would probably have been 122mm rockets hitting the compound.