71–80 of 102 posts
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No? Why do you think that? Ask a Vietnam War veteran, or a Korean War veteran, if they fought any enemy soldiers at any point. War was not declared in those cases either. And these are obviously not soldiers in the first place - they're sailors.
Was there any civilian submarime at that time? I doubt it.
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The phrase "Cold War" isn't without meaning. They were generally deemed to be the enemy by Americans at that time, enough so that Americans were often surprised to learn that Russia and the US were on the same side during WW2. This is how search auto completed my query on the matter: were russia and us allies in ww2 That suggests people are still surprised to learn that and routinely search that question. Americans t…
On the other hand, this operation was contemporaneous with pictures like this: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/467434main_a...
A Russian leader gave a speech where he clasped his hands together above his head, iirc. Americans interpreted it as a threatening gesture suggesting Russia "winning" against America or conquering us. It was interpreted like he was a boxer self congratulating following a win, raising his own hand up in triumph over the enemy.
It was kind of a scandal and only came out later that it was a cultural misunderstanding. It was intended to suggest hands clasped in friendship or reaching out to each other and bridging the distance.
My mother knows some Russian. It was the norm to study Russian in school in East Germany, where she happened to grow up. This interfered with her getting permission to marry my father, an American soldier, because it helped make her a suspicious character who was probably a spy.
> In this post-Cuban Missile Crisis era, both American and Soviet submarines prowled the open seas with nuclear weapons aboard, prepared for potential war. They still do that, no?
As Mitch Hedberg said, "I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too."
two separate Soviet ships (likely loaded with intelligence operatives) closely monitored the supposed mining vessel as it worked to retrieve the submarine. It sounds like they knew exactly what was going on. Tangent: My grandfather was part of a U.S. Navy operation during WWII that was responsible for verifying enemy submarine sinkings ... basically, sending someone down to pick up an artifact that would prove the su…
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No? Why do you think that? Ask a Vietnam War veteran, or a Korean War veteran, if they fought any enemy soldiers at any point. War was not declared in those cases either. And these are obviously not soldiers in the first place - they're sailors.
Was there any civilian submarime at that time? I doubt it.
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I don't find it very spooky. Moving though, considering it's a solemn burial of the bodies of enemy soldiers. And if really it was top-secret, it's not even propaganda. Better times than ours. And how cool is the Soviet anthem?
> Better times than ours. Not sure why it’s necessary to make a slight against our times? Even Osama Bin Laden was given a proper burial at sea, and he wasn’t even a soldier, he was a damn criminal. We didn’t even use photos of his remains for propaganda.
Possibly the coolest and most spooky Cold War artifact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJAJUJ41PBI It's the video on board the Glomar Explorer of a burial at sea ceremony of Soviet sailors found in the half of the submarine they managed to bring to the surface. Supposedly this was Top Secret until a copy was given to Yeltsin in 1991 or so.
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It is actually being scrapped. It arrived at a Chinese scrap yard in 2015.
For years, it was moored in Suisan Bay along with other WW2 vessels. You could see it driving along the bay on 680. I'm not sure what happened to the barge. It went back to Lockheed's facilities in Redwood City for awhile but I don't think it is still there.
Possibly the coolest and most spooky Cold War artifact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJAJUJ41PBI It's the video on board the Glomar Explorer of a burial at sea ceremony of Soviet sailors found in the half of the submarine they managed to bring to the surface. Supposedly this was Top Secret until a copy was given to Yeltsin in 1991 or so.
The speech is so sobering and self-aware. I wish I saw more of this side when I studied the cold war in high school. There was always a bit of, "wow people from the past were so blind and naive."
I remember the first political news, perhaps, that I really remember mattering (and understanding that it mattered) was the fall of the Berlin wall. I mean, I was like nine, so I didn't fully understand why it mattered, but I understood that it did matter.
But, I've always been into history, and I read a lot about it later.
Whenever I read about the period I'm overcome with just how quickly humanity developed restraint.
If we had any war in the second half of the 20th century that was at all like either of the major wars in the first half of the 20th century, humanity would be no more. If we had leaders of major powers in the second half of the 20th century who were as brutal and stupid as the leaders of the first half of the 20th century, we would not exist.
In just a few years, we went from expending all of our power, pouring every last ounce of effort and ingenuity into killing the enemy to the firing of MacAurther.
It's amazing, and really life-afferming in a lot of ways. Whatever you think of human nature, the fact that when faced with the actual choice, our leaders hesitated is huge. They resisted. rationality won out, and we continue to exist in this increasingly unlikely world.
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Really? There were joint operations, they received US lend-lease like Britain, there were regular Arctic convoys to Murmansk and Archangel. Not just food and supply aid, Britain sent well over 1,000 Spitfires and 3,000 Hurricanes, the US over 6,000 P39s and P40s. No end of tanks and other vehicles too, including over 75,000 jeeps. An alliance in every sense - it just wasn't a permanent alliance. Allied even though fe…
> Not just food and supply aid... The whole army and the workers of the most crucial factories had ate almost exclusively a lend-lease food from USA, also after food stock depletion in 1943 Soviet Union increased the demand of food over weaponry to ¼ of supplies' tonnage (that's how my grandmother had a first taste of chocolate at the age of 9). So don't talk like it was "just food", some (due to widely censored docu…
Without it USSR would have probably lost - probably the whole war, certainly Moscow and St Petersburg. Maybe there could have been withdrawal to the Steppes - though the fightback always struck me as unlikely after such a retreat. The food aid, and the hundreds of thousands of trucks, entire divisions using GB, Canadian and US tanks, or squadrons of aircraft. First convoy only weeks after German invasion. Enough that Britain delayed some operations due to lower availability at home. Important enough to both sides, to keep Germany split on two fronts. Without it all it could have taken far longer, or been lost on the Western front too. Liberating Europe would have been that much harder, perhaps impossible.
Then it all went to crap at Yalta, though signs were there from the Anglo-Soviet treaty in 41 with Stalin's wish to stick to the Nazi Molotov-Ribbetropp pact's view of Europe, and its spheres of influence. Which is pretty much exactly what post-war Europe got.