Anyone here alive in the 195o's?

In Europe we call it the cold war. It could only be a 3rd WW if there had been a fighting war and there was not. There were wars all over but not one single one including the whole world in one war.

I do not have a feeling of it was a decade of paranoia in Scandinavia nor the rest of Europe. Some people might have lived in a state of fear all the time - but they always excist.
Of course the fear was higher the closer you lived to the eastern Europe´s border.
When the Korean War broke out there was fear. I know that the Swedish military were not allowed to leave the barracks for a few days(?)
Uproars like in Germany and Hungary or Tcheckoslowakei of course caused fear.

That statement is ignorant of the communist war to conquer and enslave the Earth,
conceived by Karl Marx. The 3rd World War included multiple "fighting wars". Maybe u were not paying attention.



It was a long, on-going effort to enslave the world. Some of the fighting was violent.
Some of the fighting was quieter, e.g., the activities of the NKVD, GRU or the KGB.





David

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. We rode the subways and enjoyed the nonworking fans and the straw seats. While waiting for the train, my father often took a penny or two from his pocket and bought a few little packages (2 pieces each) of Chiclets gum from the vending box attached to the support column by the platform edge. My biggest fear was the moving platforms at a few stations which occasionally jammed or other ways malfunctioned.

In New York City, when there, we had comical air raid drills where we heard the 2 or 3 clanging bells, lined up, headed into the hallway and stood there until there was 1 clang to indicate the drill was over. In the 4th grade, we were on the top floor and the drill changed to lining up, heading into the hall and then down a flight to the next floor where we stood in the hallway with the students from that floor. Much like fire drills, I figured if anything real ever happened we'd all be dead. In the 8th grade I was proven wrong as we had a fire at the school during school hours and we all escaped unharmed. The fire was in the library which is probably why nobody got hurt...until then we hadn't even known the school had a library.

Never once did we hide under our desks. If bombs had come in, we would have been roasted rather quickly so it was silly to go anywhere.

In Vermont, I can't recall us ever having these ludicrous air raid drills. It was Vermont after all and we probably didn't merit such a luxury.

The Cold War was all about the terrible Commies and how they were going to destroy us. Mainly the Russians were the big bad guys. There were other Commies, but the Russians were our biggest worry since they had a zillion missiles aimed at us and they hated us for being such a great country.

It wasn't discussed at home, any of the places I lived and it wasn't really discussed in school other than a 10 minute sermon each year by a teacher and even worse, by the principal and most years some mucky muck in the auditorium. The mucky muck was usually a military sort telling us how grand the military was and why when we were older we should all do our part and enlist. About then, Vietnam got going and the idea of enlisting seemed rather absurd. It made more sense to wait and get drafted and then hide in Canada.

In any event, I had no desire to get shot and killed. Mercifully, I was never drafted (at least not legitimately). I admired those who did serve and was grateful for their service, whether draftee or enlistee or a military school sort.

The Cold War continued along in through the 1980s in some form, until the Soviet Union fell apart. I never really had any fear of it. Essentially, the Cold War was just like any other time. Some people were a-scared and some were not.

I think that the Cold War lasted until the late 1980's.

Since I live just some dozen miles from the "frontline" and since I was a child in the 50's, a soldier conscript, national service) later ... well, I know a bit about that time as well.

In 1970, we had to look at all ships from the "Eastern Bloc" leaving the Baltic Sea.
Due to some stupid reason, I'd got a rather high security clearance ... and thus got some "secret" documents, which helped me to identify those ships - I had to photograph them, decode all the infos on a paper tape ...

Our boat was going with a speed of less than 4 knots north of the island of Fehmarn .... 6 miles eastward, then back again, then eastwards again, then ...
The East did the same - during those four weeks I've done that, the East german navy was "on duty".
However, they just anchored most of the time.

We changed boats any 24 hours, they did the same.

In one foggy night, I noticed on the radar that they seemed to change earlier than usually.
So we had to approach them ... quite close, to read their ID-number.
Officially, in such a case, the guns had to be manned, everyone on the bridge had to carry a weapon ...
But after a short discussion with the officers, our captain accepted my information that on that other boat the crew mainly was conscripted (they had to do three years instead of our 18 months, though), that they were as nervous as we were ... and since we didn't want to start the 3rd world war, I wrote in the log that we the guns were ready to fire and weapons were ready.

I sweated a lot to calculate that we didn't enter the 3-mile-zone ("by hand", there was no GPS in those days) and that I found the number with th searchlight at once (because they had searchlights which were a lot stronger [natural gas powered] than ours and they 'liked' to blind us ...


But all went well. Even the other week, when we had to catch "some persons" directly on the 3-mile-border, who seemed to have come from the GDR-territory, didn't have a name or nationally, weren't mentioned as passengers in the log ...

I was alive in part of the 1950s.
Can't remember much, though.

Girls wore crinolines at kindergarten. Us boys wore overalls.
Teachers stamped you a golden star in the forehead if you behaved very well, a silver star is you behaved well and a red star if you behaved just O.K.

My dad wore a hat with his suit, when he went to work. In the very early 60s he stopped wearing it.

In 1959 I went to Cuba with my mom to celebrate the victory of the Revolution. Cuba was to become, according to her, "the Switzerland of the Americas". I got my miliciano uniform and collected a sticker album of histories of the Revolution, and I had my white and olive-green life-saver with the pictures of Fidel, Ché and Camilo (Cienfuegos).
Then came the 60s. Cuba was not to have any resemblance to Switzerland at all.

I was only 6 when the 50's came to close and while I remember "air raid" drills as they were called on Long Island NY, the real anxiety didn't start until the 60's.

Perhaps I wasn't quite as sophisticated, as a first grader, as some of the other posters on this thread, but I took the air raid drills seriously, and they were very creepy.

First of all they were announced by a siren rather than a bell, as was the case for Fire Drills, and the sound was chilling.

Secondly, we all moved out into the halls, put our noses up against the brick walls and locked our hands, behind us and on our necks. We were told this would save us from broken necks when the ceiling and walls collapsed. We had to be silent and still, and for a bunch of little kids this was torture. Everyone fidgeted and everyone got yelled at by teachers.

Contrast this with a fire drill when everyone marched out of the building into the sunlight. We still weren't supposed to talk, but we did and we could release any nervous energy by moving around. It was easy to tell, even as a little kid, that the teachers took the air raid drills more seriously than the fire drills.

Years later I came to the same conclusion as has been expressed here: The air raid drills were pointless since we would all be vaporized by a bomb that fell anywhere near our school, however David is right, the air raid drill weren't intended to save us from a direct or near direct hit, they were intended to help protect us if a nuke was dropped on New York City (as it almost certainly would have been) and the resulting hurricane force winds made it as far as my town out on the Eastern half of Long Island.

Thank God we never had to find out if the procedure would have made any difference in terms of casualties. The radiation probably would have killed most of that survived the first hit, but I believe that in addition to the procedure having some potential utility, it was meant to, in some way, placate the adults, by showing them a) the government was on the job and b) a nuclear attack was surrvivable.

The real anxiety developed, for me, during the Cuban Missile Crisis which, of course, was in 1963. At age 9 I had a fair understanding of what was going on (at least in terms of what the News of the day was telling us) and I could easily tell that my parents were very nervous. It was a scary time.

I recall having nightmares from time to time about some country, Russia or China "dropping the bomb," and I specifically remember waking up in terror in the middle of the night shouting "Please don't drop the bomb!"

I also recall when Khrushchev was ousted in 1964 and thinking we were in a lot of trouble. Since the Cuban Missiled Crisis was defused under his regime I had come to the conclusion that he was the only sane Russian leader, and I was certain that the very grim looking Leonoid Brezhnev was a very dangerous man.

At the time, Alexei Kosygin was sharing power with Brezhnev, but he reminded me of Stan Laurel and so I didn't see him as a threat. It turns out I was right, because Brezhnev made short work of him and assumed full power.

There is reason to consider the Cold War, to have been WWIII, because while the primary antagonists never faced off against one another in a Hot War (except during covert operations instigated by one side or the other) there were proxy wars occurring all over the world.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_War

In 7th grade I wrote a "term paper" entitled "The Spread of Communism in Southeast Asia" Actually got an "A+" on it but maybe the teacher was a right-wing Hawk. The Vietnam War was underway and I was a supporter. We had to stop the Communists from overrunning Asia

The Soviet Union was as intent upon global domination as any previous would-be world conquerer. Obviously there came a time when they realized it wasn't going to happen and the USSR eventually fell apart, but they, along with Red China, were very much our determined foes during this period.

I wouldn't call either of them our friends now.

I remember the period of the Hungarian Uprising: the "bomb shelter" (the cellar in our house was officially one during WWII) was kind of re-activated by my grandmother and great-aunt: mineral water, sugar and lard (the latter I found most peculiar was stored in the "safest' room besides the (home made) canned and pickled stuff ...

Similar happened later when the Berlin Wall was erected and during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (But then I thought it to be spleeny ideas of old people.)

"Red China".

In 1964, everyone was talking about the "Mao bible" ('Quotations from Chairman Mao'). I really wanted to have a look at it, read it, before discussing the pros and cons.

Since they only had an embassy in Switzerland, I wrote there and asked for it.
Got it (plus a lot more, which I don't remember.)

I must have been one of the first to have got it in Germany ... in 1970, the MAD (" (Military Counterintelligence Service) asked me if I still had connections to Red China ...

I was a child in grade school during the 50's. The drills to hide under your desk were very real, not funny. I think being afraid of 'the bomb' was also very real, for good reason. After all, we had just dropped two on Japan. We didn't know that hiding under your desk wasn't going to help much.

The USA and Soviet Union were in a very real 'battle' for world supremecy. The bomb probably did keep us from an all out war. This cold war also cost us a lot economically. We spent huge sums of money to defend against an attack from the Soviets. Their spending on defense against the US had a lot to do with their collapse.

This cold war cost the world a great deal and had a big effect on the world today. It wasn't trivial.

We had just come out of a war that unified us greatly. Most people then just accepted what the government said. It wasn't normal or acceptable to question those in power. Communications was nothing like what we have today. Newspapers were the only source. TV was just starting to be available, and only three channels, all with the same news.

Times were very different.

Hand-built chrome decoated cars w/fins, music on AM radio, light traffic everywhere, etc,etc; they were indeed different times

Gracie, what a surprise and a pleasure this thread has been. I'm glad you asked the question.

Ah, the cold war:

Some at a2k know my father handled photography for the Bikini bomb tests (1946), and was in the plane that shot down into the center of the exploding atom bomb, Baker. I've known this since I was little (I was nearly five then, and learned about it a few years after). I consumately hate bombs of all kinds. This is not so much to do with reason, although that is reasonable, as complete horror.

Sometime around 1950 a guy who had been under my father's command showed a classified photo at a party; my father then lost his very high security clearance. This affected our lives off and on ever after.

When I was twelve in 1954, the Army McCarthy Hearings were on tv. My parents and I watched a lot of the tv reportage, me whenever I wasn't in school. My mother and father differed re McCarthy.

Around the same years, we had air raid drills in school - yes, under the desks.
I don't remember the nuns and the desk routine causing us to panic, or I didn't, but I was older than most other a2kers reporting on this. I was probably looking forward to it being over and the class playing Geography Baseball.

In 1956, some people who later became friends of mine fled from Hungary post the Hungarian Revolution. I didn't know them then.

In '62, I think the whole of the U.S. was on pins and needles about the cuban missile crisis. I remember not being able to sleep. Well, maybe not the whole of the U.S., but those with radios and tvs.

Not long after, stuff started happening in south east Asia. My father was the first person I remember talking against our actions. Certainly long before anything against our actions in news magazines or by anyone on tv. Don't remember if that was '62 or 63 as we had our noses in there early and I forget what incident got my father talking with me.

In the later sixties, '68, I was glued to news about the Prague Spring and about Alexander Dubcek.

On politics, once I left high school (mid '59) with the conservative nuns and our civics class, I started paying more attention and figuring out my own views, which rolled around with opinions forming and unforming, working themselves out.

At age 21, 1963, a guy in my chem lab surprised me by asking me to go see Coltrane (Coltrane!) and I fell in love with him. His parents had been communists in the thirties, and because of that, he doubted he could have any serious career in chemistry, though he was at the top of the class. Ended up a nature explorer, writer, professor. Anyway, his politics and those of mine by then were similar - not marxist, but on the left. That romance passed, but my time with him steadied my own interests. I've changed off and on over the years, have a bit of libertarian in me to balance other parts, probably always did have, just didn't know that word.

On the cold war, I considered it essentially over when Mikhail Gorbachev showed up in our lives, in '85 and later. I was happy about the denouements, mostly. Not too happy about oligarchical power in Russia, and so on, but there is a lot in the world at large and in my own country that I'm not happy about.

At least a few times, we were almost caught in all out nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Here is a story about one Russian, who averted an all out attack on America, by going against his orders.

http://www.richmann.com/StanislavPetrov.htm

Coltrane?

The only Coltrane I know is the sax player.

I was in grade school during the Cuban Missile Crisis. My parents were glued to the radio... there were rumors of Havana being bombed.
I remember a magazine first page with Kennedy and Khrushov diving into a pool of fire.

My cousin in Havana was in his first year at the Engineering School. He and his schoolmates were summoned to help build platforms for anti-aircraft equipment.

But that was 1962 already.

I live in what has been the British Zone.
Besides quite a lot of British troops, we had had Canadian and Belgian troops stationed here as well. (And quite a few US-troops, too, since they had had the "keys" for the nuclear weapons.)

Not too far from my hometown, the Russians had the "Soviet Military Mission BAOR". They were driving especially around the country, when military exercises were going on.
The Russian commanding officer usually had a Mercedes - but when an admiral was in command, he got a Opel (GM) Admiral ... what I found quite funny, since my father had exactly the same car (though in a different colour)

I was on a destroyer during the Cuban Missile crisis. All leaves and liberty was cancelled for us and we waited to see if the Russian ship would actually be attacked. It was very tense, very real, to me.

Yes, that's who we went to see on our first date..

Whoa! Lots of replies! Thanks guys!

Okay! We're gonna be discussing the Cold War all this week in class but so far this is what we've/I've learned (basically) about Capitalism and Communism. Theres's some other stuff but these are the differences.
Stuff I like - Blue
Stuff I dont like- Red
Neutral-Black

Capitalism:
-Any person should be free to start a business and employ people
-Average standard of living higher than under Communism, but a wide spread between rich and poor.
-A free economy
-Opportunity for all
-Any profit he or she makes is reward for hard work
-Choice of many parties for Government, chosen by the people. A democracy

Communism:
-No private person should be allowed to profit from the work from other citizens
-Lower average standard of living, but (in theory) everyone equal (So everyone's poor?)
-A controlled economy
-Fairness and equality for all
-Only one party of Government--no need for any more
-All profits, instead of going into the pockets of one owner or even shareholders, goes to the state--everyone benefits

So, there's good and bad in both, I think.