Read Sebastian Faulks' Bird Song
http://www.amazon.com/Birdsong-Novel-Love-Sebastian-Faulks/dp/0679776818
if you want a clue of war.
I recall when Sputnik was launched, in 1957, when I was fourteen. The whole nation got very nervous, because we had no satellite of our own and not much of a space program to speak of. We felt the Soviets maybe were going to dominate us and this was just a first step. That was the reason the government got behind the space program and decided to send people to the moon.
I recall having a conversation with a teacher about it. I was interested in the propaganda effect of Sputnik, more so than the satellite itself, because fear is such a powerful weapon. A few times, I worried the Soviets might conquer us, but only for short times. Their people were much poorer than the Americans and their products were the butt of jokes. I decided that we had the edge on them, even if they did have Sputnik.
I was seven when they launched Sputnik. I think it was in late September cause we had meatloaf that night .
smoky fought in Korea during the 50's.
A hydrogen bomb IS an atomic bomb.
It comes from nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms, the way that the sun burns.
The atomic bombs that we used on the Japs in 1945 were from nuclear fission,
splitting atoms of uranium (the first bomb) or splitting atoms of plutonium (second bomb).
The Korean War, the Vietnamese War, the communist revolutions in China, Cuba & other places
were part of the "Cold War" which was the 3rd World War.
The commies were trying to conquer the world and to enslave it
under the political and economic ideas of Karl Marx.
That was the most thorough-going totalitarianism of anything that the world has ever known.
Schools ofen have very large windows facing outdoors. If a bomb detonated such that
the school was on the fringe, the edge of that bomb's power of destruction,
those windows woud become many 1,OOOs of fragments of flying glass.
It was a good idea to get under our desks
to avoid the trajectories of those glass fragments.
I believed that because of the cowardice, faint heartedness and disloyalty of the liberals,
we were going lose the Cold War. It was the 3rd World War.
For years and decades, I believed that because of liberal weakness
and disloyalty, the commies woud win, and eventually,
communist battle tanks woud come rolling down my street,
such that [bI 'd have to take a gun and kill my mother][/b]
and then be killed myself while trying to kill as many communist troops as possible,
always remembering that, when running out of ammunition,
the last round had to be for ME.
The second happiest day in my life was Christmas Day of 1991,
when the USSR went out of business and ended.Freedom won. Slavery lost.
In school in the 50s, we had these "air raid" drills, where we'd crawl under our desks and "duck and cover"--which meant we'd curl up in a little ball and cover our heads with our hands. By about 1956, i was asking myself what earthly good that would do if anyone dropped the atom bomb on us. I also asked myself why anyone with a brain cell would be dropping an atom bomb on the totally insignificant little town i lived in.
From time to time we were told that our generation was being warped by "living in the shadow of the bomb." I'd say, though, that the ones who were freaked out were the grown ups. When you grow up with something, it becomes a commonplace, something you don't think about much. I don't recall being worried about the bomb--after all, it they dropped one on us, we were toast, game over.
I attended more than one school, in California, in the fifties. None of them made us do the duck and cover stuff. I moved to Texas in Jan of 57. Until the Sputnik scare, nobody there mentioned the Soviets much at all.
We would have to "duck and say a rosary" Sr ATtila (the Nun) would always do a rosary check before we got our chocky milk break in the morning.
If they were so worried about us getting cut up from the bomb blast, why the hell did they put in those big walls'o windows?.
OH YEAH, I remember that me and several other boys (this was second grade) would have to pull the shades down. Sr Attila didnt want us to be frightened by the flash That was something we found strange.
You aparently saw through the idiocy at an early age. I, on the other hand was scared shitless and the only thing that kept me from years of therapy was because our next door neighbor was a psychiatrist and My Dad always said he was nuttier than a Snickers.
I would dream about atomic bomb blasts and hydrogen bomb blasts, always in school .
SR Attila assured us that, should we all die from the blast we would get a free pass into heaven without any Purgatory time. I was afraid of heaven cause lightning came from heaven. SO there I was, 6 years old and really fucked up . I was afraid of lightning, clowns, Thad Zstchynsky,Polio, the hydrogen bomb,mosquitoes carryiing Equine Meningitis and the ghost of Johnie Hannahoe. I had a very full plate of things to be afraid of.
There on top of it, I was enrolled in a school wherein the nuns were pushing this crap that dying for "The Faith" was a really big deal. Its amazing that I never delved into being a cereal killer
No serial killer on the other hand.... Commie lovers were welcome to stand and look out the window to admire the communist bombs.
Travelling to Berlin from any place in Western Europe was a difficult thing.
It was really bad for the West Germans as they were the great animies of the East Germans and the sowiet Union behind them.
If I wanted to go to Berlin(the western part) during the cold war I first had to get a visa and permission to go through East Germany. Coming from Scandinavia via boat getting off in Sassnitz boarding a train in which soldiers with machinguns were walking back and forth. Passport control made you shake all over. One person to control the passport, two to control the passport controller.
You should not talk to anyone in the train who was not a Scandinavian. If you said something bad about the East part it might be reported to someone. If the German talked to you it might be reported.
Crossing the border to any East country was horror.
The link here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uprising_of_1953_in_East_Germany
was one of the things in the 50. which made people believe in a third world war, but was part of the cold war.
Here is another one
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956
Life was a bit different than just to cover your head. Especially in the communistic countries. These people suffered and we in western were afraid of the communists, but not the way you Americans were and are.
Germany was nothing but ruins 1945 and was rebuildt during the 50
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaftswunder
So I'd be sitting in class trying to pay attention, and all of a sudden the teacher would yell, "Take cover." The students had to crawl under our desks with our heads faced away from the window. I didn't think much of this from a Cold War perspective. I just liked the change of pace.
The Cold War seems to have been a war of fear. Once the US was not the only country with the bomb, we got noivous. It was also a war of mistrust. Maybe paranoia. It wasn't a real war in the fighting sense.
You ask about what kind of war is it where no actual fighting takesplace, Gracie. Well, the 'cold war' is really a metaphorical expression for what actually went on from the 1950s into the 1980s until the Soviet Union (aka the USSR) just fell apart in 1991. It was not a 'war' in the usual sense of the word. There were several actual shooting wars that went on during this time -- Korea, Vietnam, the Communist revolution in Cuba which brought Fidel Castro to power. But the expression 'cold war' just refers to the fact that we -- i.e. the USA, the United Kingdom, NATO and the rest of the Western world were lined up against the Soviet Union (Russia), China and all their so-called satellite puppets in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Russia and Chine in particular were our sworn enemies and we made no bones about that. We didn't trust them and they didn't trust us. We spied on each other shamelessly.
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
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 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.
Gracie, what a surprise and a pleasure this thread has been. I'm glad you asked the question.
I really really appreciate it. Thanks again!
)
