50 years ago this Saturday, a CIA U-2 spy aircraft which was flying over the Soviet Union was shot down, the first victim of the newly deployed SA-2 Surface-to-Air missile. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, had grown up in Virginia. If you get a chance, I suggest you go by the Virginia Historical Society and see the traveling exhibit which his son has put together with artifacts from The Cold War Museum. Those of you who remember the 1960 incident, and then the Cuban Missile Crisis two years later, will no doubt have a mild anxiety attack just thinking about how real nuclear war was to us back then. At the height of The Cold War, American school kids did "duck and cover exercises," jumping out of their seats, and scrambling to get under their desks. And I learned a few weeks ago from a new Russian friend, that they did the same thing. (Actually, during WWII back 1942, I did the same thing in The WT Haley Elementary School at Virginia Beach, but we were just hiding from airplanes.... ICBMs were another 20 years in the future.) Those were all scary times, and we need periodic reminders of just how fragile peace has been.
If you can't get to the Virginia Historical Society, I suggest two very good alternatives:
#1 - This one is a good four-minute overview of The U2-incident, opening with the voice of Francis Gary Powers himself describing the first he knew something was wrong.
www.youtube.com/user/vahistorical#p/a/u/1/VB9ArG-IWsE
#2 - A 1975 movie, FRANCIS GARY POWERS, THE TRUE STORY, stars Lee Majors, whom old geezers out there like me will recall as "The Six Million Dollar Man." I don't think it ever made it to a DVD, but I ran down a VHS tape, which creaks a bit, but tells a pretty accurate story of the incident and of Power's subsequent trial, incarceration in Vladimir Prison, and the eventual exchange engineered by Willian Donavan, for Soviet Spy Rudolf Abel 22 months later.
U-2s still fly today, and I am told it is the ONLY aicraft that the USAF ever requested be put back into production. The closest one that I know of is in the Smithsonian in downtown Washington.
But since they fly at over 70,000 feet and thus are all but invisible to the naked eye, there may be one soaring above me as I write this!!!
Toward the end of this year, Gary Powers Jr. plans to open the Cold War Museum at the old US Army Communications Base outside Warrenton, VA -- Vint Hill Station.
Randy Cabell
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