"The impudence of the United States was .... until we sobered them. Missiles ..."
The arrogance of the United States, who consider themselves "the masters of the world" after the collapse of the USSR, and who unleashed aggression against Iraq, in general, probably did not surprise anyone. However, few people know that the impudence of the Americans literally had no limits half a century ago with regard to the USSR. Until we sobered them. Missiles ...
Our sky was that communicating yard ...
After the Second World War, the recent allies in the anti-Hitler coalition - the Americans, having brazenly, began to completely ignore our air borders. The United States sent dozens of its reconnaissance aircraft to the airspace of the Soviet Union, turning our skies essentially into a courtyard. We then had nothing to "adequately answer" the insolent: the American B-29, B-52, B-47 and PB-47 with a very large "ceiling" of the flight altitude were inaccessible to Soviet air defense systems, not who were then in service with long-range anti-aircraft missiles.
Judging by the documents we have, in the 50-ies. Americans managed to hang around with impunity in the airspace in the Moscow, Leningrad, Baltic region, Kiev, Minsk, Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, Soviet Far East regions - Primorye, Khabarovsk, Sakhalin, Kuriles, Kamchatka ...
And, it happened, they did not just hang around in the air, no matter where they fell, satisfying their spy curiosity, but also attacked our military facilities. So, on October 8, 1950, two US Air Force F-80 Meteor planes not only flew into the territory of Soviet Primorye, but also suddenly attacked the Pacific Fleet airfield near the village of Sukhaya Rechka, located in the Khasansky district, as a result of which seven were destroyed our planes! As a participant in the war in Korea recalled, an air defense fighter pilot, Colonel aviation Retired Sergey Tyurin: "While we got the go-ahead for interception, these vultures, presumably, were already drinking beer in Seoul ..."
It got to the point that the Yankees, having invaded our airspace, defiantly practiced a nuclear strike on the ground facilities of the Soviet Union. This is exactly what happened to 29 on April 1954 on the Kiev-Smolensk-Novgorod line, when several dozen US Air Force planes played great on the nerves of the Soviet military-political leadership ...
In connection with all these facts, the leadership of the USSR 27 in May 1954 was forced to adopt a decree "On unpunished flights of foreign aircraft over the territory of the USSR", which was tough task special KB in a short time to create the necessary means of counteracting overdue Americans.
According to some reports, the first time we managed to do this was 8 on April 1950 in the Baltic. "B-29" US Air Force violated the border in the area of Liepaja and invaded 21 km on our territory. Soviet fighters intercepted him and ordered to follow them for landing at the airfield. However, "B-29" opened fire and tried to escape. This predetermined his further fate: the downed American collapsed into the Baltic Sea. From 10 crew members, the search group managed to find only one alive ...
6 November 1951, during a reconnaissance over the Sea of Japan, was shot down by a Soviet fighter aircraft by the US Navy's P2V "Neptune" from the American naval base in Japan, Atsugi. What happened to the crew of "Neptune" is unknown to this day. In the afternoon of November 18 1951, in 30 km south of Cape Gamow, in the Peter the Great Bay, there was an air battle between four Soviet MiG-15 fighters and a group of US F-9 fighters. There are still conflicting information about this clash. However, it is known that as a result of this clash, three “MiGs” did not return home: one crashed and fell into the sea at Cape Leo, the other two were shot down near the island of Furugelm (both discovered and raised). One of our pilots managed to jump out with a parachute, but he was never found alive or dead. The Americans were lucky then: only one of their planes suffered damage.
13 June 1952. During a reconnaissance flight over the Sea of Japan, our fighter jet shot down an RB-29 aircraft from the 91 strategic reconnaissance squadron (from Yokoto base, Japan). The fate of 12 members of its crew remains unknown.
7 October 1952, our MiG managed to shoot down another American reconnaissance aircraft RB-29 from the same 91 squadron at the Kuril Islands. From 8 crew members, our search and rescue forces found only the lifeless body of US Air Force captain John Donham, who was buried by Soviet border guards on the Kuril island Yuri (in 1994, his remains were exhumed by the American side and reburied at the national Arlington cemetery).
By the way, we must pay tribute to the Americans, who did everything possible to save their warriors who had survived (for example, during the Korean war, Vietnam, they had special operational search and rescue teams that quickly found themselves on the site of a downed helicopter or an Air Force plane USA), as well as to find the bodies of the dead at any cost, establish their names and sell them to the land in their homeland with honors. In the USSR, and now in Russia, they did not favor the living and did not favor the living, but there is no reason to talk about the dead. After the Great Patriotic War, 58 years passed, and according to various estimates, from the 800 thousand to 1,5 million soldiers who fell on the battlefield, defending the Fatherland from the Nazi invasion, are still not buried in the earth. But the old wisdom says: the war cannot be considered finished until the last soldier is not buried, as it should be.
... Early in the morning of 29 on July 1953. The radar of the Pacific Fleet in 130 miles south of Cape Gamow an unknown aircraft was found heading for Vladivostok. After 12 min. From the airfield of the fighter-aviation regiment in Nikolaevka, two duty MiG-17 fighters, manned by guards captain Alexander Rybakov and guards senior lieutenant Yuri Yablonovsky, were alerted into the air to intercept the adversary. In 7 hour. 11 min. The flight commander A. Rybakov discovered an intruder plane that turned out to be an American B-10 bomber over our territorial waters at a distance of 50 km south of Askold Island. The Yankees responded to the signal from our pilots that they were in the airspace of the USSR and must immediately leave it, by fire, damaging A. Rybakov’s MiG. Ours struck from aircraft guns in response. And in the 7 hour. 16 min. - in 15 min. after entering the Soviet airspace, the B-50 of the USAF crashed into the water 8 miles south of Askold Island, where at a depth of about 3 thousand meters its fragments remain to this day. A day later, the American destroyer managed to save one of the crew members of the aircraft - co-pilot Lieutenant John Roag. We lost planes during the Cold War and we. In this black list they are listed 14. True, the American side, as far as we know, recognizes only two Soviet planes shot down by them. This is the Boston A-20J bomber (obtained by Lend Lease from the USA in 1944), shot down by 4 September 1950 in the area of the island of Hayon-tao with carrier-based fighters from the American aircraft carrier "Wolley Rog" (remains of one of the pilots Lieutenant Mishin, we were returned to 1956). And unarmed, converted into a passenger IL-12, coming from Port Arthur to Vladivostok, and destroyed by American fighter jets 27 on July 1953 - on the day of the end of the war on the Korean Peninsula (there were 21 people on board, including crew members; with their ashes 18 December 1953 were interred in a public garden at the Dalzavodskaya bus stop in Vladivostok).
Americans deny involvement in the death of the rest of our aircraft, so nothing is known about their fate to this day. Let's name some of them. 15 July 1964, tracking the actions of the US Navy carrier strike team in 200 miles east of Japan, lost our “Tu-16P”. 25 May 1968, another Tu-16P, carrying out a reconnaissance mission in the area of the American carrier-carrier strike group in the Norwegian Sea, suddenly caught fire and crashed into the water. The Yankees found the bodies of three pilots of seven and handed them over to a Soviet warship. 10 January 1978 in the area of the Japanese islands disappeared into obscurity the Soviet aircraft "Tu-95РЦ" with the whole crew ... But if we occasionally managed to shoot down ordinary aircraft of the US Air Force, then "get" the American "ghost" - a new aircraft Lockheed’s U-2 scout (built with 1956) with a low reflective surface and an 20-25 km altitude ceiling — we could not (MiG-19) could not rise above KNUMX, there were no such rockets). Meanwhile, U-17,5 flew almost over the entire territory of the Soviet Union with complete impunity, including over Moscow and Leningrad (whose defense was considered one of the most reliable in the world), collecting the necessary intelligence information.
As part of the secret reconnaissance program "Mobi-Dik", the US intelligence services launched special balloon balloons equipped with automatic cameras and other spy equipment, which pilots of both the USSR and the USA often took to be UFOs, into Soviet airspace. In 1957, our anti-aircraft gunners in the Kuriles discovered such a balloon and even opened fire, but to no avail — the target was at too high an altitude.
But everything is once the limit. And we finally "vdarili." Although some of our aircraft designers, and other pundits, could not believe for a long time that at such an inconceivable height the plane could “hang” for hours, and therefore tended to think like the pilots that it was most likely a UFO.
The events of 1 in May of 1960 demonstrated that abnormal phenomena or some kind of devilry were nothing to do with this. On this day, in the area of industrial Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), stuffed with defense enterprises, the US Air Force spy plane U-2, piloted by pilot Francis Garry Powers, showed up at its inaccessible height. Our anti-aircraft gunners rocket the new complex "C-75", finally, without much difficulty, "got" him. The plane crashed to the ground. The pilot, instead of ending his life, as he was instructed by the instructions, preferred to eject and surrender to the victors. True, our anti-aircraft gunners then threw up another plane. Own By mistake. Pilot Safronov was posthumously awarded the Order by a closed decree. And the widow of the deceased captain was told not to talk about what happened to her husband.
Powers was tried and imprisoned, though not for long. Soon he was exchanged for our intelligence officer, Colonel Rudolf Abel (Fischer), captured in the US back in 1957.
Two months later, on July 1 1960, we shot down another air spy over the Baltic, the PB-47, whose crew did not want to obey and board our airfield. One crew member was killed while two others - US Air Force lieutenants D. McCone and F. Olmsted - were captured, they were later returned to their homeland.
So at the beginning of 60's. the airspace of our Motherland was closed. So far, in May 1987, it was not uncorked by German amateur 19 pilot Mathias Rust, who sat on his light-engine Cessna right on Red Square in Moscow on the Day of Border Guard. Among the military and political leadership of the USSR was a shock. It was much more than a shame ...
The last incident in the air of the Cold War period, according to our data, occurred in the same 1987 of 13 in September. NATO conducted naval exercises adjacent to our northern borders. It is clear that we watched them, they - for us. The usual thing in such cases. When our Su-27 fighter ordered the training to intercept the Orion P-3 Norwegian patrol aircraft and began to guide it over the neutral waters of the Barents Sea, the Norwegian tried a special maneuver not only to get rid of the Soviet Sushki, but also to punish her pilot. But he did not take into account the unique technical capabilities of the “Su-27” and, as a result, the “Orion” itself suffered, having touched the tail fin of our aircraft. The Norwegian propeller fell, hitting with fragments the wing and fuselage of the Orion, which, after puffing up and giving a distress signal, barely reached its base ...
And there was a diplomatic scandal. Our pilot was accused of “amateur activities” and roughly punished for the edification of others — the Gorbachev era of “new thinking” gained momentum when surrendered one after another with such hard-won positions to the US mercy and political priorities began to change, resulting in a potential adversary becoming " partner. " The tough Cold War standoff would seem to have sunk into oblivion and become property stories. There is no longer the USSR or the socialist military bloc Warsaw Pact. However, judging by the events in the world in recent years, Americans are still craving. The “partnership” relations with Russia that were proclaimed cannot be fully considered as such. The United States Air Force, as in the old days, hangs along our borders, except perhaps not invading the Russian space, spy satellites and ground tracking stations “in both” for “Russian friends”, and atomic submarines are periodically detected by naval Russian bases in the North and the Far East: off the coast of Kamchatka, in the Peter the Great Bay near the island of Askold ...
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