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15-03-2013, 00:23
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חבר מתאריך: 13.11.04
הודעות: 16,823
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50 שנים למשבר הטילים בקובה - ריכוז חומרים, חלק 1
מאמרים ממגזין AIR AND SPACE של הסימתסוניאן ומ DEFENSE MEDIA NETWORK
על טיסות הצילום של מטוסי ה RF-101 של חהא"א וה RF-8 של חיל הנחתים
Kennedy’s Evidence
http://www.airspacemag.com/military...-170040946.html
פענוח התמונות בבסיס הומסטד
שימו לב לסוללת ה 37 מ"מ בפריסה קרבית (אולי אותה אחת שפגעה ב RF-8 - ראו בהמשך)
על פעילות מטוסי הפטרול של חיל הים האמריקני סביב קובה, כולל מעקב אחר הטילים בעת עזיבתם את האי
When the Missiles Left Cuba
http://www.airspacemag.com/military...-169354346.html
For about a week, flying out of U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay on Cuba, our detachment of Neptunes had been making low-altitude flights three miles off the coast of Cuba to find, photograph, and report all aircraft, ship, and submarine traffic. We had already detected several submerged Soviet submarines.
Flying at 50 feet above the water, we readied our two bulky KB-10A 70-mm black-and-white cameras to photograph the details of the ship as we raced past it. As we swept up the ship’s starboard side, we saw eight canvas-covered, cigar-shaped objects lashed on the deck. Was this a Soviet ship carrying the first load of missiles coming out of Cuba? Were the Soviets relenting?
לגבי הזרקור שנשאו מטוסי הפטרול בכנפם טרם עידן האמר"לים
At night, the only way to see the ship was with the 70-million-candlepower searchlight 50 feet out on our starboard wingtip. If the searchlight was on longer than 30 seconds, heat from the burning carbon arc tips would melt the searchlight frame and possibly start a fire in the wing. Two aircraft in our detachment of five had experienced such melting, requiring new searchlight units to be flown in. The destroyed units had to be chopped out with a hammer and chisel.
על ההכנות קובניות לפלישה אמריקנית - צריך לזכור שהמשבר אירע שנה וחצי בלבד אחרי סיפור מפרץ החזירים
Cuba During the Missile Crisis
http://www.airspacemag.com/military...-169357496.html
On June 6, 1961, less than two months after the failed U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, enormous wooden crates arrived at San Antonio de los Baños air base on the western part of the island, along with more than 100 Soviet troops. Inside the crates were MiG-15s and -19s, the first weapons in a buildup in Cuba that included Soviet fighters, bombers, radar, anti-aircraft batteries, and eventually the nuclear missiles that would ignite the 13-day standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union in October 1962.
Del Pino recalls dozens of MiG-21F.13 fighters arriving at Santa Clara air base in central Cuba in August 1962, to be assembled by Soviet engineers. “When 44 aircraft were ready to fly, we knew something of great significance was up,” del Pino writes in Inside Castro’s Bunker, a memoir of his life in Cuba, published last July. “There were not enough pilots in Cuba, even including the ones with flight training in the Soviet Union, to complete the MiG-15 and MiG-19 squadrons we now had.” On September 15, about 50 Soviet pilots arrived at the base.
“Any lingering doubt as to what was about to happen disappeared in early October with the arrival of a squadron of Ilyushin Il-28 bombers at the San Julian air base, at Cuba’s extreme western tip,” del Pino recalls in his memoir. “This, plus the speedy installation of 24 SA-2 batteries in western regions and six in the eastern part of the island were unmistakable signals that war was near.
“All over the island, fed by Fidel’s fiery speeches, people were getting ready to fight,” recalls Canas. “We were a small island. The United States was our enemy. Everybody was yelling Patria o muerte! It was crazy. Fidel is up there telling everyone the Yanquis are coming back to finish the job. Everyone was joining defense brigades, even grandmothers.”
The next morning, October 27, an unarmed U-2F piloted by 35-year-old Air Force Major Rudolf Anderson Jr. took off from McCoy Air Force Base in central Florida and headed for Cuba. On station at 70,000 feet, he could see the curvature of Earth. On the ground stood batteries of Soviet surface-to-air missiles. At noon, three SA-2 anti-aircraft missiles nestled in the tropical foliage of Banés were launched toward Anderson’s airplane; two hit it, killing him.
“Much speculation has surrounded this U-2 incident,” del Pino says. “It has even been said that the missile unit had been taken over by Cubans and that the Cubans had opened fire on the U-2. This is sheer fantasy. Anyone who is knowledgeable in the complexities of these missile systems can understand that it takes at least two years of learning and training for an officer to be capable of operating them with minimum efficiency. At the time of the missile crisis, we didn’t have the slightest idea of the operating principles of an anti-aircraft missile.”
Almost four hours after the U-2 was hit, several U.S. Navy RF-8A Crusader aircraft flying low-level photo-reconnaissance missions over Cuba were also fired on. One was hit by a 37-mm shell but managed to return to base in Key West, Florida.
עוד על הפלת ה U-2 מעל קובה במהלך המשבר
U-2 Pilot Maj. Rudy Anderson: The Only American Killed During the Cuban Missile Crisis
http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/...missile-crisis/
The Soviets sent 40,000 troops (not just 8,000, as the CIA came to believe when the crisis unfolded), 42 MRBMs and 20 nuclear warheads for the missiles.
Maj. (later Col.) Richard S. “Steve” Heyser completed the first U-2 flight over Cuba, taking off from Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., on Oct. 14, 1962. Heyser landed at McCoy Air Force Base, Fla., from which subsequent U-2 missions were mounted. The following day, Heyser’s images reached analysts of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), first in Suitland, Md., and later that same day in the second story of a used-car dealership in Washington. The analysts saw what appeared to be components of MRBMs.
On Oct. 23, looking for Soviet action in response to what some perceived as an ultimatum, Kennedy sent six Navy RF-8A Crusaders (which had been designated F8U-1P before Oct. 1) over Cuba. Air Force RF-101C Voodoos also made flights over the island and U-2 missions continued.
That morning, Anderson made a pass over Cuba and was approaching the shoreline when the Soviets fired two surface-to-air missiles at his U-2. One exploded behind Anderson and sent shrapnel into the cockpit, puncturing his pressure suit. He probably was killed instantly. His U-2 broke apart, plummeted at least 60,000 feet, and crashed on Cuban soil.
סוללת טק"א SA-2 סובייטית בקובה, דוגמת זו שהפילה את ה U-2
Due South of Key West
http://www.airspacemag.com/military...-170232476.html
John I. Hudson was a 30-year old Marine captain when he flew the Vought RF-8A Crusader on eight photo-reconnaissance runs over Cuba from May 1962 to June 1963. He went on to fly the McDonnell F-4B on 308 combat missions in Vietnam, and retired in 1989 as a lieutenant general after 35 years in the Corps.
מספר על פרופיל גיחות הצילום המסוכנות הללו
Hudson: There were a number of probable targets that had been located by the U-2, and [U.S. intelligence analysts] wanted to know what specifically was there. So we’d work out a route. You’re flying at 480 knots, which is eight miles a minute. You can’t navigate except by time, heading, and distance. We’d have anywhere between two and four targets on our route. So we’d take off from Key West in radio silence, on a specific heading for a point of ingress. Whether we hit that point or were 400 or 500 yards or so in either direction didn’t really matter. We’d look for some prominent feature that was supposed to be there, and if we were a little off, we’d correct from that and fly to our first target. We were literally feet off the water and the treetops. We’d go to our first target, maintaining speed at 480. We knew how many minutes it should take us to get to the target, and about 15 seconds before arriving, we’d pop up to 1,000 feet where we could see a little bit and have time to make a hard bank to get right over the target, flip our cameras to the max rate, and run over the target. Then it was cameras off, and back down to the trees, with a hard turn to the new target.
Our targets were generally five minutes or so apart. When we would pop up, maybe the target would be a couple hundred yards away. Then we would egress [the island] at that same low altitude. When we got over the water, we had a fighter CAP [combat air patrol] waiting for us. We would call “feet wet,” indicating we were over the water. After we got 10 or 12 miles out, we’d climb to 35,000 feet, then go to NAS Jacksonville, because that’s where the Navy photo lab was located.
Was there any coordination between the Crusader pilots and the Air Force F-101 Voodoo pilots, who also flew low-level reconnaissance over Cuba?
We never saw any Voodoos. They were flying, I think, out of some place like Tyndall [Air Force Base, near Panama City, Florida], but they weren’t down at Key West. I don’t think we flew on the same days, or if we did, we didn’t fly at the same time. The only Air Force that was at Key West were F-104s that arrived about mid-way through our program to be our fighter escorts because the Marines had been doing that with F-8s out of Beaufort, South Carolina. Frankly, we saw the -104s, but we never had them join on us after we came out [from Cuba]. We would be in radio contact with them.
ועל קרב אוויר בין מיג-17 קובני לאחד הפנטומים הראשונים של חיל הנחתים שכמעט ונגמר בפנטום מופל
The Battle of Key West
http://blogs.airspacemag.com/daily-...le-of-key-west/
The Marines F-4s were just too late to see action in the [October 1962] Cuban [missile] crisis, but the “Gray Ghosts” [VMF-531] did make it to Key West, where they flew scrambles against Mexican airliners, lost lightplanes and even the odd Cuban MiG-17. After Cuban MiGs strafed a fishing boat 50 miles southwest of Key West, Marine Phantoms were scrambled to investigate. Their crews soon discovered that the MiG-17 enjoyed a very short turn radius. As one of the MiGs closed onto the tail of his aircraft, one laconic RIO [radar intercept officer] was heard to remark, “You’d better do some of that pilot sh-t, ’cause we’re losing!”
The Cuban Missile Crisis 50th Anniversary: Roots of the Confrontation
Part 1 of a series on the anniversary of the 1962 confrontation
http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/...-confrontation/
A survivor of the paranoid circle of confidants that had surrounded Josef Stalin until his death in 1953, Khrushchev was an odd and ruthless combination of strongman, reformer, family patriarch and technocrat. By the spring of 1962, he also was a national leader walking a high wire without benefit of a safety net. A master of bombast and aggressive confrontation, Khrushchev had spent five years from 1956 to 1961 going from crisis to crisis, usually winning concessions from Western powers by stopping just short of war. By 1962, he was a living incarnation of the Communist “Boogey Man” in the minds of Western citizens and observers.
Meanwhile, Khrushchev had to face the reality that the United States and its Allies around the globe were ringing the USSR with a cordon of nuclear-armed ships, submarines, bases, and listening/monitoring posts, effectively containing the Soviet Union within its borders. Perhaps most personally upsetting to the Soviet Leader were a new set of launch sites for 45 SM-76/PGM-19 Jupiter Medium Range Ballistic Missiles (MRBMs) in Italy and Turkey. Khrushchev, who had a dacha (vacation home) on the Black Sea, was said to have looked out over the water toward Turkey, and said, “I can see them…
The Cuban Missile Crisis 50th Anniversary: The Berlin Crisis, the Bay of Pigs, and the Soviet Bluff Called
Part 2 of a series on the anniversary of the 1962 confrontation
http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/...t-bluff-called/
The Cuban Missile Crisis 50th Anniversary: Castro, OPLAN 314/316, and Khrushchev’s Decision
Part 3 of a series on the anniversary of the October 1962 confrontation
http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/...chevs-decision/
Beginning in mid-1961, the Kennedy Administration began a two-track campaign to deprive Fidel Castro of his regime and life. The military part was built around a pair of quick-reaction Operational Plans (OPLANs), 314 and 316, rewritten from the existing Cuban OPLAN 312. Both OPLANs were design to rapidly mobilize an invasion force roughly the size of the U.S. force on D-Day, the only real differences between the two being the duration of the mobilization and the forces available at the end of that period.
The unconventional part of President Kennedy’s anti-Castro campaign was personally supervised by RFK out of the White House and Justice Department, and was known alternatively as Operation Mongoose and “the Cuban Project.” The operational end of Mongoose was led by Gen. Edward Lansdale, USAF and William Harvey of the CIA, with the actual forces being drawn from CIA resources, including the anti-Castro Cuban expatriate community. For over a year in 1961 and 1962, Mongoose teams conducted a variety of raids and strikes on Cuban infrastructure targets including oil refineries, sugar mills, and maritime targets, including cargo ships. In addition, dozens of additional assassination attempts against Castro were considered, planned, and attempted. The target date for completion of Mongoose and execution of OPLAN 314 or 316 was ominous: October 1962.
The Cuban Missile Crisis 50th Anniversary: Castro, OPLAN 314/316, and Khrushchev’s Decision
Part 3 of a series on the anniversary of the October 1962 confrontation
While vacationing in May 1962, Khrushchev began to tell members of his inner circle of a plan to forward-base a number of medium and intermediate-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs and IRBMs) to Cuba, along with a large joint task force (JTF) of ground, air, naval, and air defense forces. Drawn from the “belt” of roughly 300 MRBMs/IRBMs that held European targets “at risk,” the missiles, by being based in Cuba, would have just enough range to target cities and military bases throughout the continental United States. In addition, the 50,000-man JTF would provide a bulwark against any American attempt to invade Cuba, and thus preserve the Castro regime. The target date for completion of this deployment would be October 1962, and it would be known as Operation Anadyr.
Cuban Missile Crisis 50th Anniversary: Operation Anadyr
Part 4 of a series on the anniversary of the October 1962 confrontation
http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/...ation-anadyr-2/
Cuban Missile Crisis 50th Anniversary: Operation Anadyr
Part 4 of a series on the anniversary of the October 1962 confrontation
Operation Anadyr, named after a river in Far Eastern Russia, was the largest out-of-area deployment ever made by the Soviets, and a daunting enterprise for them by 1961 standards. Anadyr was a daring plan to restore the U.S./USSR strategic weapons balance, hold back the Stalinist elements in the Soviet Union, and provide protection for Castro’s Cuba against the Americans, even though the Soviet Union lacked a significant surface fleet, had little experience in tropical operations, and had hobbled nuclear submarine and strategic weapons programs. The reasons for Nikita Khrushchev’s daring, and political willingness to go “all in” with Anadyr could be explained by the balance of strategic forces in the fall of 1962.
The United States had 142 Atlas, 62 Titan, and 20 Minuteman I intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), the latter being deployed in hardened silos, against the Soviet Union’s six R-7/SS-6 Sapwoods, one R-26/SS-8 Sasin, and 17 R-16/SS-7 Saddler ICBMs.
The U.S. and U.K. also had 60 Thor intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) based in Great Britain, and the U.S. Air Force had 62 Jupiter medium range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) based in Italy and Turkey, while the U.S.S.R. had no comparable deployed force. Operation Anadyr aimed to alter that balance.
The U.S. Air Force had 639 B-52 Stratofortress, 880 B-47 Stratojet, and 76 B-58 Hustler nuclear-capable bombers, while the Soviets had around 100 Tu-20 Bear and Mya-4 Bison nuclear bombers.
The U.S. Navy had 32 to 64 nuclear-tipped Polaris submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) at sea aboard two to four nuclear ballistic missile submarines, as well as six nuclear-armed Regulus I cruise missiles aboard two cruise missile submarines. Against this the Soviet navy had nothing, because its nuclear ballistic missile and cruise missile submarines were all in port for inspection and overhaul after submarine K-19′s reactor accident.
Finally, the U.S. Navy could deploy 220 nuclear-capable A-1 Skyraider, A-3 Skywarrior, A-4 Skyhawk, and A-5 Vigilante aircraft from five forward-deployed aircraft carriers, while the Soviet navy had no carriers at all.
פירוט הסד"כ המתוכנן של מבצע "אנדיר"
Operation Anadyr’s central objective was to deliver, deploy, and support the delivery of five MRBM/IRBM regiments (eight launchers and 12 missiles per regiment, equipped with 1 megaton (MT) warheads) drawn from the 43rd Rocket Army, part of the Soviet missile belt in the Western USSR, as well as accompanying forces to protect and support the missile regiments. The forces included:
79th, 191st, and 664th Missile Regiments (R-12/SS-4 Sandal MRBMs)
665th and 668th Missile Regiments (R-14/SS-5 Skean IRBMs)
10th and 11th Air Defense Divisions, each with 12 V-75 Divina/SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries (six launchers and 12 missiles per battery)
40 MiG-21 F-13/Fishbed-C interceptors of the 32nd Fighter Aviation Regiment
23 Il-28 Beagle light jet bombers (six equipped to drop 12 kiloton (KT) 407N nuclear gravity bombs)
A squadron of 33 Mil-4 helicopters for liaison/command support
11 An-2 Colt/An-24 light transports
Two regiments of FKR-1/SSC-2a cruise missiles (each with eight mobile launchers and 40 missiles), equipped with 12 KT warheads.
Four Motor Rifle Regiments (MRRs – the 74th, 106th, 134th, and 146th) equipped with T-55 or T-34/85 tanks, armored personnel carriers (APCs), heavy artillery/field guns, and three Luna/FROG nuclear rocket artillery batteries (two launchers per battery, each with four rockets
חלקו של הצי הסובייטי במבצע
Soviet fleet’s contributions to Khrushchev’s Cuban deployment were fairly modest. In the end they only deployed a flotilla of six Project 183R/Komar-class fast attack craft (each with two P-15 Termit/SS-N-2 Styx ASCMs), an anti-ship missile regiment with six KS-1 Sopka/SSC-2b Samlet, and a squadron of 33 Il-28 Beagle light bombers equipped for torpedo attack and minelaying (including four nuclear mines). They also sent the 69th Torpedo Submarine Brigade, composed of four Project 641/Foxtrot-class diesel-electric attack submarines, each armed with 22 torpedoes (including one with a 15 KT nuclear warhead).
Cuban Missile Crisis 50th Anniversary: Discovery
Part 5 of a series on the anniversary of the October 1962 confrontation
http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/...sary-discovery/
While the Soviet strategic deception plan (maskirovka) had dictated the use of specialized merchant snips such as timber ships, with the large deck hatches necessary for the strategic missiles and all the nuclear/thermonuclear warheads to be stowed below, much of the other outsized weaponry had to moved as deck cargo. Photographic analysts, such as those led by Art Lundahl and Dino Brugioni at the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in Washington, D.C., practiced an arcane science called “crateology” to build a picture of just what sort of weaponry was being sent to Cuba. By using their knowledge of shipping crates and other packaging obtained by earlier U-2 and Corona satellite photography, the NPIC analysts were able to identify a number of the weapons systems being shipped before they ever reached Cuba. This included MiG-21 interceptors and Kormar-class missile patrol boats, each of which had very distinctive crates.
This all changed on Sept. 28, when a U.S. Navy patrol plane overflew and photographed the Soviet freighter Kasimov, which had ten large crates as deck cargo. An analysis showed the containers to be the kind used to transport Il-28 Beagle jet bombers, which were capable of delivering nuclear gravity bombs
מטוסי IL-28 מאופסנים בארגזים על גבי ספינת תובלה סובייטית - בהעדר בסיסים מתאימים בית ההיא במערב אפריקה או דרום אמריקה, לרוסים לא הייתה דרך להטיס את המטוסים קצרים הטווח לקובה.
Destroyer USS Joseph P. Kennedy Pulled Highly Visible Duty During the Cuban Missile Crisis
http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/...missile-crisis/
אנקדוטה מעניינת - אחת מספינות הצי האמריקני שנטלו חלק באכיפת האמברגו הימי שהוכרז סביב קובה הייתה ה USS JOSEPH KENNEDY משפחתת מדגם גרינג שהושלמה בשלהי מלחמת העולם השנייה ושנקראה על שמו של אחיו הגדול של הנשיא באותה העת, שנהרג כזכור בתאונה במהלך מבצע אפרודיטה. בין היתר עצרה המשחתת הנ"ל את ספינת התובלה הראשונה שאתגרה את הבלוקדה אבל אחרי שנבדקה פיזית התברר שמדובר במטען אזרחי והותר לספינה להמשיך בדרכה לאי.
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