The U-2 Over the Soviet Union - Dmitry Degtev - diskuze

On 1 May 1960, a traditional military parade was held in Moscow. What stood it out from the previous ones, however, was the number of missiles, and in particular the ground-to-air anti-aircraft variants, that were present.There was perhaps nothing surprising in this dominance of missiles, for Nikita Khrushchev had already declared that the so-called Rocket Troops were to be the ‘main branch of the armed forces’. Not for nothing had the Politburo allocated huge sums of money and the best scientific minds to the on-going development of these weapons and units. In fact, there was no fly-past over the Red Square in 1960 as Khrushchev considered aircraft to be a ‘dying species’. From then on, it was being stated, military aviation would be assigned little more than an auxiliary role in the defence of the Soviet Bloc.Khrushchev’s assessment of the future of aircraft was seemingly confirmed by an incident that occurred more than 1,000km to the east of Moscow. For what the spectators and participants of the grand ‘rocket’ parade did not know was, that in one of the key events of the Cold War, an American high altitude reconnaissance Lockheed U-2 jet had, barely hours before, been shot down over the Urals by one of the types of missiles that were passing before them.Based on documents held in the CIA’s archives, declassified documents released by the Russian Ministry of Defence, and the memoirs of participants in the events in quest
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