Need quick: Map of 1960s U.S Military Bases in Europe.

RemadERemadE Global Moderator
edited May 2011 in Spurious Generalities
Hey &T,
My friend needs a map for a presentation he is doing tomorrow on the Cuban Missile Crisis. In short it's a map of American Military Bases in Europe, more than likely to show how close they were to the USSR.

If anyone has anything then please can you post it here? As long as it's relevant of course. You'll be forever in my good books ;)

Cheers.

Comments

  • RemadERemadE Global Moderator
    edited May 2011
    Cheers man! Every little helps :hai: :thumbsup:
  • dr rockerdr rocker Regular
    edited May 2011
    Just get him to shade in Southern West Germany as it was - the Americans were pretty much all over it.

    The role of the US and the UK forces in Germany in the '60's was not to fight a toe to toe war should USSR and Soviet Bloc countries invade, but to act as a delay. My Father was stationed in Germany a few times in the '60's and '70's and he was told that if the shit hit the fan, do not expect to be coming home. At the time, he would regularly buy my mother gold incase things went tits up - money would have been useless, but gold could have been used to buy a passage to safety.

    The plan at the time was to hold / stall / slow a Russian advance for long enough for reinforcements to arrive. Whilst the Russians had very short lines of communication - they could pretty much stack all of the hardware and men needed close to the border as it was their zone of threat, the UK and USA had lines of communication that meant it would take days for the forces on the ground to be reinforced to even a minor degree and a couple of weeks to get a force into Europe that would have any chance of holding the Russians for any period of time.

    Russian plans at the time, if put into action would have been like the Von Schlieffen plan on roids - punch through Germand and the Benelux countries (home of Supreme allied comand Europe) and into France onto Paris. The Russians would then have informed Britain that if we so much as whimpered, would would have been anihalated with nukes, if we STFU and did not let any more Americans land to get a toe hold in Europe, Russia would have sued for peace, which at the time, Britain would have been forced to accept.

    So the whole plan was to hold Southern Germany at all costs. He was also stationed in Northern Norway for a time on border ski patrol, but said this was much more relaxed - the UK forces would ski down one side of the border, the Russians down the other, often a hundred yards apart. They would should to each other when one side wanted to take a break for a brew or a smoke and both sides would then take a break for 5-10 minutes, then back on the skis. It was more just for show than anything else up there - the Russian presence was to deter any allied invasion of the Northen Russian naval ports - no side really wanted to fight up there due to the extreme conditions.
Sign In or Register to comment.