DRAMATIC COLD WAR MOMENT THE TURNED HOT
The brutal murder of a seven-man RAF crew in the skies over Germany ramped up the 1953 superpower standoff... and, as a new book reveals, inched the world closer to nuclear Armageddon
JUST AFTER 9am on Thursday, March 12, 1953, Flight Sergeant Peter John Dunnell climbed into the pilot’s seat of a four-engine RF531 Avro Lincoln bomber at the Central Gunnery School at RAF Leconfield near Beverley, East Yorkshire. The 29-year-old and his six crewmen were setting off on a Nato training flight across north-west Europe. It would have been surprising if a degree of apprehension had not crossed their minds.
The Cold War had had a massive jolt with the messy death, a week earlier, of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.The new regime in the Kremlin, led by his protégé, the unknown – to the West – Georgy Malenkov, had yet to reveal its true colours.
The Korean War showed no signs of ending. Suspicion and uncertainty abounded on either side of the Iron Curtain.
There were already worrying signs the air “war” between the two superpowers was escalating. It had been taking place almost stealthily – but was now intensifying – in the skies above Korea for the past two years.
But of particular concern to Dunnell and his men would have been the aggressive approach of the fast, manoeuvrable Russian jets along the borders in central Europe.
Two days earlier, a USAF F-84 Thunderjet had been shot down by a Soviet MiG fighter after apparently breaching Czech airspace. Its pilot managed to parachute to safety. But it was the latest in a spate of skirmishes that ledWestern strategists to wonder if the nervous new Soviet leaders had issued “shootto-kill” orders to pilots.
Dunnell’s sortie went smoothly until his Lincoln approached the German city of Saarbrücken on the French border.
Then the aircraft overshot its turning point and sped into the Soviet zone, where it remained for a good period of time, possibly – although this has always been a matter of conjecture – taking the opportunity to carry out intelligence gathering.
Whatever the Lincoln was doing, at around 1.20pm it made it back into the 20-mile-wide air corridor linking Hamburg to Berlin, and was just west of the river Elbe, definitely inside the British Zone, when it was attacked without warning by two Russian MiG-15 fighters, which opened fire with their cannons from point-blank range on the unsuspecting crew.
The Lincoln plummeted into a steep dive, followed by the MiGs, which continued to strafe the crippled aircraft as it went down. The main fuselage, with Peter and three of his crew in the wreckage, crashed, burning, into a wood near Boizenberg, three miles inside the Soviet zone.There was no hope for their survival. The three other crew members bailed out, but one parachute failed to open. The remaining two appeared to open theirs successfully, but several horrified German witnesses would testify that one of the MiGs swooped low and deliberately hit them with cannon fire. One Lincoln crew member died soon after being picked up, and the other later that night in hospital.
This was exactly the moment the British Chiefs of Staff had feared. In their analysis of the state of the Cold War the previous summer they had talked about the danger an incident of “comparatively minor injury” – but a spark, nonetheless – could light the fire of war. The downing of the Lincoln was front page news all over the world the following day.
THE DAILY Express splashed the story on its front page on Friday, March 13: “Now MiGs shoot up RAF – Six men killed in trainer – Protest to Russians.” In the US, the Los Angeles Times raged: “Russ-Allied tension mounts as MiGs down British bomber – New red air strike raises fear of European war crisis.”
Meanwhile, the News-Journal in Wilmington, Delaware (where out-of-work used car salesman Joseph R Biden had just moved, along with his 10-year-old son Joe Jr) was one of several papers to report that theWhite House had authorised the dispatch of another 70-plus Sabre jets to German bases. In the war of words that followed,
Britain’s high commissioner in Germany, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, described the shooting as a “deliberate and brutal act of aggression”.
Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, addressing the United Nations in New York, labelled it “barbaric”.
General Vasily Chuikov, hero of the Battle of Stalingrad and now Commander-in-Chief of Soviet Forces in Germany, had his men thoroughly examine the wreckage of the Lincoln, and claimed it had been equipped with a cache of weaponry – aircraft cannons, a heavy machine gun and plenty of ammunition.
The Lincoln, he claimed, clearly in Soviet territory, had fired first at the MiGs.
Winston Churchill, Britain’s ageing prime minister, summoned the Leconfield station commander, Group Captain Herbert “Tubby” Mermagen, to Downing Street so he could be briefed on the Lincoln’s flight and the validity of Chuikov’s claims.
After “Tubby” satisfied the PM that all ammunition had been removed from the tail guns and the mid-upper turret prior to the flight, and the belt-feed mechanism removed from the cannons, Churchill could confidently stand up in the House of Commons on March 17 to refute Chuikov and condemn a “cruel and wanton attack”.
In Congress, where the Republicans held sway, there were dark and ominous mutterings. Dewey Short, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said: “We should shoot the hell out of them.”
For several weeks, all Nato aircraft flying near the East German border operated on a fully armed “fire back” basis.
On March 17, the same day as Churchill’s speech in the Commons, MiGs fired their cannons near a British European Airways Viking on a scheduled flight in the Berlin air corridor. It was not hit.
Five days later, an American B-50 bomber was attacked by MiGs but managed to drive them off with cannon fire.
Very slowly, cool heads prevailed. Chuikov invited the four powers administering Germany – Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States – to a conference about air safety in the Berlin corridors. A compromise of sorts about the rules of engagement was eventually thrashed out, giving a pledge of free, unimpeded airspace to the Allies.
IT WAS far from being the only jittery moment in this most tense of years. Just a few weeks later President Eisenhower and his hawkish Secretary of State John Foster Dulles began to seriously discuss using tactical atomic bombs to bring the KoreanWar to an end.
“Ike” told his National Security Council that he and Dulles “were in complete agreement that somehow or other the taboo which surrounds the use of atomic weapons would have to be destroyed”.
The shadow of nuclear war loomed large in 1953. America had already moved from the kiloton to the megaton era on November 1, 1952, when it exploded the first-ever thermonuclear device codenamed “Mike”, the prototype of a hydrogen bomb, out in the Central Pacific Ocean.
The Soviet Union responded in kind on August 12, 1953, successfully exploding its own thermonuclear device, named “Joe-4” after the late dictator, on the steppe in northeast Kazakhstan.
The arrival of Joe-4 was enough for the editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Eugene Rabinowitch, to move the hands of the so-called “Doomsday Clock” to two minutes to midnight – the closest estimate there had yet been of the world facing Armageddon. It had been established in 1947 by the Bulletin, an organisation formed by the men who built the first atom bomb at Los Alamos and now had grave concerns about the savage power they had unleashed.
In its first year. the hands had been set at seven minutes to midnight. In America, Joe McCarthy continued to stoke the fires of paranoia, warning of the Communist enemy within. While back in Britain the country’s early warning and detection system – Operation Rotor – was being modernised in preparation for the day when Soviet Tu-4 bombers swooped over the Channel with their atomic payload on board.
We might have had the Coronation, England’s Ashes, and the ascent of Everest in 1953. But fundamentally, it was a year of living very dangerously.
● Two Minutes To Midnight: 1953 – TheYear Of Living Dangerously by Roger Hermiston (Biteback, £20) is out now. For free UK delivery, call Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 or order via expressbookshop.co.uk