An ‘interesting’ document if you want to get a feel for how the USSR planned to kill the US, Brit and French carriers…
Suffice to say Kamikaze plans were alive and well…
Document link is HERE.
As one of the commenters said last week, John Q. Public has absolutely no idea how close things came a few times…
And Putin is putting all those ‘players’ back in motion today. Probing, flying ‘training’ missions in the Baltic, pushing a Russian surface group back into the Med, etc.
Today, we don’t have access to a lot of the bases we needed then and may need again. The Brits no longer have an ASW aircraft in their Fleet, neither do the Dutch. The French and Germans are still flying Atlantiques, and the Spanish are still flying P-3s…
Playing ‘tag’ with the Bears was always a challenge, and while there was ‘some’ camaraderie (hey, we’re all airdales regardless of country), they’d still do their damnest to knock us out of the air if we screwed up. We’d show them Playboys and they’d shoot us the bird, or we’d show them beer and they’d show us vodka…
From Wikipedia (HERE)
A Soviet Tu-142M aircraft (NATO code “Bear F Mod 3”) being escorted by a U.S. Navy Lockheed P-3C-155-LO Orion (BuNo 159319) of patrol squadron VP-45 Pelicans, on 6 March 1986.
Not my squadron, not my airplane in this case… 🙂 But the time period is right…
h/t Stretch
