REME Keeping the British Army on the road during the Cold War (309)
Aged 16 Chris joined the British Army apprentice school in Arborfield, at Princess Marina College. He was trained as a vehicle mechanic in the Royal Electrical Mechanical Engineers otherwise known as ...
15 Sep 202331min
Gunfire in the Woods: A foiled escape and imprisonment in Cold War East Germany (308)
This is part two of Henrik’s story. You can hear the first part in episode 307. https://coldwarconversations.com/episode307 It’s the late 1980s and Henrik and his friends plan to escape from East Germ...
8 Sep 20231h 29min
Growing up in Cold War East Germany's Valley of the Clueless (307)
Henrik was born in the late 1960s near Dresden in East Germany. The area was sarcastically known as the Tal der Ahnungslosen or Valley of the Clueless, as the area generally was not able to receive TV...
1 Sep 20231h 14min
Flying the Cold War A10 Tankbuster Part 2 (306)
You are listening to part 2 of my chat with Joe who joined the USAF in 1981 and was trained to fly the A10 Warthog a single-seat, twin-engine jet aircraft designed to provide close air support to grou...
25 Aug 202349min
Flying the Cold War A10 Tankbuster Part 1 (305)
Joe’s father served in World War 2 in the USAF. His service inspired Joe to try and join the USAF or the Naval Air Force despite having no flying experience. It’s the aftermath of the Vietnam War so f...
18 Aug 202353min
A Cold War Polish childhood near Wroclaw (304)
Tom lived in western Poland in an area that had been part of Germany until the end of World War 2. He describes how his grandmother settled in this area and the strangeness of taking over formerly Ger...
11 Aug 20231h 29min
Soviet MIG shoots-down a US RB-47H reconnaissance plane (303)
On 1 July 1960, a United States RB-47H reconnaissance plane was shot down by the Soviet Air Defence Forces while performing signals intelligence in the Barents Sea, near the Kola Peninsula, off the Ar...
4 Aug 202349min
The rise and fall of East German leader Erich Honecker (302)
Honecker emerged as an ambitious political player and became the shadowy mastermind behind the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, a crucial moment in twentieth-century history. Author Nathan Mor...
28 Jul 20231h 13min
