Paul Lashmar
Sutton Publishing, Stroud (UK), 1996
£12.99 (pb)
Beautifully produced, large (trade) format, with many photographs, this is the story of the US and later US-UK spy flights round – and over – the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Alternatively, it is the story of a protracted series of skirmishes between the Soviet and US air forces as the US risked war in its efforts to penetrate ‘the Iron Curtain’. Lashmar reports that more than 40 NATO aircraft were shot down and hundreds of USAF personnel died in these operations. He also paints a picture of USAF General Curtis Lemay – the man who wanted to ‘bomb North Vietnam back into the stone age’ – who was in charge of much of the programme, which makes the Air Force General played by George C. Scott in late Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove seem rational and reasonable.
Lashmar ends the book unclear as to how much of this programme was known about by the politicians who were nominally in charge of it. Fletcher Prouty discussed the same question in his 1973 The Secret Team and concluded that the politicians knew very little.
This is an important contribution to the continuing reevaluation of the Cold War; and what with the IRD book and this, Lashmar must now be one of Britain’s more important contemporary historians.