The Cold War

On 24 June 1948 the Soviet Union closed the road, rail and canal routes into West Berlin. Two days later the first American transports landed at Tempelhof, and the RAF’s Operation Plainfare began soon afterwards. The planners thought the city needed about 4,500 tons a day. In the first week the airlift managed about 90 tons a day.

By the spring of 1949 it was landing more than 7,000 tonnes a day, every day. The blockade was lifted on 12 May 1949, but the flights went on until 30 September to build up stocks.

Britain’s answer to the Soviet bomb was three four-jet bombers from three different firms: the Vickers Valiant (in service February 1955), the Avro Vulcan (1956) and the Handley Page Victor (1958). Together they were the V-force, and until 1969 they carried Britain’s strategic nuclear deterrent. From 1962 one armed aircraft per squadron was held on Quick Reaction Alert, crewed and ready to be airborne within 15 minutes.

On 1 July 1969 the job passed to the Royal Navy’s Polaris submarines. The Vulcans went on as tactical bombers, and in 1982 flew the longest bombing raids then attempted, to Port Stanley and back from Ascension Island.

Soviet long-range aircraft probed the edge of British airspace throughout the Cold War, usually Tu-95 ‘Bears’ heading round the North Cape for the Atlantic. Each one was met: by Meteors and Javelins, then Lightnings, Phantoms and finally Tornado F3s, launched from Quick Reaction Alert at Leuchars, Binbrook, Wattisham and elsewhere.

In June 1981 the Minister of State for the Armed Forces, Peter Blaker, told the Commons that in 1978 the RAF had carried out about four interceptions of Soviet aircraft a week, and that in 1980 the figure had risen to nearly five.

The U-2 flew higher than any Soviet fighter could reach, and from July 1956 it photographed Soviet airfields, missile ranges and factories that no other aircraft could reach. It could not outclimb a missile. On 1 May 1960 an SA-2 brought down Francis Gary Powers near Sverdlovsk, and on 27 October 1962 another killed Major Rudolf Anderson over Cuba, the only American killed by enemy fire in the missile crisis.

Its successor never needed to cross a frontier. The SR-71 flew along borders at three times the speed of sound and 80,000 feet, looking sideways, and when missiles were fired it simply accelerated. None was ever shot down.

In 1945 a Gloster Meteor set the world air speed record at 606 mph. Thirty-one years later an SR-71 raised it to 2,193 mph, and no one has gone faster in a jet aircraft taking off under its own power since. In between it was raised 22 times, and British aircraft set five of those records: the Meteor twice, Neville Duke’s Hunter and Mike Lithgow’s Swift (which held it for less than a month between them in September and October 1953), and Peter Twiss’s Fairey Delta 2, which in March 1956 added 310 mph to the record in one go.

The altitude record told a similar story. English Electric Canberras held it three times; after 1958 it belonged to Starfighters, Phantoms and, finally, MiGs.

The three most-built jet aircraft in history are all Mikoyan-Gurevich fighters, and all three were designed in the first fifteen years of the Cold War. Licence production spread them across the Warsaw Pact, China and India, and they fought in Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East and Africa. The West built fewer of more types. Britain’s most-built swept-wing fighter, the Hunter, reached 1,972; its Mach 2 interceptor, the Lightning, 337.

By the late 1980s both alliances were preparing to negotiate cuts, and both published counts of each other’s aircraft. They could hardly have been further apart. NATO’s November 1988 comparison gave the Warsaw Pact more than twice as many combat aircraft. The Warsaw Pact’s reply in January 1989 made the two sides almost level. Neither was lying outright: they counted different things, including or leaving out trainers, naval aircraft and air-defence fighters at home.

The treaty that resolved the argument, Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, was signed on 19 November 1990 and capped each bloc at 6,800 combat aircraft from the Atlantic to the Urals.