Empires Lost: Cold War Memoir

What was the Cold War, and are we on the verge of another, or worse?

I was born amidst the Nazi V-1 and V-2 raids on London and Croydon, England, during WWII. My mother, father and I survived that worldwide conflict and settled in Montreal, Canada, in 1945. That year saw the end of one war and the beginning of another: the Cold War between old Allies in the Eastern and Western Blocs, between Communism and Capitalism.

Two of the first to recognize the dangers of that new conflict were the authors and survivors of WWII George Orwell and Winston Churchill. Orwell used the term, Cold War, in an essay in October 1945. Churchill coined the Iron Curtain as the physical boundary between the two sides, or Blocs, of the Cold War in a 5 March 1946 speech in the US. I was a child during the first ‘Proxy War’ of the conflict between communist North Korea. China and the Soviet Union backed the Communist North. The United Nations, the US, and the Western Allies, supported Capitalist South Korea from 1950 to 1953.

By 1961, when I joined the Royal Canadian Navy as a sonarman to find Soviet submarines, and John F. Kennedy became President of the United States. Nikita Khrushchev was the Soviet premier, and Fidel Castro was the Cuban premier. The Cold War was in full swing with those leaders in command. I was immediately thrown into my new role on a NATO exercise off Gibraltar, among others. However, the war and my new occupation reached their pinnacle during the Cuban Missile Crisis on the Grand Banks in October 1962. What would this war’s outcome be? Would Kennedy, Khrushchev, Castro, and I survive, and would the Cold War increase the dangers to a world otherwise at peace?

This 4th book of The Rutherford Chronicles relates the author’s personal experiences with the last major crisis of the 20th Century. He searched for Soviet submarines during the Cuban Missile Crisis and for America’s most advanced US Atomic Submarine. He saw a divided Germany and the Berlin Wall. He witnessed the fight against Apartheid and the formation of Nelson Mandela's government in South Africa. Finally, he witnessed the collapse of the USSR, and the end of the Cold War and the mighty British Empire.

Are we in danger of a similar conflict today, or worse, WW3?