Find old cold war articles here. We have free newspaper articles from the 1950s cold war check them out today!
The latest U-2 photographs, showing increased numbers of Russian planes on or near Cuban airfields, have forced U.S. intelligence experts to raise their estimates from 150 to 300 Soviet planes in Cuba
During the earliest days of 1951 many journalists and intelligence analysts in the West thought Ho Chi Minh’s prolonged absence from public view meant a coup d’état had taken place within the Viet Minh hierarchy. These same minds held that the most likely candidate to launch such a power play was Ho’s number two: Dang Xuan Khu (1907 – 1988). This article goes into some detail explaining who he was and what he’d been up to for the past forty years.
The outcome of the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis was seen as a largely tasteless affair by the brass caps in Moscow. They believed Premiere Khrushchev and his diplomatic bungling left the U.S.S.R. in a weaker position and they wanted him out, pronto. Numerous men in the Soviet Army and within the Kremlin united in a plot to force him out. The Premiere proved himself a master at seeing through such intrigue; he stopped the coup dead in its tracks with a boatload of key arrests and executions which then knocked the remaining confederates off their game, sending them hither and yon.
Ten months later the Kremlin forced Khrushchev into retirement.
During the opening week of October, 1949 President Harry Truman announced that the Soviet Union had exploded its own nuclear weapon. Americans were deeply shocked and wondered aloud as to what this would mean – Would the peacetime draft call be doubled?
…Russia had caught the U.S. flatfooted. For the first time in history every American looked straight down the gun barrel of [a] foreign attack.
The pace of the Cold War picked up soon after this event took place.
This article concerns the observations of a Japanese diplomat who was privileged to tour a Chinese Army base. He spoke at length about all that he saw during his tour and used his surveillance, mixed with his general knowledge of China, to understand what their general capabilities would be in the event of war. When asked what was most impressive about the Chinses military, the diplomat replied:
The mining. They explained that the antipersonnel mine is their most unusual weapon, developed primarily to sap the enemy’s morale.
The Chinese foray into Korea resulted in the coming together of numerous politicians in Washington in order to boost Army spending by $41.8 billion dollars, with an additional $1 billion designated for nuclear warfare preparedness. Assorted branches of the military increased the draft pool and lowered their admission standards. New Jersey Representative Charles Eaton(R) gravely stated:
We face the greatest danger of extinction since the nation was founded.
A highly quotable article from 1963 that articulates precisely how highly organized the Communist guerrillas were in the Vietnam War.
The Reds fight a fluid war that may last for years. They do not make the mistake of saying the war will be won in three, five or ten years.
Joseph Stalin (1878 – 1953) is credited as the author of the attached article, Russia’s Plan for World Conquest, and it outlines all the various methods Soviet agents can subvert and curry-favor among the various youth and labor groups that are based in the industrialized democracies of the West:
…here is the Russian Dictator’s nine point program for world conquest, taken from his recorded writings, which are now on file in the Stalin Archives of the National War College in Washington, D.C. Italicized sentences have been inserted throughout the article in order to point up Stalin’s plan in the light of today’s crucial events. [ie. the Korean War]
As Lenin has said, a terrible clash between Soviet Russia and the capitalist States must inevitably occur…Therefore we must try to take the enemy by surprise, seize a moment when his forces are dispersed.
Click here to read about Soviet collusion with American communists.
The 1963 struggle in Vietnam was important for a number of reasons: as the year began the world saw the first major defeat for the Army of the Republic of Vietnam at the hands of the Viet Cong guerrillas at Ap Bac. Five months later Buddhist clergymen revealed their deep distaste for the war effort which quickly resulted in the Diem administration putting numerous Buddhist pagodas to the torch. Ngo Dinh Diem himself would be put to the torch in November when he and his brother would be overthrown in an American-backed coup. Historians have long maintained that by meddling in the internal political affairs of South Vietnam, JFK had unwittingly doomed any chance for their self-reliance; following the November coup, that country became more and more reliant upon the United States – and when the U.S. abandoned the cause of a free and independent South Vietnam, their fate was sealed.
A small notice from the closing weeks of the 1952 presidential contest between retired General Eisenhower (R) vs former Governor Adlai Stevenson (D) in which Senator Joseph McCarthy stepped forth to muddy the waters with one of his characteristic insults:
McCarthy charged Stevenson was ‘part and parcel of the Acheson-Hiss-Lattimore group’ and that Stevenson in 1943 (as a State Department official) had a plan to ‘foist Communism’ on Italy when Mussolini fell.
Whether the comment convinced anyone was not recorded, but Eisenhower won the 1952 election by a wide margin, as did all Republican candidates.
Lenin went to his grave believing that he had established a nation where a worker’s labor would be fairly compensated – a land free from want; but this was not the case. The Soviet Union, and all its assorted satellites, was in actuality, a police state where people longed to get away from all the free stuff that was offered – thousands of people successfully escaped while many others died trying. The country he created was one in which the word escape was frequently uttered – which brings us to this article – it concerns cars and how they were able to be refashioned in such a way as to conceal the East Germans who wished so badly to get away to the West – and it is very well illustrated.
The President has asked all Americans to keep their eyes open for spies and subversives and to report them to the FBI. Who would you start looking for?
Illustrated with a chart that shows how much the U.S. Navy had shrunk after W.W. II and then expanded anew when faced with the war in Korea, this short article pertains to the various steps Congress was taking to meet the Soviet challenges abroad:
A $2.3 billion ship-building and repair program, just approved by President Truman, will add a 57,800-ton carrier and 172 other new vessels to the fleet. And 291 more are to be demothballed-including 6 carriers, 12 cruisers, 194 destroyers.
[Stalin was incapable of responding to such growth, so he simply ordered the production of additional A-Bombs]
Here is an article by a respected American journalist who was dispatched to South Vietnam in order that he might see for himself what the problems were as to why the Republic of Vietnam seemed so incapable of maintaining military dominance in the field. Everywhere he went he got the same answer:
A highly respected professor at Saigon University [remarked]:
‘If you have to make a choice between supporting the Ngo family
and withdrawing from South Vietnam, you might as well pull out.
You cannot win with the family.’
When General James Van Fleet let it be known that much of the previous two years in Korea had been plagued by a shortage in ammunition, tempers flared in the Senate as both parties talked of convening an investigative committee.
Attached is an article concerning a page from American Military History and it outlines the losses and gains of the Korean War (1950 – 1953). In five sentences this article gives the number of American dead and wounded, the number of U.N. dead and wounded and the amount of ground lost to the Chinese and North Korean military; a map of the stabilized front is provided.
In South China, 6,000 French troops stood ready to reenter French Indo-China. A portion of the French fleet and a French air force unit prepared to back them up.
We are definitely taking over.
In 1954 the French gave up on Vietnam and the U.S. accepted the challenge – click here to read about it…
Hanoi is now the fountainhead of the largest and most successful anti-French insurgent movement ever mounted in Indo-China. Here Vietminh (first and last words of Viet Nam Doclap Dong Minh, meaning the league for the independence of Viet Nam) has set up the provisional government of the Viet Nam Republic. Viet Nam is the ancient name for the coastal provinces of Indo-China. Vietminh has been actively in existence since 1939. The President of Viet Nam and leader of the whole insurgent movement is a slight, graying little man of 55, named Ho Chi Minh who commanded guerrillas in collaboration with American officers in Northern Tonkin… For 43 years he has devoted himself to anti-French activity. Constantly reported captured or dead, he never actually fell into French hands.
