I was reading through this site http://www.aiipowmia.com and found this
Over 400,000 cold war related deaths? Can that be right? I was just a kid, but I can remember being taught that it was simply a political “war” and I’ve never considered that it might have included such a large number of fatalites. How were all these people killed? Did we really have that many spies? Am I simply misreading the stats?
They may be counting all the proxy struggles - i.e. Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, etc… But that’s admittedly just WAG on my part.
It has to. I don’t have a clue where else they could be pulling that large of figure from.
If you go through that entire stats page, you’ll see large numbers, so to speak, of extremely odd numbers.
One of those lines is duplicated.
One of those numbers is duplicated.
I have no idea what the meaning of the POW statement is.
And now for the OP.
The deaths in service for the Cold War is obviously the missing deaths in service figure for World War II.
Just a poorly done site.
What about the revolts in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe? Were those who revolted not American in spirit?
John Birch, who was killed by armed supporters of the Chinese Communist Party in 1945 is considered by some on the American far Right to be the first casualty of the Cold War.
IMHO…the first victims of the cold war were the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This is a very very vague memory but…
Weren’t several Allied planes delivering supplies shot down by the Soviets at the end of the Second World War or very soon after the end of it?
I think I remember reading that those were the first shots of the Cold War.
Even if you accept the argument that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were part of the Cold War, they certainly were not the first part of it. American, British, and French soldiers intervened in the Russian Civil War against the Soviets and certainly the associated casualities must be considered due to the Cold War.
Good point.
But in the intervening times who used who?
Thanks, to all. It’s raised an interesting discussion so I’m not too dissapointed the site was wishy-washy. I was actually poking around looking for information on POWs and whether there were any acknowledged living POWs in other countries, from when, etc. Can anyone recommend a good one?
I have read accounts of American (and perhaps other Western) fighter pilots engaging in air-to-air combat with their Russian counterparts on several occasions towards the end of WWII… but I have never been able to find a definitive source that would confirm or deny these stories. The closest I’ve come is a couple of mentions that it probably did happen, but more as a case of mistaken identity rather than an actual agenda on either side.