 Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Lee Glazer. I'm the director of the National Archives Museum, and it's a pleasure to welcome you all today to the William G. McGowan Theater at the National Archives, which is situated on the ancestral lands of the Anacocchan peoples. Welcome also to our audience members watching on our YouTube channel. I'm delighted to introduce today's discussion, poise, professionalism, and a little luck, the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, and we're really pleased to be presenting this program in collaboration with the Army War College and the Naval History and Heritage Command. Before we get to the main event, I want to tell you about two upcoming virtual programs you can watch on the National Archives YouTube channel. On Thursday, October 6th at 1 p.m., authors Judy Zuchan Wu and Gwendolyn Mink will discuss their book, Fierce and Fearless, Patsy Takamoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress. Mink was best known for her work, Shepherding and Defending Title IX, the federal civil rights legislation that prohibits discrimination based on sex education, based on sex and education programs and activities receiving federal funding, and one of its greatest impacts was making it possible for girls and women to more fully participate in school sports. Then on Friday, October 14th at 1 p.m., we continue our commemoration of the Cuban Missile Crisis with a book lecture entitled The Abyss, Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962 with author Max Hastings. And to find out more about our many programs and activities at the National Archives, please visit our website at www.archives.gov. Okay, now about today's program. For two weeks in October 1962, the world teetered on the edge of thermonuclear war. Earlier that fall, the Soviet Union, under orders from Premier Nikita Khrushchev, began to secretly deploy a nuclear strike force in Cuba just 90 miles from the United States. President John F. Kennedy said the missiles would not be tolerated and insisted on their removal. Khrushchev refused. The standoff nearly caused a nuclear exchange and is remembered in this country as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Among the holdings of the National Archives are many documents, photographs, cartographic and motion picture records related to the Cuban Missile Crisis. They're spread over several record groups. So it's most appropriate that we're presenting this program in this theater today. And now it's my pleasure to introduce our panel up on the stage. Moderating the discussion will be Jeff Hawks, Education Director at the Army Heritage Center Foundation. And joining him will be Stephen M. By, U.S. Army War College, Dr. Frank Jones, U.S. Army War College Retired, and Curtis Utt's Naval History and Heritage Command. So please join me in welcoming our panel. Good afternoon and thank you. I'm honored to be here with this group here today. It was a defining moment of the 20th century, a defining moment in the Cold War and a defining moment in the lives of everyone who lived through it. It was a moment when two superpowers grappled with themselves and with each other in an attempt to control the mechanisms they had created. It changed the way everyone understood the world. Staring to the abyss often has that effect. Now Mark Twain supposedly said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Less than a year ago it would have been hard to imagine that even as we gathered here to mark the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, that we would once again be contemplating the very real possibility of a nuclear exchange in a conflict between Russia and the West. I'm Jeff Hawks, Director of Education and Veteran Outreach for the Army Heritage Center Foundation, and I'm pleased to see you all here for our presentation, Poise Professionalism and a Little Luck, the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962. Just a show of hands from the audience, how many of you were alive and remember the crisis? Okay, a fair number. I'm pleased to see you here for our presentation. I'm sure that you can attest that the crisis was a critical point in world history, and I'm sure there are many great perspectives in this audience, and I look forward to hearing your questions toward the end of the program. These events then and now are why we preserve history here at the National Archives and at the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center at the Army War College. We preserve documents and artifacts, reports and personal accounts, photographs and monographs so that we can learn from them to understand the rhythms and rhymes of history, to better anticipate events, and to better prepare for the future. This presentation is the result of a collaboration between our hosts, the National Archives, the Army Heritage Center, the Heritage and Education Center, and the Army Heritage Center Foundation, and I'm pleased to introduce our panelists. Dr. Frank Jones, U.S. Army War College, retired. Frank Jones taught for over 14 years in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College after retiring from the office of the Secretary of Defense. With over 30 years of military and civil service experience, including tenure as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, he's the author of Blowtorch, Robert Comer, Vietnam, and American Cold War Strategy, and Sam Nunn, statesman of the nuclear age, as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Curtis A. Utz has held several positions in the Navy History and Heritage Command and its predecessor, the Naval Historical Center, including leading the Naval Aviation History and Archives branches from 2003 to 2014. He authored Cordon of Steel, the U.S. Navy and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Assault from the Sea, the amphibious landing at Inchon. A historian and analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency from 1994 to 2003, he has lectured in history of the University of Maryland, the Joint Military Intelligence College, and the Joint Military Intelligence Training Center. And Stephen M. By is the reference archivist with the Academic Library Division, Analysis and Research Team of the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, AKA USAHEC. He has worked as an archivist with the Archives Branch, Military History Institute at USAHEC, Staff Lead of the Circulation Branch, Patron Support Team, Military History Unit. Also at USAHEC, he's held numerous other positions at the U.S. Army War College and Fort Indian Town Gap. Each panelist will make their remarks, and I do remind you that the opinions our speakers express are their own and do not reflect the position of the United States Army, the United States Navy, or the Department of Defense, or any other organization. At the end of their presentations, we'll open the program up, we'll have a few questions for conversation, and then open it up to questions from the floor. For those of you watching from home, please go ahead and type your comments in the comments section of the YouTube channel, and we'll do our best to answer them all. So with that, I'd like to begin, and I will invite Dr. Jones to join us at the podium. Well, good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be here and looking forward to a discussion among ourselves as panelists, but also with you as well, those of you online. Of course, I think it's important to set the stage, if you will. What's the strategic environment? And Dr. Glazer mentioned this when she introduced us a few minutes ago, but what was going on with these two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union? And I think it's good to remember for those who may not be familiar with the crisis itself, to realize that the United States actually had an overwhelming strategic advantage. The nuclear systems that it had were reliable and accurate, and there were more of them than there were of the Soviets. Additionally, the United States had actually in place, it made operational, some medium-range ballistic missiles, Jupiters, in Turkey, which was a really annoying and humiliating for the Soviet Union, and that plays into their thinking. The administration, I think one could say, was obsessed, as one historian said, with the idea that Cuba under Castro was a communist regime in the Western hemisphere, and they're concerned about that as well. Concerned that it would be, as the Joint Chiefs of Staff Historian said, a cancer that would really precipitate revolution throughout the hemisphere. And then, of course, there have been some embarrassing points as well. The botched Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, a humiliation. And in response to that, Operation Mungus, a covert operation against Cuba that started in 1961 and was continuing into 1962. And then there was another friction point. The United States and its NATO allies were concerned about the city of Berlin, and there had been good reason for that. Not only the Berlin Airlift, which you might be familiar with, where the city was isolated, but the Soviets demanded the Western powers leave the city, the three Western powers of the United States, Great Britain and France. That set off a crisis in itself, and in 1961 the Berlin Wall was constructed. So, just to set this a little bit more specific, what's happening in 1962? Well, part of it is this recognition by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the JCS, that there may be come a time when the United States will actually invade Cuba and oppose the Castro regime. And to this point, Cruz Jeff and Castro and his leaders are interested in making sure that they can deter the United States from taking that action. And so it begins, it precipitates a series of indications about Soviet equipment coming into Cuba, then the fact that there are actually some sophisticated weaponry coming in there during the summer, and then in September, President Kennedy releases a statement in which he reveals that surface-to-air missiles and sizable Soviet military presence is in Cuba. A little more than a week later, President Kennedy says in a Nunes conference that the additional Soviet troops that are there do not constitute a serious threat. But he warns that if there are offensive capabilities there, that will change the whole nature. That is not tolerable to the United States. And then over the next three days, you can see in the middle of October, 14th, 15th, and 16th, there's a series of photo reconnaissance flights which have really the recognition and concrete evidence that the Soviet Union is putting offensive weapons into Cuba. And October 16th is where that evidence becomes conclusive as far as the President is concerned, and it starts the famous 13 days. Curtis will talk a lot more about the quarantine, but as you can see within a few days that quarantine will go in effect and it will become really the high point of the actual crisis. So I mentioned there are plans that the Joint Chiefs of Staff actually had started planning for a possible contingency, including an invasion, of Cuba. And they focus on the first one, 312, which is air strikes. And then you'll notice there's two that really talk about airborne operations, airdrops of personnel, and also the direction to go ahead and concentrate on the Plan 316 eventually, where you can see where the three objectives are. Overthrow the regime, occupy Cuba, establish a new government, conduct air force, excuse me, air attacks first, and then an invasion by sea with an airborne landing in western Cuba in five days, and then an amphibious assault thereafter. What's the bottom line? What are American leaders thinking? Two things I think are very important. One, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military leaders, are interested in an immediate surprise attack and taking out all these offensive weapons. Not only the fighter aircraft, the bombers that are there, that are being uncrated, the missiles in their launches and the surface air missiles, they want to take that out and the tanks to eventually add that to the target list. And the Secretary of McNamara, Robert S. McNamara, is interested in trying to get a sense of what the United States should do militarily. And he often finds himself differing about his views day to day as details become more and more available to these leaders. But, being good secretary, he follows the Commander-in-Chief, backs him up, and certainly as Curtis will talk about, has some friction points with the military over these actual operations. What's the Army mission? Well, the Army mission is really fourfold. First of all, they're going to execute the land invasion. 316 becomes the plan which will be executed if the President should decide so. They have to provide air defense. I'll talk a little bit more about that. Third, they have a continental Army command, which Army units all across the continent are under, but they have to provide logistical support because they're moving Army units from across the United States, as far as ways Fort Lewis will Washington. And they have to also consider the establishment of a special base command in the Peninsula of Florida and other activities, as you can see. Now, the command and control for this looks how would this work out? If this were to take place, 316, you can see, and Curtis will talk about this side, here with the Navy and Marine Corps, but there is a JTF Cuba, that's the commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, those units will be subordinate to him and the Air Force through the tactical air command. And as I mentioned, part of this is there's Havana, the Port of Marial is where the surface echelon will come aboard, come ashore, excuse me, and over here is Tarara, which is about 10 miles east of Havana, and it will be the place where the Marine Corps is supposed to land, but some Army units will land there as well. This is a sticking point. The United States was thinking about how does it defend itself from air attack by the Soviet Union coming over the Arctic Circle, not sending ballistic missiles, medium range or intermediate range from Cuba. And so they basically gerry-rig a set of units from across the United States, and picket ships from the Navy, radars have to be reoriented in order to be able to pick up these signatures of aircraft that might be approaching or missiles. And so there's a vast organization that has to be thought about and defending staging bases where the Air Force will take off and even the true carrier routes that you have to carry people in in terms of the airdrop. The Air Force has, again, wide variety of missions, as you can see there, surveillance flights, reconnaissance flights, targeting for the air attack if it should happen, dropping the airborne forces, and then prepositioning material. And the Air Force in general is heavily involved from everything from aircraft to reconnaissance to tankers, to actually procurement civilian contracts and other types of support systems, including air traffic control and navigational aids. And lastly, just point out the strategic air command. Here is a specified command, meaning it has a specific mission. And part of that is to conduct surveillance eventually. And the other part is deter the Soviet Union and Cuba from attacking the United States. And you can see that the readiness level two DEF CON two means the readiness level is just below going to war. So that's how much the strategic air command is poised in order to act. And as a consequence, they are alerted throughout the world, not just in the United States, but throughout the world. And that, I think, gives you a good overview of what's happening in terms of the military response and the relationship that the military has with its civilian leaders as well. So I'll turn it over to Curtis at this time. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. And thank you for joining us for this presentation. And I'd like to thank my colleagues from Carlisle for inviting me to participate in this panel. So I'm gonna be talking about what is the Navy and the Marine Corps' perspective on the missile crisis and what was going on. Now, one of the things that has to be understood, you're carrying out normal peacetime operations. Well, for the Navy and the Atlantic, that's a pretty broad group. There's regular deployments to the Mediterranean, the Sixth Fleet. There's the deployment of the newly built Polaris-armed, nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, which were on patrol, maintaining anti-submarine warfare patrols in the Atlantic, monitoring Soviet and Eastern block shipping, particularly what's headed to Cuba. Plus, there's a series of regular exercises that are always ongoing. Now, one thing I should mention in the realm of joint cooperation, as far as the monitoring of Soviet and Eastern block shipping, it's not just the Navy and the Marine Corps. The air force is involved, and as you get closer to Cuba with operations out of Florida and Puerto Rico, so is the Coast Guard. So everybody's working in this. Now, as far as the exercises I have listed here, I'll point out two. One is they're doing the annual brigade level, about 5,000 men landing exercise near Puerto Rico. And they're doing it on the island of Vieques, and the objective is to land and remove a fictional dictator named Ortsak. That's Castro spelled backwards. So they're already thinking in terms of these op plans that Frank was talking about. Another thing to note is there was a very large anti-submarine warfare exercise planned with the Canadians for later on October and November. And the Canadians had gone so far as to recall reservists, test bringing a ship out of mothballs to see how fast they could get ready. It was a major, major effort by the Canadian Armed Forces that will have some benefits in a few weeks. Now, as far as Navy missions during the crisis, the primary one is carry out the quarantine. Essentially, it's a blockade to prevent the importation of any other offensive weapons, ballistic missiles, capable of striking the United States or bombers that could carry nuclear devices. There's also the ability to provide low-level photographic reconnaissance, not the high-level strategic U-2s. The guys down on the deck and the Navy excelled at that. But they still needed to maintain their anti-submarine warfare capabilities in the Atlantic, and they also needed to maintain the strategic deterrent patrols. And lastly, if needed, carry out an invasion if order. As to these missions, in enforcing the quarantine, President Kennedy said to CNO, George Anderson, Chief of Naval Operations, it looks as though this is up to the Navy. And Anderson replied, Mr. President, the Navy will not let you down. The Navy essentially assembled two primary task forces to enforce the quarantine, one primarily built around surface assets, and one built around two attack aircraft carriers. And the thing is, it should be understood, both of these organizations could carry out significant anti-submarine warfare operations if required, because submarines are one of your greatest threats. As far as the aerial surveillance in the Atlantic and the Caribbean basis, it continues to be a multi-service effort. And I should also point out that later in the crisis, in addition to the fact that Canadians are involved, several of the South American navies are involved and provide ships to help enforce the blockade near the end. Now, as far as enforcing the blockade, which could mean stopping ships, boarding, searching, that's pretty tricky operation. We only did it once. A single ship was boarded. That was the Lebanese freighter, Marcula, which we knew the Soviets would not put weapons of any type on the ship of a neutral. And so here it is, where it stopped by two US destroyers and a destroyer in the background is the Joseph P. Kennedy, the one named after President Kennedy's brother. So what happens with the quarantine when the Soviets figure out we're being serious about this is they're approaching the quarantine line and the time on 24 October that Kennedy has set. All of a sudden, Soviet ships start stopping dead in the water. Either that or they're turning around and the circuits back to Moscow are lighting up. And they're like, okay, what do we do? Eventually they turn around and leave. As far as low-level reconnaissance, Navy Light Photographic Squadron 62 was considered the best low-level reconnaissance unit in the armed forces. That was the assessment of the head of NPIC, Art Lundahl. And the thing is when you're doing low-level work, you're far more susceptible to a lot of things, not just missile defense, but also triple-A, automatic anti-aircraft fire, in some cases even small arms fire. But they used sound tactics. They were shot at near the end of the crisis. They were never hit. And the USMC also provided pilots and aircraft that joined VFP 62. Same aircraft, same training, did very well. To be blunt, the Air Force didn't do so well. The Air Force, the VUDU, is a bad platform for low-level reconnaissance work. It has a tendency to have its nose pitch up, which really isn't good, because that's where your cameras are. They didn't have good cameras. They had poor training. And in fact, Curtis LeMay's chief of staff, the Air Force realizes they need to get new cameras. He goes to the manufacturer, manufacturer said, sold everything in stock to the Navy, go ask them. So George Anderson, the CNO, enjoyed the fact that essentially LeMay had to come to him hat and hand and ask for cameras. But to give you an idea of the capability of that imagery, that's what you could do. And this is amazingly detailed stuff for technology that's 60 years old. Another thing that had to be maintained was the anti-submarine warfare mission. It's not just the problem of the threat of Soviet submarines near Cuba or in the Caribbean to US naval forces. The Soviets have submarines that are capable of launching missiles at the United States, not anywhere the number we have. They have several Zulu-class boats, which have to surface, but have a ballistic missile loaded in their sail. And we actually spotted one of those near the Azores during the crisis. But they also had submarines or equipped with cruise missiles, which again, you need to surface and fire, but all of these missiles could be armed with nuclear weapons. So that needs to be kept track of. Now the US forces are really stretched thin. They're the destroyers, the patrol aircraft. And since the Canadians were already, they're like, okay, the US has dropped out of the exercise, they kept going ahead with the exercise. And Canadian forces took over a large amount of the effort in the North Atlantic, in fact, all the way down as far as the Azores and in some cases off the East coast of the United States. Now, one of the things that has come up over time is the Soviet Foxtrot diesel-electric attack boats, very good submarines in a lot of ways. And they were in fact, each armed with one nuclear armed torpedo. And there's been a lot of things that people have been concerned about what would have happened with that. The problem is we were very good, or the problem for them I should say is, we're very good at anti-submarine warfare. And eventually all four of the Foxtrot's that were in the vicinity of Cuba were eventually forced to the surface and directed to go 090 dead due east and away from the area. The other thing we had to do was assemble an amphibious force in case an invasion was required. The Navy did this and they made sure that they reorganized the leadership in second fleet, the main combatant fleet off the East coast of the United States to make sure qualified amphibious warfare officer was in charge. His previous job, commanding the amphibious forces in the Atlantic, he also got a really good replacement in Horacio Rivera, who was one of the Navy's rising stars. And they are mobilizing the elements of a second Marine expeditionary force. Now, luckily there's part of it already down getting ready for the exercise off Puerto Rico and those forces are actually shifted in to reinforce the garrison at Guantanamo because the US still does have a naval station at Guantanamo at that time and it needs to be reinforced and held. They in the ships that actually took in the first group of Marines evacuated all the civilian dependents out of Guantanamo as well. But the need and requirements potentially for forces, the JCS actually ordered the mobilization of a Marine brigade from the West Coast, from San Diego, which were put on board ship, brought through the Panama Canal and were present by early November in case they were needed. As to the sect deaf and the Navy, McNamara supported the blockade but McNamara really didn't have much of an idea of how Navy organizations worked or operated and he had several issues with Anderson. He was shocked one time when he went down into the CNO flag plot and Anderson wasn't there. Navy officers are used to standing long watches and Anderson knew if I'm down here all the time I will get exhausted and I will be useless. So himself, the VCNO and two of the senior DCNOs, four officers are standing six hour shifts. So that you've got somebody there, none of them are leaving the Pentagon from what I've been able to determine. So it's like we're ready, we're here, whereas McNamara near the end of the conflict or I should say the crisis was basically exhausted because he didn't have a similar type system to work with. Part of the issue is with McNamara, he's tired of these confrontations with Anderson when Anderson is due for reappointment. The next year for a second two year term as CNO he is not renominated. Well, once the Soviets agreed to withdraw the weapons, the offensive weapons, it primarily fell to the Navy to monitor the removal of weapons. Castro did not allow neutral observers to come into Cuba to monitor the removal of weapons. So the US said, okay, all these offensive weapons have to go through designated alongside areas so literally we can count missile bodies and bombers. And so the weapons had to be carried as deck cargo and ships had to go through the alongside areas. However, some Soviet freighter captains attempted to avoid the alongside areas. Sorry, freighters can't run away from destroyers or hide from aircraft. And basically this was one of the guys that tried to run the Vagolas. That's the destroyer Vessel there alongside. Vessel made them roll back the cover so they could confirm that they were in fact medium range missile bodies. But this is 9 November. Everybody's like, oh, the crisis ends after 13 days. Look under the wing of that patrol aircraft, the P2V. Those are 250 pound general purpose bombs. We're still prepared if hostilities are needed to do something. This is still a very serious situation, but we did confirm that all of the missiles were removed and that all of the IL-28 bombers eventually would be removed by December as they were nuclear capable aircraft. That concludes my presentation. Thank you for your time and attention, Stephen. Good afternoon. I'm Stephen Baye. I'm the reference archivist at the Army Heritage and Education Center. I'm here today to talk a little bit about the Army Heritage and Education Center and our holdings that we have that concern the Cuban Missile Crisis. The US Army Heritage and Education Center, also known as USAHEC, makes available contemporary and historical materials related to the strategic leadership, the global application of land power and the heritage of the US Army to inform research, educate international audience and to honor soldiers past and present. The USAHEC vision is to be the nation's best resource for study of strategic leadership, the global application of land power and the heritage of the US Army in honor of soldiers past and present. The United States Army War College and the Army Heritage and Education Center, we used to use these bibliographies. These are no longer considered up to date. However, I put them on here so you can see an idea of the things that we do hold concerning both the Bay of Pigs, which happened before the Missile Crisis and of course the Missile Crisis. Now the Missile Crisis bibliography is about five pages long and the Bay of Pigs is only three pages long. The Army Heritage and Education Center has an archive and this is extensive archive and these are the papers of different players during the Cuban Missile Crisis. You'll see a lot of names that you recognize. Herbert Powell is one that I really wanted to get into his papers and see exactly what he had. It was mentioned to me that he was a very important player during that time, but all of these, we have not only their papers, but also their oral histories. And if you were to come to the Education Center and into our reading room in Ridgway Hall, you could ask for any of these collections and we would actually bring you down the boxes and let you look through them yourself. We also have books. If you were to go on to our online catalog and request these books, these, this is what would pop up and of course these aren't clickable right now so you can't actually see how they come up, but these are the lists that you would print out and bring up and we would be able to pull these books for you. Now among the books, we have several that are critically acclaimed, including the Kennedy tapes inside the White House and 13 Days, a Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Bobby Kennedy. These are also books that you can request and you can read them right there in our reading room. We also have audio visuals. This is a DVD on the Missiles of October. It was directed by Anthony Page. This is something that we don't have the ability yet to put these in a machine and watch them there. However, at the War College, you could request that and take it home and watch it and bring it back. We also have student papers. The War College does a student paper that your degree is dependent on your student paper. Well, these are the student papers that were written specifically about the Cuban Missile Crisis and we have the date and the year and the individual who wrote it and of course the title. If you wanted to come into the reading room in Ridgeway Hall, all you would have to do is say, I want to see Keo's paper in 1984 on the explaining the Bay of Pigs and we would actually bring that out to you so you can look through his student paper. You can make a copy of it or send it over to our copy center and have them do it. We also have in the Army War College a department called SSI, Strategic Studies Institute. They do historical writings. These are two of the historical writings that they did on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Also something you could request and see if you came to visit. In 1963, NBC did a white paper, a half an hour show that they put on and in 1970, you'll see the Frederick... What is his last name? Anyway, he was a major at the time. He did a white paper on the Cuban Missile Crisis. He took the video from NBC and he turned it into a training document for classes that he taught. He was a major, he later became a Lieutenant General and this is another item that we have. If this was clickable, you could open it up and read it right here. However, it's something that you can see at the Army War College. This is something that the DOD has put out on Cuba. It was different questions came up on different aspects of Cuba, main thrust on the Cuban Missile Crisis. They put together a little booklet of questions and answers. This is also something you can see and of course it's a good segue into our next segment. I'll turn it back over to Jeff. Thank you very much. We do have some microphones set up so we can take some questions from the audience but I thought we'd start out with trying to get a little conversation going up here and so I guess, thank you all three of you for your fantastic presentations. I guess my first question would be from the perspective of the various military service branches that are responding to this crisis, what is the biggest operational challenge that they each face? Well, I think in certain ways for the Marine Corps, it's being able to get everybody there that they need to get there in a timely manner and make sure that they are logistically backed. I mean, as I mentioned, they could get some reinforcements into Guantanamo from the assets that were available immediately in theater but like the alert battalion at Lejeune had to be flown in by the Air Force. Marine Corps doesn't have that kind of organic capability. As far as the Navy, I'd say we had good command and control but part of the issue is I think the biggest challenge it's like we've got the forces in place, we've thought about this before but how do you deal with how the other guy reacts? I mean, one of the things when the quarantine timeline was set, they were like, what are we gonna do if the Soviet ships keep pushing on? And some eventually, I mean, some do but they're clearly not carrying weapons, they let us come up and inspect them but it's always what's gonna be, how do you react to whatever challenge you face? I think for the Army, the studies that's done a few years after the event, almost 20% of it is dedicated to the problems and deficiencies in the workarounds that they had to do. Probably the largest demand was the fact that it was logistics, supporting all those units that were moving from across the United States as far as Washington State. The other aspect is that they soon learned that because they had some responsibility for ensuring a reinforcement of Europe is some of the divisions that they had planned to use had to be switched out and swapped and the divisions they had replaced them with didn't have all their equipment. The Army's undergoing a force structure change at the time and because of that, it's got this mix that it has to deal with. I would say the other aspect is personnel. They find out that they don't have all the personnel they need, but particularly certain specialties, air defense capabilities, they don't have the specialization there, Spanish speakers become an issue for them, particularly for civil affairs issues where they set up a military government, if you will. So those were the challenges, I think. The Air Force less so, but as you can imagine, transportation, airlift, shipping, landing craft, all of that affected in the Air Force and the Army and you had to have enough space and bases to put all this aircraft. And so you're dispersing some of your aircraft into various areas so that they're not perfect targets and so you have to have the infrastructure and that's something that you also discovered that was a problem. You used the term workarounds which segues perfectly into my next question which is how well prepared were the services for this kind of mission? To what extent were they doing things by the book? To what extent were they rewriting the book? And how far outside their normal scope of what they prepared and trained for, were they operating here? Well, I think Curtis mentioned the Navy would come through for the President. I think the Air Force and particularly the strategic air command came through as well. The after action reports and studies that were done would indicate that they were pretty much what they planned is what they could execute. I think the Army had the biggest challenge and that was because of the changes in those operational plans we mentioned from 314 which was they gave them much more time in order to react to when books truncated, shortened time span and they had to get ready for that and they had to move units that didn't belong because of the command and control relationships that didn't belong to the Atlantic, Commander-in-Chief Atlantic Command and so they were moving units from other commands into the Atlantic Command that had the responsibility for that region, Southeast in the United States just to be able to have sufficient forces on hand. And how about the Navy? I think the Navy, you know, because for lack of a better term, Navy has almost always been forward deployed. You're always carrying out mission, you know, before the middle of the crisis, start chair, we're worrying about ASW and Atlantic, it's everyday work. Okay, we have to shift it further south in some cases and again, one of the reasons we're able to do that is because of what the Canadians provide. But the struggle was gonna be okay, we hadn't done something like a blockade or a quarantine in a while, but as one of the Navy leaders joked he said, you know, the computer actually worked because one of the things they said, any ship that's got a possibility of interacting with a Soviet vessel, we gotta get a Russian linguist on board. And what he meant by the computer worked, they actually identified these people, where they're at pretty quickly and actually all the vessels had at least one Russian speaker on board, which was pretty impressive for the time. And, but yeah, I mean, it basically required a redirection of certain type of efforts. But again, it's just a slight change on what you're doing pretty much most of the time. Okay, so I wanna ask about, again, relative to the individual services, what was the point of greatest danger? And I wanna think about that in two different ways. One is in terms of what was the actual moment of greatest danger during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but what was the greatest concern for each of the services? What was that one thing that could have gone most wrong for them? Well, I think from the Navy's perspective, and this is also true, and unfortunately, the Air Force had to deal with this when the One U Two was shot down, was what happens if they shoot down one of our reconnaissance aircraft? Much greater threat to the lower level aircraft, but again, they had effective tactics and methods that largely precluded that, but as the crisis wore on, they kept response elements, armed fighter and attack planes, immediately outside the 12 mile limit that if something goes wrong, whether it's air defense from the surface or counter air, because the Soviets had gotten MiG-21s, as well as the lower digit fighters into Cubits like we can respond. So that's one danger. Another danger is what happens if we have to have a major confrontation with a vessel? Because the Navy's got a book, it says this is how you carry out a blockade. This was one of the confrontations McNamara had with Anderson and Flagplot, because one of the Soviet ships, it's like, okay, guys not responding, vessel keeps going, okay, fire a couple of star shells across his bow, maybe we'll get the picture. Nope, still keeps going. Admiral Dennis in Lamp Fleet and Sink Lant Commander Norfolk's like load the five inch guns. Live Am, you know, not a star shell and then he kicks it back up to Opnav and says, okay, what do we do? Well, McNamara just happens to be there. He said, what are you gonna do if this vessel doesn't stop? Anderson's like, follow the procedure, we're gonna blow a rudder off. And McNamara's just appalled. He goes, no, you're not shooting at anybody unless you've got my authorization or the president. Well, of course, if you've ever, anybody in this room ever handled a five inch 38? And thanks, though, you gotta swing that thing around and clear it. It's not like you can, you know, back the round out of it. And so, yeah, after that and all the other stuff, the Soviet captain's like, maybe I should stop. But, and again, and this was the thing, we had very good intelligence operations because we immediately know, oh yeah, he's calling back to Mother Moscow for what are my instructions. And, but yeah, and there was also issues and this has come up, what happens if something goes wrong with one of the submarines? There is a misperception and I've dealt with this for many years. It's like, oh my God, these Soviet submarines are like in the middle of U.S. formations. Well, they're between U.S. formations or not in the middle of them. One's over here about 180 miles away, any other ones over here. It's like, no, it's not like we were that inept with anti-submarine warfare. But it was a challenge of how are we gonna deal with this and how do we get these guys away? Because remember, and I don't think all the operators out at the deck plate level understood this. These Foxtrot boats are carrying a nuclear armed torpedo. And one of the Soviet submarine captains who wrote after the fall of the wall said, if I had been ordered, I would have made my best effort to fire nuclear torpedo into an aircraft carrier. The thing that amazes me though is once the American people found out something was going on down there, there was a bit of a panic. And these gentlemen kept their heads. And if they did not have a cool head, they probably might have fired on a ship or whatever and then there would have been war. But they kept their heads even though everybody around them was losing theirs. Well, I'd like to interject one point with that. For those of you who've got much of a background in naval history, one of the guys who worked for our command for years as an outstanding student of the Cold War was Jeff Barlow. Jeff's a teenager in North Florida during the time of the missile crisis. And his father is the executive officer of heavy eight or heavy 11, one of the Navy nuclear attack squadrons. And he said, I can remember sitting there and watching President Kennedy's speech on Monday the 22nd. And he says, I'm old enough and bright enough to like, oh, this could be really scary. Said, my dad walks up to the television, turns it off. I mean, this man's a senior Navy commander. And he just looks around, he says, Russians won't go to the wall for the Cubans, go on with your life. He just, that was, you know, and I think that was typical of a fair number of the professionals. Just like, yeah, this will resolve itself. So the Army, now this is gonna be somewhat hypothetical, but what were their great concerns? I think there were two. First of all, putting airborne troops and establishing an airhead in four-year fields in Cuba and getting three hours basically to do that and seize it so they could bring in additional support units as well as infantry and other support units including artillery. That was considered very, very risky. And so there was that risk. The other thing, and part of this is intelligence. How good was the intelligence about where the Soviets were located? Approximately 5,000 troops, couple of motorized tank regiments that are actually only miles away from some of the airfields that they're going to attack. And so General Wheeler, who's the Chief of Staff of the Army, is very concerned about how quickly can I get armored tanks and armored CAV units into the shore so that I can back up or get them on landing on these airfields so they can ensure that these light infantry units have that protection. So again, as you said, this is a lot of planning for the Army. It doesn't hold true that it's executed, but it is something they're concerned about. I would add also that, as Curtis pointed out, the flights that take place in 14, 15, 16, in terms of those, those are strategic air command flights. And he mentioned one of them is shot down. That scenario had been played out. In fact, there's a whole section of scenarios that the Joint Staff actually went through in terms of planning out an air attack and what would happen, they decided not to retaliate. So that is a major concern for them. And for the Air Force, we've also started flying reconnaissance measures in support of the Air Force. Lessons learned, what did the services do differently after the Cuban Missile Crisis? I mean, I think one of the things the Navy did, and again, even though they did it very well during the crisis, is how do we prepare to shift and provide logistics? Because, you know, Navy's got to do all the at sea logistics for the Marine Corps too. And that's something that they needed to look into. And they understood while they had done fairly well with intelligence, is making sure it gets out to the right people in a timely manner. Because there were some things with that that didn't work quite so well. Because, you know, it's critical that the person who's closest to the decision has as much information as they can. There are less changes for the Air Force and Strategic Care Command, which is a major command of the Air Force, but it's also a specified command. The greatest problem, I think, and it's a matter of doctrine and of organization is the fact that the command and control of Army forces. And on Steve's slide, there was a General Powell, you mentioned it particularly. General Powell had four hats that he was wearing during the crisis. He had to be responsible for Continental Army Command. He was the coordinating agency for coordinating the efforts. He was also the Army Component Commander for the Army Component that would go with LANCOM, the Atlantic Command. And he was also the Army Component Commander for STRIKOM, which had to provide some of the air defense systems. And one of the things they found out was how is he gonna manage all this? And that becomes part of the problem is why Admiral Dennison, who was the head of the Atlantic Command, begins to drill down and put the 18th Airborne Command Commander, General House, into the role of being in charge of the task force for the landing aspect of the invasion of should it occur. Because they just realized that there's such a fragmentation of authority here and the lines are not clear in who's responding to who and the creation of ad hoc organizations such as Peninsula Command, which had not been envisioned in any of the plans. Okay. So we're in an archives. We have to have a question about archives. In your research, what has been, what have been the challenges? What roadblocks and obstacles do you run into in archival research? Well, when I first started researching my Cuba study, which was 30 years ago. So there's been a lot of changes, particularly with the handling of classified information. I was actually very surprised that the amount of material which had already been declassified when I was working for the Navy. I was even more shocked when some of my colleagues in Canada were able to provide me with information about the Canadian Navy, which the US Navy was still treating as highly classified, but the Canadians declassified it. But the challenge of working with the records, there's no nice way for me to put this. 30 years ago, you had people working with information security who were mostly lifers. They had a lot of experience in it. They'd worked a lot of stuff and the expansion of what we saw with the efforts to do more declassification. Starting with the Clint Neo onto classification. More and more people got brought into the process who, in my mind, knew less and less. And the problem is documents, particularly, one of the things we have to worry about in the Navy are the Kyle Lott amendments about nuclear information, including Navy nuclear repulsion. A lot of things started getting re-controlled. Including some of the documents I used to write the book 30 years ago. They start getting re-controlled 20 years ago. They get referred. Well, how does the referring agency answer this? It's not like we can go out and task them. Although I will say this, with many of the records that were reviewed in the early aughts and in the late 90s, the Army responded independently, came to, I was running the archives at that point, and he said, we understand you get about 900,000 pages of Army equities. We're gonna send people there to take a look at it. And he did, and they did an outstanding and very professional job. But I think even all these years later, the fact that there's not clarity on declassification is a problem. Yeah, there's a lot of material that's declassified and publicly available, but there's a lot that's not available to the public. The Army study, which is more than 300 pages, is declassified but never been publicly acknowledged. There are others that have been declassified. Even since the early 1990s, when a lot of information came out, for instance, the existence of tactical nuclear weapons actually being in Cuba, there is still some of the literature is huge, right? But on the other hand, there's a lot that hasn't been declassified. And of course, mentioned the nuclear, and if you look at some of the documents, as I've done with the strategic air command, they're redacted and the margins, Department of Energy, Department of Energy, Department of Energy. So even some of the ones that have been declassified are not completely available. And some of them, some of the operation plans are not available. They're referred to in studies and after action reports, but they're not readily available. All right. Just one for you if folks want to come and do research here at National Archives or up at USAC. As an archivist, what is your advice to somebody who wants to get started on this? Somebody who doesn't have experience. The first thing that you need to do is pinpoint what it is exactly you're looking for. If you go in with a broad idea of what you want to look at, there's so much that you'll be inundated and you could be there for a month and not get what you're looking for. So if you can pinpoint what it is that you're looking for specifically, what research topic you want to pinpoint and then that's where you see what the different institution would have so you don't waste your time going to NARA if the item's not at NARA, it might be at the Army Heritage and Education Center or come to Army and Heritage and Education Center, excuse me, try them out. If we don't have the document, so you want to know what is where and you want to know what you're looking for specifically first before you make that trip and then once you get there, be confident. I mean, if you know the document is there, ask for it, we'll bring it to you. All right, thank you gentlemen. Do we have any questions from the floor? If you have a question, please come on down and use the microphone. Folks online. I have a couple of questions from the online audience. Oh, fantastic. I'd like to ask a relay. What was the role of Guantanamo Bay during the crisis? Okay, Guantanamo Bay was still an active naval station. It had been maintained even after Castro came to power. It was held by a relatively, essentially it's got a reinforced infantry battalion as a garrison with limited anti-air assets, but during the course of the crisis, they essentially put three more rifle battalions into Guantanamo. Plus there's elements of two CB battalions that are there. And if you've ever looked at a map of Guantanamo, it's really, really small. That's a lot of people to shove in there. But the Cubans also didn't move against it directly, but they assembled militiamen near the area. We'd already prepared for the fact that they could cut electrical and water supplies. But Guantanamo maintained its station, but if it had come to a landing, okay, you've already got a reinforced brigade on the ground. Thank you. The second question. How did they, I assume this means the military, plan to maintain operational secrecy in the 100-mile or so transit from the United States? I don't know that they really, it's like if we're going, we're going, we're not gonna worry about it. I mean, I think if they would be more concerned because the Soviets had placed some anti-ship missiles, the SS2Cs over some of the more obvious landing beaches, I think they would have been more worried about that sort of thing, but as far as the ability of the Cubans or the Soviets to monitor much, I don't think, other than surface radar, they wouldn't have had much that would have worked because any attempt to do that kind of reconnaissance with aviation assets would have been shot down. Yeah, I don't know how much fee they were getting on radio or television broadcasts in the United States, but part of that was, so there were some rather humorous events where exercises were taking place at Hollywood Beach in Florida, and they land military lands to prepare and rehearse for this, and the soldiers who are landing end up fraternizing with the civilians on the beach. So there were moments like that where there was obvious cases of, and you mentioned Puerto Rico and others, where there was a lot of action going on. So I'm not sure there was any attempt to really blind the Cubans and the Soviets from knowing what was happening. Maybe you could comment, but I would assume that really there's no chance of a strategic surprise, and what tactical surprise there would be would come from the airborne landings, at least in terms of where they ended up, but I would imagine the Cubans would see those coming as well. Yeah, I think that's a good position to take. Okay, question of scale. How big was the Navy forces in the Atlantic at the time? We talked about needing Canadians to assist. How big was the Soviet ballistic fleet, missile fleet, or submarine fleet that they had in the Atlantic, and did they get any concerns about Soviet submarines operating off the West Coast? Well, I'll go with the last question first. I've never seen any documentation about concerns over Soviet operations off the West Coast with submarines. They had primarily, at least as far as their strategic assets, they were concentrated in the Northern Fleet out of Murmansk. They had relatively few of the Zulu-class boats that I mentioned earlier that had one or two ballistic missiles in the sail. You had to get them up to the surface to fire them, but they had relatively decent range, something in the vicinity, if I'm remembering correctly, 7,800 nautical miles. The cruise missiles that I mentioned earlier that were on the whiskey-class submarines, they've got a very, it's essentially a turbojet, so it's got about a 300 nautical mile range. They're gonna have to get very close to the US, but that was one of the things we were concerned about. Are there other vessels like this going around? They have to be monitored. The US has significant assets in the Atlantic. Of course, you still have to keep your forward-deployed presence in the Sixth Fleet, which has to stay manned up, but the fact that so many of the anti-submarine and the service assets, particularly destroyers, were needed for both quarantine operations, ASW operations, that's why it was good that the Canadians were able to pick up some of that slack because one of the things you got monitors, not just the submarines, the good old AGI, Soviet intelligence trawlers, which hide in the fishing fleet sometimes. And they had done some very unusual things in the years leading up to this. I recently read an article by one of my colleagues in the Canadian MOD where they actually pulled up an Atlantic cable at one point in 1961. These AGI's also stayed close, or tried to stay close, let me rephrase that, to SOSIS arrays, the underwater sound system and their cables. And so, you know, but it's just having to do so much at one time. Do we have any more questions from the floor from our friends online? All right, I think I'm gonna end with one last question for a brief answer. If there was one popular misconception about the Cuban Missile Crisis, you would like to correct what would it be? No, dear me. One, just one. One. There has been a misperception based on some of the stuff that's come out from Soviet veterans that at one point, one of the Foxtrot captains, tired of being harassed by the U.S. Navy, actively considered shooting his nuclear armed torpedo into the destroyer, which is, and I'm like, okay, if somebody really thinks that's gonna happen without an order from Moscow, if this guy attempts to order it, his political officer is gonna intervene and it will end very badly for the captain. But that's one of those things that keeps reoccurring and I'm like, nobody's gonna fire a nuclear weapon without authorization from Moscow. I would also think a destroyer is kind of a waste of a nuke. Oh, yeah. You can do it fine with a torpedo. Yeah, and oh, by the way, whether you're shooting at a destroyer or an aircraft carrier, your boat's done. I think it's the factor of time. Time to prepare, time to understand courses of action, time to make good decisions and understanding the risk. I think sometimes the popularization, 13 days of the movie, et cetera, gives the impression about how steady every event was. And yet there's always this conflicting information coming in and even today, when you read the after-action reports in the studies, they're inconsistencies. And so I think the perception that it was a well-oiled machine that came into play is an overstatement. It really is number of meetings and the chronologies of just how much time was taken to go through each of these events. I think it has to be understood that this wasn't just sitting there in the cartoon of Dean Russ, the Secretary of State, or the President, looking at Chris Jeff, the Premier, and staring eyeball to eyeball and they blink. The one thing that comes to my mind is, the title of it is Cuban Missile Crisis, but it was less to do with Cuba as it was more for Russia versus the United States. The missiles, yeah, we're in Cuba, but this was against Russia versus the United States. And like you said, who's gonna blink first? But everybody thinks so, the Cuban Missile Crisis. So it was Cuba that was doing, oh no, like Cuba just allowed Russia to put their missiles there. And in fact, in Russia, it's known as the Caribbean Crisis. Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Thank you.