Winning the Cold: The Hard Way. This item is unavailable.Winning the Cold: The Hard Way

This is a story about Cold War soldiers/warriors using intellect rather than arms to confront the enemy. The enemy being the Soviet Union and their Eastern European subordinates who intended to occupy and rule all of Europe. These are the recollections and memories of one of those Cold War warriors. He reminisces, as he awaits aboard a troop ship docked in New York harbor to muster out of the United States Army. He is returning from Germany where he served as a signals intelligence analyst assigned to an intelligence gathering and processing unit.It encompasses the time from the latter part of World War II through the height of the Cold War in the early 1960s. Soviet Premier Khrushchev is alleged to have once said something along the lines of, “Berlin is the testicles of the West, every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze Berlin.” A great deal of this story relates to the Soviets’ genital compressions of Berlin—the airlift, erecting the wall, Checkpoint Charlie, and the Cuban missile crisis. The latter occurred halfway around the world from Berlin, but it inarguably involved Berlin. The airlift was the result of the firm testicular clinch by Khrushchev’s predecessor, Joseph Stalin.If Berlin were to fall to the Soviets, it would only be a matter of time before West Germany and almost certainly all Western Europe would follow suit. And if the Soviets attempted to take Berlin, there were no alternatives. Either fight a conventional war the Western Allies were sure to lose because of the Soviets’ overwhelming military advantage, or resort to nuclear Armageddon! Maintaining the status quo in Berlin became paramount.This tale has a background and a foreground. The background consists of two parts. The first relates to the German people’s experiences at the end of the war and the years following that resulted in their subsequent attitudes and actions during this time toward the occupying Allied troops. The counterpoint, then, is the GIs’ attitudes and reactions toward the Germans.The foreground is about the antics and accomplishments of a unique group of intelligence soldiers and is written in a manner as to counterbalance the serious historical events whose narration is rarely entertaining or amusing, but nevertheless an essential part of the story. Throughout the book, these episodes are scattered about to demonstrate the GI vocabulary, sarcasm, cleverness, and humor.