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World War II began last week at 5:20 a. m. (Polish time) Friday, September 1, when a German bombing plane dropped a projectile on Puck, fishing village and air base in the armpit of the Hel Peninsula. At 5:45 a. m. the German training ship Schleswig-Holstein lying off Danzig fired what was believed to be the first shell: a direct hit on the Polish underground ammunition dump at Westerplatte. It was a grey day, with gentle rain...
...major lessons that Western analysts have gleaned from the Korean jet incident is that the Soviet air defense force is apparently far less competent than thought. The first group of interceptors that scrambled over the Kamchatka Peninsula never could find Flight 007. Military officials attending the International Institute for Strategic Studies meeting in Ottawa last week commented on the "juvenile" level of radio chatter by the Soviet pilots and their apparent confusion about what they should do. "The question arises," said Stephen Larrabee, a member of the Institute for East-West Security Studies, "whether the finger on the nuclear trigger...
...Flight 007, cruising southwestward from Anchorage over the Bering Sea in the early-morning darkness, came under the watchful eye of Soviet radar. For the next 2½ hr. the blip moved into and out of Soviet airspace. When it crossed over the eastern border of the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Soviets scrambled four MiG-23s and Su-15s from the Petropavlovsk airbase on Kamchatka to search for the intruder. Just after 3 a.m., over the Soviet island of Sakhalin, where another six interceptors had given pursuit, the hunters found their quarry...
According to the account of Secretary Shultz, Flight 007 first crossed the Kamchatka Peninsula, then the Sea of Okhotsk and the island of Sakhalin. Unless it changed course, the airliner apparently would have approached the area around Vladivostok on the Soviet mainland. This cold and bleak region is ordinarily off limits to foreigners...
...Soviets have military reasons for their sensitivity. Kamchatka is the site of Soviet missile-testing facilities and early-warning radar systems. The port of Petropavlovsk is home base for some 90 nuclear-powered submarines. The Soviets hope to turn the Sea of Okhotsk, between the peninsula and the mainland, into a private sheltered lake for submarines armed with missiles that could strike the continental U.S. The southern half of Sakhalin bristles with at least six Soviet airfields and is merely 27 miles across the Strait of Soya from Japan's Hokkaido Island. The strait is a choke point...