Gary Powers in Life
Around fifty years ago a spy plane piloted by Gary Powers was shot down over the former Soviet Union, a rare moment of conflict in the otherwise deadlocked Cold War. Here is an extract from the Wikipedia article on the incident:
On May 1, 1960, thirteen days before the scheduled opening of an East-West summit conference in Paris, a U.S. Lockheed U-2 spy plane left the US base in Badaber on a mission to overfly the Soviet Union, photographing ICBM sites in and around Sverdlovsk and Plesetsk, then land at Bodø in Norway. All units of the Soviet Air Defence Forces in the Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Siberia, Ural and later in the U.S.S.R. European Region and Extreme North were on red alert, and the U-2 flight was expected. Soon after the plane was detected, Lieutenant General of the Air Force Yevgeniy Savitskiy ordered the air-unit commanders “to attack the violator by all alert flights located in the area of foreign plane’s course, and to ram as necessary”.
Due to the U-2’s extreme operating altitude, Soviet attempts to intercept the plane using fighter aircraft failed. […] According to the official version of the event […], the U-2 was eventually hit and brought down near Degtyarsk, Ural Region, by a salvo of fourteen SA-2 Guideline (S-75 Dvina) surface-to-air missiles. However, the plane’s pilot, Gary Powers, successfully bailed out and parachuted to safety […] He was captured soon afterward.
The anecdote at the end of the Wikipedia article provides an amusing insight into the personality of Gary Powers:
According to his son, when asked how high he was when flying on May 1, 1960, Powers would often reply, “not high enough”.
I’ve always been interested in the story of Gary Powers and his unlucky U-2 (very interested, if I’m being honest: a couple of years ago, I travelled to Yekaterinburg, a city in the middle of Russia, specifically to visit a museum that had on display fragments of wreckage from the downed plane), and a few days ago I decided to see if there was anything related to the incident in Google’s Life archive. There was a great deal of material there, unsurprising when you consider both the scale of that archive, and the nature of the event; but amongst the many images, the work of one photographer, Car Mydans, really stood out.
In 1960, Carl Mydans was working for Life Magazine as a staff photographer, and it seems that in the August of that year he accompanied Powers’ parents to Moscow, the parents travelling to watch their son’s trial, and Mydans travelling to document both the trial, and the parents themselves. The photographs Mydans took in Moscow combine to form a fascinating tableau of the events in Moscow that summer: the angry Khrushchev; the twisted, scorched wreckage of the downed spy plane; the face of Powers himself on the screen of a small television set; and most striking of all, the moments of very palpable anxiety and uncertainty shared by Oliver and Ida Powers as they wait to discover their son’s fate.
Here are six of Mydans photographs from the assignment (captions and larger versions of each of the images can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here):
