P.S.

Boulogne, 1973

 I was talking with my mother regarding the post I made the other day about her trip where she met my father.  In it I mentioned that she had visited Egypt.  She recalled that she left shortly after she arrived and abandoned her plans to visit other countries in the area because there was an uneasy sense that something was about to happen.  Thinking back, she couldn't put her finger on it, but she just wanted to get back to Europe and then go on home.

She went to France briefly and then decided England would be safer if something happened and she couldn't get back to the States.  Not long after she arrived, the Yom Kippur war broke out and things got grim, even in London town.  She stayed through December before returning to the States, only to encounter the OPEC oil embargo and the first so-called oil crisis.  Grim times.  

London, 1973

My father was assigned to one of the carriers of the Sixth Fleet flying an F-4B when his leave was over so he was right in the thick of things. I looked up what the Navy was doing during that war and was surprised to discover just how close we came to war with the Soviet Union.  I found this passage in one article (link below):

Soviet destroyer so close during Yom Kippur war.

The Soviets rode herd on the American vessels so aggressively that Adm. Daniel Murphy, the Sixth Fleet commander, sent a semaphore message to his Soviet counterpart asking him to adhere to an accord obliging their vessels not to point guns or missiles at the other.

As tensions mounted, Adm. Murphy reckoned the chances of the Soviet squadron attempting a first strike against his fleet at 40 percent. (In the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy put the chances of war at between one in three and even.) Adm. Murphy, in an interview with this writer a decade after the event, said that if he had detected Soviet preparations for a strike there would have been no time to consult Washington before taking action. If his fleet survived the opening exchange, he said, he planned to hunt down and sink every Soviet naval vessel remaining in the Mediterranean.

The Soviet commander, Admiral Yevgeni Volubuyev, was meanwhile preparing scenarios of his own. Lacking air cover, he planned, if the crunch came, to strike first at the American aircraft carriers, disabling them before they could launch their planes.

In the US Naval War College Review in 2004, Lyle J. Goldstein and Yuri M. Zhukov quote from a personal diary kept by the former chief of staff of the Soviet squadron, Capt. Yevgeni Semenov. Dubious about the chances of winning “the battle of the first salvo,” as he called it, Semenov mused that “(The squadron’s) attack groups need to use all weaponry –missiles, artillery, torpedoes, rockets – the whole lot, since it is unlikely that anything will remain afloat after an air strike. We are kamikazes.”
Unlike the Cuban missile crisis, the world at large, focused on the land battles, remained ignorant of the superpower confrontation at sea.

F4 shadowing Soviet Tu-95 bomber, Med., Oct., 1973.

The Soviet squadron had 52 ships when the land war began on October 5. The Sixth Fleet initially had 48 vessels, including two carriers -- the Independence, then in port in Greece, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt in Spain. The Joint Chiefs of Staff cautioned Murphy to avoid any move that could be construed by the Russians or the Arabs as direct involvement in the conflict. The US Navy made a point of announcing it had no ships in the war zone.

As the land war continued unabated, nerves in both fleets frayed. The solitary Soviet destroyers that normally shadowed the carriers – “tattle tales” the Americans called them -- were reinforced by heavier warships armed with missiles. Although ranking officers had never before been noted on the tattle tales, the Americans now became aware of two admirals on the ships following them. The Americans, in turn, kept planes over the Soviet fleet prepared to attack missile launchers being readied for firing. Both sides were aware that their major vessels were being tracked by submarines.

The little-known US-Soviet confrontation during Yom Kippur War

An in-depth analysis of these events I found in a Naval War College Review issue:  

 A Tale of Two Fleets—A Russian Perspective on the 1973 Naval Standoff in the Mediterranean

It's hard to believe that only weeks before the US and the Soviet Union were on good enough terms that American tourists could travel across the whole country virtually unhindered.  Things may be bad now, but they were truly terrible during the  Cold War.  It's amazing there was no World War III.  If that was avoided, maybe we can avoid war with China and solve our own problems and move on to better times.

Fingers crossed.