This weekend marks the 50th anniversary ....

[Utah Bob #35998]

of a bad thing.

 

One bright Sunday morning in 1961, a young officer of the German Democratic Republic put on a pair of walking boots. He packed his map, a bucket of white paint, and a paintbrush and headed toward the center of Berlin. Hagen Koch’s path began at the junction of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse, and a crowd soon gathered there to watch him. He took out his can of white paint and the paintbrush, dipped the brush into the can of paint, and began a line on the cobbles.

 

Hagen Koch was drawing a new meridian, a new equator, a new edge of the world, at which one ideological, political, economic, social, historical system came to an end and another began. The line he had painted was the line of the Berlin Wall.

 

Article

 

With all our economic and political trials and tribulations we forget that dark period of history sometimes.

The good news is...we're still here. The Wall is only a memory.

[Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984]

Wikipedia has a pretty good article about West Berlin, its defence and defiance.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall

 

My favorite part is:

 

They arrived in a city defended by three Allied brigades—one each from the UK, the US, and France (the Forces Françaises à Berlin). On 16 August, Kennedy had given the order for them to be reinforced. Early on 19 August, the 1st Battle Group, 18th Infantry (commanded by Colonel Glover S. Johns Jr.) was alerted^]

 

On Sunday morning, U.S. troops marched from West Germany through East Germany, bound for West Berlin. Lead elements—arranged in a column of 491 vehicles and trailers carrying 1,500 men, divided into five march units—left the Helmstedt-Marienborn checkpoint at 06:34. At Marienborn, the Soviet checkpoint next to Helmstedt on the West German/East German border, US personnel were counted by guards. The column was 160 kilometres (100 mi) long, and covered 177 kilometres (110 mi) from Marienborn to Berlin in full battle gear. East German police watched from beside trees next to the autobahn all the way along.

 

The front of the convoy arrived at the outskirts of Berlin just before noon, to be met by Clay and Johnson, before parading through the streets of Berlin in front of a large crowd. At 04:00 on 21 August, Lyndon Johnson left West Berlin in the hands of Gen. Frederick O. Hartel and his brigade of 4,224 officers and men. Every three months for the next three and a half years, a new American battalion was rotated into West Berlin; each traveled by autobahn to demonstrate Allied rights.

 

 

[Apache Hawk 60642]

:FlagAm:

 

Long may she fly !!!

[Apache Hawk 60642]

:FlagAm:

 

Long may she fly !!!