Spare a thought?

[Handley_Page]

I remember the event:


Francis Gary Powers to Get Posthumous Silver Star

Jun 08, 2012
Associated Press


BRISTOL, Va. -- The American pilot whose spy plane was shot down in 1960 over the Soviet Union is set to receive a Silver Star posthumously.

A ceremony to award the third-highest combat military decoration for valor to Francis Gary Powers is scheduled June 15 at the Pentagon.

An Air Force report last year said that the U-2 pilot distinguished himself with his gallantry during harsh interrogation in Soviet prisons.

Powers was swapped for a Soviet spy in February 1962 in Berlin. He died in a 1977 helicopter crash.

Powers posthumously was awarded a military POW medal and a CIA medal in 2000, after incident records were unsealed.

His son, Francis Gary Powers Jr., told the Bristol Herald Courier that the award is a wonderful honor and that the family is humbled.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I remember the event:


Francis Gary Powers to Get Posthumous Silver Star

Jun 08, 2012
Associated Press


BRISTOL, Va. -- The American pilot whose spy plane was shot down in 1960 over the Soviet Union is set to receive a Silver Star posthumously.

A ceremony to award the third-highest combat military decoration for valor to Francis Gary Powers is scheduled June 15 at the Pentagon.

An Air Force report last year said that the U-2 pilot distinguished himself with his gallantry during harsh interrogation in Soviet prisons.

Powers was swapped for a Soviet spy in February 1962 in Berlin. He died in a 1977 helicopter crash.

Powers posthumously was awarded a military POW medal and a CIA medal in 2000, after incident records were unsealed.

His son, Francis Gary Powers Jr., told the Bristol Herald Courier that the award is a wonderful honor and that the family is humbled.

I was pretty young when he was shot down, too young to have any opinion at the time, and I find I still don't have any opinion. He got shot down, was released in a spy exchange, and became a traffic copter reporter or something. What am I missing?

 

[Handley_Page]

I was pretty young when he was shot down, too young to have any opinion at the time, and I find I still don't have any opinion. He got shot down, was released in a spy exchange, and became a traffic copter reporter or something. What am I missing?

Much of what he went through at the hands of the KGB is still shrouded in mystery, but it was neither pretty nor easy.
Unlike the prisoner for whom he was exchanged (I think it was the atom spy, Rudolf Abel) Powers was not treated well.

 

[sr71plt]

He wrote a memoir about it (Operation Overflight). He wasn't treated as a hero at the time because at the time the U-2 pilots were under instruction to destroy both the plane and themselves if they were going down in enemy territory--and were given the means to do so. He didn't do either. Others did, and all they've gotten that I am aware of is a star, with their true name, on the wall of the foyer of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

I assume that time has mellowed attitudes about what he should have done.