We recently welcomed Major General (Retd) Bill Robins and Brigadier (Retd) Ian Cameron-Mowat to the Museum. Both Bill and Ian took part in filmed interviews for the exhibition, ‘The Cold War, in the Shadow of the Bomb,’ recalling stories from their service days in Germany.
Bill (pictured below), remembered being a young officer at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
“The Cuban Missile Crisis itself did not pass us by in that about 10 o'clock at night, we all got the call to go and collect our weapons and ammunition. And my soldiers in the troop that I was second in command of were horrified to see that they were being given live ammunition. They didn't bargain for this at all. So we went for the deepest, darkest wood that we could find, and adopted our general defensive positions, dug huge trenches, and waited for the hordes of Russians to come over the border. And of course, they didn't because Kennedy effectively defused the crisis. But we're all set to have a rather more interesting time than we bargained for.”
Ian, who served with the Corps from 1983 to 2009, recounted numerous anecdotes from his time with BRIXMIS. One of these focussed on the early use of thermal imaging and can be viewed on the Museum’s Facebook page.
‘The Cold War, in the Shadow of the Bomb’ opens on 13th February.
