The United States Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 Patch

The letters running down the missile on this patch read CCCP, the Cyrillic initials of the Soviet Union, and the missile is standing in the middle of Cuba. That is the picture Major Richard Heyser's U-2 brought home on October 14, 1962, when his flight over the island took 928 photographs and turned up Soviet missile sites 90 miles from American shores. For thirteen days, from October 16 to October 28, Washington and Moscow stood closer to nuclear war than at any other time. The people holding the line were sailors on the quarantine, aircrews flying reconnaissance and sitting alert, and the soldiers and Marines waiting on orders. This patch is for all of them.

The missiles were R-12s, known to NATO as the SS-4 Sandal, and longer-range R-14 SS-5 Skean sites were under construction too. President John F. Kennedy went on national television on October 22 and announced a naval quarantine of Cuba. Air Force U-2s and RF-101 Voodoos kept working the island, the Voodoos sometimes at treetop level, and the Air Force passed the Navy data on scores of ships headed for Cuba. On October 25 the destroyer USS Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. was ordered to intercept the Lebanese freighter Marucla, and her boarding party cleared the ship the next day after checking its cargo. Strategic Air Command went to DEFCON 2, with B-52 Stratofortresses on continuous airborne alert. On October 27 an SA-2 missile brought down Major Rudolf Anderson Jr.'s U-2 over Banes, Cuba, and on October 28 Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles.

This is a 4 by 4 inch round patch with a black merrowed edge around a sky blue field. CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS arches across the top in heavy black letters, and 1962 sits at the bottom. The island of Cuba runs across the middle in green, with a smaller island off its southwest coast and CUBA stitched across the main island in black. A tan missile with black bands stands straight up through the island, the CCCP running down its body, so the whole story of that October fits in one picture. It has an iron-on backing and can also be sewn on.

Major Anderson was the only American killed by hostile fire in the crisis, and he was posthumously awarded the Air Force Cross, the first one ever presented. The thirteen days ended with the missiles going home and no war, which is exactly what the quarantine line and the alert crews were there to make happen. The crisis also showed both governments they needed a direct line to each other, and the Moscow-Washington hotline came out of it. The patch puts a name and a year on a watch they never forgot.

Put it in a shadow box beside a ship or squadron patch from 1962, or on the vest you wear to reunions. It also makes a good gift for a father or grandfather who was on the quarantine line or sitting alert that fall, and for the grandson who has only read about it. It is a plain way to mark where he was in October 1962.