Nothing like that Northern Wedding

Some 40 years ago, in the darkest stretch of the Cold War, Exercise Northern Wedding ’86 was a massive, three-week NATO maritime and amphibious exercise conducted from late August to mid-September 1986, involving 150 ships, 35,000 troops, and 500 aircraft from 10 Western nations. The NARA has hundreds of pics from the exercise, and they really show off the might of the Western fleets at the time, including at least three carriers (Nimitz, America, and Ark Royal), the newly recommissioned battlewagon Iowa, and ‘phibs a-plenty, including LHA’s with their original 5-inch guns intact, LSTs, and LPHs. There were FFGs. Remember how nice it was to have those? Heck, there were even hydrofoils, with the PHMs out of Key West seen in a rare overseas deployment. A port bow view of the battleship USS Iowa (BB-61) underway during NATO Exercise Northern Wedding ’86, DN-ST-87-00986 A port bow view of the guided missile frigate USS Doyle (FFG-39) participating in an underway replenishment with the…