U-2 Avionics/EWS mechanic here.
There are two questions there, “was he shot down” and “did he give up the U-2’s secrets.”
Lets take them one at a time.
Yes, Gary powers was shot down. Most people acknowledge that, but most people don’t know how the U-2 was actually shot down.
As a troop who used to maintain the electronic warfare systems on the U-2, including it’s SAM radar detection systems and jammers, this event was discussed at length.
That particular incident was not the first time the Soviets had tried to shoot down a U-2. But the combination of altitude, speed, electronic SAM suppression (primitive now but good enough for back then) and an extremely small engagement envelope had resulted in no hits for many missions. They (the Soviets) always knew the U-2 was there, they could see them on the radar, They just couldn’t do anything about it. So they tried a new trick. Launch the missiles unguided with an altimeter fuse.
The U-2’s fatal flaw in this case was the very straight paths they tended to fly. There is only a 5-7 knot margin of error between going supersonic and stalling out at those altitudes. This doesn’t leave a lot of room for evasive maneuvers. By knowing the path the plane was flying, its speed and attitude, its very easy to plot a ballistic intercept trajectory, so that’s what the Soviets did. They salvoed several missiles, unguided, at the U-2 hoping that the U-2 couldn’t maneuver out of the way and one of them would explode near enough to the plane to knock it out of the sky. Which is what happened.
The jammers on the U-2 were ineffective this time, because the missiles weren’t being guided. The missile never actually hit the plane, it exploded nearby and the shock-waves caused the plane to tip stall, which the pilot was unable to recover from. As it fell it gained speed, broke the sound barrier and ripped the wings off. This is why Gary Powers was not killed and was able to bail out.
Next we have, ‘revealing the U-2 secrets.’
What secrets? There was nothing secret about the plane. It did not contain exotic materials or use advanced technology to fly. It was a glider with a jet engine that had every extra ounce of weight ripped out of it they could possibly spare. The Soviets knew how fast it could fly and how high it could go from the start. They could see it on radar. Any child with a piece of paper, pencil and the equation D=V x T can figure out how fast it went.
It’s not, as they say, rocket science.
I worked on U-2’s for six years and I can tell you there is nothing magical or highly advanced about the plane.
Now don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the airframe. It’s very reliable, very easy to work on and very pretty in its own way. But in the effort to achieve high altitudes, exotic technologies (that might be temperamental or problematic) were ignored in favor of simple and reliable systems that would not need redundant backups that added weight and complexity.
Far from being technically advanced, the U-2 was built to be dead simple. Here’s my favorite example. You see the string hanging in front of the windscreen there? That’s the yaw indicator..
They literally stole that from gliders. It looks like this while you’re flying.
If the string is slipping to the left, your nose is yawing left.
Boy, sure hope Gary Powers doesn’t let THAT little gem slip to Khrushchev….(sarcasm).
There were no secrets to betray to the Soviets about the U-2.
If I remember correctly, Lee Harvey Oswald even offered information he had about the U-2 from his time as a radar operator in the Marine Corps as part of his defection package to the Soviets in 1959.
Who were completely uninterested. They knew even then, there was nothing secret there.