Bay of Pigs – Part 2

(This is the second part of a two-part article on the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. Read Part 1.)

We left the 1,400 Bay of Pigs invaders abandoned on the beachhead last week, with Castro’s air force unopposed above them and with 51,000 Red troops massing for attack. The Brigada 2506’s lumbering B-26s now provided rollicking sport for Castro’s jets, and the troops and supplies below even more. It was a turkey shoot.

The Brigadistas dug in deeper, counted their meager ammo, tried to treat their wounded comrades. Things looked grim ...

But WAIT! Turns out a few U.S. destroyers and the carrier Essex were just offshore, deadly Skyhawk jets poised on the carrier deck for takeoff! They could clean up Castro’s entire air force with a few cannon bursts, obliterate his troop columns with a few bombing and strafing runs – and be back on deck in time for breakfast.

The Brigade’s own air force could then fly in from its Nicaragua base to the newly captured airfield on the beachhead, bringing ammo, supplies and – most importantly – HOPE!

Then they’d pick up where the Essex jets left off, flying sorties themselves against the Castro infantry and tank columns that blundered down the only three roads to the beachhead. These roads were elevated over the surrounding swamp and completely open. The Brigades’s B-26s would slaughter anything on them, a veritable shooting gallery here, a cakewalk – Castro’s very own "Highway of Death."

From that mission the Brigade planes would refuel, rearm and move on to hammer any more troops coming down Cuba’s Central Highway from Havana. More defeats, more defections. The tide would turn. Cuba might still be free!

Then Washington sent its response to the carrier Essex: "Can’t do it. Too noisy."

So all those jets with their rockets and cannon, those destroyers brimming with artillery, those ace Navy pilots, chomping at the bit, kicking in their stalls, panting for action – all this was hogtied by strict orders from the commander in chief.

"See, Latin ‘street’?" Camelot was saying with wide eyes and a smug little grin, like Eddie Haskell in front of June Cleaver. "See, U.N.? As you can plainly see, we’re not involved in this thing! Gosh, we’re wonderful folks! Gosh, aren’t we good neighbors after all! See?"

This infantile and criminal idiocy had Adm. Arleigh Burke teetering on mutiny. Years before, Adm. Burke had sailed thousands of miles to smash his nation’s enemies at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Now he was chief of naval operations and was aghast as new enemies were being given a sanctuary 90 miles away!

The fighting admiral was livid. They say his face was beet red and his facial veins popping as he faced down his commander in chief that fateful night of April 18, 1961.

"Mr. President, TWO planes from the Essex," His jaw trembled and lips quivered as he sputtered the plea. "That’s all those boys need, Mr. President. Let me ...!"

JFK was in white tails and a bow tie that evening, having just emerged from an elegant social gathering. "Burke," he replied. "We can’t get involved in this."

"WE put those boys there, Mr. President!!" The fighting admiral exploded. "By God, we ARE involved!"

For the bow-tied, white-tailed and manicured New Frontiersmen the thing STILL boiled down to that all-important "image" problem. What would the Latin American "street" and the all-important U.N. think of the Yankee bullies?

A lot more than they ended up thinking of the "Yankee pansies and nincompoops," that’s for sure.

While the wine-sniffing Ivy Leaguers mulled over their image problems, the men on the beachhead had problems of their own ...

"MAYDAY! MAYDAY! Have Castro jet on my tail! Request ... I REPEAT! – Request ...!"

"Sorry," replied the Essex. "Our orders are ..." The Cuban pilot didn’t hear the rest of his death sentence. An explosion and his radio went dead. These messages went on and on, hour after hour, from different pilots – to no avail. By the second day, a third of these almost suicidally brave Cuban exile pilots had met a fiery death from Castro’s jets.

This was too much for their enraged American trainers at the base in Nicaragua. Four of them suited up, gunned the engines and joined the fight. These weren’t pampered Ivy Leaguers. They were Alabama Air Guard officers, men with archaic notions of loyalty and honor.

They were watching the decimation. They knew the odds. They went anyway. All four died on that first mission.

And I wouldn’t call those Alabama pilots "mercenaries" anywhere near Little Havana, especially on the streets named after them. One of their remains was recently returned from Cuba and given an honorable burial in Birmingham. None of the Best and the Brightest were on hand to comfort the surviving family members. Several Cuban-American families were.

JFK had a chance to offset his criminal blunder of canceling the air strikes – by acceding to Adm. Burke’s desperate plea two days later. But Burke’s pleas – "Mr. President! TWO planes!" – were vain.

So the Cuban pilots’ pleas – "MAYDAY!" – were in vain. So Commander San Roman’s pleas from the beachhead – "SEND PLANES! – Repeat: SEND PLANES or we CAN’T SURVIVE!" – were vain.

More correctly, the planes’ combat role was denied. Because , amazingly, JFK did permit some Essex planes over the beachhead. One of these pilots quickly spotted a long column of Castro tanks and infantry making for the Brigade. The Soviet tanks and trucks were sitting ducks. "AHA!" he thought. "NOW we’ll turn this thing around!" The pilot started his dive ...

"This is CRAZY!" he bellowed back. "Those guys are getting the hell shot out of them down there! I can SEE it!!"

Another Navy pilot had a Castro jet in his sights. The Red pilot was frantic, trying every evasive maneuver in his book. Dream on, chico. The naval pilot was hot on his tail and preparing to blow him from the skies. One little burst here, a few at his wingmates and he’d change the course of battle – and thus of history. No "shock and awe" needed here.

"WHAT the hell are we here FOR?!" He screamed back. Had the Navy pilot "engaged," this "Fidel Castro" chump would merit less textbook space today than Pancho Villa.

In Peter Wyden’s "Bay of Pigs," he reported that these Navy pilots admit to sobbing openly in their cockpits. They were still choked up when they landed on the Essex. Now they slammed their helmets on the deck, kicked the bulkheads and broke down completely.

"I wanted to resign from the Navy," said Capt. Robert Crutchfield, the decorated naval officer who commanded the fleet off the beachhead. He’d had to relay Washington’s replies to those pilots.

To take pictures, it turned out. That’s all JFK authorized. Friends, are you beginning to understand why we get a trifle "worked up" over these things?

Just saw on Fox that we flew THIRTY THOUSAND sorties over Iraq. And sure looks like some Iraqis are grateful. But I’ll admit to a twinge of wistfulness. This because 42 years ago this month – and only 90 miles off our shores – some desperately embattled freedom fighters couldn’t beg two sorties. That’s two. I repeat: T-W-O sorties. And this to knock out a major league swine, thief and mass murderer who a year later confronted the U.S. with the gravest threat in its history.

A close-up glimpse of the heroism on that beachhead might have sent those Essex pilots right over the edge. As JFK adjusted his bow tie in the mirror and Jackie picked lint off his tux, the men of Brigada 2506 faced a few adjustments of their own. To quote Haynes Johnson, "It was a battle when heroes were made." And how!

We call them "men," but Brigadista Felipe Rondon was 16 years old when he grabbed his 57 mm cannon and ran to face one of Castro’s Stalin tanks point-blank. At 10 yards he fired at the clanking, lumbering beast and it exploded, but the momentum kept it going and it rolled over little Felipe.

Gilberto Hernandez was 17 when a round from a Czech burp gun put out his eye. Castro troops were swarming in but he held his ground, firing furiously with his recoilless rifle for another hour until the Reds finally surrounded him and killed him with a shower of grenades.

By then the invaders sensed they’d been abandoned. Ammo was almost gone. Two days of shooting and reloading without sleep, food or water was taking its toll. Many were hallucinating. That’s when Castro’s Soviet Howitzers opened up, huge 122 mm ones, four batteries’ worth. They pounded 2,000 rounds into the Brigada’s ranks over a four-hour period. "It sounded like the end of the world," one said later.

"Rommel’s crack Afrika Corps broke and ran under a similar bombardment," wrote Haynes Johnson. By now the invaders were dazed, delirious with fatigue, thirst and hunger, too deafened by the bombardment to even hear orders. So their commander had to scream.

"THERE IS NO RETREAT, CARAJO!!" Erneido Oliva, second in command, stood and bellowed to his dazed and horribly outnumbered men. "WE STAND AND FIGHT!!!" And so they did. Right after the deadly shower of Soviet shells, more Stalin tanks rumbled up. Another boy named Barberito rushed up to the first one and blasted it repeatedly with his recoilless rifle, which barely dented it, but so rattled the occupants that they opened the hatch and surrendered. In fact, they insisted on shaking hands with their pubescent captor, who an hour later was felled by a machine gun burst to his valiant little heart.

On another front, CIA man Grayston Lynch, from his command post offshore, was talking with Commander Pepe San Roman. Lynch urged, "Hold on, Pepe! We're coming in. If we have to, we can evacuate ..."

"We don’t want EVACUATION!" Pepe bellowed. "We want MORE AMMO!! We want PLANES!"

The Reds had 50,000 men around the beachhead now. Oliva had one tank, manned by Jorge Alvarez, and two rounds. Jorge aimed – BLAM! Reloaded – BLAM! and quickly knocked out two of Castro’s Stalins. But more Stalins and T-34s kept coming. So Alvarez – outgunned, outnumbered and out of ammo – had no choice: He gunned his tank to a horrendous clattering whine and CHARGED!!

He rammed into another Stalin tank. Its driver was stunned, frantic. He couldn’t get a half-second to aim his gun. So Alvarez rammed him again. And AGAIN. And again, finally splitting the Stalin’s barrel and forcing its surrender.

The Brigada’s spent ammo inevitably forced a retreat. Castro’s jets were roaming overhead at will. They long ago had sunk the ammo ships; now they concentrated on strafing the helpless men.

"Can’t continue ..." Lynch’s radio crackled – it was San Roman again. "Have nothing left to fight with ... destroying my equipment ..." The radio went dead.

"Tears flooded my eyes," writes Grayston Lynch. "For the first time in my 37 years I was ashamed of my country." These weren’t the tears of a Bill Clinton on a camera-op, either. Lynch landed on Omaha Beach. He helped throw back Hitler’s Panzers at the Battle of The Bulge. He fought off human wave attacks by Chi-Coms at Korea’s Heartbreak Ridge. Grayston Lynch does not strike me as a whiny fraud and a tear-squeezer.

If you overlook his superb book, "Decision to Disaster," you simply miss out on some of the century’s most momentous history. You rely on Camelot and its press agency version – which is to say on self-serving, sycophantic HOGWASH!!

Lynch takes Camelot’s version and compares it to what he saw – first-hand – on that doomed but heroic beachhead, plus what he heard from CIA and military colleagues in the thick of the planning.

Camelot’s cover-up emerges from his book like a green pepper emerges from my Popeel’s Veg-O-Matic. The man is absolutely merciless with his chopping and mincing. He purees it – demolishes it.

Almost to a man, the American officers involved in the invasion admit to breaking down under the emotional ordeal. And who can blame them? To them, Duty, Honor, Country were not abstract principles. They’d put it on the line – literally.

So imagine a dilemma where that oath to Duty, Honor and Country violated their oath to obey their commander in chief. It was HIS hasty intervention that doomed their plan to defeat, their Cuban comrades to death and prison, and Cuba itself to 44 years of serfdom and horror.

This dilemma agonized them worse than any bombardment at Omaha Beach or Iwo Jima. To read their own accounts is to realize that all the bullets and bombs blasted at them by Nazis and Communists, all the sleeplessness, wounds and mouth-parching terror of trials like Inchon and the Battle of the Bulge – all that stuff was easy compared to watching helplessly as their embattled Cuban comrades were overwhelmed (NOT defeated!) by Soviet arms and slaughtered on the bloody beaches at Playa Giron.

But man, did they ever go down in a blaze of glory. When the smoke cleared, over a hundred of them lay dead and hundreds more were wounded, their very mortars and machine gun barrels melted from their furious rates of fire.

After three days of relentless battle, barely 1,400 of them – without a single supporting shot fired by naval artillery and without air support – had squared off against 51,000 Castro troops, his entire air force and squadrons of Stalin tanks. According to defecting Castroites, the Red forces took casualties of 20 to one against Brigada 2506.

Humberto Fontova holds an M.A. in history from Tulane University. He's the author of "Helldiver's Rodeo," described as "Highly entertaining!" by Publisher's Weekly, "A must-read!" by Booklist, and "Just what the doctor ordered!" by Ted Nugent. You may reach Mr. Fontova by e-mail at hfontova@earthlink.net.

Part One of the story can be read *here.* It's well worth the time for rest of the story it tells.

My dad was a refining engineer and draftsman for Texaco through the 1950s and '60s, and in 1958 was sent to the Texaco/Caltex refinery at Santa Clara, Cuba by his company. Mom and dad thought it would be a swell *learning experience* for me, and it was indeed that: we had our school shot up on one occasion and a Marine quick-response platoon showed up to prevent any reoccurance; we were eventually evacuated back to the states before Fidel's victory parade on New Years Day of 1959. Many of the Cubano workers at the factory were also relocated to the USA after Fidel and his fellow communists nationalized the refineries, and like us, were reposted to the Texaco refinery facility town of Lawrenceville, Illinois, where we continued to live through the early 1960s.

On 22 November 1963, I had skipped school that morning due to a flat tire on my motorbike, which I patched, figuring to catch my afternoon classes after I'd had lunch. My mom had the TV on and was watching her soap operas when the news bulletins began rolling in, and we put into effect our family's standing plan for such emergencies that we'd long bego practiced in Cuba and Venezuela. Dad got a phone call into us, and directed me to meet him in town at the American Legion hall, where he was a post officer.

And so I went, with mom holding down the post at home. When I got there, several of dad's Cuban co-workers were with him, very clearly cheering and celebrating that the one responsible for the deaths of their sons, brothers, fathers uncles and cousins, either on the beaches at Playa Giron or in Fidel's prisons against bullet-pocked walls, had himself taken a few bullets. Most of the American residents of the smallish town couldn't understand why the Cubans were so celebratory, but those of us who'd been there understood.

That the shooting was eventually blamed on Oswald, a New Orleans boy who was a former Marine with ties to Navy intelligence, was not lost on the surviving Cubanos of Brigada 2506.

Here's how the surviving Brigadistas conducted themselves after capture. The heroism was FAR from over.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/3/5/130121.shtml

There's just one thing wrong with that story; there's no picture of Tommy Cruz with it.

Several years back when a young NCO acquaintance was saying some fairly nasty things about straphanger chaplains who had no idea what the military was really all about, I let him go on for a little while, then threw in my own two bits worth. I didn't know enough of his whole story to tell it as well as the article does [and there's a bit more not mentioned that you might hear if you're around the right places on Miami's calle ocho at the right time] but I made my point, or rather, he made it for me.

To Tomas Cruz; a hell of a soldier and one hell of a man:

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