Invasion Fiasco Showed Necessity of Air Support

Aero-News HISTORY by Senior Correspondent Kevin R.C. "Hognose" O'Brien

An anniversary slipped quietly past in the night this week, just as two rubber rafts slipped quietly through the mangrove swamps surrounding Playa Giron in Cuba on the night of April 16/17, 1961.

Each raft held a CIA officer -- contract officers considered expendable by the Ivy Leaguers in Langley -- and a handful of Cuban exile frogmen. They were marking the limits of a beach for an invasion that was as bold, and as historic in its own way, as D-Day.

The mission, known forever as the Bay of Pigs invasion, would fail. Unknown to the two Americans and the 1,500 Cubans they had trained and advised -- after months of training, their close friends -- Washington power brokers had already decided to pull the air cover and cancel five-sixths of the preparatory air strikes which had been calculated to ground Castro's air force.

Already, parachute units had been dropped at strategic choke points by the C-54s and C-46 of the rebel Cuban air force. And a first pre-emptive strike by 16 rebel-manned Douglas B-26 Invaders was supposed to have eliminated the Cuban Air Force on the ground.

The ground invaders were kept in the dark, but the Kennedy brothers, unnerved by State Department objections, feared the US would be exposed as a patron of the invasion. So they cut back on the air available to the troops on the ground. They cut sorties. They cut targets. They cut reconnaissance needed to determine if targets had been hit effectively. They ordered the defensive guns removed from the Cuban exiles' B-26s. Instead of three strikes by 16 aircraft each, only one strike was made -- and only with half the planned striking force, 8 instead of 16 planes.

The half-strike destroyed half of Castro's air force on the ground. He was still left with B-26s of his own -- and more critically, with Sea Furies and three armed T-33 jets. And no sooner had the President ordered the cancellation of subsequent strikes -- at the urging of Secretary of State Dean Rusk -- than someone in the US Government leaked that decision to the Soviets, who quickly passed it to their Castro Cuban clients.

Castro's air arm was not very well manned or led, but it was so unequally equipped it didn't matter. Even though the B-26s were able to outmaneuver and shoot down a couple of the Sea Furies (which is less amazing the more you know about the B-26), the exiles had no answer for the jets except the air cover that had been in the original plan. The low-level dogfights alternately elated and depressed the exile ground unit, "Brigada 2506" -- depending on who was getting shot down at the time. But the lack of cover not only exposed them to enemy fire, it allowed the Castro Cuban Sea Furies and bombers to destroy or sink the supply ships with the ammunition that the men of 2506 needed to stay in the fight.

Thinking that the problem was that the men in Washington didn't understand, the rebels and their US advisors mounted a desperate attempt to airlift an eyewitness out of the beachhead on the 19th: two Alabama ANG-crewed B-26s would fly as "fighter support" for an attempt to land the C-46 on the beach landing strip at Playa Giron and remove B-26 shootdown survivor (and aerial victor over a Sea Fury and a Castro B-26) Matias Farias. Farias was rescued and recorded a tape which has been described as "a vivid account." The tape was flown to Washington, but it appears to have disappeared; it doesn't come up in the CIA, Kennedy Library, or National Archives collections.

Admiral Arleigh Burke, Chief of Naval Operations, General Lyman Lemnitzer, his army counterpart, and CIA officer Richard Bissell tracked down President Kennedy at a social event at the White House and ran through several options to save the crumbling beachhead. Kennedy objected to each one: "Then we'd be involved!" the President objected. "Mr President, we ARE involved!" Burke thundered. "We trained and armed these Cubans. We helped land them on the beaches. Goddammit, Mr President, we can't let those boys be slaughtered there!" (It was career curtains for Burke, a Pacific War hero; he'd be shuffled into retirement in a little over three months). What Kennedy thought can never be known, but he returned to dancing while the Admiral returned to the Pentagon, forbidden to send his ships or planes to the rescue.

One of the CIA officers would take the last message from the doomed troops ashore. "I have nothing left to fight with. The enemy tanks are already in my position. Farewell, friends!" A veteran of Omaha Beach on D-Day and a former Army Special Forces officer, Grayston Lynch was as hard as Americans get, but he was in tears as he copied the message down in a shaky hand. "For the first time in my 37 years, I am ashamed of my country," he would later write.

The men of Brigada 2506 met various fates: a handful were plucked off the beaches and out of the mangroves by the same two Agency men. A larger number were shot without trial by Castro. The rest went into captivity; some were tortured, some not. President Kennedy ransomed some of the survivors for tens of millions of dollars in 1962, but others stayed in captivity. Of the men that were ransomed, most became US citizens; dozens served as US military officers; and some found other employment with CIA.

The Cuban rebel air corps did little better. Of the original 16 B-26s, 13, and several replacements, were lost. When the Cuban exile pilots collapsed from exhaustion, their instructors -- Americans from the Alabama National Guard -- took over. Four Americans were lost, two of them were murdered -- one, Thomas "Pete" Ray (right), in Castro's presence, and possibly by Castro himself -- after capture. In a gruesome coda to the whole exercise, Ray's body was kept in a freezer until 1978 and occasionally removed and abused by Cuban leaders. (His daughter, Janet Ray Weininger, won a large judgment from the government of Cuba in US court in 2004). The other Americans killed were Riley Shamburger and Wade Gray, shot down in the other B-26, and Ray's flight engineer, Leo Baker, who was murdered and thrown into an unmarked mass grave. (Ray's got special mistreatment because he was definitely American; Baker was mistaken for a Cuban).

The Bay of Pigs invasion is a tidy little package of object lessons made for a War College seminar, but perhaps because it was such a shameful defeat for the US. it's little studied today. A lesson learned from World War II, and neglected in this case, was the necessity of air supremacy to permit an invasion to succeed. Britain, Norway, Singapore, Guadalcanal, Crete, Sicily, Normandy, the party that holds the air winds up holding the ground. Perhaps no battle in history better illustrates this than the Bay of Pigs. It is also a study in several even older principles of war, and perhaps some principles in human factors.

The US failure was diplomatic as much as military. Despite the State Department and President strangling the operation to prevent its US origin from becoming public knowledge, the cat was out of the bag from the very beginning. UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who had been kept in the dark about the whole project, was outraged when he found out he'd been sent into the UN to utter a false, and easily disproven, denial. The Soviets and their satellites had a propaganda field day. Kennedy was ultimately forced to drop the 150-plus-year-old Monroe Doctrine.

If the Soviet source in the high levels of the US government was ever discovered, his name has never been revealed.

While US vacillation weakened the nation abroad, secrecy and recriminations ruled at home. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, for instance, publicly denied that the follow-on air strikes had been canceled. The CIA was scapegoated for the incident, with director Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell (the man behind the U-2 and SR-71 reconnaissance programs, as well as the Bay of Pigs) forced to resign for the consequences of decisions they'd opposed. The first accurate report didn't come until 1964, when lawyer Dr Mario Laza -- who would have run for President of a democratic Cuba -- was able to piece together the story, after interviewing surviving participants. A Reader's Digest version (literally!) of his study can be found as one of the exhibits in the first FMI link.

A classified CIA study by Agency Inspector General Lyman Fitzpatrick came to similar conclusions, although it also identified many shortcomings in planning and procedures. WIth only mild redactions to protect the privacy of living individuals and certain intelligence sources and methods, that document was declassified in 1998, and is available along with many other primary source documents at the second FMI link.

The last word should probably go to Dwight D. Eisenhower, who knew something of invasions, of Presidency, and of this plan, which started, after all, on his watch; of Kennedy's handling of the crisis: "A profile in indecision and timidity."

FMI: www.bayofpigsmuseum.org, www.foia.cia.gov/bay_of_pigs.asp, www.brigada2506.com