CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE BREAKUP WAS A long time coming. I couldn’t say I was surprised.

“I’m tired, Bill,” Elinor said before she packed up and took the three kids back to Mama’s in California. “I’m tired of you being gone all the time and leaving me and the kids behind to wait for you, not knowing where you are, what you’re doing, or when and if you’ll be back. We’re not going to live like that anymore.”

“Elinor … Elinor, I’m sorry—”

“Sorry’s not enough, Bill. You don’t need anybody. Better you go take care of your Navy and we’ll go home. Maybe I’ll never have to see the Navy again.”

Now they were gone. Linda Jean was in the third grade already, Bill Jr. would start kindergarten in the fall, and little Jana Lee was toddling about the house chanting “DaDa.” Gone where I would rarely see them and be an influence in their lives. Too often I saw families breaking up like this: Daddy gone so much, returning home after a WestPac or Far East tour, disembarking to a lonely and troubled wife and children bawling in terror at the sight of some big stranger trying to hug them.

Elinor was right. I wasn’t around all the time and I should have been.

I drove Elinor and the kids to the airport and saw them off in a flood of largely unspoken recriminations and tears. Then, having been informed that the Cuban invasion was on, I caught the next military flight to Guantanamo to be near the action when the excrement hit the prop. I didn’t wait long. At dawn on August 17, 1961, radio traffic in the Gitmo Operations Center began to crackle with excitement as brass from all over the military arrived for the show.

At the other end of the island, about four hundred miles away, Fidel Castro awoke when two B-26 bombers flew rooftop-low over “Point One,” the national military headquarters in suburban Havana.

“What are those planes?” he demanded of his staff.

No one could tell him. He bolted to the window and watched in helpless rage as the American-made, World War II–type bombers began diving on Campo Libertad Airport nearby. He heard the crump of exploding bombs and the stutter of anti-aircraft fire.

He was sure the long-dreaded invasion had begun.

* * *

While CIA personnel promised Cubans that America would assure the invasion’s success, JFK was saying something else. On April 12, three days before the B-26 strikes on Castro’s air force, Kennedy announced to the Alliance for Progress for Latin America that “there will not be, under any circumstances, an intervention in Cuba by the U.S. armed forces or American civilians.”

Bissell, Hunt, Enders, and other CIA operatives assumed JFK’s statement to be one of misdirection to lull Castro into a false sense of security. They continued with their plans to attack.

“These men are ready,” I assured E. Howard Hunt after one of my jaunts to the main training base in Guatemala. “They’re trained and overtrained, and from now on they can only go downhill. How soon do they get to fight?”

“I haven’t been told,” Hunt replied.

President Kennedy still vacillated. He couldn’t seem to make up his mind. To give himself more time, he established an invasion date of April 11, then changed it to April 17. He still had time to call off operations, even though the first troop ships had left the staging area at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, on April 11, six days before the scheduled landing. The last ships would start across the Caribbean on Thursday, April 13.

Two events were scheduled on April 15, two days before troops landed. First, B-26 air strikes against Castro’s air force; and, second, Nino Diaz would lead a diversionary force ashore in Oriente Province.

JFK telephoned Richard Bissell to ask how many aircraft would fly against Castro’s airfield. Bissell told him sixteen.

“I don’t want it on that scale,” the president said. “I want it minimal.”

On the morning of Saturday, April 15, a bomber force sharply reduced to six airplanes took off from CIA base Happy Valley in Nicaragua. President Luis Somoza bade the pilots farewell, with an admonishment to bring back Castro’s beard. Two planes would strike each of three Cuban airfields—Campo Libertad on the outskirts of Havana, Antonio Maceo airport at Santiago de Cuba 450 miles southeast of Havana, and San Antonio de los Baños. The planes would strike simultaneously at dawn with bombs, rockets, and machine guns.

Gustavo Ponzoa and his wingman, Gonzalo Herrera, were the first to take off from Nicaragua. The two B-26s skimmed the Caribbean at an altitude of fifty feet to avoid radar detection, then climbed over the seashore cliffs in Cuba and roared down the runway at Santiago de Cuba at 1,200 feet. Ponzoa released both his 500-pound demolition bombs. Heavy red-and-black smoke billowed up from underneath his right wing as he throttled and pulled out of his bombing glide. Anti-aircraft fire and tracers from machine guns arched skyward.

Herrera, Ponzoa’s wingman, followed with his run. In the meantime, the two other teams of two attacked their own targets at Antonio Maceo and at Campo Libertad, where an alarmed Castro watched from his window.

Each team was supposed to make two runs. Ponzoa and Herrera made five, thundering in at fifty feet above the runway to slam rockets and machine gun bullets into hangars and aircraft. Ponzoa’s bomber took a hit in the nose on his fifth run. Herrera was also hit.

“Gus!” Herrera yelled over the radio to Ponzoa, “I can see holes in both wings.”

Ponzoa radioed back, “Let’s get out of here and go home!”

All six bombers managed to return safely to Nicaragua, although Herrera busted all three tires when he landed. Jubilation that Castro’s air force was wiped out soon turned to gloom when U-2 reconnaissance photos revealed that only five of his aircraft had been destroyed on the ground. Anticipating attack, wily Fidel had dispersed his planes and used several broken-down ones as decoys. He still possessed a formidable force to use against an invasion.

On Sunday at Quarters Eye in Washington, the Air Operations Officer was ordering ordnance for a cleanup strike against the airfields when General Charles Cabell arrived. Cabell was acting director of the CIA in Allen Dulles’s absence. Dulles was in Puerto Rico.

“What are you doing?” Cabell asked.

“Readying the follow-up strikes, sir. We have to finish them off.”

“Seems to me we were only authorized one strike at the airfields,” replied Cabell.

“Oh, no, sir. There are no restrictions on the number of strikes. The authorization was to knock out the Cuban Air Force.”

Cabell’s jaw jutted. “I don’t know about that. So to be on the safe side, I’m going to ask Dean Rusk about it.” Dean Rusk was secretary of state. “Cancel that strike order until I get someone to approve it.”

JFK, who had given the go-ahead for the invasion, now scrubbed the cleanup air strikes. Rebel pilots in Happy Valley were revving up B-26 engines for the follow-up when they received orders to cancel. Major General George “Poppa” Doster, the American commander of brigade pilot training, slammed his hat on the ground and yelled, “There goes the whole fucking war!”

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff referred to the cancellation as “pulling out the rug … absolutely reprehensible, almost criminal.”

The other elements of the invasion were experiencing their own difficulties. During the final days of preparations, the CIA decided to change the landing site from the Trinidad sandy beaches to the Bay of Pigs, more than 100 miles farther east along the southern coast. CIA intelligence showed the area to be a sparsely populated stretch of territory isolated from the rest of the island by the treacherous Zapata Swamps, crossed only by two narrow-gauge railroads and tricky paths known to local villagers alone. The small 108-man government militia detachment at the village of Giron was not considered a real threat to the invasion. Bissell decided that since there were no rapid communications between the Bay of Pigs and Havana, the invaders could land, capture the airfield at Giron, and begin flying in war supplies before Castro realized what was happening.

What the Americans did not realize was that Fidel knew the region well from having fished for trout in nearby Laguna del Tesoro. Three hard-topped roads now crossed the swamp. A resort facility and another 180 concrete houses were under construction. Changing the invasion site was simply another planning snafu in a long line of mistakes and poor judgments leading up to the night of April 16, when a U.S. naval task force consisting of the aircraft carrier Essex and seven destroyers secretly rendezvoused off the coast with Eduardo Garcia’s seven ragged freighters of the invasion fleet.

This U.S. task force had orders to merely escort the insurgent craft to the coast, nothing more. It was to remain strictly uncommitted when the invasion began.

Shortly before midnight on Sunday, April 16, six Cuban Frogmen led by Andy Pruna and the stocky and balding CIA agent Grayston Lynch slipped toward shore at Playa Giron to mark the beach for landing. Their rubber boat was still fifty yards from land, grounded by a reef that planners thought was a stretch of subsurface seaweed, when a jeep swung along the beach and bathed the landing party in its headlights.

An American fired the first shots at the Bay of Pigs. Grayston Lynch opened up with one twenty-round magazine from his Browning automatic rifle. The Cuban Frogmen joined in, riddling the jeep and two militiamen with gunfire. The headlights went out.

Knowing the element of surprise was blown, the Frogmen scurried up and down the beach, placing landing lights. About twenty-five Castro militiamen pulled up in a truck; Lynch radioed an urgent request that the landing craft (LSVPs) from his freighter, the Blager, be quickly loaded with troops and rushed ashore.

Gunfire rattled as the two LCVPs roared in for the invasion’s first troop landing. One of the landing craft struck the reef and soon sank. Wet but uninjured, the first fighters at the Bay of Pigs waded onto sand. They took off for Giron, firing wildly into the pastel-colored bungalows of Castro’s new recreation colony. The militia retreated to the woods and swamps beyond.

Grayston Lynch returned to the Blager after Pepe San Roman and the other brigade commanders waded onto Cuban soil. An urgent message from Washington awaited him: “Castro still has operational aircraft. Expect you to be hit at dawn. Unload all troops and supplies and take ships to sea as soon as possible.”

In spite of the reef, the brigade’s 1,453 soldiers began pouring onto “Blue Beach” at Playa Giron in the predawn hours of April 17. The other half of the landing under the command of Hugo Sueiro disembarked at “Red Beach” at Playa Largo deep in the mouth of the bay, twenty miles away. It received light machine-gun fire but landed without casualties to find a microwave radio station still warm from use. So much for the CIA’s intelligence that the Bay of Pigs was without communications.

In New York, E. Howard Hunt dictated a press release in the name of the Frente Revolucionari Democratica: “Before dawn, Cuban patriots in the cities and in the hills began the battle to liberate our homeland from the despotic rule of Fidel Castro.”

And in Havana, Fidel Castro was awakened at 1:15 a.m. and told that the land invasion had begun. He took immediate personal command.

By 6:00 a.m., even while the invasion fleet was still offloading infantry and equipment, Castro’s troops and his nine surviving aircraft were in full counterattack against Brigade 2506. Garcia’s freighters in the bay were being pounded by Castro’s Sea Fury aircraft and B-26s. Grayston Lynch and Rip Robertson on the freighter Blager fired 50-caliber machine guns so steadily at the attacking planes that the barrels turned white hot.

The freighter Houston was sinking, still laden with ammunition. The Rio Escondido exploded in a massive eruption of fire, struck by rockets from a Sea Fury. The ship contained the bulk of the invasion’s ammunition, fuel, and medical supplies. The planes also knocked out Marsopa, from which the invasion was being coordinated, as well as several smaller vessels used to ferry troops ashore. Garcia, the ships’ owner, must have been crying his eyes out.

Lynch, in command on-site, was assaulted by messages from headquarters: “To sea!” The ships would have to return after dark to offload supplies. The agent radioed San Roman ashore: “Pepe, we’re going to have to go.”

“Okay, but don’t desert us,” Pepe responded.

“We’re not going to desert you,” Lynch promised.

JFK’s ill-advised decision not to provide U.S. air cover, coupled with his unwillingness to permit the knockout blow against Castro’s air force, took a toll on the rebel air operations that day.

Shortly before sunup, Captain Eddie Ferrer, pilot of the first of six lumbering C-46s en route to drop 177 paratroopers northeast of Blue Beach to cut off and defend the invasion site, passed over the aircraft carrier Essex and two destroyers plowing toward the beaches. He was certain they were joining the battle.

“Hell, we can’t lose!” he exclaimed to his copilot.

The C-46s were slow and unarmed and without a fighter escort. Rebels were still under the impression that the United States was providing an “umbrella.” Ferrer was thus all the more surprised after he dropped his paratroopers on the San Blas Road to find Castro’s T-33s attacking the brigade flight. Machine gun bursts puffed smoke from attackers’ wings. Ferrer saw one of the C-46s plummet to earth streaking smoke. He managed to escape to sea by skimming the waves and slow-flying with full flaps.

As the battle progressed, T-33 jets picked five of the Brigade’s twelve remaining aircraft out of the air, including the B-26 flown by Americans Pete Ray and Leo Francis Baker, who were killed on the ground when they tried to escape their crashed bomber amid the fighting. Their bodies would be kept frozen in a Havana morgue for the next eighteen years.

American A-4D pilots from the carrier Essex watched helplessly as Castro’s bombers and fighters made sorties against the beaches, the freighters in the bay, and the hapless C-46 transports. A Cuban T-33 made a run at pilot Tim Lanahan, who was cruising his jet at twenty-five thousand feet. Within seconds, both jets were diving, with the A-4D close on the Cuban’s tail.

“Don’t fire! Don’t fire!” came the air controller’s frantic cry from the Essex. “Rules of engagement have been changed.”

Lanahan had no choice but to drop his pursuit of the T-33 and return to the carrier.

Pilot Jim Forgy came upon a Cuban Sea Fury riding the tail of a Brigade B-26. The bomber’s starboard engine erupted in flames. The Sea Fury closed in for the kill.

“I have a Sea Fury shooting this B-26 down,” Forgy radioed. “Request permission to take positive action.”

“Negative,” came back the reply.

On the ground, Erneido Oliva’s Second Battalion requested two Brigade B-26s to attack an enemy column of nine hundred approaching the battle zone in sixty vehicles, including buses. The bombers routed the battalion, but a Castro T-33 and a Sea Fury shot down one of the bombers.

By midnight of the first day, Fidel and twenty thousand soldiers had arrived to trap the invaders against the beaches, squeezing them into tighter and tighter perimeters. Castro’s tanks and infantry battered the Brigade with artillery fire for forty-eight straight hours. At the traffic circle on the northern outskirts of Playa Larga, Oliva and his men endured more than two thousand shells falling on them in less than four hours. Stalin tanks rumbled against Oliva’s dug-in defenders until midnight.

A little former barber called Barberito ran around and around one of the advancing tanks, peppering it with fire from his recoilless rifle until the frightened crew surrendered. Barberito was killed later by a machine gun burst.

A Brigade tank driver named Jorge Alvarez knocked out an enemy tank with his last shell, then deliberately crashed his tank into another Stalin. The two monsters rammed each other in a remarkable nose-to-nose battle until the Stalin’s gun barrel split and it retreated.

Of Oliva’s 370 men, twenty had been killed and another fifty were wounded by the time they beat back the enemy’s initial attacks. Weakened and bleeding, knowing another attack at dawn was inevitable, the Red Beach invaders retreated to Giron to link up with Blue Beach invaders. They arrived at 8:45 a.m. on Tuesday, April 18.

Castro closed in on Blue Beach.

Oliva organized the last battle of the Bay of Pigs, which came to be known as “the last stand at Giron.”

Armed with seven bazookas and three tanks, Oliva’s battalion destroyed three Castro tanks and an armored truck during the first fighting. The Brigade’s 81mm mortars fired so fast the tubes started to melt. When Castro’s troops pulled back to regroup, Oliva found he could no longer raise Pepe San Roman on the radio.

San Roman had pulled back to within twenty feet of the water. Crouching on the sand with artillery fire bursting around him, the Brigade commander issued his last radio message, shouting across the air to Grayston Lynch aboard Blager: “Am destroying all equipment and communications. I have nothing left to fight with. Am taking to the woods. I can’t wait for you.”

Abandoned by the United States, surrounded by a force ten times larger, pounded by artillery and fighter bombers, pushed back to the beaches and swamps, unable to escape, out of ammunition, Pepe San Roman ordered his command to break into groups and escape however they could. Grayston Lynch later told me it was the first time he was ever ashamed of his country.

I knew how he felt. At Guantanamo, I lowered my head and bit my lip to keep from bawling like an abandoned baby seal as news of the failure streamed in across the operation center’s commo. I wanted to go home—except Elinor was gone and I no longer had a home.