Veteran UPI newsman Martin P. Houseman was Havana Night Editor on April 17, 1961. Twenty years later he recalls the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The military intelligence was screwed up, to begin with. The Bay of Pigs operation went downhill from there.
'Seaweed, my ass!' an invading Cuban frogman heard Grayston Lynch mutter in the darkness as the first reconaissance boat to approach Giron Beach clanged and grounded on a coral reef.
Moments later, Texan Lynch fired the first shot of what was to become the greatest debacle of the John F. Kennedy Administration. In communist annals it is called 'The Battle of Giron.' In the western world it is generally referred to as 'the half-cocked (or botched-up), CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion.'
Lights from a jeep fell on the wading reconaissance party. Lynch opened up with a Browning Automatic Rifle. So did the frogmen. The jeep lights went out and the two militiamen inside toppled over dead. The mercury vapor streetlights of Giron, which U. S. intelligence had overlooked, also went out.
The first invader to land at the second beachhead was also an American, William Robertson, known to the invading Cubans as 'Rip.' Military advisers Rip and Gray were not supposed to be ahsore. No American was supposed to participate in the belligerency. They had gone to the beach without authorization to size up the situation. Their presence did not prove a good portent. When the invasion brigade so direly needed American help 72 hours later, it received a radioed 'Good luck.'
Pepe San Roman (Jose Perez San Roman), commander of Invasion Brigade 2506, quickly realized after coming ashore under fire that the invaders' American advisers had committed an even greater intelligence gaffe than the coral and the lights. A microwave antenna was spotted atop a building. Fidel Castro's Havana headquarters had been flashed word of the landing. The Americans had said there was not even a telephone at Giron.
The a-building resort of Giron had a lot more houses and people than when U.S. intelligence last looked. In their rush to secure the beach against a handful of militia and coastguardsmen, the invaders indiscriminately shot up the houses and thatch 'bohios.' Unfortunately, a number of women and children were hit.
The complex landing was taking place at night mainly to shield the nearby presence of a U.S. Navy task force consistingof the carrier Essex, five destroyers and a tanker. A monumental Landing Ship Dock, the USS San Marcos, quickly dispatched eight landing craft with the brigade's tanks and vehicles, and stole away into the darkness.
Kennedy, in office less than 100 days, had declared categorically (some say unnecessarily) the week before that there would be no U.S. military involvement in Cuba. The declaration had merely served to confirm tacitly what much of the U.S. news media and nearly every Cuban in Miami and Havana already knew: that a Cuban exile invasion force trained by Americans in Guatemala was soon to land.
The final CIA-sponsored battle plan -- approved by Kennedy's Joint Chiefs of Staff -- called for complete air mastery and a popular uprising. Battle packs for 15,000 men were included in the five invasion ships with only 1,500 invaders. The plan called for moving the brigade's air force, including 16 B-26 bombers, to Giron airstrip after Fidel's motley air force was destroyed on the ground. Finally, it called for airlifting to the beachhead the Cuban Revolutionary Council, headed by Dr. Jose Miro Cardona, to proclaim itself a provisional government-in-arms, opening the way to recognition and support from friendly governments.
For international political considerations, Kennedy kept reducing the scope of the battle plan. The chiefs of staff kept approving the cutbacks. Only Marine Commandant Gen. David M. Shoup qualified his approval, the record shows. Shoup said the invasion had a chance of success if it had air superiority and if there were popular uprisings.
The brigade was denied both. Castro's Czech-trained security apparatus quickly rounded up 200,000 suspected enemies of the state, including this correspondent and two UPI colleagues. Underground leader Rogelio Gonzales Corso (Francisco) was snared in the dragnet and executed. The CIA delayed too long its 'blow bridges' order to the underground, presumably for reasons of invasion security. There was no uprising.
The lack of air superiority has to be laid at the doorstep of John F. Kennedy, who nobly assumed full responsibility. Kennedy was concerned by the difficult mission confronting U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson faced Cuba's wily foreign minister, Raul Roa, in a General Assembly debate on 'The Cuba Item,' to wit, denunciation of a feared U.S. invasion.
By feigning a sore throat, the cunning Roa succeeded in getting the debate postponed until April 17, 1961, which Castro's intelligence had deduced to be D-Day plus or minus one or two. Stevenson was not privy to invasion details.
The tough Irishman in the White House wanted to begin his administration with a bang, by kicking the communists out of Cuba, but he wanted the U.S. role covered deeply. He was surrounded by a covey of 'dove' advisers -- notably, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and presidential aides Arthur M. Schlesinger and Richard N. Goodwin. At every turn they nurtured Kennedy's own misgivings about reaction to the idea of a large nation appearing to attack a small one. Kennedy also wondered what the Soviets might do.
Kennedy ordered the April 15 air strike on Castro's grounded air force to be reduced from 16 to six planes. He canceled a second strike set for April 16. Incredibly, he canceled the D-Day morning strike which was supposed to have destroyed the last remnants of Fidel's air force.
Why did the joint chiefs approve the castrated plan? Years later, Schlesinger was to write that the brass assumed that Kennedy, under pressure of emergency, would order U.S. intervention to prevent a disaster.
To this day, brigade military and political leaders candidly concede that they were explicitly told not to expect U.S. ground support if the invasion bogged down, but they affirm they were led to believe by Americans at all levels that they would have an air 'umbrella.' Douglas Dillon, in on the original planning as under-secretary of state of the Eisenhower Administration, said he was certain the Pentagon would never agree to any plan without standby combat support by U.S. naval air strength.
The lone April 15 air strike left Fidel Castro with two bomb-carrying Sea Furies, two T-33 jet trainers armed with wing rockets, and two B-26's.
At Giron Beach, the night landing was a disaster. Fiberglass landing boats with outboard motors proved useless. Coral and general disorganization put the operation hours behind.
What was left of Fidel's air force was over the beaches early on the morning of April 17, battering the invasion flotilla, five decrepit freighters under charter to the CIA. Before the day was over, Fidel's air had blown a hole in the Houston, which skipper Luis Morse managed to run aground anyway, sunk the Rio Escondido with the Brigade's communications trailer and fuel, strafed the Barbara J. and the Blagar, where Gray ended up in the communications room as de facto invasion coordinator, and put to flight the Atlantico and the Caribe with most of the brigade's ammunition. That materiel never got to shore.
On the left flank, or western front, at Playa Larga, the commander of the brigade's 2nd and Armored Battalions, Erneido Oliva, was about to join the ranks of history's intrepid combat leaders at the service of lost causes.
Only three major roads cut through the Zapata Swamp to Giron Beach, respectively, from the west, north and east. Oliva's mission: hold the western approach.
He chose to establish his line just beyond the curve of the traffic circle or 'rotonda' where side roads intersected the highway from Matanzas. He sent Maximo Leonardo Cruz with three rifle squads and a recoilless rifle team into ambush positions on both sides of the swamp-lined highway. He lined up one of his tanks and bazooka team with varying angles of fire at a curve. The second tank was held in reserve. The stage was set for 'The Battle of the Rotonda.'
The first Castro unit to reach the front was the 334th Militia Battalion reinforced by the 339th Tank Battalion, both under the command of Public Works Minister Osmani Cienfuegos. They were followed by cadets from the Matanzas Military Academy in a miles-long truck convoy.
The vanguard of blue-shirted militiamen walked right into the ambush. The convoy's three tanks rolled up, a Soviet-made tank, an old Sherman, and another Soviet tank, in one-two-three order. It was tank-to-tank combat at 20 yards. The well-trained brigade tank crew knocked out the first two tanks in a hurry. Having expended his final round, tank commander Jorge Alvarez rammed the remaining Soviet tank, which then could not get distance for an angle of fire.
The two tanks crashed into one another 'like prehistoric monsters' until the barrel of the Soviet tank split open, and it withdrew.
Castro knew of the intention to establish a government-in-arms -- it had been proclaimed loudly enough by the exile leaders in Miami -- and he determined that the beachhead be wiped out as quickly as possible at any cost. Cienfuegos sent his men in massive infantry charges down the narrow road.
The invaders chopped them up like liver for fish bait with rifle, .50-caliber machine gun, and recoilless rifle fire. When the militia tried to outflank through the tangled swamp vegetation, Oliva brought down on them white phosphorous rounds from his 4.2-millimeter mortar battery. Cordite smoke obscured the road. In the smoke, Oliva walked into the center of the highway, and, upright, fired clip after clip from his M-1 rifle into the Castro troops. They pulled back.
Three Castro ambulances came forward to pick up the wounded. Oliva ordered his men to cease fire. Oliva's forward observer radioed that an armored personnel carrier bristling with blue-shirted militia was creeping up behind the third ambulance. Olive ordered mortar fire. Soon all four vehicles were flaming wreckage.
Two invader B-26's finally arrived from the Nicaraguan base. They blasted the convoy column on the road. A militiaman in the column, who later defected, estimated that of the first 2,100 Castro men to fight at Playa Larga, 500 were killed and 1,000 wounded.
A Castro T-33 and a Sea Fury shot down the two lumbering B-26's. The brigade bombers didn't even have tail gunners. Hadn't the American plan called for complete air supremacy?
At Giron, a brigade recoilless rifle man got an angle of fire on a hill to avoid burning himself up with backblast, and made military history by knocking down a low, strafing Sea Fury. A Castro B-26 was shot down by rifle and machine gun fire from the brigade ships, which the invaders were still trying to unload.
Brigade paratroopers under Alejandro Del Valle captured San Blas on the road from the north and hurled back a counter-attack by Castro's 117th Militia Battalion, consisting of retail sector workers from Havana.
Yet, without supplies, good communications and air cover, the brigade was in trouble.
The next day, Oliva's position was pounded by four batteries of Soviet-made 122-millimeter howitzers. Then, Oliva's men repelled an infantry attack spearheaded by 300 Rebel Army regulars. Ammunition was low. A Castro tank rolled up to the main line at the traffic 'rotonda.'
Olia walked out to meet it, carrying a bazooka. In the tube was the last rocket in Oliva's arsenal. When he saw the tank's machine gun tracking him, he knelt down and took aim. The tank stopped. The tank commander and crew jumped out and joined the invaders.
In the political arena, the unwitting Adlai Stevenson had been trapped on the U.N. General Assembly floor in a web of lies spun by his own government. He was furious. Nontheless, the military and CIA 'hawks' outshouted the administration doves for once, and Kennedy finally authorized four Sky Hawks from the Essex to protect a planned April 19 re-supply effort, and to engage if attacked, but under no circumstances to fire on ground targets. It was too little, too late. The order was rescinded before it could be acted upon.
San Roman messaged Gray on the morning of the 19th, 'I will not be evacuated. We will fight to the end here if we have to.'
By then, nine of the 16 brigade B-26 bombers had been shot down. Six American flight instructors, four from the Alabama National Guard and two on contract to the CIA, shamed by their country's 'betrayal' of the brigade, flew suicidal combat missions in crews of two. Four of them died when two of the vintage bombers were shot down.
At 4:32 p.m. San Roman transmitted, 'Tanks are in sight. I have nothing to fight with. Am taking to the woods.'
Twenty-five survivors swam to a sailboat. Fifteen days later 12 were picked up by a freighter in the Gulf of Mexico, 178 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi. The rest had died of starvation and dehydration.
At 6:00 p.m., April 19, 1961, Castro's cautious troops moved into what was left of Giron. They eventually rounded up about 1,200 brigade survivors in the swamp, many nearly starved. Osmani Cienfuegos, whose militia battalion had been shredded by the invaders, crammed 149 prisoners into a hermetically sealed truck trailer for the eight-hour ride to Havna. Ten died of suffocation.
Nearly two years later, after a show trial and unspeakable mistreatment of the prisoners, Castro bartered them to a Cuban exile families committee for millions of dollars worth of medical supplies raised in the United States.
It has been a long time since the Bay of Pigs invasion -- 20 years. It hasn't been nearly long enough for the men of Invasion Brigade 2506 to forget.
