That CIA man, Grayston Lynch, knew something about
fighting – and about long odds. He carried scars from Omaha Beach, the Battle
of the Bulge, and Korea’s Heartbreak Ridge. But in those battles Lynch and his
band of brothers counted on the support of their commander in chief. At the Bay
of Pigs, Lynch (an American) and his band of brothers (Cubans) learned — first
in speechless shock and finally in burning rage — that their most powerful
enemies were not Castro’s Soviet-armed soldiers massing in nearby Santa Clara,
but the Ivy League’s best and brightest dithering in Washington.
Lynch trained, in his own words, “brave boys who had
never before fired a shot in anger” — college students, farmers, doctors,
common laborers, whites, blacks, mulattoes. They were known as La Brigada
2506, an almost precise cross-section of Cuban society of the time. The Brigada
included men from every social strata and race in Cuba—from sugar cane planters
to sugar cane cutters, from aristocrats to their chauffeurs. But mostly, the
folks in between, as befit a nation with a larger middle class than most of
Europe.
Short on battle experience, yes, but they fairly burst
with what Bonaparte and George Patton valued most in a soldier: morale. No
navel-gazing about “why they hate us” or the merits of “regime change” for
them. They’d seen Castroism point-blank.
Their goals were crystal-clear: firing-squads silenced,
families reunited, tens of thousands freed from prisons, torture chambers, and
concentration camps. We see it on the History Channel after our GI’s took
places like Manila and Munich.
In 1961, newsreels could have captured such scenes
without crossing oceans. When those Cuban freedom-fighters hit the beach at the
Bay of Pigs 50 years ago this week, one of every 18
Cubans suffered in Castro Gulag. Mass graves dotted the Cuban
countryside, piled with hundreds who’d crumpled in front of Castro and Che
Guevara’s firing squads. Most of the invaders had loved-ones among the above.
Modern history records few soldiers with the burning morale of the Bay of Pigs
freedom-fighters.
From the lethal fury of the attack and the horrendous
casualties their troops and militia were taking, the Castro brothers and Che
Guevara assumed they faced at least “20,000 invading mercenaries,” as they
called them. Yet it was a band of mostly civilian volunteers their Soviet armed
and led-troops outnumbered 20-to-1.
“Where are the planes?” kept crackling over U.S.
Navy radios two days later. “Where is our ammo? Send planes or we can’t
last!” Commander Jose San Roman kept pleading to the very fleet that escorted
his men to the beachhead (and sat much closer to them than the Sixth Fleet sits
to the Libyan coast today). Crazed by hunger and thirst, his men had been
shooting and reloading without sleep for three days. Many were hallucinating.
By then many suspected they’d been abandoned by the Knights of Camelot.
That’s when Castro’s Soviet Howitzers opened up, huge 122
mm ones, four batteries’ worth. They pounded 2,000 rounds into the
freedom-fighters 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 in his book, The Bay of Pigs.
By that time the invaders were dazed, delirious with fatigue, thirst, and
hunger, too deafened by the bombardment even to hear orders. But these men were
in no mood to emulate Rommel’s crack Afrika Corps by retreating. Instead they
were fortified by a resolve no conquering troops could ever call upon–the
burning duty to free their nation.
“If things get rough,” the heartsick CIA man Lynch
radioed back, “we can come in and evacuate you.”
“We will NOT be evacuated!” San Roman roared back to his
friend Lynch. “We came here to fight! We don’t want evacuation! We want
more ammo! We want PLANES! This ends here!”
Camelot’s criminal idiocy finally brought Adm. Arleigh
Burke of the Joints Chief of Staff, who was receiving the battlefield pleas, to
the brink of mutiny. Years before, Adm. Burke sailed thousands of miles to
smash his nation’s enemies at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Now he was Chief of
Naval Operations and stood 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!
(the U.S. Carrier just offshore from the beachhead)” that’s all those Cuban
boys need, Mr. President. Let me order…!”
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 Cuban boys there, Mr. President!” The
fighting admiral exploded. “By God, we ARE involved!”
Admiral Burke’s pleas also proved futile.
The freedom-fighters’ spent ammo inevitably forced a
retreat. Castro’s jets and Sea Furies were roaming overhead at will and tens of
thousands of his Soviet-led and armed troops and armor were closing in. The
Castro planes now concentrated on strafing the helpless, ammo-less
freedom-fighters.
“Can’t continue,” Lynch’s radio crackled – it was San
Roman again. “Have nothing left to fight with …out of ammo…Russian tanks in
view….destroying my equipment.”
“Tears flooded my eyes,” wrote Grayston Lynch. “For the first
time in my 37 years I was ashamed of my country.”
When the smoke cleared and their ammo had been expended
to the very last bullet, when a hundred of them lay dead and hundreds more
wounded, after three days of relentless battle, barely 1,400 of them — without
air support (from the U.S. Carriers just offshore) and without a single
supporting shot by naval artillery (from U.S. cruisers and destroyers poised
just offshore) — had squared off against 21,000 Castro troops, his entire air
force and squadrons of Soviet tanks. The Cuban freedom-fighters inflicted over
3000 casualties on their Soviet-armed and led enemies. This feat of
arms still amazes professional military men.
“They fought magnificently and were not defeated,”
stressed Marine Col. Jack Hawkins a multi-decorated WWII and Korea vet who
helped train them. “They were abandoned on the beach without the supplies and
support promised by their sponsor, the Government of the United States.”
“We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any
hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival
and the success of liberty!” proclaimed
Lynch and Hawkin’s Commander-in-Chief just three months earlier.
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