Playa Giron | Part 7

Millions of people would refer to him as that bastard for most of his long life and personal opinions aside from a legal and semantic point of view, they would be right. Perennially presenting himself as a man of the people, he had nevertheless grown up on a 23,000 acre plantation and was the out of wedlock son of a man worth around $500,000 at the time of his birth on August 13th, 1926, which is $4.5 million in today's money. His father was named On Hell, that'd be angel to English-speaking years, in photographs On Hell looks remarkably like British actor Sir Patrick Stewart who played Captain Picard on Star Trek the next generation. He would go on to have five children by his first wife, Maria, called Maria the wealthy by her family due to her obsessive intent to marry into money than buying expensive clothes and find jewelry. 15 years younger than her husband, the date of Maria's death is not known with certainty what is known with certainty is that one of On Hell's friends introduced him to his niece named Lena, age 15. On Hell Hiredar is a maid. 28 years younger than her employer, Lena would go on to bear seven children for On Hell who married her after the birth of their third child, the one who would go on become not only world famous but in fact iconic. On Hell would go on to have yet another out of Woodlock child, his 13th, with a farmhand named Generosa. Looking back on the life of On Hell's son, it seems clear that the boy had learned at least two formative lessons from his father. One of them was an attitude towards the rule of law. As a young businessman, On Hell would frequently sneak out in the dark of night silently crossing his initial 200 acre plot. Bit by bit, month by month, he would slowly relentlessly extend his property's boundary posts, becoming ever larger, ever closer to road and railway lines. His growing prosperity seems to have come largely from his exploitation of black plantation workers from nearby Haiti. In later years, his son would recall On Hell routinely buying politicians to advance whatever legal or legal plans he had laid. Now, surely this idea of the law being a flexible thing was instilled in the son by the time he was sent away to boarding school at the age of six. Frequent misbehavior at that school got him expelled and sent to a private Jesuit academy out in the country. The second lesson instilled in this rebellious misbehaving child was paradoxically, an intense loading of riches and capitalism and not so paradoxically a hatred of the United States. On Hell had fought in the Cuban War of Independence against Spain, a war which in 1898 finally escalated into the Spanish-American War, ostensibly fought by the United States to defend Cuba from Spanish brutality while renouncing any claims on the island. While Americans had indeed helped to throw off the Spanish yoke, the initially grateful Cubans watched with growing concern as the Treaty of Paris which ended the war. Transferred sovereignty of the Philippine islands from Spain to the United States which had also annexed the Hawaiian islands that same year. It was to everyone's misfortune that this brief period in American history was a time of yellow journalism and manifest destiny, fake news hardly being a modern invention. This short but immensely destructive period of America's empire building was a time denounced by Mark Twain and many others as America's loss of innocence and moral integrity. Now certainly by the time on Hell returned from the war, heat harbored deep suspicions about the Yankee Nation to the North which hardened into open hatred after years of dealing with the U.S. conglomerate United Fruit. This American war for the liberation of Cuba somehow managed to become the trigger for well over a century of distrust and mutual loathing that remains to the present day. Because whatever the precise cause, something had possessed on Hell costro y Orgis to name his eighth child Fidel, meaning truth. The Russian Communist Party had also given their party newspaper the same name truth or Pravda in Russian and that name alone would be invaluable when it was later applied to a Marxist revolutionary, the illegitimate son of a Cuban millionaire and his maid. Today in the world of freedom the proudest post is, is spent on dealing with the unburdened and defended democracy. The only answer to communism is a massive offensive. Let me zoom across the system of international control and conform. You and I have a rendezvous with them. Never give in. Never, never, never. Mr. Gorbachev teared down this world. Now whether through shrewd planning, sheer luck or both, Fidel Castro benefited greatly from what we today refer to as optics. The emotional response to how a thing appears. On November 26, 1956, Fidel Castro ended his self-imposed exile by sailing from Mexico to Cuba with 81 other armed communist revolutionaries on a small, dilapidated and leaky private yacht called grandma. After a traumatic trip across the Gulf of Mexico, grandma ran a ground on Cuban soil in a mangrove swamp. The revolutionaries immediately fleeing inland, hotly pursued by soldiers of the U.S. back Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. By the time they'd managed to stop running and set up camp, only nine of the original 81 revolutionaries remained, including Castro's younger brother Raul and Raul's particularly charismatic Argentinian friend, a handsome young revolutionary named Che Guevara. Bolstered by Cuban recruits, Castro and his men began raiding small, remote, army outposts in order to obtain weapons. In January of 1957, they attacked an outpost at La Playa, provided medical care for those of Batista soldiers who'd been wounded and summarily executed Chico Osorio. The corrupt, deeply hated local mayor and company overseer, this greatly impressed the Cuban people who began flocking to Castro in ever greater numbers. One of these new recruits was an American named Frank Sturgis who smuggled guns for the revolution and who will later re-enter the story as a petty burglar breaking into a Washington office complex in 1972. In 1958, Batista launched an all-out counterattack named Operation Barano, Operation Summer, but despite the Army's numerical and technological superiority, they had no experience in guerrilla warfare. By October, Castro's revolutionaries had launched a counteroffensive severing Raul and road connections and cutting the island in half. Then on New Year's Eve, during the final hours of 1958, Batista fled the island with $300 million, Fidel Castro went on to form a communist dictatorship 90 miles south of Key West, Florida. Castro maintained an image as a servant of the Cuban people for over a half century and saw a full 11 US presidents take office in the Yankee Republic to the north. Admired by many leftists to this very day for his humble lifestyle and commitment to socialist egalitarianism, there was one particular character defect that he kept well hidden but which had dogged him his entire life. Back in 1940 at age 14 Castro wrote a letter to US president Franklin Roosevelt congratulating him on his re-election, the boy who would become a communist icon closed with this paragraph. If you like me, give me $10 Bill green American in the letter because never I have not seen a $10 Bill green American and I would like to have one of them. He signed it senior Fidel Castro and he'll hopefully included his return address. Iconic and ironic I guess this communist revolutionary who claimed he lived in a fishing hut had rid the island of General Batista who fled Cuba with $300 million and has since gone on to become the poster boy for political corruption. But when Fidel Castro finally fled the island on November 25th 2016 at the age of 90, his personal bank account contained $900 million. Three times that of the corrupt dictator he had asked it. 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There's no risk if you don't love the final painting your money is refunded paint your life will transform your memories into a work of art that will be cherished forever if you put one of these things on your wall it's going to change the entire feel of your room. At last count I think I have nine or ten oil portraits of myself surrounding the walls of the studio and it makes me feel cozy and right now as a limited time offer you get 30% off your painting that's right 30% off and free shipping. Now to get the special offer text the word cold to 64000 that's cold. who sixty-four thousand, text C-O-L-D to sixty-four thousand. America had a golden boy as well. He was young, handsome, and athletic, and smart. When he was born, his influential father, who was then mayor of Boston, told the newspapers that this child is the future president of the nation. What went on said was that his Irish father had also determined to make his son America's first Catholic president as well. He'd gone to all the right schools, played football and rugby, and was once on the rowing crew at Harvard. His father had been U.S. ambassador to Great Britain when it entered the war in 1939. Shortly after war came to America on December 7, 1941, this child of destiny enlisted in the United States Navy, alongside his brother, and received his commission as an ensign, and then eventually a promotion to Lieutenant. His defining moment would come as the result of a twist of fate, a fluke, an accident that changed the course of history. In mid-1944, right about the time that the Japanese first deployed the world's first guided weapons, the suicide submarines called kaitans, and the suicide aircraft called kamikazis, the latest of the American experiments in guided missiles took place. It was a heavily modified PB4Y, the naval reconnaissance version of the Army's consolidated B-24 liberator. The liberator could fly further, faster, and carry half again as many bombs as her more glamorous cousin, the B-17 flying fortress. With this particular aircraft called BQ-8, was filled with something very different from the liberator's normal 8,000 pounds of bombs. Instead, it had been stripped of bomb racks, radio and navigation stations, and eight of its ten crew positions. In place of the 8,000-pound bomb load, BQ-8 had been stuffed with 24,240 pounds of high-explosive corpex. Fitted with remote controls, the aircraft was capable of being flown from a chase plane completely unmanned. Now these controls were not sophisticated enough to allow complex activities like take-off, however, and BQ-8 was never intended to make a landing. Two pilots would be aboard to fly the overloaded, unarmed liberator off the runway. Once at altitude, which was a mere 2,000 feet, the pilots would engage the remote controls, stay on board for a few simple turns to ensure that the system was working, arm the torque hex, and then parachute from the aircraft while still over England leaving the massive four-engine bomber to continue out into the North Sea, controlled by a chase plane, and then flown directly into the U-boat pens on the tiny German-held island of Heligaland. BQ-8 took off just after 6pm on August 12, 1944. This would be the first flight of Operation Anvil, the Navy version of the cruise missile. The Army Mirror Image Program Operation Aphrodite had been a spectacular failure. Six previous attempts, using no less than a full dozen remote controlled B-17s, usually resulted with the drone aircraft spinning out of control shortly after the crew jumped to safety. A couple had been shot down by Flak, and one of them had stubbornly refused to obey its radio commands and began to circle the British industrial town of Ipswich out of control until it luckily ended up crashing into the sea. But this was the first time a Navy B-24 had been tried in the Navy meant to show the Army how it was done. The two pilots, Blue BQ-8, named the Baby, to 2,000 feet where it successfully completed a remote control turn shortly followed by the radio call Spade Flush, indicating that the pilots had armed the explosives. They then headed for the coast, the two pilots babysitting the Big Bomber out to the bailout position on the far eastern tip of the British Isles. Two minutes after signaling Spade Flush and still several minutes away from the cruise schedule departure by parachute, Fate Intervie. Interviewed from his hospital bed, one Lieutenant McCarthy flying behind B-Q-8 in the chase plane reported that "the baby just exploded in midair as we neared it, and I was knocked halfway back into the cockpit." A few pieces of the baby came through the plexiglass nose and I got hit on the head and caught a lot of fragments in my right arm. I crawled back to the cockpit and lowered the wheel so that Bob could make a quick emergency landing. No one knows what caused the massive explosion that instantly vaporized the two men on board. Navy Lieutenant Wilford J. Willie and Navy Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the eldest son of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., formerly Mayor of Boston and US Ambassador to Great Britain. Late on a Saturday afternoon, August 12, 1944, the boy had been in the hospital. The boy who would be King, the first Catholic President of the United States of America, died instantly on a top secret mission over the British Isles, an event that devastated and almost broke the Iron Will of his father almost but not quite. Joe Jr. was dead, but Joe Sr.'s dream remained alive. The burden suddenly shifting from the man who grew up knowing he'd be President and onto the shoulders of his younger brother, John, who'd always assumed that his future consisted of little more than watching it all happen. "Oh my fellow America, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." After narrowly defeating Vice President Richard Nixon in the 1960 election, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated President on January 20, 1961, accompanied as his custom by the outgoing President, in this case Dwight David Eisenhower. Ike didn't trust Kennedy. In fact, he didn't much like him very much either. Communist Revolutionary Fidel Castro's triumphant entry into Havana on January 1959 had given Eisenhower two years to watch what was happening in Cuba and he didn't like what he was seeing. Neither did Vice President Richard Nixon and together they started planning an operation designed to topple the wildly popular Fidel who had instituted a communist dictatorship less than a hundred miles off the coast of Florida. Just one month after he entered the capital to cheering crowds, Castro declared himself Prime Minister he would later change that title to El Presidente and announced that due to the success of the Revolution, elections wouldn't no longer be necessary. Castro called this form of dictatorship "direct democracy," the Cuban people holding mass rallies where the people could democratically express their wishes and complaints to Fidel himself. Eisenhower had already greenlit a number of small scale attempts to remove Castro from power but all it failed. So in August of 1960, the Eisenhower administration allocated $13.1 million to Alan Delas and his CIA, earmarked specifically for the overthrow of the Castro regime. Delas had succeeded on a smaller scale in 1954 in Guatemala when the CIA successfully deposed democratically elected left-leaning President Jacobo Arbenz and replaced him with a military whom to led by Carlos Castillo Armas. Delas's solution to the Castro problem was a plan for an invasion that was not an invasion, some kind of strange new hybrid like Korea, war but not war. Instead of landing US troops and storming the island, enduring not only hostile fire but a hostile press and hostile worldwide opinion to boot, Delas met with former Cuban army refugees, assorted exiled volunteers and other counter-revolutionary forces who had banded together under the name Brigade 2506. The CIA supplied this ad hoc group of 1400 Brigadistas with small arms, eight obsolete B-26 bombers and tickets to Guatemala, where they would train in secret for an all-cuban invasion of their former homeland scheduled for the middle of April 1961. Now that meant that Eisenhower's CIA run invasion was set to take place three months after Eisenhower had left office, it being generally assumed that President Nixon would be in office by then to carry out the operation. Neither Nixon nor Eisenhower trusted Kennedy enough to inform him of the invasion plans during the 1960 election campaign and so somewhat ironically. Kennedy's popularity rose, what he called for tough actions against the Castro government, while those who were well on their way to actually overthrowing Fidel Castro had remained silent on the issue. This invasion plan was the second poison chalice that I could hand at the young inexperienced JFK. This evil smelling drawt would have to be downed almost immediately, but having been passed to him, Kennedy nevertheless grabbed the goblet with both hands and willingly drank from it. It would be the following year, 1962, when he would have to drink from Ix First poison chalice, a bombastic, furious and revenge-minded Nikita Khrushchev, who felt personally betrayed by the United States in general and Dwight D. Eisenhower in particular. After the U-2 surveillance aircraft piloted by Francis Gary Powers had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May of 1960. I think by this point we've gotten to know each other pretty well, so I'll just give you a little bit of personal information you may not have asked for. I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but opening the mail is not actually on my top ten favorite list of things to do, but I found a way to game the system. bespoke posts Sends guys only the best stuff and they do it every month. 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They release new boxes every month across a ton of different categories. It's free to sign up and you can skip a month or cancel anytime. Now each box only costs 45 bucks but has over $70 worth of gear inside and look folks. If you've gone around and tried to price champagne sabres the way I have lately, you know that's a pretty good deal. Get 20% off of your first monthly box when you sign up at boxofawesome.com and enter the code cold at checkout. Boxofawesome.com the code is cold for 20% off your first box. After winning the 1960 election, Kennedy was finally given a full briefing on the invasion on January 28, 1961, just eight days into his presidency. The success of Operation Pluto, the ship born invasion of Cuba by the 1400 Brigadistas, the soldiers comprising Brigade 2506, depended on two key elements. Now the first de bees was air cover. The eight B-26 bombers donated to Brigade 2506 had been stripped of all US markings, camouflage and serial numbers and painted to look like those being flown by the Cuban Air Force. Initially, the landings were planned to take place near the town of Trinidad located on the southern coast about halfway down the Long Island. Trinidad had several attractions among them. Good port facilities, a strong contingent of local anti-castro forces and a convenient escape route into the Asgambra Mountains. What Trinidad did not have was a runway big enough to safely operate the Brigadistas B-26 bombers, which were essential to the success of the campaign. Kennedy stated he wanted a more remote location, the better to hide whatever direct US military forces that may prove necessary. And so on April 4th, Kennedy approved a modified plan, now known as Operation Zapata, Zapata is Spanish for Shoe, and likely was chosen to represent the foothold from which the counter-revolution would spread. The new landing point would be at Playa Heron, a beach on Cuba's southern shore, but considerably to the east of Trinidad, a mere 90 miles south east of Havana. Playa Heron would be the name the Cuban people would use when recalling the invasion attempt, but to most of the world, it would be named after the nearby Bahia de Cochinos, or the Bay of Pigs. The second requirement for a successful counter-revolution had nothing to do with ports, airfields, bombers, or logistics. For Operation Zapata to exceed, it would require the support of the Cuban people themselves, or at least a significant number of them. But when the CIA agents casually investigated this premise, they returned to Washington with the news that everyone they had talked to had been enthusiastic supporters of Fidel Castro. Now, this, of course, should have been more than enough of a reason to cancel the operation, but it did not, of course, end up penetrating the closed mindset of those backing the operation up to and including President Kennedy. On the night of April 14, 1961, the invasion fleet set sail from Nicaragua. 1,800 men from Brigade 2506 and tons of food, weapons, and ammunition spread over five small-ish freighters, the Houston, the Rio Escundino, the Caribe, the Atlantico, each with 30 days worth of supplies and ammunition and the Lake Charles, carrying what all hoped would be the provisional government and an additional 15 days worth of supplies. The next day, April 15, all eight B-26 bombers bearing Cuban Air Force markings split into three groups and attacked three different airfields destroying a handful of military aircraft. One of the Brigadier's bombers was shot down and another got knocked out of the fight for repairs. The following day, April 16, has been remembered as the Fony War, which consisted of a few unsuccessful landings at various points along the coast in order to divert the Cuban Army forces from the actual invasion point at Pliahirón. After that evening, the small invasion flotilla assembled at rendezvous point Zulu, roughly 40 miles south of the Bay of Pigs, where the five freighters carrying men and material were met by Blager and Barber J, two ex-Navy LCI's that would be landing craft infantry, their sizable tenders armed to the teeth stripped of all U.S. markings and flying the flag of Nicaragua. U.S. Naval Task Force 81-8 was waiting at point Zulu and it was not insignificant. 11 destroyers plus USS Boxer, a helicopter assault carrier. USS San Marcos, a landing craft tender. Fleet carrier USS Shangri-La and two submarines, USS Cobbler and USS Threadfinn, non-nuclear World War II vintage guppy boats, streamlined and improved by the Greater Underwater Propulsion Power Program. That evening, the seven ships of the Cuban Expeditionary Force turned north, leaving the U.S. fleet at point Zulu except for the San Marcos, which brought the shallow water landing craft all the way up to the three mile territorial limit at which point it unloaded its landing craft and returned south to rejoin the U.S. fleet well over the horizon. Before first light on the morning of the invasion, April 17, 1961, a mock diversionary landing by CIA operatives hovered just offshore near Bahia Honda, a handful of small vessels armed only with gigantic speakers, which did such a good job of reproducing the sounds of an amphibious assault that a temporarily pulled Castro in his forces away from the actual landing site. Right around midnight, the two LCI's Blegar and Barber J entered the Bay of Pigs, preceded by underwater demolitions teams. At 1 a.m. on the 17th, the main assault was launched against Playa Hiron, located at the mouth of the Bay and designated Blue Beach for the operation. Laya Larga, or Red Beach, was at the very tip of the funnel-shaped Bay and the frogman arriving on scene where shocked and dismayed to see the entire area lit up with floodlights. Engine troubles put some of the small fiberglass landing boats out of action, causing hang-ups and delays. Many more were badly damaged by the granite-hard reef-slining the shore. CIA photo analysts had assumed that these smudges were merely concentrations of seaweed. The local militias managed to get a warning off to Havana before offering token resistance and surrender. Castro was awoken at 3.15 a.m. He placed all available militia units on the highest possible alert and ordered what was left of the small Cuban Air Force to attack the Red Beach landings at Playa Larga at first light. Then El Camandante put on his trademark green fatigues and headed south. At daybreak, right around 6.30 on the morning of the 17th, the men unloading at Red Beach encountered the full might of the Cuban Air Force. Three propeller-driven seafiary attack aircraft, one B-26 bomber, and two very obsolete T-33 fighter jets. Nevertheless, this motley assortment managed to put enough bombs and rockets into the Houston, but she had to be intentionally run aground, her stern a wash, and her superstructure burning. She'd managed to land 270 troops by the time of the morning air attack, but the 180 survivors were out of the fight at the outset since their weapons and most of the medical supplies for Brigade 2506 had been destroyed when the Houston was hit. At 7 a.m., two of the Brigadistas B-26 bombers managed to sink a Cuban Navy patrol escort before they joined two more B-26s and attacked the defenders engaging the main invasion force at Playa Heron. By 8.30 in the morning, all troops assigned to Blue Beach Playa Heron were assured as were several of the Brigadistas M-41 Walker Bulldog-like tanks. But the main force at Playa Heron lost contact with the secondary troops at Playa Larga 20 miles deeper into the Bay of Pigs because for some reason, every single radio in both assault waves had been soaking in seawater all night long. By now, you may have ascertained that the Bay of Pigs operation fell somewhat short of the precision of a Swiss watch. At 7.30 that morning, 177 paratroopers from Brigade 2506's airborne battalion were landed behind the Cuban defensive line. As Cuban army units headed for the paratroopers, the handful of Cuban Air Force C-Furies and T-33 jets returned to the Bay of Pigs. He now turned their attention to the Rio Escondito, two miles off the beach. She was still carrying aviation fuel and enough ammunition, food and medical supplies to last 10 days. Rocket fire managed to find that aviation fuel and Rio Escondito simply vanished in a bright orange explosion. at 11 a.m. Pedal Castro addressed his island nation by radio, saying that an invasion consisting of Cuban exiles had come to take away the revolution and destroy the dignity and the rights of man. By noon, thousands of militia fighters were making their own way to plie a heroine right around that time. A Cuban Air Force T-33 shot down one brigade B-26 and damaged another, which had to make an emergency landing on Grand Cayman Island. The two surviving brigade ships, the Careeb and the Atlantico, made a run south for international waters hotly pursued by Cuban aircraft. Sharp anti-aircraft gunnery from the landing craft barger shot down a Cuban bomber as they did so. The lake Charles and her provisional government remained well out of range of the fighting. As the Cuban militia forces started to converge on Red Beach, Playa Larga, the ubiquitous brigade B-26s hit them hard, causing heavy casualties. By 2.30 that afternoon, the group of Cuban militia men of the 339th battalion set up a defensive position inland from Blue Beach, Playa Hiron. Brigade tanks overran that position, inflicting very heavy losses on the defenders, and action the Cubans would remember as the slaughter of the lost battalion. The T-33s flown by the Cuban Air Force were well, well past their prime. The T- designation was for trainer, the T-33 being a two-seat version of America's first operational jet fighter, the mediocre at best T-80 shooting star. Long ago surpassed by the Super-F-86 Sabre, which was also getting a little long in the tooth by 1961. But in the skies over Cuba in April, the T-33 was having its fine stoward. Not only had they helped sink both the Houston and the Rio Escundito, but that morning, a Cuban Air Force T-33 shot down a brigade B-26, and by the afternoon of the first day, the trainer had added two more B-26 bombers to its ever more impressive tally. And the bad news just kept coming. That same first day, Osvaldo Ramirez, who had for two full years been leading a revolt of farmers and former Batista soldiers against the Castro regime in the rural areas, was captured by Castro's forces and immediately executed. So 9 p.m., the brigade launched a five-plane bombing raid on the Cuban airfield that had plagued them all day. Two of the remaining B-26s had to abort for mechanical reasons, and the three that flew on had been unable to find the airfield, let alone attack it. Oh, and there was a final humiliation to crown this day of disasters. Once it was fully dark, the two remaining brigade supply ships, the Atlanteco and the Karee, departed to the south, ostensibly to return to Poizulu, rearm and restock for a return trip to the Bay of Pigs by the following morning. But the captains of both vessels had already realized that they had been on the wrong horse, and so they decided to cut their losses by simply sailing away. The US Navy destroyer managed to catch up with the Atlanteco 110 miles south of the invasion force and persuaded it to return to the fight, but by the time the Navy finally caught up to the A-Wall Karee, she was over 200 miles to the south, and by the time she'd been caught, the fight was over. It is not hyperbole to say that the battle had been lost before it had even begun. The strategic objective, namely the overthrow of the Castro regime, had depended on the Cuban people abandoning the man who they believed had liberated them just a couple of years earlier. 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But while the overthrow of Castro was never really a possibility, the actual invasion itself could have succeeded had it been given the one thing that everyone had agreed in advance that it would need in order to succeed and that was air cover. The initial brigade air attacks against Cuban airfields had been less effective than their pilots had claimed. That same day, whatever veneer of deniability the US was clinging to simply dissolved when one of the brigade B-26 raiders returned not to Nicaragua as planned but instead landed in broad daylight at Miami International Airport where everyone could see the brand new paint job and the guns still mounted in the nose American style and not under the wings as they had been on the Cuban B-26s. Two days before the Cuban expeditionary force left the US fleet behind a sail north to the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy could see that the entire world knew that CIA backed American pilots, reflying at least some of these supposedly counter-revolutionary airstrikes manned exclusively by Cuban resistance fighters and expats. So Kennedy made a decision. It's not clear why he made this unconscionable decision but he did. Two days before the invasion, Kennedy had decided to withdraw the US naval air cover upon which the entire Bay of Pigs invasion hung. Through the ships ever sailed north from point Zulu into this abominable catastrophe, both of the two essential conditions for a successful invasion had not been met, the support of the Cuban people and the US air power needed to destroy the Cuban Air Force and attack Castro's troops on the ground. But to me anyway, the unconscionable decision was not the withdrawal of American air support what I find unconscionable was the decision to allow the invasion to continue at all. Wherever you may think of CIA duplicity, shoddy brigade backgrounds and ranking competence, the fact remains that 1400 brave Cuban patriots won a shore on April 17th with the assurance that American air power would be there if it was needed. But by the end of that first day, the Houston and the Rio Escondito had been sunk by Cuban air attacks in half of the brigade's B-26 Air Force had been shot down. Had the invasion gone on as planned, Cuban pilots flying obsolete trainers would have been contemptibly easy-pickings for frontline US carrier-based naval aviators, but those American jets did not appear as promised, allowing the Cuban Air Force to sink the Houston and the Rio Escondito and harass the brigade forces practically at their leisure. By April 18th, the day after the invasion, D+1, significant Cuban ground forces had made contact with both blue and red beach heads. The Brigadistas already low on supplies and ammunition due to the loss of the Houston and the Rio Escondito, desperately through their light M-41 tanks against Soviet-built World War II-ARA-T-34s, which had been the best tank of the war and more than a match for the newer but lighter American Walker Bulldog tanks. At 2pm that afternoon, President Kennedy received a telegram from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, plainly stating that the Kremlin would not tolerate a US invasion of Cuba and hinting darkly that a full-scale Soviet thermonuclear attack against the American Heartland would be a likely consequence of any refusal to heed such a warning. By that point, April 18th, D+1, it was clear that the invasion had already failed and failed catastrophically. By D+2, desperate brigade forces were giving way to ever more powerful Cuban Army counter-attacks, and by the end of that day, the Brigadistas were fighting on the beaches with their backs to the sea. Late that afternoon, the American destroyer's USS Eaton and USS Murray sailed into the Bay of Pigs and took off the survivors from red and blue beaches, the battered and exhausted force to play a larga, and the larger but equally desperate command to play a heroine. At 2 is credit, Kennedy also ordered the destroyer's Conway and Coney plus the submarine Threadfin and a PBY-5 Catalina flying boat to fly right up against the Cuban coastline for an additional two days, looking for stragglers and finding and rescuing almost 30 of them. No doubt JFK must have remembered the loss of his own PT-109 cut in half by a Japanese destroyer during the war. Kennedy. knew what it was like to be stranded on an enemy-held island in hostile waters. The finale to the Bay of Pigs was as tragic and ramshackles the entire operation. 67 Cuban exiles from Brigade 2506 have been killed in action. 10 more were executed by firing squad after their surrender and another 10 died while trying to escape by sea onboard the tiny boat Celia. 9 more Cuban POWs died horribly in the back of a sealed truck, slowly rumbling back to Havana in the murderous Cuban heat. 4 died by accident and 2 died in prison. An additional 10 Cuban exile air crews died when shot down by the unopposed Cuban Air Force as did 4 volunteer American aviators. Officially, Cuban losses totaled 176 killed in action but this number referred to the Cuban Army only, taking the militia and civilians into account. The best guess is around 2000 Cubans that had been killed or wounded during the entire operation. It would be just a few days short of a full year before the most seriously wounded or 6 survivors of Brigade 2506 were released from Cuban jails, with 60 of the most desperate cases finally being set free on April 14, 1962. All of the 1179 men had been put on trial and convicted of treason and all were sentenced to 30 years in prison. At the end of December 1962, a full 20 months after going ashore at Plyaheron and Plyolaga, the two beaches on the southern coast of Cuba located in the Bay of Pigs, the CIA rescued the remaining members of Brigade 2506 by brokering a deal with Fidel Castro to exchange them for $53 million in food and medical supplies. Years later, in 1975, Fidel's brother Raul Castro had this to say about the Fiasco. "Can it be vacillated?" If at that moment he had decided to invade us, he could have suffocated the island in the sea of blood but he could have destroyed the revolution. Luckily for us, he vacillated. An ad-vacillation that blink would be studied very carefully, half a world away in Moscow. Many leaders throughout history have been reluctant to greet the men wounded or taken prisoner as a result of their decisions but John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a better man than that. On December 29th, he and First Lady Jackie Kennedy flew to Miami to greet the returning survivors from Brigade 2506, an event so emotionally compelling to the hundreds of thousands of newly exiled Cubans that had to be held in the orange bowl. There, he praised their courage and their resiliency and honored those men who died in the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy surveyed the enormous crowd gathered before him, then turned to the men that he had abandoned. "Welcome home," he said. The Cold War, what we saw, is written and presented by Bill Whittle, produced by Robert Sterling, directed by Jonathan Hay. Executive producer is Jeremy Boring. Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover and our associate producer is Katie Swinerton. Post-production producer Alex Singaro, story producer Jared Sashel, edited by Matthew Scheller, audio recorded by Mike Coromina, original music and mixed by Kyle Perrin, designed by Cynthia Angulo. The Cold War, what we saw, is an esoteric radio theater production copyright, esoteric radio theater 2020.