“They fought like tigers,” writes the CIA officer who helped train the Cubans who splashed ashore at the Bay of Pigs 50 years ago this week. “But their fight was doomed before the first man hit the beach.”
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, the American Grayston Lynch and his Cuban band of brothers 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 and cutters, to aristocrats and their chauffeurs. But mostly, the band was comprised of the folks in between, as befit a nation with a larger middle class than most of Europe.
Short on battle experience, yes, but they were bursting with what Bonaparte and George Patton valued most in soldiers: morale. No navel-gazing about “why they hate us” or pondering 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 such scenes on the History Channel after our GIs took places like Manila and Munich. In 1961, newsreels could have captured much of the same 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’s Gulag. Mass graves dotted the Cuban countryside, filled with hundreds of victims 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 that their troops and militia were taking, the Castro brothers and Che Guevara believed they faced at least “20,000 invading mercenaries,” as they called them. Yet it was a band of mostly civilian volunteers who were outnumbered 30-to-1.
“Where are the planes?” was heard 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. 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 weapons, 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 to even 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.
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