Posted on 04/15/2016 10:22:37 AM PDT by Kaslin
“The Bay of Pigs took place the year that I was born. The next year, the entire world held its breath, watching our two countries, as humanity came as close as we ever have to the horror of nuclear war.” (President Barack Obama, Havana, Cuba, March, 22, 2016.)
Moral equivalence, anyone? Was this threat “humanity’s” fault? America’s fault? Are—just maybe, who knows?--were the Soviet satraps in Cuba at fault for this threat of nuclear war? You’d never know it from Obama. Here’s a little background on an event dated exactly 55 years ago this week that could have easily strangled that threat in the cradle:
“They fought like tigers,” wrote the CIA officer who helped train the Cubans who splashed ashore at the Bay of Pigs. “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, Grayston 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 and led 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, 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 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.
“If things get rough,” the heartsick Grayston 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…!”
President John F. Kennedy 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!”
Adm. Burke’s pleas also proved futile.
The freedom-fighters’ 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 100 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 — had squared off against 21,000 Castro troops, his entire air force and squadrons of Soviet tanks.
The Cuban freedom-fighters inflicted more than 3,000 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 World War II 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.
pfl. I was there.
“The self-described Best and Brightest of the Kennedy and Johnson administration failed at everything they did.”
I would say that their performance was worse than mere failure.
They couldn’t have done worse if Khrushchev had been calling the shots—which, you know, he was.
“Oswald shot JFK, he acted alone, and any crazy conspiracy theory is just horsesh*t.”
Go back to sleep. A cursory look shows that it was a CIA coup. Compare it to every other assassination attempt on a President. We know everything about them, all are very clear. But in JFK world its a murky world of coverups, lies, coincidences, and nothing fitting. It was an extremist coup, designed to replace the government and hopefully provide a reason to attack Cuba.
Launching coups was a CIA specialty throughout the 1950s -70s. And JFK was a bitter enemy of that. They killed him and installed a government that would allow them to continue. Hell, its obvious to a 5 year old that this one murder has a huge official zone of secrecy around it. Why? It benefitted his opponents drastically. It was investigated by these same opponents. Why?
Nobody sealed the Lincoln assassination records till 1915, did they? Because there was no need.
As final proof Harry Truman said the same thing.
This is his personal OpEd FOUR weeks after JFK was murdered. A president was murdered and the nation was in shock. And Harry Truman rushes to immediately publish an opinion piece that he is sorry he created the CIA, and that it is out of hand, it has become an instrument of policy making and subterfuge instead of a raw data clearinghouse.
He says they have become distasteful and need to be brought under control.
Unless one is in the nutty “Truman was a communist” camp, it’s pretty obvious he believed our covert forces were behind it.
Think what you want. (using the term “think” loosely.)
http://www.maebrussell.com/Prouty/Harry%20Truman’s%20CIA%20article.html
Bautista was another fascist tin pot dictator that we habitually kept in power to loot raw materials from 3rd world countries at the behest of the banker oligarchs and their CIA warlords. This policy of raw material extraction has ended up making us the enemy of developing countries and their only vehicle of redress, the UN. You Cold War conservatives think that Marxism was conjured up by an evil wizard hypnotist rather than a reaction to 19th century oligarch abuses of working stiffs such as yourselves. These sadistic ABUSES of working conditions CREATED Marxism. Google “Triangle Shirt Factory Fire” to discover why the Marxist International Ladies Garment Workers Union was formed, for example. There is capitalism and there is MONOPOLISM. You fascist plantation overseer war lord conservatives will never understand the concept of workers as a valued component of production rather than as wage slaves to be hoodwinked, exploited and thrown away.
From Wikipedia:
Back in power, Batista suspended the 1940 Constitution and revoked most political liberties, including the right to strike. He then aligned with the wealthiest landowners who owned the largest sugar plantations, and presided over a stagnating economy that widened the gap between rich and poor Cubans.[5] Batista’s increasingly corrupt and repressive government then began to systematically profit from the exploitation of Cuba’s commercial interests, by negotiating lucrative relationships with the American mafia, who controlled the drug, gambling, and prostitution businesses in Havana, and with large US-based multinationals who were awarded lucrative contracts.[5][6] To quell the growing discontent amongst the populace—which was subsequently displayed through frequent student riots and demonstrations—Batista established tighter censorship of the media, while also utilizing his Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities to carry out wide-scale violence, torture and public executions; ultimately killing anywhere from 1,000 to 20,000 people.[7][8][9] For several years until 1959, the Batista government received financial, military, and logistical support from the United States.[10]
I agree that it was both compromised AND a poor plan. There is little doubt Castro knew it was coming. And the site and the plan were idiotic.
But the true goal was to simply get people on the beach, and have them in a desperate situation they could then use to strong arm JFK away from his clear position that it was not going to be a US military invasion of Cuba.
They didn’t count on JFK standing up to their pressure.
But the plan all along was exiles on the beach. Backs to the wall, rescued by a US invasion, which was their plan all along.
1500 exiles, and a handful of B-26s. Yeah, that was clearly a plan to successfully invade Cuba. It was obvious that it was just designed to fail and demand rescue.
Hooboy... I thought I was a bomb thrower. You are in big trouble now.
Many other Democrat Presidents have abandoned allies - we need a strong commander in chief.
“Hooboy... I thought I was a bomb thrower. You are in big trouble now.”
Heh, Yah, LOL! But Republicans used to be fair minded Christian fair play types that were against the slave owning caste stratification abuses of the aristocracy. Republicans were for meritocracy, equality of opportunity offered to anyone capable of working for it. How republicanism got hijacked by its enemies is a story of infiltration and co-option, particularly after Teddy Roosevelt. Today’s Republican Party USA, in bed with Wall St. and the City of London globalist financier elites, would be unrecognizable to the party of Lincoln. Our Cold War foreign policy would be indistinguishable from a Czarist or Assyrian or Idi Amin foreign policy. Slavery, even wage slavery, is unChristian and will be wiped from the Earth.
An avowed communist named Lee Harvey Oswald did it. Without any help. There is not one shred of physical evidence of another shooter.
Agree ..... I was just a pup then but seems same folks that had JFK shot were the ones that figured out who it was that threw them under the bus at Bahia de Cochinos ..... oink oink !
What about the ballists report on the entry hole in me Kennedy’s skull? Smaller than the caliber used by Oswald, closely matching a .5.56 round.
In April 1962, I was on my way to a place called Vietnam, delivering troops and helicopters. Of course, we were never there. We were too busy to pay attention to what was going on in Cuba.
A year after The Bay of Pigs, I was stationed at MCAS Beaufort, SC during the Missile Crisis. I came back from a weekend pass to find the base fully lit up at 3 AM on Monday morning. Guard at the gate told us to change into utilities and report to your squadron. We didn’t get to sleep until Tuesday at 2100. It was a non-stop parade of trucks, transports, fighters and equipment.
At University of Florida, I got to know several Cubans who got away. One was with the troops at The Bay of Pigs. He spent 6 months in a Castro prison until he escaped. No kind words for the Kennedys.
Come to think of it, Kennedy put me in harm’s way twice.
“I’ve never understood why JFK allowed this operation to go forward if he was just going to let it founder like this.”
Because he cut the JCS, the military, out of the loop. They weren’t informed of changes that he made in the original plan and he didn’t ask their opinion.
“They tried to strong arm him. He did exactly what he told them he would do and didn’t let the CIA and the Joint Chief morons start the war they wanted.”
What a load of nonsense. Pick up a copy of McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty and clear your head.
Why did Oswald murder Police Officer JD Tippit on a Dallas street in full view of 12 witnesses 45 minutes after Kennedy was shot? Please tell us what you think his motive was.
You can’t argue with these types. They just can’t face the fact that the Commie did it.
I know. But sometimes it’s entertaining to see how they try to explain away Oswald’s murder of Officer Tippit. He did that killing right in front of a dozen people. A lot of people have no idea that it even happened.
Because he was part of the plot, the patsy. He shot Kennedy and Connely but the head shot was insurance.
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