Posted on 04/17/2021 4:20:44 AM PDT by Kaslin
“It was 60 years ago this week that an uncertain new president launched an ill-conceived military venture of astonishing naivety (italics mine)…1,400 U.S.-trained Cuban exiles would land at the Bay of Pigs…It was an unmitigated disaster…Kennedy had learned the hard way not to blindly trust the advice of his decorated military and intelligence chiefs," wrote Beltway media stalwart and former Democrat White House official Lawrence Hass in The Hill.
And yet again, rather than go through the trouble of concocting their own propaganda, communist Cuba’s KGB-founded and mentored media simply transcribed the U.S. beltway media….Think I exaggerate?
“It was 60 years ago this week that an uncertain new president (John F. Kennedy, JFK) launched an ill-conceived military venture of astonishing naivety…. 1,400 U.S.-trained Cuban exiles would land at the Bay of Pigs… Lawrence J. Hass, a U.S. expert on international relations, acknowledged on Monday that Washington's invasion of Cuba in Bay of Pigs was 'an ill-conceived military venture and an unmitigated disaster,'" Stalinist Cuba’s propaganda organ Prensa Latina published.
Between snickers 62 years earlier, Che Guevara explained the fascinating process seen so starkly above: “Much more valuable than rural recruits for our Cuban guerrilla force were American media recruits to export our propaganda,” said Ernesto “Che” Guevara in1959.
In fact, in complete refutation of the Media-Democrat-Castroite spin, the lack of naivety started with the invasion’s very begetter and main booster: Vice President Richard Nixon.
Here was the man who bucked the astonishing naivety (and treachery) of the Beltway establishment to see through and call out Alger Hiss. Nixon was also among the first U.S. officials to buck the astonishing naivety (and treachery) of the Beltway establishment by calling out and urging the overthrow of the closet Stalinist and Soviet asset Fidel Castro—and at the very moment Castro was being lionized by the U.S. media, State Department, and even many in the CIA.
In fact, the military venture was expertly-planned and was anything but naive. The astonishing blunders and naivety were entirely Camelot’s.
After it dropped in their lap with Nixon’s electoral defeat, the New Frontiersmen insisted on sticking their manicured fingers and fumbling with almost everything planned on the orders of the Supreme Commander of Operation Overlord.
“Help the Cubans to the utmost,” Eisenhower stressed to his successor while handing over the reins. “We cannot let Castro's government go on.”
For starters, the original invasion plan by the CIA and its military partners (all WWII and Korea vets) picked the Cuban town of Trinidad as the landing site. This coastal town 100 miles east of the Bay of Pigs was originally chosen by the CIA and the military men because it was a hotbed of anti-Castro sentiment and offered good off-loading facilities.
Also, the nearby Escambray Mountains crawled with anti-communist guerrillas, who were giving the Castroites fits. These would join the invading force that also carried arms for them. Just as importantly, only two major roads led to Trinidad from the north, so any Castro troops moving in would have been sitting ducks for the freedom-fighter’s small air force.
Alas, landing in a populated area like Trinidad was deemed "too noisy" by the guilt-stricken New Frontiersmen. They had a fetish about hiding the U.S. role (this massive secret!). Any hint of such a role might discomfit the Latin American "street," you see. The New Frontiersmen suffered a guilty conscience about such "Yankee bullying."
And, mercy me, what would the U.N. say? The best and the brightest suffered a veritable fit of the vapors just thinking about it. So back to the drawing board for the planners.
They returned with a landing site at the Bay of Pigs, a desolate swamp. This was worse from a military standpoint but had a good chance of success – given total air superiority, given the complete obliteration of Castro’s air force. This was stressed by the military and CIA planners, just as it’s stressed here by me. Don’t let Camelot’s Press Agency (the Beltway media and academia) feed you any malarkey about this all-important factor, please, amigos.
Idiotically (and tragically) 80 percent of the pre-invasion sorties by the freedom-fighter planes from Nicaragua -- the essential component of the plan to knock out Castro's air force on the ground as originally devised under the Eisenhower administration -- was canceled at the last moment by JFK on the advice of his best and brightest. The U.S. hand after the first air strike (that HUGE SECRET!) was showing, you see.
So the flustered and guilt-stricken Knights of Camelot, while frantically fanning their blushing faces, nixed the next airstrikes literally in their tracks. Some of the freedom-fighter planes were already taxiing down the crude runways.
'WHAT?! Are they NUTS?!” bellowed Brigade Air Force chief Reid Doster when he learned that Kennedy had canceled most of the vital airstrikes to destroy Castro’s small air force before the invasion. “There goes the whole f***ing war!"
The canceled airstrikes made the Brigade's lumbering B-26s easy prey for Castro's jets and fast Sea-Furies -- and the troops, ships and supplies below them were even easier prey. It was a turkey shoot for the Castroites.
But the unequal battle raged furiously on the tiny beachhead. “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!” Brigade Commander Jose San Roman kept pleading to the very U.S. 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. 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 (representing every race and social class in Cuba) 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.
The term "liberation" was no abstraction to these men. No navel gazing about the merits of "regime change" for them. Sullen or hostile foreigners in sandals, beards, keffiyehs, and strange robes wouldn’t be the ones meeting them. They’d be bashing open prison doors and bulldozing down barbed wire, all right – but their own fathers, uncles, cousins and even sisters, aunts, daughters would be the ones staggering out to suffocate them with teary hugs and sobs.
One of 19 Cubans was a political prisoner that horrible year. Firing squads were murdering hundreds every week. Dozens of American citizens languished in Cuba’s prison cells too.
"If things get rough," the heartsick CIA man 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!”
It seemed like Camelot’s criminal idiocy had finally relented when President Kennedy allowed some Skyhawk jets to take-off from the Essex, which was just offshore of the beachhead. One of these pilots quickly spotted a long column of Castro tanks and infantry making for the freedom-fighters. The Soviet tanks and trucks were sitting ducks. "Aha!" he thought. "Now we’ll turn this thing around!" The pilot began his dive.
"Permission to engage denied," came the command.
"This is CRAZY!" he bellowed back. "Those guys are getting the hell shot out of them down there! I can see it!" Turned out, JFK had allowed them to fly and look—but not to shoot!
Some of these battle-hardened Navy pilots (well before U.S. military personnel were required to be “woke”) admit to sobbing openly in their cockpits. They were still choked up when they landed on the Essex. Now they slammed their helmets on the deck and broke down completely.
"I wanted to resign from the Navy," said Captain Robert Crutchfield, the decorated naval officer who commanded the fleet off the beachhead. He’d had to relay Washington’s replies to those pilots.
A close-up glimpse of the heroism on that beachhead might have pushed those Essex pilots over the edge.
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 Soviet-led Castro troops, his entire air force and squadrons of Soviet tanks. The Cuban freedom-fighters inflicted over 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 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.”
Never trust democrats as the vietnamise would find out and those in the mideast would too with millions killed.
Some have speculated that that is the reason Kennedy was assassinated.
No doubt in my mind.
Tragic.
This should be required reading in every school in America. Democrats worship such tarnished heroes.
I remember it well. Kennedy refused to provide the air cover he promised.
He then had to ransom the captives with 500 “tractors”. Those “tractors” were actually bulldozers.
I also remember when Canada made some FN rifles for Castro complete with the Cuban Coat of Arms stamp.. Those rifles turned up in Venezuela a few months later with the Cuban crest ground off. They were sent to the commie rebels there but were found buried there before delivery could be made.
Certain chemicals can be applied to the ground off portion to bring out the stamp due to stresses in the metal.
Best explanation I’ve ever seen.
“To Vince, At least we tried, JFK.
Who could have guessed the old movie The In Laws was actually a historical documentary of the CIA.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lN0knclQ6V4
My earliest memory is sneaking a sandwich to my half brother who was captured and imprisoned during the BoP invasion. After he was released he was able to get our family out in 1964.
The CIA set JFK up. Tried to force him into an all-out invasion of the Island.
Belgium, not Canada. Fabrique Nationale originally sold to Batista’s government, but when Castro came to power, they initially made a new deal with them too. Also, the Cuban crest was in the magazine well, and was drilled out.
That was Belgium. Canada’s official policy was not to sell weapons to foreign countries, even allies...which helped lead to Canadian Arsenals Ltd’s demise in the 1970s after operating on a skeleton crew for a decade.
It’s also why, when Castro later supplied FNs to the Sandinistas in the 1970s, the crests were drilled out.
The original plan, as hatched under Eisenhower, had been very different. Cuban volunteer forces (with much more air support) were to land in the midpoint of the island, closer to where the anti-Castro sentiment was strong, and secure a beachhead. Then they would bring in an “exile” Cuban government to announce themselves, Washington would recognize them in response, and provide open support. If the plan failed, the volunteer force was to escape into the central mountains and meet up with the guerilla movements.
Ike had no compunctions about removing an outpost of America’s main enemy from its front yard. It was Kennedy that first started cutting support in the name of “plausible deniability” and relocating the landing point away from sources of support.
The “grinding out” story of the FALs and MAGs supplied to the Venezuelan guerillas is true. Israel tried the same thing when they supplied worn-out FALs to one of the Phalangist militias in Lebanon in the 1980s.
That story is not the whole truth. Kennedy did not cancel the air strike, that was MacGeorge Bundy, who had not even talked to Kennedy. Kennedy had approved the plan only the day before. Strictly speaking the person missing in action that day was DCI Allen Dulles who went on vacation before the Op started.
No one had any authority to go to the President on the air strike, so instead of Castro’s 3 fight jets not knocked out they destroyed the invasion.
I am reading right now Col. Fletcher Prouty’s book on this, he was in a position to know the whole story of the failure, “JFK, The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to kill JFK”.
The original concept of going into Cuba was Eisenhower and it was not supposed to be a invasion, that happened later on after Kennedy was elected and the Op was expanded. Kennedy was handed this OP and eventually signed off on it.
It is quite possible Dulles wanted this OP to fail why else did Bundy make that call to Dulles’s deputy General Cabell? The aftermath investigation by Cuban Study Group never really explained it.
The entire OP was a CIA planning operation, look up Operation Mongoose.
Tell me more.
That isn’t true at all. Eisenhower’s plan was a small operation that was expanded after Kennedy was elected. And Kennedy is not the one who called off the air support to take out Casto’s 3 fighter jets. Two days before there had been air attack to take out all of castros Air Force and they got them all except the 3 planes that had been moved and U2 flights were able to find them.
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