“Miami’s veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion voted late Wednesday (Oct. 12) to endorse Donald Trump for president, the first endorsement in the organization’s 55-year history.”
Fifty years before Benghazi we had the Bay of Pigs:
“Where are the planes?! Where is our ammo?! Send planes or we can’t last!”
The pleas came from Commander Jose San Roman as Soviet tanks, Soviet artillery and tens of thousands of Soviet led troops pounded the 1400 Cuban freedom-fighters he commanded on a bloody and heroic beachhead now known as the Bay of Pigs.
The same heartsick and enraged U.S. Navy men listening to these pleas had escorted these freedom–fighters to that beachhead. Their ships—including the aircraft carrier Essex groaning under a heavy load of deadly Skyhawk jets– sat just offshore.
“If things get rough,” radioed back the heartsick CIA man who helped train and had befriended them, “we can come in and evacuate you.”
“We will not be evacuated!” San Roman roared back to his friend Grayston Lynch, a multi-decorated WWII and Korea war hero. “We came here to fight! We don’t want evacuation! We want more ammo! We want the planes that were promised! This ends here!”
Camelot’s criminal idiocy as the U.S.-trained freedom-fighters battled savagely against outrageous odds finally brought Adm. Arleigh Burke of the Joints Chief of Staff, who was receiving the battlefield pleas, to the brink of mutiny. Years earlier, 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! 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!”
Finally JFK relented and allowed some Skyhawk jets to take-off from the Essex. One of these pilots quickly spotted a long column of Castro’s Soviet tanks 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 started his dive…
“Permission to engage denied,” came the answer from his commander.
“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 Navy pilots admit to sobbing openly in their cockpits. They were still choked up when they landed back on the Essex. Now they slammed their helmets on the deck, kicked the bulkheads and broke down completely.
“I wanted to resign from the Navy,” said Capt. Robert Crutchfield, the decorated naval officer who commanded the destroyer fleet off the Bay of Pigs beachhead. He’d had to relay Washington’s replies to those pilots.
A close-up glimpse of the heroism on that beachhead might have sent those Essex pilots right over the edge. As JFK adjusted his bow tie in the mirror and Jackie picked lint off his tux, the freedom-fighters of Brigada 2506 faced a few adjustments of their own. To quote Haynes Johnson, “It was a battle when heroes were made.” And how!
We call them “men,” but Brigadista Felipe Rondon was 16 years old when he grabbed his 57 mm cannon and ran to face one of Castro’s Soviet tanks point-blank. At 10 yards he fired at the clanking, lumbering tank and it exploded, but the momentum kept it going and it rolled over little Felipe.
Such things went on for three days—until the inevitable “defeat” after the freedom-fighters had spent their very last bullets.
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.”
Maybe it’s an odd coincidence that such men are endorsing Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton?
