Humberto Fontova. Monday, April 29, 2002.
NewsMax.com
"They fought like Tigers," writes the man who commanded the Cubans
who splashed ashore at the Bay of Pigs 41 years ago this month. "But their
fight was doomed before the first man hit the beach."
That commander, CIA operative Grayston Lynch, knows something about fighting
and about long odds. He carries scars from Omaha Beach, The Bulge and
Korea's Heartbreak Ridge. In those battles freedom's cause also appeared doomed.
In each, Americans were out-manned and out-gunned. In each, the odds looked
hopeless. In each, surrender beckoned.
But in France, Belgium and Korea people are free to rant, screech and
trample American flags today because half a century ago Lynch and his "band
of brothers" yelled "NUTS!" rammed in another clip, and charged
forward, smiting the enemies of freedom.
America's reward? Her compensation for sacrificing her treasure and boys?
Surely some booty? Some mines or oil wells? Some ports? Harbors? Colonies?
Nope. "Just a little land to bury our dead," as Barry Farber so
pricelessly put it.
They won every time. But those earlier enemies were out front, they wore
swastikas and red stars. They carried Mausers and burp guns. They manned Tiger
and Stalin tanks. They wore military uniforms. Such enemies might be tough, but
not invincible. Back then Lynch and his brothers could count on the support of
their own chief executive.
At the Bay of Pigs Lynch and his men learned first in speechless
shock and finally in burning rage that their most powerful enemies were
not Castro's soldiers massing in Santa Clara, but the Ivy League's Best and
Brightest conferring in Washington.
Grayston Lynch put it on the line for the U.S. Constitution like few living
today. I'd say he's earned the right to indulge in a little "freedom of
speech" himself. So when he writes "Never have I been so ashamed of my
country" about the bloody and shameful events 41 years ago this month, I'd
say we owe him a respectful audience.
The problem is he writes this in a book that castigates Kennedy's Camelot.
Such impudence won't get you a respectful anything from the Beltway media. Their
darling remains untouchable. So Lynch's eye-opening and simply superb "Decision
to Disaster: Betrayal at The Bay of Pigs" has been mostly ignored or mocked
by "The Best and The Brightest."
Lynch commanded, 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.
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." They didn't need a Frank Capra to explain in brilliant
documentaries "Why We Fight." They'd seen Communism point-blank:
stealing, lying, jailing, poisoning minds, murdering.
They'd seen the midnight raids, the drumbeat trials. They'd heard the
chilling "FUEGO!" as Castro's firing squads murdered thousands of
brave countrymen. More importantly, they heard the "VIVA CUBA LIBRE!"
from the bound and blindfolded patriots, right before the bullets ripped them
apart.
They set their jaws and resolved to smash this murderous barbarism that was
ravaging their homeland. And they went at it with a vengeance.
When the smoke cleared and all their ammo had been expended, when a hundred
of them lay dead and hundreds more wounded, after their very mortars and machine
gun barrel had melted from their furious rates of fire, after three days of
relentless battle, barely 1,200 of them without a single supporting shot
fired by naval artillery, and without air support had squared off against
51,000 Castro troops, his entire air force and squadrons of Stalin tanks.
Tigers, indeed! These men fought till the last round, without food or water,
and inflicted losses of 20 to one against the Soviet-trained enemy. Castro
defectors, some the very doctors who attended the casualties, tell us these
invaders inflicted over 2,200 casualties.
Castro and Che were jittery there for a while, urging caution in the
counterattack. From the lethal fury of the attack and the horrendous casualties
their troops and militia were taking, the Red leaders assumed they faced at
least 20,000 invading "mercenaries," as they called them.
Yet it was a band of mostly civilian volunteers they outnumbered 40 to one,
led by the heroic Erneido Oliva. (A black Cuban, by the way, Messieurs Rangel
and Jackson and you, too, Mrs. Waters.) A high percentage of these men had wives
and children.
But to hear Castro's echo chamber (the Beltway media and leftist academics),
Fidel was the plucky David and the invaders the bumbling Goliath! How
appropriate that Fidel awarded his chum Yasser Arafat with something called the
"Bay of Pigs medal" in 1974.
It's perfect: "For meritorious service in the war of humbug. For
turning facts on their heads. For conspicuous bravery in grinding the organ of
propaganda and managing to keep a straight face while the media monkeys chatter
and dance to the tune."
The invaders themselves suffered 100 dead. Four were American "advisers,"
who gagged on, snarled at and finally defied direct orders to abandon the men
they'd trained and befriended. "Nuts!" they barked but at their
own commander in chief.
Then they flew in to try and provide some air cover. But they piloted
lumbering B-26s and Castro had jets. They had to know it was hopeless. And every
one gave his life.
These were Southern boys, not pampered Ivy Leaguers, so there was no
navel-gazing. They had archaic notions of right and wrong, of honor and loyalty,
of who America's enemies really are. I wouldn't call them "mercenaries"
anywhere near Little Havana, especially on the streets named after them.
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 Stalin tanks
point blank. At 10 yards he fired at the clanking, lumbering beast and it
exploded, but the momentum kept it going and it rolled over little Felipe.
Gilberto Hernandez was 17 when a round from a Czech burp gun put out his
eye. Castro's troops were swarming in but he held his ground, firing furiously
with his recoilless rifle for another hour, until the Reds finally surrounded
him and killed him with a shower of grenades.
By then the invaders sensed they'd been abandoned. Ammo was almost gone. Two
days shooting and reloading without sleep, food or water was taking its toll.
Many were hallucinating. That's when Castro's Soviet howitzers opened up, huge
122 mm ones, four batteries' worth. They pounded 2,000 rounds into the invaders'
ranks 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. By now the invaders were dazed, delirious with fatigue,
thirst and hunger, too deafened by the bombardment to even hear orders. So their
commander had to scream.
"THERE IS NO RETREAT, CARAJO!!" Oliva stood and bellowed to his
dazed and horribly outnumbered men. "WE STAND AND FIGHT!!!"
And so they did, and wrote as glorious a chapter in military history and the
annals of freedom as any you'd care to read. Right after the deadly shower of
Soviet shells, more Stalin tanks rumbled up.
Another boy named Barberito rushed up to the first one and blasted it
repeatedly with his recoilless rifle, which barely dented it, but so rattled the
occupants that they opened the hatch and surrendered. In fact, they insisted on
shaking hands with their pubescent captor, who an hour later was felled by a
machine-gun burst to his valiant little heart.
On another front, Lynch, from his command post offshore, was talking with
Commander Pepe San Roman. Lynch knew about the canceled air strikes and figured
the men were doomed. "If things are really rough," he told Pepe, "we
can come in and evacuate you."
"We will NOT be evacuated!" Pepe barked. "We will fight to
the END!"
The Reds had 50,000 men around the beachhead now. But Oliva had one tank
manned by Jorge Alvarez, and two rounds. Jorge aimed BLAM! Reloaded
BLAM! and quickly knocked out two of Castro's Stalins. But more Stalins
and T-34's kept coming. So Alvarez outgunned, outnumbered and out of ammo
finally had no choice: He gunned his tank to a horrendous clattering
whine and charged!
He rammed into another Stalin tank. Its driver was stunned, frantic. He
couldn't get a half-second to aim his gun. So Alvarez rammed him again. And
again. And again, finally splitting the Stalin's barrel and forcing its
surrender.
These things went on for three days, my friends. But here's what Peggy
Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal last year on the invasion's 40th
anniversary: "The battle lasted half a day and the men quickly surrendered."
Et tu, Peggy!
You expect this from reporters credentialed by the Castro government,
because they're no longer reporters; they're stenographers. They walk in gaping
with imbecile grins, sit down, and write down whatever Fidel or his
propagandists tell them.
That's how the howler that Castro's forces suffered "151 casualties"
in the Bay of Pigs battle got into Time, Newsweek, Yahoo, MSNBC, AP, UPI
and yes, sadly, the WSJ last year at this time.
Any of the dozens of Cuban-American Web sites could refute this
conclusively, as could any of the books written about the invasion, even those
written by liberals like Haynes Johnson and Peter Wyden. They'd show that
Castro's forces suffered casualties almost 20 TIMES that number.
But why bother when you're a stenographer?
You'd never know about these men's heroism from the mainstream media. Indeed
you'd get the impression the anti-Castro invaders were all scoundrels and
cowards; at worst, mercenaries; at best, hopeless bumblers.
The question of "air support" over the invasion still haunts.
Camelot groupies have a point when they claim that U.S. air support was never
part of the plan. Ah, but control of the skies was.
The original plan (but how many battles go by this?) was for Cuban exile
pilots flying from bases in Nicaragua to totally destroy Castro's air force,
before the invasion. So Castro would have no air power to bring against the
invaders.
But then JFK, eager to hide the U.S. hand (yeah, boy, that was a BIG
secret!) canceled 70 percent of these air strikes. This left Castro's planes
free to sink the ammo and supply ships, and wreak general havoc over the
invasion site.
That's when some air support was desperately needed. That's when two planes
from the carrier Essex (which was lying right offshore, its pilots pounding
their fists and screaming in tears of desperate rage against Washington) might
have flown in, engaged a few Castro planes and changed the course of the battle
and thus of history.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Arleigh Burke (a man responsible for some
dynamite dive sites in the Pacific today, by the way. These consist of the
shell-riddled carcasses of about half the Japanese fleet circa 1944) knew the
stakes in Cuba at the time. And he came damn near a mutiny.
He wouldn't let up. "Two planes, Mr. President," he pleaded with
JFK, fighting to keep his composure. "That's all they need."
"Burke!" replied Kennedy. "We can't become involved in this."
The fighting admiral almost lost it. "Hell, Mr. President!" he
barked, inches from the young president's face. "We ARE involved!"
Two planes, folks.
Think about it. We can enforce a "no-fly zone" half a country wide
on another continent with half the U.S Air Force for a decade. But we couldn't
provide one three miles across, 90 miles away, for half a day with two planes.
You figure it out. I've given up.
Even crazier, this same president then dispatched U.S. forces to openly
engage Communists half a world away in Indochina. But he refused even token help
to allies in a desperate battle to the death against Communists 90 miles away.
As I said, you figure it out. I'll start beating my dog again if I continue.
The battle was over in three days, but the heroism was not. Now came almost
two years in Castro's dungeons for the captured Brigada, complete with the
physical and psychological torture that comes with Communist incarceration. And
remember, these communist jailers, psychopaths and sadists later gave hands-on
training in their techniques to John McCain's torturers in Hanoi.
But through 18 months of it, none of the Brigadistas broke. They even
refused to denounce the nation that for all they knew at the time
had betrayed them. They stood tall, proud and defiant, even sparring with Castro
himself during their televised Stalinist show trials.
Please excuse me, but I'm forced to quote Jackie Kennedy approvingly here.
The Brigade had been ransomed back from Castro and were gathered at the Orange
Bowl on Dec. 29, 1962. She's addressing them with little John-John at her side:
"My son is still too young to realize what has happened here," she
spoke in flawless Spanish. "But I will make it my business to tell him the
story of your courage as he grows up. It is my hope that he'll grow into a man
at least half as brave as the members of Brigade 2506."
I daresay that the story of these men's bravery has been not just forgotten,
but deliberately trashed and slandered by Castro's flock of stenographers.
Small wonder that such men as these Brigadistas refuse to file meekly into
the liberal plantation, like good little "Hispanics," with a nice pat
on the head by Chris Dodd , Jose Serrano, Maxine Waters and Dan Rather.
Small wonder the Beltway media, academia and liberal Democrats spare no
opportunity to impugn their honor. Well, brother-in-arms Grayston Lynch does
them the ultimate honor the truth. And coming from a man like him, it
almost makes up for 40 years of mud slinging and calumny by liberals.
Humberto Fontova holds an M.A. in history from Tulane University. He's the
author of "Helldiver's Rodeo," described as "Highly entertaining!"
by Publisher's Weekly, "Terrific!" by Salon.com, and "Just what
the doctor ordered!" by Ted Nugent.
You may reach Mr. Fontova by e-mail at
hfontova@earthlink.net. |