Night Fighter

by Hamilton, William H. ; Sasser, Charles W. ;

  “The bullshit is about over,” Boehm predicted. “We’re getting down to the nut cutting.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  FROM THE AIR, THE forty-five square miles of land and water that made up the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay seemed to sparkle back the sunlight. Arranged like a thumb and forefinger around the bay, it was America’s oldest overseas base, having been acquired in the Cuban-American treaty of 1903. It was also the only American base inside a communist country—and a sharp stick poked in Castro’s eye.

  Aboard the C-54 military transport as it turned upwind on final were, in addition to Boehm and me and Frog-turned-spook Smarty Marty Martinez, fourteen Cuban patriots trained in demolitions, communications, escape-and-evasion, and survival. Our Cubans, along with other teams of saboteurs and spies, had been inserting onto the island for the past several weeks to prepare the way for a landing, their mission to blow up roads, bridges, and railroads when the invasion began.

  “Listen to your radios,” spooks instructed during a team briefing held at Naval Station Little Creek the night before. “You will hear the codes that tell you where and when to go into action.”

  Boehm, Marty, and I had strict orders not to accompany the Cuban teams when they infiltrated. Roy was pissed off about the prohibition, grousing his usual “fucks” and “cocksuckers,” but there was little we could do about it. There’d be hell to pay internationally if Castro captured an American inside the country blowing up something.

  The C-54 rolled off the runway and immediately into a hangar. The door closed against possible spies. The base commander met us to ensure everything went smoothly. Boehm and I hootched up at the BOQ with Smarty Marty and other CIA operatives while a covered deuce-and-a-half truck transported our Cubans to a barracks isolated on a corner of the base. Boehm and I weren’t essential to the mission, but we had insisted on going along to Guantanamo in moral support of “our” Cubans.

  There was little to do for the next couple of days except cool our pipes and stay out of sight. Finally, we got a go for that night. A Jeep drove Boehm and me to the Cuban barracks as soon as the sun went down. Smarty Marty and another agent had arrived for last-minute briefings. The Cubans seemed in high spirits as they made final preparations, having been issued C-rations, weapons, radios, maps, and other gear. The plan called for them to split into two seven-man teams for insertion at two separate locations.

  Teams assembled dockside where a Navy landing craft and an eighty-five-foot open-sea rescue “crash boat,” an AVR, waited. The crash boat bristled with twin 50-caliber machine guns and a 20mm anti-aircraft gun. Nothing said we couldn’t fight back if attacked while in international waters.

  It was a moonless night so far. Dark settled around the two boats as though all light in the world was shut off. We had to feel our way up the gangplank and onto the landing craft; not a single light penetrated the darkness, not even the pinprick glow of a cigarette. No one spoke.

  The boat low-throttled to sea followed by the crash boat running overwatch. I rode the bow with the salt air in my nostrils and the warm breeze off the tropic island brushing across my cheeks. Boehm and I spoke in low tones. Smarty Marty took the bridge with the captain. The Cubans waited silently on deck gripping M-14 rifles and huddled around backpacks full of dynamite and C-4 plastic explosives, radios, ammo, rations, and survival gear. Once deposited, they must hide out in swamps and in the mountains until they received word to sweep into action.

  I wondered if they felt as nervous as I had the night I ran my first mission with UDT-5 in Korea.

  The Sierra Maestra Mountains, Fidel Castro’s old refuge in Oriente Province, rose dark and irregular off to starboard. So far so good. Even fishermen avoided these seas after dark in fear of being fired upon by Soviet patrol boats.

  Our boats pulled alongside each other and pulled throttle. Infiltrators along with Marty and Boehm silently transferred to the crash boat with its shallower draft in order to pull nearer the shoreline. Rubber rafts, ready to go on the crash boat, provided the last leg into wooded coves and hidden swamps. My duty was to remain aboard the first craft and use it as a command ship until Boehm and the spook returned. I solemnly shook hands with my Cubans as they departed the ship.

  “When we meet again, Commander Bone,” Eduardo said, “it will be in a free Cuba.”

  “Ojalá que es verdad,” I replied.

  I gripped Boehm’s arm as he prepared to drop over the side of the landing craft into the crash boat. I felt it necessary to issue a final warning.

  “Roy, stay on the boat and keep your sorry ass off Cuban soil. All Khrushchev needs to start an international incident and fuck up the landing is capture a U.S. personnel.”

  We dropped the first team of seven near the mountains about forty miles east of Gitmo. The other seven infiltrators went into an inlet called the Bay of Pigs.

  “Remember the story I told about killing the shark?” Boehm reminded his guerrillas before they vanished into the darkness. “Don’t give yourself away until you have the element of surprise. Then—”

  A soft Spanish chuckle. “And then—fuck them over. Right, jefe?”

  “Fuck ’em good. Fierce and deadly.”

  Aboard the command boat we waited out a time interval listening for gunfire or some other indication the infiltrators may have been compromised. Smarty Marty finally sighed with relief. Nothing out there but waves washing against shoreline and the occasional night bird.

  “They’re in,” he said. “Let’s get out of here before daylight and we’re spotted.”

  The next day Boehm and I hopped the C-54 back to UDT-21 at Little Creek. I couldn’t help feeling that we had deserted our guerrillas in not accompanying them ashore. I knew Roy felt the same way.

  “I wonder if we’ll ever see those poor bastards again,” he said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE BREAKUP WAS A long time coming. I couldn’t say I was surprised.

  “I’m tired, Bill,” Elinor said before she packed up and took the three kids back to Mama’s in California. “I’m tired of you being gone all the time and leaving me and the kids behind to wait for you, not knowing where you are, what you’re doing, or when and if you’ll be back. We’re not going to live like that anymore.”

  “Elinor … Elinor, I’m sorry—”

  “Sorry’s not enough, Bill. You don’t need anybody. Better you go take care of your Navy and we’ll go home. Maybe I’ll never have to see the Navy again.”

  Now they were gone. Linda Jean was in the third grade already, Bill Jr. would start kindergarten in the fall, and little Jana Lee was toddling about the house chanting “DaDa.” Gone where I would rarely see them and be an influence in their lives. Too often I saw families breaking up like this: Daddy gone so much, returning home after a WestPac or Far East tour, disembarking to a lonely and troubled wife and children bawling in terror at the sight of some big stranger trying to hug them.

  Elinor was right. I wasn’t around all the time and I should have been.

  I drove Elinor and the kids to the airport and saw them off in a flood of largely unspoken recriminations and tears. Then, having been informed that the Cuban invasion was on, I caught the next military flight to Guantanamo to be near the action when the excrement hit the prop. I didn’t wait long. At dawn on August 17, 1961, radio traffic in the Gitmo Operations Center began to crackle with excitement as brass from all over the military arrived for the show.

  At the other end of the island, about four hundred miles away, Fidel Castro awoke when two B-26 bombers flew rooftop-low over “Point One,” the national military headquarters in suburban Havana.

  “What are those planes?” he demanded of his staff.

  No one could tell him. He bolted to the window and watched in helpless rage as the American-made, World War II–type bombers began diving on Campo Libertad Airport nearby. He heard the crump of exploding bombs and the stutter of anti-aircraft fire.

  He was sure the long-dreaded invasion ha
d begun.

  * * *

  While CIA personnel promised Cubans that America would assure the invasion’s success, JFK was saying something else. On April 12, three days before the B-26 strikes on Castro’s air force, Kennedy announced to the Alliance for Progress for Latin America that “there will not be, under any circumstances, an intervention in Cuba by the U.S. armed forces or American civilians.”

  Bissell, Hunt, Enders, and other CIA operatives assumed JFK’s statement to be one of misdirection to lull Castro into a false sense of security. They continued with their plans to attack.

  “These men are ready,” I assured E. Howard Hunt after one of my jaunts to the main training base in Guatemala. “They’re trained and overtrained, and from now on they can only go downhill. How soon do they get to fight?”

  “I haven’t been told,” Hunt replied.

  President Kennedy still vacillated. He couldn’t seem to make up his mind. To give himself more time, he established an invasion date of April 11, then changed it to April 17. He still had time to call off operations, even though the first troop ships had left the staging area at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, on April 11, six days before the scheduled landing. The last ships would start across the Caribbean on Thursday, April 13.

  Two events were scheduled on April 15, two days before troops landed. First, B-26 air strikes against Castro’s air force; and, second, Nino Diaz would lead a diversionary force ashore in Oriente Province.

  JFK telephoned Richard Bissell to ask how many aircraft would fly against Castro’s airfield. Bissell told him sixteen.

  “I don’t want it on that scale,” the president said. “I want it minimal.”

  On the morning of Saturday, April 15, a bomber force sharply reduced to six airplanes took off from CIA base Happy Valley in Nicaragua. President Luis Somoza bade the pilots farewell, with an admonishment to bring back Castro’s beard. Two planes would strike each of three Cuban airfields—Campo Libertad on the outskirts of Havana, Antonio Maceo airport at Santiago de Cuba 450 miles southeast of Havana, and San Antonio de los Baños. The planes would strike simultaneously at dawn with bombs, rockets, and machine guns.

  Gustavo Ponzoa and his wingman, Gonzalo Herrera, were the first to take off from Nicaragua. The two B-26s skimmed the Caribbean at an altitude of fifty feet to avoid radar detection, then climbed over the seashore cliffs in Cuba and roared down the runway at Santiago de Cuba at 1,200 feet. Ponzoa released both his 500-pound demolition bombs. Heavy red-and-black smoke billowed up from underneath his right wing as he throttled and pulled out of his bombing glide. Anti-aircraft fire and tracers from machine guns arched skyward.

  Herrera, Ponzoa’s wingman, followed with his run. In the meantime, the two other teams of two attacked their own targets at Antonio Maceo and at Campo Libertad, where an alarmed Castro watched from his window.

  Each team was supposed to make two runs. Ponzoa and Herrera made five, thundering in at fifty feet above the runway to slam rockets and machine gun bullets into hangars and aircraft. Ponzoa’s bomber took a hit in the nose on his fifth run. Herrera was also hit.

  “Gus!” Herrera yelled over the radio to Ponzoa, “I can see holes in both wings.”

  Ponzoa radioed back, “Let’s get out of here and go home!”

  All six bombers managed to return safely to Nicaragua, although Herrera busted all three tires when he landed. Jubilation that Castro’s air force was wiped out soon turned to gloom when U-2 reconnaissance photos revealed that only five of his aircraft had been destroyed on the ground. Anticipating attack, wily Fidel had dispersed his planes and used several broken-down ones as decoys. He still possessed a formidable force to use against an invasion.

  On Sunday at Quarters Eye in Washington, the Air Operations Officer was ordering ordnance for a cleanup strike against the airfields when General Charles Cabell arrived. Cabell was acting director of the CIA in Allen Dulles’s absence. Dulles was in Puerto Rico.

  “What are you doing?” Cabell asked.

  “Readying the follow-up strikes, sir. We have to finish them off.”

  “Seems to me we were only authorized one strike at the airfields,” replied Cabell.

  “Oh, no, sir. There are no restrictions on the number of strikes. The authorization was to knock out the Cuban Air Force.”

  Cabell’s jaw jutted. “I don’t know about that. So to be on the safe side, I’m going to ask Dean Rusk about it.” Dean Rusk was secretary of state. “Cancel that strike order until I get someone to approve it.”

  JFK, who had given the go-ahead for the invasion, now scrubbed the cleanup air strikes. Rebel pilots in Happy Valley were revving up B-26 engines for the follow-up when they received orders to cancel. Major General George “Poppa” Doster, the American commander of brigade pilot training, slammed his hat on the ground and yelled, “There goes the whole fucking war!”

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff referred to the cancellation as “pulling out the rug … absolutely reprehensible, almost criminal.”

  The other elements of the invasion were experiencing their own difficulties. During the final days of preparations, the CIA decided to change the landing site from the Trinidad sandy beaches to the Bay of Pigs, more than 100 miles farther east along the southern coast. CIA intelligence showed the area to be a sparsely populated stretch of territory isolated from the rest of the island by the treacherous Zapata Swamps, crossed only by two narrow-gauge railroads and tricky paths known to local villagers alone. The small 108-man government militia detachment at the village of Giron was not considered a real threat to the invasion. Bissell decided that since there were no rapid communications between the Bay of Pigs and Havana, the invaders could land, capture the airfield at Giron, and begin flying in war supplies before Castro realized what was happening.

  What the Americans did not realize was that Fidel knew the region well from having fished for trout in nearby Laguna del Tesoro. Three hard-topped roads now crossed the swamp. A resort facility and another 180 concrete houses were under construction. Changing the invasion site was simply another planning snafu in a long line of mistakes and poor judgments leading up to the night of April 16, when a U.S. naval task force consisting of the aircraft carrier Essex and seven destroyers secretly rendezvoused off the coast with Eduardo Garcia’s seven ragged freighters of the invasion fleet.

  This U.S. task force had orders to merely escort the insurgent craft to the coast, nothing more. It was to remain strictly uncommitted when the invasion began.

  Shortly before midnight on Sunday, April 16, six Cuban Frogmen led by Andy Pruna and the stocky and balding CIA agent Grayston Lynch slipped toward shore at Playa Giron to mark the beach for landing. Their rubber boat was still fifty yards from land, grounded by a reef that planners thought was a stretch of subsurface seaweed, when a jeep swung along the beach and bathed the landing party in its headlights.

  An American fired the first shots at the Bay of Pigs. Grayston Lynch opened up with one twenty-round magazine from his Browning automatic rifle. The Cuban Frogmen joined in, riddling the jeep and two militiamen with gunfire. The headlights went out.

  Knowing the element of surprise was blown, the Frogmen scurried up and down the beach, placing landing lights. About twenty-five Castro militiamen pulled up in a truck; Lynch radioed an urgent request that the landing craft (LSVPs) from his freighter, the Blager, be quickly loaded with troops and rushed ashore.

  Gunfire rattled as the two LCVPs roared in for the invasion’s first troop landing. One of the landing craft struck the reef and soon sank. Wet but uninjured, the first fighters at the Bay of Pigs waded onto sand. They took off for Giron, firing wildly into the pastel-colored bungalows of Castro’s new recreation colony. The militia retreated to the woods and swamps beyond.

  Grayston Lynch returned to the Blager after Pepe San Roman and the other brigade commanders waded onto Cuban soil. An urgent message from Washington awaited him: “Castro still has operational aircraft. Expect you to be hit at dawn. Unload
all troops and supplies and take ships to sea as soon as possible.”

  In spite of the reef, the brigade’s 1,453 soldiers began pouring onto “Blue Beach” at Playa Giron in the predawn hours of April 17. The other half of the landing under the command of Hugo Sueiro disembarked at “Red Beach” at Playa Largo deep in the mouth of the bay, twenty miles away. It received light machine-gun fire but landed without casualties to find a microwave radio station still warm from use. So much for the CIA’s intelligence that the Bay of Pigs was without communications.

  In New York, E. Howard Hunt dictated a press release in the name of the Frente Revolucionari Democratica: “Before dawn, Cuban patriots in the cities and in the hills began the battle to liberate our homeland from the despotic rule of Fidel Castro.”

  And in Havana, Fidel Castro was awakened at 1:15 a.m. and told that the land invasion had begun. He took immediate personal command.

  By 6:00 a.m., even while the invasion fleet was still offloading infantry and equipment, Castro’s troops and his nine surviving aircraft were in full counterattack against Brigade 2506. Garcia’s freighters in the bay were being pounded by Castro’s Sea Fury aircraft and B-26s. Grayston Lynch and Rip Robertson on the freighter Blager fired 50-caliber machine guns so steadily at the attacking planes that the barrels turned white hot.

  The freighter Houston was sinking, still laden with ammunition. The Rio Escondido exploded in a massive eruption of fire, struck by rockets from a Sea Fury. The ship contained the bulk of the invasion’s ammunition, fuel, and medical supplies. The planes also knocked out Marsopa, from which the invasion was being coordinated, as well as several smaller vessels used to ferry troops ashore. Garcia, the ships’ owner, must have been crying his eyes out.

  Lynch, in command on-site, was assaulted by messages from headquarters: “To sea!” The ships would have to return after dark to offload supplies. The agent radioed San Roman ashore: “Pepe, we’re going to have to go.”