The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [336]
The CIA director said that he believed that the operation could not be a disaster because “quite a number … would go through the swamp and take up guerrilla activities.” Most of the brigade members who had fled into the swamps had had their clothes ripped from their bodies by the prickly, cactuslike vegetation and their flesh lacerated. They had stumbled ahead, half starving, running away from the Cubans that pursued them and on occasion shot at them like hunters.
For the most part, the attorney general, the other study group members, and the witnesses had only the most demeaning and patronizing comments to make about Castro’s Cuba. Castro’s tiny air force had rendered savage damage. The “aircraft were probably flown by 50 Cuban pilots that had been trained in Czechoslovakia and returned to Cuba a few days before the invasion.” It could not be, as it was, that only nine pilots flew all these missions, and that none of them had any training outside of Cuba. Castro’s forces had arrived a day earlier than they were supposed to and fought more fiercely than any one had imagined they could. The Cubans had fought so well that the Americans believed that the action had been “spearheaded by Czechoslovakians … indicated by the report that one of the tanks knocked out had three persons aboard that were not Cuban. Further, another report said that some of the command chatter was in a foreign tongue.”
There had been a foreign tongue on the beaches, but it was English, not Czech. Grayston Lynch, one of two American CIA operatives who had gone ashore, led frogmen onto the beach and fired the first bullets. Lynch had blown away a jeep with a burst of fire when its militia driver turned on its lights, thinking he had seen a lost fishing boat. And on the second day, when most of the brigade pilots in Nicaragua had their stomachs full of Cuba and were refusing to fly and the battle was lost, Bissell had ordered two American CIA pilots into the air with planes full of bombs and napalm. They flew north from the CIA base along with those brigade pilots willing to fly back once again.
As the planes reached the Zapata Peninsula, they saw that the road leading to Girón Beach was full of traffic backed up for miles. Among the vehicles on the road were twenty Leyland buses filled with the militia of Battalion 123 from the town of Jaguey Grande consisting of “men of all ages and professions—except the military: masons, carpenters, schoolteachers, sales clerks, shopkeepers, dock workers, bank and office employees, telephone company workers, musicians, artists, writers, witch doctors, surveyors, doctors, architects, house painters and others.” They bombed the front of the column, and then they bombed the back of the column until the Cubans could go nowhere except into the swamps. And then the planes swept back and forth, machine-gunning and napalming, and when they came to one end of the great column, they swept back again, and they did not stop until they had no more bullets and no more napalm.
When they turned back to Nicaragua, they left seven burning tanks, trucks, and buses and a column of smoke rising for seven miles. Lynch says that informants told the CIA that they counted nearly 1,800 grave markers, more dead in that one attack by far than died everywhere else on both sides in the entire three-day battle. Hawkins recalls that it was only American pilots flying that day and the intercepts from the Cubans referred to 1,800 casualties. This would have included not only the dead but also the burned and the maimed. That latter figure was listed in the official Taylor