Chris Oakley
Banned
Venceremos!
The Florida Keys War
Part 1
Adapted from material originally posted at Othertimelines.com and Changingthetimes.net
The Two Toughest Kids On The Block: April 30th-May 16th, 1961
On the surface it looked like Cuban Communist overlord Fidel Castro had achieved his greatest political triumph since his
overthrow of the Batista regime two years earlier. He’d faced
down and defeated an attempt by CIA-backed counterrevolutionary
troops to land an invasion force at the Bay of Pigs and given
President John F. Kennedy a black eye in the process. Now, it
seemed, his grip on power was secure and the Americans would
think twice before challenging him in his own backyard again.
In reality, though, the Bay of Pigs incident had sparked a
chain reaction that would ultimately spell the doom of the
Castro regime and deal a sharp blow to the global prestige of
his chief foreign ally, the Soviet Union. For the Cuban ruler,
convinced the United States was a pushover, made an ill-advised
decision to retaliate for the invasion by mounting an attack of
his own against the islands of the Florida Keys.
On April 30th, 1961, two weeks after the Bay of Pigs assault,
Castro ordered his top generals to draft plans for a combined
air and sea attack on the western tip of the Keys; his intent
was to occupy them as part of a bold gambit in which he would
use the Keys as a bargaining chip to force JFK’s administration
to close the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay.
The proposed assault, code-named Operation July 26th, was set for
late May and involve 13 warships and 160 aircraft. Besides the
Florida Keys operation, there were provisions for diversionary
attacks against the Guantanamo Bay installation to keep American
forces off-balance.
Convinced that his patrons in Moscow would share his desire to
capitalize on his victory at the Bay of Pigs, Castro phoned the
Soviet embassy in Havana in early May and invited the embassy’s
military attaché to accompany him on an inspection tour of the
Cuban bases from which Operation July 26th would be launched. The
attaché’s reaction was not what Castro had expected, however: he
told the Cuban leader in no uncertain terms that the invasion
should be postponed until the Soviets could muster a sufficiently
large military force in the area to back the landings up.
But Castro wouldn’t hear of it; the Yanquis were ‘paper tigers’,
he asserted, and would quickly grow tired of the fight. Operation
July 26th would go forward, and it would be a smashing success.
*****
As distressed as the Soviet military attaché in Havana was about
Castro’s stubbornness, he would have been truly alarmed had he
known that word of the planned attack was already starting to get
back to the White House through the CIA. Even as Castro and his
generals were laying the foundations for Operation July 26th, a
mole at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City had cabled Washington
that Havana was in the first stages of preparing an assault on
the Florida coast.
About the same time as Castro and the Soviet attaché were on
their inspection tour, President Kennedy began holding a series
of late-night conferences with his top military and diplomatic
advisors to discuss what measures could be taken to stop the
looming invasion in its tracks. Though there were some disputes
as to what specific steps to take, Kennedy’s aides were united
on three crucial points: (1)the United States could not afford
to show even the slightest sign of hesitation or weakness in the
face of the invasion threat; (2)whatever action was going to be
taken to stop Operation July 26th had to be taken quickly; and (3)
further evidence of Cuba’s aggressive intentions would have to be
obtained and presented to the UN if Washington hoped to gain any
foreign support for its response to Castro’s actions.
Fortunately for the White House, such evidence wasn’t long in
coming. On May 8th, a U-2 dispatched from Homestead Air Force Base
in Florida brought back photos clearly showing a massive buildup
of ground and air forces along Cuba’s eastern tip; two days later
CIA sigint personnel intercepted a cablegram from Castro to the
Cuban embassy in Moscow instructing his ambassador there to meet
with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and work to change the CPSU
general secretary’s attitude regarding Operation July 26th.
On May 11th, American ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson showed
both the photos and the cablegram to the General Assembly. The
Soviet delegates, understandably chagrined to realize that Moscow
and Havana had been metaphorically caught with their hands in the
cookie jar, made no comment throughout the entire session; the
Cuban delegation, on the other hand, vehemently denounced the US
ambassador as “a verminous little liar” and gave further vent to
their displeasure by walking out of the session in protest. At
7:30 PM US Eastern time that evening, President Kennedy delivered
a televised speech in which he announced the establishment of a
‘tripwire’ air and naval defense line along the Florida coast; if
any Cuban ships or aircraft crossed that line, he said, it would
be regarded as an act of war against the United States to which
his administration would respond by authorizing air strikes on
every major military and industrial facility in Cuba. A similar
‘tripwire’, involving Marine air and ground personnel, would be
set up at Guantanamo Bay.
Kennedy’s proclamation was greeted with apprehension in Moscow;
for all his bluster about burying the West, Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushchev understood that the slightest miscalculation by the
Cuban government— or his own —could have fatal consequences for
the socialist bloc. In addition to having what was widely seen as
the world’s best conventional military, the United States also
held a considerable edge over the Soviet Union in nuclear arms,
particularly when it came to ICBMs.
On May 13th, at Khrushchev’s request, the Soviet embassy in
Havana again urged Castro to postpone Operation July 26th; he
dismissed their worries with an overconfident smile and told
the embassy’s third secretary that ‘my troops will march all
the way to Miami if they have the chance!’.
Kennedy, and his Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General
Maxwell D. Taylor, were determined to make sure Castro’s army
never got that chance. Not only were all Air Force bases in
Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana on full alert, but every Navy
submarine which could be spared from patrol in the Atlantic
was included in the Florida ‘tripwire’ line; furthermore, the
Army’s famed 101st Airborne Division had been activated and
the 82nd Airborne was being held on standby reserve pending
further orders.
The day after Castro’s meeting with the Soviet embassy staff
in Havana, Kennedy approved Operational Plan 307, a strategy
for a combined land, air, and sea campaign against Cuba. This
plan, of which the projected Air Force raids on major Cuban
military and industrial targets was to be a major component,
would be activated at the first sign of a Cuban move against
the Florida Keys or Guantanamo.
At 11:56 PM on May 16th, the main assault force for Operation
July 26th departed from Cabo san Antonio; it consisted of six
destroyers, eight corvettes, twenty patrol boats, nine diesel
submarines, and an indeterminate number of landing craft. Most
of the ships in the landing force were of Cuban or Soviet
manufacture, but many were, ironically, US-built vessels that
had been sold to Cuba back when Batista was still in power.
While this armada was traveling the 90 nautical miles which
which separated Cuba from Florida, 3 squadrons of Cuban MiG-17
fighters were escorting an equal number of Il-28 bombers towards
the edge of U.S. airspace; to confuse American radar personnel,
the Cuban planes flew in an irregular pattern over as wide an
area as possible, and when they reached U.S. soil they would
drop to treetop level to deny anti-aircraft defenses any chance
to hit them before they struck their designated targets.
Everything seemed to be going according to plan...
The Tripwire Crossed: May 17th-May 21st, 1961
...but as the old saying goes, sometimes the best-laid plans of
mice and men go astray. At 12:42 AM on the morning of May 17th,
the Skipjack-class nuclear submarine USS Scorpion detected the
Cuban Communists’ Florida Keys invasion force on their sonar
screens 40 nautical miles south of Key West. They immediately
reported the sighting to the aircraft carrier USS Ranger, the
designated flagship for the naval task force assigned to monitor
the Florida ‘tripwire’ perimeter. Ranger, in turn, contacted the
US Atlantic Fleet headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia; within less
than fifteen minutes word of the sighting had reached the White
House.
At 1:00 AM US Eastern time, President Kennedy phoned Defense
Secretary Robert S. McNamara with a single terse directive:
“Activate Op Plan 307.” No sooner had he hung up than both
the naval and air components of the Florida ‘tripwire’ sprang
into action. The Ranger and her sister ship Indepedence, along
with the Midway-class carrier USS Coral Sea, scrambled planes
to stop the invasion force while land-based F-102s moved to
intercept the Il-28s and their MiG escorts.
What followed was the biggest air and sea battle fought by
American forces since Midway. The Cuban surface ships and
their American foes traded salvo for salvo while the waters
beneath them churned as both sides’ respective submarines
unleashed furious torpedo volleys; one of the Il-28 squadrons
was diverted from its original targets on land in a desperate
attempt by the Cubans to neutralize the American carriers. At
1:10 AM the Ranger’s captain ordered all his ship’s available
strike aircraft launched against the Cuban task force.
By this time, US Air Force chief of staff General Curtis LeMay
had authorized his SAC squadrons in Florida, Georgia, and
Alabama to begin hitting Cuban military and industrial targets
as outlined in the air component of Op Plan 307. “Bomb the SOBs
back into the Stone Age” was his succinct directive to the
bomber units, and they were more than happy to oblige— for the
B-52 and B-58 crews, already hopping mad at the Communists to
begin with, Castro’s attempt to invade the Florida Keys was the
last straw.
At 2:17 AM, air raid sirens abruptly broke the nighttime silence
in Havana as the first wave of B-52s came in at treetop level and
began bombing the Cuban capital’s factories, naval outposts, and
anti-aircraft batteries into rubble. The second wave came in just
fifteen minutes later and took out of most of Havana’s airfields
and utility plants. Though the Cubans managed to shoot down five
aircraft and capture their crews, for the most part they’d been
caught napping.
Shortly after the second wave of B-52s made its run on Havana, US
Chief of Naval Operations Admiral George W. Anderson visited the
White House to debrief Kennedy and McNamara on what was already
being called the Battle of the Florida Straits. While it would be
some time before the full results of the engagement were known,
he had received confirmation that five of the six destroyers in
the Cuban landing force, including its flagship the Project 7-
class destroyer Bayamo , had been sunk along with seven patrol
boats and all but one of the submarines. The total number of
Cuban landing craft sunk, he admitted, could not yet be reliably
calculated, but he was confident that his task force had made it
very difficult if not impossible for the invasion force to mount
even a token assault on the Florida Keys.
US air defenses, meanwhile, had shot down 80% of the Il-28s and
55% of the MiGs committed to the Florida Keys assault, and of
the planes that weren’t shot down at least a third returned to
Cuba so badly damaged they would require days if not weeks of
repair work before they could be put back into operation. “Now
we’re eyeball to eyeball with Castro.” Kennedy told White House
assistant counsel Kenny O’Donnell when the debriefing was over.
“It’s just a question of who blinks first.”
*****
It was 10:30 AM Moscow time when Nikita Khrushchev first learned
of the battle raging in the Florida Straits and the American air
strikes on Havana. An aide to the Soviet military attaché had
phoned the CPSU general secretary with a rough précis of Castro’s
invasion attempt and Kennedy’s response; just as Khrushchev had
feared would happen, his Cuban allies had taken a severe beating
in their attempt to invade the Florida Keys. Of the 100,000 Cuban
troops assigned to the first wave of the planned Keys assault, at
least 80,000 were known to have been killed in the Battle of the
Florida Straits and another 1500 had been reported missing.
To make matters worse, the losses which the Cuban air force had
sustained in the Florida Straits clash and the B-52 raids on
Havana were being compounded by tactical strikes on other Cuban
air bases. A-6 Intruders out of Pensacola Naval Air Station and
F-100 Super Sabres from Homestead had started bombing fighter
airfields all over western Cuba, and Soviet intelligence reports
indicated that there was a possibility of additional strikes out
of MacDill and Patrick within the hour.
In a blind fury, the CPSU general secretary phoned the Cuban
ambassador in Moscow and assailed him with a torrent of epithets
more befitting a Minsk factory worker than the leader of the
world’s most powerful socialist state. In less-than-polite terms,
Khrushchev made it clear that he considered the Florida Keys
invasion a catastrophic mistake for which the entire socialist
bloc would inevitably pay; he also made at least one unflattering
remark about Castro’s family background.
When Khrushchev’s two-hour harangue was finally over, the Cuban
ambassador said to an aide in a dry understatement: “The General
Secretary seems less than pleased with the way the fighting down
in Key West is going.”
*****
General LeMay’s decision to eschew his B-52 squadrons’ normal
high altitude tactics in favor of treetop-level attacks during
the first American raids on Havana has long been a subject of
heated debate among Cold War scholars. LeMay’s critics argue
that by ordering them to fly in at low altitude for those first
raids on Cuba, he exposed his flight crews to unnecessary risk
while at the same time increasing the likelihood of civilian
casualties.
But his defenders assert that the change in tactics actually
worked to the bombers’ advantage; they argue that the switch
disoriented the Cuban air defense forces and denied them any
opportunity to mount a coherent opposition to the B-52 and B-
58 raids. Furthermore, they suggest that a lower altitude
meant the bombs would reach the ground faster, which according
to their viewpoint would decrease the risk of civilian losses.
In any event, General LeMay felt that he had little choice in
the matter— two weeks prior to the Battle of the Florida Straits
his own staff had warned him that if the Cubans went ahead with
their invasion plans most of the Air Force’s tactical assets
would initially be needed to suppress the landing force. The
bombers, they suggested, would have to wait until at least the
third day of the war before they could resume their customary
high-altitude attacks.
At 3:00 AM US Eastern time President Kennedy gave the go-ahead
for the 101st Airborne to begin making airdrops on Cabo san
Antonio and Isla de la Juventud. Simultaneously the 82nd Airborne
was activated and given orders to secure a beachhead at the port
of Cárdenas. While this was going on, elements of the 3rd Marine
Expeditionary Force were en route to Guantanamo Bay to strengthen
its defenses against a possible Cuban ground attack.
The remnants of the Florida Keys invasion force staggered back
to Cabo san Antonio just in time to see the main advance units of
the 101st Airborne descending on the very harbor from which they’d
set out on their assault attempt less than five hours earlier. A
brief but ferocious firefight ensued which ended with most of the
Cuban sailors being taken prisoner.
With many of Havana’s phone lines knocked out by the B-52 and B-
58 raids, Castro’s generals found it difficult to co-ordinate any
sort of effective counteroffensive against the US paratroopers
entrenched at Cabo san Antonio or Isla de la Juventud. More to
the point, their enforced delay in responding to the initial US
air and ground assaults gave the 3rd MEF critical extra time to
strengthen the ‘tripwire’ line at Guantanamo Bay. When the attack
on Guantanamo finally came, it would meet such bitter opposition
from the Americans that one full division of the Cuban army would
literally be wiped out to the last man.
Vice-President Lyndon Johnson was at his ranch in Texas when he
first learned the United States was at war with Cuba. Just after
5:00 AM Eastern time, he flew back to Washington on Air Force Two
and drove to the Pentagon for a full debriefing on the initial
clash between US and Cuban forces at the Florida Straits; shortly
after the debriefing he met with President Kennedy at the Oval
Office and strongly recommended that the chief executive and his
entire family and staff be prepared to evacuate the White House
if the Soviets showed any intention of using nuclear weapons to
respond to the American ground and air offensive. Kennedy felt a
full evacuation was premature but did accede to Johnson’s advice
to have First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and her children Caroline
and John Jr. flown by helicopter to the Kennedy family estate at
Hyannisport. He also authorized the relocation of part of his
cabinet to the Mount Weather underground bunker in West Virginia.
At 6:05 AM Eastern time, as his family was boarding Marine One,
Kennedy made a televised speech from the Oval Office formally
declaring that as of 1:00 AM a state of war now existed between
the United States and the Republic of Cuba.
*****
Next to General Taylor— and President Kennedy himself —no man
in JFK’s administration had a tougher task than Secretary of
State Dean Rusk, who had the twin daunting assignments of (1)
delivering the message to Castro’s Soviet patrons that America
would not back down from defending its interests and its honor
and (2)lining up foreign support for the US military campaign
in Cuba. Ironically, America’s longtime ally Great Britain was
the toughest nut to crack when Rusk sought international backing
for military action against Cuba— then-prime minister Harold
MacMillan was still somewhat bitter about the part that Kennedy’s
predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, had played in stopping Britain’s
intervention in the Suez crisis five years earlier, and some of
the more left-leaning members of Parliament felt that what was
happening in the Florida Straits was nothing more than Washington
getting its just deserts for its actions during the Bay of Pigs.
Even setting those factors aside, there was the stark truth that
Britain had already made extensive commitments to NATO and was
just beginning to rebuild Malaya after that country’s vicious 12-
year-long guerrilla war. Thus, MacMillan was understandably less
than enthusiastic about committing British ground troops to yet
another regional conflict in a tropical country.
Rusk, however, succeeded in persuading MacMillan to send air and
naval forces to the Bahamas and Jamaica to assist US personnel in
Cuba; in return, MacMillan obtained from Rusk a guarantee of US
financial aid to Britain’s reconstruction efforts in Malaya.
Mexico’s co-operation was the easiest to obtain; the government
of Adolfo López Mateos was tired of the Castro regime’s constant
attempts to foment insurrection among the Mexican working class,
and they also feared that if Castro succeeded in his Florida Keys
venture he might go after Mexico’s oil fields next. A force of
5,000 troops and 150 combat aircraft was assembled and sent to
Cabo san Antonio to support the US landings in that region.
*****
By noon on the first day of the Florida Keys War, American troops
at the western tip of Cuba had advanced as far as Mantua; in the
east, the 3rd MEF had not only repulsed Cuban attempts to capture
Guantanamo Bay but were cutting off Cabo Maisi and the town of
Baracoa from the rest of the country. Meanwhile, at Cárdenas, the
82nd Airborne was steadily expanding its beachhead and tanks were
being offloaded there in anticipation of a possible armored push
against Matanzas.
That push came at 7:30 AM on the morning of May 18th as three
Army and two Marine tank battalions initiated a four-column
thrust on the Cuban seaport. The Cubans struck back with a
fierced armored assault of their own; the boldness of their
attack briefly forced the Americans into retreat.
However, Kennedy had learned many critical lessons from the
Bay of Pigs disaster, the most important of those being not to
give in to the temptation to quit at the first sign of Cuban
resistance. The American tank forces soon dug in their heels,
and by 10:30 AM they were on the outskirts of Matanzas chasing
their Cuban counterparts towards Santa Cruz del Norte.
Castro and his brother, then-Cuban defense minister Raul Castro
Ruz, were alarmed at the way the situation was developing-- this
was most certainly not how they’d expected things to turn out
when they first thought of Operation July 26th. Less than 36 hours
after their invasion fleet had departed Cabo san Antonio, Cuba’s
armed forces had lost 47,836 men, 320 combat aircraft, and 67
warships; American losses by contrast totaled just 1841 men, 51
aircraft, and 6 warships.
And the Castro regime’s troubles weren’t over yet; even as the
first American tank shells were exploding in front of the Cuban
defensive lines at Matanzas, Mexico’s expeditionary force to Cuba
had already established its headquarters in Cabo san Antonio and
a British task force of 23 ships and 145 aircraft was preparing
to depart from the Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow. Headed up by
the Audacious-class aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, this group, designated “Special Operations Unit Caribbean” by the Ministry of
Defense, would have the responsibility of not only supporting the
US-Mexican coalition’s operations in Cuba but also guarding the
Cayman Islands against possible Cuban attack.
Though certain cynics on both sides of the Atlantic questioned
the legitimacy of MacMillan’s (admittedly reluctant)support for
Kennedy’s actions vis-à-vis Cuba, Britain did have real interests
to protect in the Caribbean. Many of the islands adjacent to Cuba
were or had been members of the Commonwealth of Nations, and just
about all of them still had close ties with London; furthermore,
these islands were home to tens of thousands of British nationals
who had to be protected. Finally, MacMillan and his Secretary of
State for War, John Profumo, shared the uneasy feeling that if
Castro were to succeed in his Florida Keys venture, his Soviet
benefactors would feel encouraged to expand their then-token
military presence in Cuba— which might trigger a chain of events
pushing the world into full-scale nuclear war. Castro, MacMillan
and Profumo decided, had to be nipped in the bud.
*****
American forces reached San Juan y Martines early on the morning
of May 20th. Matanzas had already surrendered by then, and the 3rd
MEF was taking up positions on the outskirts of Baracoa. Despite
the Castro regime’s iron-fisted control over Cuba’s broadcast and
print media, hints of the military catastrophe being inflicted on
its armed forces were trickling back to the Cuban public with a
small bit of help from Voice of America’s Spanish-language radio
service.
Around 7:00 AM Eastern time air elements of the 3rd MEF, working
with US Air Force fighter jets out of southern Florida, started
bombing Cuban defensive positions on the outer edge of Baracoa.
Half an hour later, the 3rd MEF’s ground contingent made contact
with the Cuban regular army and a firefight ensued the likes of
which American soldiers hadn’t experienced since the first wave
hit Omaha Beach on D-Day. The Cuban ground forces, motivated
both by Communist zeal and national pride, opposed the 3rd with
everything they had. A Soviet journalist attached to the Cuban
garrison at Baracoa commented in his account of the engagement
to the official government newspaper Pravda: ”After a certain
point, I found myself wondering whether this battle was being
fought by men or demons.”
In the end, however, the American advantage in numbers and
equipment would tip the scales in the 3rd’s favor, and around
2:27 PM that afternoon Baracoa was secured. For the next 24
hours after that, there was little if any ground fighting in
Cuba as both sides paused to consolidate their supply lines
and regroup their forces. The air war was a different story; it
continued without letup, particular the B-52 raids on Havana and
the F-100 strikes on Cuban bases near San Cristobal.
Indeed, even as the last pockets of Cuban resistance in Baracoa
were being mopped up, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had given their
consent for tactical strikes against industrial and military
targets in the vicinity of Cuba’s second largest city, Santiago
de Cuba. The raid was scheduled for 8:30 AM on the morning of
May 21st…
*****
At 8:00 AM Moscow time on the morning of May 21st, 1961, KGB
Chairman Alexander Shelepin received an urgent phone call from
his station chief in London. He had a feeling it would be bad
news, and sure enough the station chief’s first words confirmed
his fears: “The British task force to Cuba put to sea two hours
ago…”
John Bull Enters The Fray: May 21st-May 30th, 1961
Like swarms of locusts, the F-100s and F-8U Crusaders started
descending on Santiago de Cuba, unloading bombs wherever any
military or industrial targets were found. Cuban anti-aircraft
gunners were helpless to do much to stop them, and the MiG
squadrons assigned to defend the city were caught so far off-
guard that a quarter of their number were destroyed before the
raid was ten minutes old.
From their barracks on the outer edge of town, the men of the
city’s Soviet advisory contingent could hear the rumble of
distant explosions as the American bombs found their mark. It
sounded like, as one of the men would later describe it, “an
erupting volcano”.
The bombing kept up for nearly two hours before the raiders
turned for home to re-fuel and re-arm; they left behind them
800 Cuban military personnel injured or dead, 65 Cuban fighter
aircraft destroyed, and more than a dozen factories in ruins.
But oddly enough, this would not be regarded as the most worrying
development of the day for the Cuban general staff; as they were
meeting to work out a plan for a counterattack against American
troops occupying Baracoa, they were informed via coded dispatch
from the Soviet embassy in Havana of the departure of Special
Action Group Caribbean from Scapa Flow.
******
Though most of the aircraft attached to Special Action Group
Caribbean belonged to the Royal Navy, the RAF had a number of
planes of its own in the expeditionary force. Chief among these
were eight Vulcan Mk. 2 strategic bombers whose assigned role
would be to take some of the burden off the Americans’ B-52
force in attacking industrial and command/control facilities; a
pair of Vickers Valiant tankers accompanied them on the journey
to Cuba, keeping them going until they could reach one of the air
bases secured by American troops.
The British task force’s approach was greeted with considerable
trepidation by Castro’s generals— having to fight the Americans
and Mexicans was bad enough, but dealing with Britain as a foe on
top of that was almost more than they could stomach. Even though
MacMillian had flatly stated that there would be no ground troops
in Special Action Group Caribbean, then-Cuban defense minister
Raul Castro Ruz was convinced that British soldiers would be
marching alongside the Americans when they moved on Havana. The
Cuban embassy in Moscow pleaded with Soviet defense minister
Radion Malinovsky to make a move against NATO bases in Turkey or
West Germany so that London and Washington would be forced to
divert their attention from Cuba and Havana could at least start
to catch its breath.
Though Malinovsky was skeptical about the idea of British troops
fighting in Cuba, he did agree that action needed to be taken if
Fidel were to be kept in power. On May 23rd, while the lead ships
for Special Action Group Caribbean were making a refueling stop
at the US naval base in Jacksonville, Malinovsky met with the top
generals of STAVKA to ask for their opinions on where the most
vulnerable points lay in US and NATO defenses.
Expecting them to suggest a blockade of Berlin, he was surprised
when they instead recommended an occupation of Turkey. There were
fewer US personnel in Turkey, one Red Army general explained, and
the Turks’ attention was focused mainly on their neighbor Greece,
with whom Turkey had a long-standing feud. Therefore, a Soviet
invasion could expect greater success there than in Berlin, where
NATO was likely to launch a fierce counteroffensive.
******
Though MacMillan had declined to attach any ground troops to
Special Action Group Caribbean per se, that did not preclude him
from sending Royal Army garrison battalions to reinforce the
defenses of Britain’s most loyal Caribbean allies, Jamaica and
the Bahamas; he also consented to the deployment of a detachment
of Royal Marines to the Cayman Islands.
These battalions’ mission was strictly defensive, but in the
first of a series of judgement errors that was to plague the
Cuban military for the rest of the war, Cuban army intelligence
officers assumed they were the vanguard of a British invasion
force and urged Castro to approve an attack on the Bahamas. He
did, with ultimately fatal consequences for his army and his
regime.
On May 24th, as American and Mexican forces were mopping up
the last pockets of Cuban resistance in San Juan y Martines,
Castro’s general staff hurriedly drafted a plan for putting an
occupation force ashore at the southern tip of Andros Island.
The hope was to gain a foothold before the garrison battalions
could arrive, thus giving(or so Castro’s inner circle thought)
the Cuban military the upper hand against the United States and
its allies.
Their plans would backfire in the most ironic way imaginable:
when word of the occupation plans got back to London courtesy
of MI6, Prime Minister MacMillan quickly ordered the Queen’s
Own Parachute Regiment detached from its normal duties as part
of the British NATO contingent in Europe and airlifted to the
Bahamas; by 5:00 PM London time that evening, the regiment was
being flown en masse to the islands’ regional capital, Nassau.
Later that same night the vanguard of Special Action Group
Caribbean reached Cabo San Antonio, now under American control
and being used to deploy men and supplies to both the eastern
and western battlefronts in Cuba.
On May 27th, the air arm of Special Action Group Caribbean
mounted its first major tactical operation as Royal Navy Sea
Vixens, backed up by RAF Lightning interceptors, bombed Cuban
air bases near the town of Pinar del Rio. These strikes came
just in the nick of time, given that the bases in question
were to have provided air support for the proposed invasion
of the Bahamas.
******
By May 29th, US and Mexican forces, with British naval support,
had captured Puente de Cabezas and Minas de Matahambre and were
making good progress towards Pinar del Rio. The sector controlled
by the 82nd Airborne now extended as far south as Colon, while the
3rd MEF was beginning to engage Cuban regular forces in the Sierra
Maestra mountains. The RAF Vulcans posted to SACG made their own
presence felt too, striking the port of Sagua la Grande at least
twice a day; on the tactical level, Hawker Hunters were proving
to be just as much of a thorn in Castro’s side as the Americans’
F-100s and F-8Us.
On May 30th, Castro reluctantly called off the proposed landings
at Andros Island. The Caymans, however, were still up for grabs;
with a little luck, he concluded, it might still be possible to
yank victory from the jaws of defeat…
Target Camaguey: May 31st-June 8th, 1961
The Florida Keys War marked television’s coming of age as a
broadcast medium; though it had been a part of American life
since at least the early 1950s, its capabilities had not been
fully tapped until the war broke out. Now, as an entertainment
source and a news-disseminating tool, TV would begin asserting
the predominant place it has held in popular society ever since.
Talk show hosts like Jack Paar were quick to grasp the draw of
guests who had even tenuous connections with the fighting in the
Caribbean; indeed, for one Tonight Show broadcast he literally
pulled a guest in off the street because that guest had made
cargo flights to Homestead Air Force Base around the time of the
Battle of the Florida Straits. Sitcom writers would tailor their
jokes to work in topical references to the war. Twilight Zone,
widely regarded as the best fantasy series of the era, aired at
least four episodes which touched on the war; the soap opera
As The World Turns struck ratings gold with a storyline about
one of its younger female leads volunteering for front-line duty
as an Army nurse.
The modern network newscast was, in many respects, a child of
the Florida Keys War. From the moment the first hints had leaked
out about Operation July 26th, America’s three major networks had
all worked aggressively to ensure their news bureaus in Miami
would be ready to cover the action when the shooting started. CBS
in particular had worked closely with its Miami and West Palm
Beach affiliates to guarantee that its national news programs
would have up-to-the-minute information on the impending clash
between the United States and Cuba; it had also expanded its
Washington, D.C. bureaus to enable them to keep pace with ever-
changing developments at the White House and the Pentagon.
Douglas Edwards, the network’s chief anchorman since 1949, would
prove to be the ultimate beneficiary of these efforts; though his
ratings had been in a sharp decline before the war began, they
would soar upwards again as millions of viewers came to rely on
his clear, concise accounts of the battles being fought on Cuban
soil and in the waters of the Florida Straits.
Rarely would his strengths as an anchorman be more in evidence
than on the afternoon of June 1st, 1961, when he announced that
the US Army’s newly activated 173rd Airborne Brigade had attacked
Camaguey, Cuba’s third-largest city.
******
The Camaguey assault was, to say the least, fraught with risk.
For starters it was being mounted by a unit which had only come
into existence less than a month earlier; furthermore, the men
charged with conducting the operation were making the attack with
much of eastern Cuba still under Communist control— a potentially
fatal problem if the assault force came under siege. Last but not
least, there were more than a hundred Soviet advisors in Camaguey
who, though they had no heavy weapons or air support to speak of,
were perfectly willing— with or without orders from Moscow— to
fight the Americans to the last man.
However, General Taylor felt the risk was worth taking; with
Cuban Communist forces gearing up for a counterattack against
US positions at Santiago de Cuba, he believed an assault on
Camaguey might take some of the wind out of their sails and
split them in half long enough for the 3rd MEF to breach the
enemy’s rear flanks and advance all the way to Las Tunas. His
top field commander on the island, General Paul D. Harkins, was
in favor of the plan as well: a protégé of the legendary George
S. Patton, Harkins was eager to stick it to Castro’s army at any
time and place the opportunity presented itself.
At 1:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time on June 1st, the first advance
units of the 173rd Airborne landed at Camaguey and established
a defensive perimeter on the western edge of the city. A second
wave touched down half an hour, and by 2:00 PM both groups had
made contact with Cuban regular forces and their Soviet advisors.
What followed was, as one Cuban soldier would later describe it,
“hell come to earth” . The two sides exchanged automatic weapons
fire in the start of what would turn out to be a lengthy siege;
with the U.S.-led coalition enjoying a decided advantage in air
power, however, there was little the Communist forces could do to
exploit the weaknesses in the 173rd’s perimeter.
******
On June 3rd, making what would turn out to be his last visit to a
foreign capital, Fidel Castro flew to Moscow in hopes of securing
a personal guarantee from Khrushchev that the USSR would deploy
combat troops to Cuba to halt the American-led invasion. To throw
U.S. and allied interceptor squadrons off the scent, he had three
decoy planes take off on wildly divergent flight paths while his
own aircraft, an unmarked Tupolev Tu-114 transport, slipped past
the Yanquis in the ensuing confusion. Once the Tu-114 had cleared
Cuban airspace, it was able to fly undisturbed across the North
Atlantic and make refueling stops in Sweden and Finland before
reaching the Soviet Union. But no sooner did Castro’s plane touch
down on the main runway at Sheremetyevo Airport than he learned
that fate had dealt the Communist bloc another setback.
Khrushchev had been stricken with a heart attack shortly before
Castro’s Tu-114 crossed the Polish-Soviet border. Nobody knew for
sure how serious it was, but it was generally agreed the attack
had been brought on by a telegram the CPSU general secretary had
received from Soviet ambassador to Cuba Alexander Alekseyev which
bore dire news about the Camaguey situation. The message reported
that the city’s entire Soviet military advisory team had been
arrested by American troops and forcibly sent home on a charter
transport plane; given the steady stream of bad news which was
already pouring in from Cuba, this latest fiasco had proved to be
the straw that broke the camel’s back for Khrushchev.
His main political rival, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, moved quickly
to take over as acting CPSU general secretary; when Castro’s Tu-
114 landed in Moscow, Brezhnev personally met the Cuban leader at
Sheremetyevo and apprised him of the situation in Moscow. It was
during this impromptu debriefing that Castro first heard about
Soviet plans to invade Turkey. The Cuban president, convinced
his country was in mortal jeopardy, was baffled and disappointed
by the news. What did Turkey have to do with anything?
Brezhnev, however, pointed out that Western strategists did not
consider Turkey as high a priority as, say, Berlin or South
Vietnam. A Soviet invasion would catch NATO off-guard and
force the United States to redirect most of its forces towards
halting the offensive, thus allowing Cuba to catch its breath
and stage a counterattack that would push U.S.-led occupation
forces off the island. He was also quick to mention that Cuba’s
own ambassadors in Moscow had suggested a move on Turkey as a
possible countermeasure to the US invasion of their island.
In theory, the Soviet plan was ingenious, and it might have
worked but for the actions of a disgruntled GRU colonel…
******
On June 4th, as the 173rd Airborne was digging in against an
expected Cuban Communist counteroffensive in Camaguey, a dark-
haired man in a nondescript-looking three-piece suit handed a
package wrapped in brown paper to a secretary from the American
embassy in Moscow. Though no one knew it at the time, the package
contained preliminary Soviet battle plans for the invasion of
Turkey, code-named Operation Anatolia.
Oleg Penkovsky’s once-bright promotion prospects had vanished
when his superiors learned that his father had fought for the
monarchist White Army during the 1918-21 civil war. That, along
with nagging fears that the growing tension between Washington
and Moscow could eventually lead to nuclear holocaust, drove
Penkovsky to become a double agent for the West. It was in that
capacity that he alerted the White House to the impending Soviet
attack on Turkey; when a CIA mole in the upper echelons of the
Red Army confirmed Penkovsky’s information, Kennedy immediately
dispatched Robert McNamara to NATO headquarters in Brussels to
confer with European defense officials about what could be done
to meet this potential threat to NATO’s southern flank.
To bolster the 250,000-man Turkish army, elements of the US
Army’s 11th Armored “Black Horse” Cavalry regiment were sent
to Turkey’s Black Sea coast as a safeguard against possible
Soviet amphibious assault while two West German infantry units
took up defensive positions around Istanbul. RAF Fighter
Command sent three Gloster Javelin squadrons to aid Turkish
air defense units in guarding against Soviet bombing raids.
Even Greece, Turkey’s traditional nemesis, came to her aid by
deploying a naval flotilla that included two guided missile
frigates capable of hitting Soviet bases on the Black Sea.
******
To Brezhnev’s dismay, he realized that not only had the West
been tipped off to his strategy, but that Operation Anatolia
might not even have that much effect on the war in Cuba. Even
as the Turkish-Soviet standoff was brewing, American troops in
eastern Cuba had captured Holguin and Bayamo and were on the
outskirts of Manzanillo; in western Cuba US and Mexican forces
had been sighted in Pinar del Rio’s outer districts while the
strategically import port of Mariel was being bombed by American
and British tactical fighters.
June 7th saw US and Mexican forces in western Cuba achieve their
most significant land victory yet as the last pockets of Cuban
Communist resistance in Pinar del Rio collapsed. Che Guevara, who
had been entrusted with the task of directing the Cuban armed
forces in Castro’s absence, was at his wits’ end trying to keep
up the flagging spirits of his troops and cope with what seemed
like an invincible war machine which now occupied close to 50% of
his homeland; it was only his Marxist zeal and passionate hatred
of the West that kept him from giving up the fight.
He immediately ordered a three-column attack by Cuban Communist
regular forces and civilian militias against American positions
at Pinar del Rio and Puente de Cabezas. The offensive was a total
disaster; the first wave was wiped out literally to the last man,
while the second wave fled towards Havana in a chaotic retreat.
Little wonder, then, that General Harkins said in his post-battle
report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “The time until this war is
over can be measured in days, if not hours.” Discipline within
all sectors of the Cuban regular armed forces was disintegrating
like the sugar cane fields Communist troops were burning as they
retreated; in Havana, ordinary Cuban citizens were beginning to
do the unthinkable and openly criticize the Castro regime. The
situation was especially dire in Camaguey, with the 173rd Airborne
Brigade controlling all but two blocks of the city and starting
to move east toward Las Tunas for a linkup with the 3rd MEF.
Early on the morning of June 8th, a brief radio announcement from
the BBC World Service brought all activity in Cuba to a sudden
halt: “Radio Moscow is quoted as saying that Nikita Khrushchev,
first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party since 1955 and
premier of the Soviet Union since 1958, died late last night of
complications resulting from heart failure.” With that single
sentence, the entire complexion of the war— and world politics as
a whole –was radically changed.
Eyeball to Eyeball: June 9th-June 15th, 1961
Though he’d disliked the man in life, Leonid Brezhnev went out
of his way to honor Nikita Khrushchev in death. He declared a
three-day national mourning period for Khrushchev in the USSR
and ordered a full military funeral in recognition of his late
predecessor’s service as a commissar in the Red Army during
World War II. This was partly a political tactic intended to
strengthen his claim on the reins of power in the Kremlin, but
it was also a shrewd means of rallying the masses to support
the coming Red Army push into Turkey.
He needed all the support he could get; Marshal Andrei Grechko,
Warsaw Pact forces C-in-C for the Red Army, had expressed grave
doubts to Defense Minister Malinovsky about Operation Anatolia.
Any NATO counterattack against the invasion forces, he warned
Malinovsky and Brezhnev, could conceivably include the use of
American MRBM launchers in that country. There was also the
danger that NATO might retaliate for the Turkish invasion by
sending an invasion force of its own into East Germany.
Grechko’s fears were not unfounded; President Kennedy had
already given his missile commanders in Turkey orders to
go to DefCon 3 as the Red Army continued its buildup in
preparation for Operation Anatolia. And even as mourners
were filing past Khrushchev’s casket in Moscow, Prime Minister
MacMillian— finally forced to admit that he’d have to commit
his ground troops to the war whether he wanted to or not –
had placed the Army of the Rhine on full alert and sent five
Territorial Army divisions to bolster their numbers. Some of
the B-52, B-58, and Vulcan squadrons that had been raiding Cuban
military and industrial targets were reassigned to “fail safe”
patrols along the Soviet border; a number of B-47 wings were
also assigned to these patrols. The US Navy’s Atlantic missile
submarine fleet, led by the George Washington-class USS Patrick
Henry, began moving its vessels within striking range of Soviet
and Warsaw Pact bases along the Baltic coast. Belgium, Holland,
and Denmark sent troops to join the American, British, French,
West German and Canadian units already massed along the East
German border.
What had started as a relatively low-scale territorial conflict
between neighboring antagonists was now threatening to escalate
into World War III.
******
Less than a month after the first shots had been fired in the
Battle of the Florida Straits, diplomats on both sides of the
Iron Curtain were beginning to reach a consensus that Castro’s
regime was for all practical purposes finished no matter what
the result of his visit to Moscow. That view prompted many of
the foreign embassies still operating in Havana to close down
and the rest to petition the UN for help in arranging some of
cease-fire or truce before American and Cuban troops started
shooting it out on Havana’s streets.
By June 10th, when US and Mexican forces had overrun La Palma
and were starting to move on San Cristobal, Canada, Italy,
Brazil, Romania, and Finland had already pulled their embassy
staffs out and India was making final preparations to evacuate
its own diplomats from the Cuban capital. The Argentine and
Swedish embassies had cut their workforces 60% and the Honduran
legation was making do with a payroll of less than 20. Even
the East German embassy, where the GDR’s ambassador to Cuba
issued almost hourly statements declaring his country’s never-
flagging faith in Castro, was beginning to prepare a tentative
plan for getting its staff out of the country.
From his office window at the Soviet embassy, Alexander
Alekseyev could see that the Castro regime’s grip on Cuba was
fading. On June 12th, as Khrushchev was laid to rest, the
USSR’s ambassador to Havana wrote a blunt letter to Foreign
Minister Gromyko describing Moscow’s position in Cuba as
“hopelessly untenable” and recommending immediate withdrawal
of all remaining Soviet diplomatic and advisory personnel from
the country. Though he was reluctant to say it publicly, in
private Gromyko had come to agree with Alekseyev’s pessimistic
viewpoint— in fact, a consensus was steadily building within
Brezhnev’s cabinet that the time had come for the Kremlin to
wash its hands of the Castro government. Even Brezhnev himself,
who had originally ordered Operation Anatolia as a means of
relieving pressure on the Cuban Communists, was starting to
question the value of continuing to prop up a regime which had
so badly miscalculated how the United States would respond to
an attempt to invade its own soil so soon after the Bay of Pigs.
******
The 173rd Airborne’s efforts to link up with the 3rd MEF ran into
an unexpected complication on June 13th when the enlisted men at
the Cuban regular army barracks in Las Tunas started a mutiny
against their officers. Fed up with the lack of adequate food and
water, and convinced the Americans would kill them all if the war
lasted much longer, they tried to seize control of the garrison
and quickly encountered stern resistance from its commanders.
One of the mutineers captured the garrison’s radio transmitter
and broadcast a plea to the American forces to aid his comrades
in taking the barracks. On orders from General Harkins, both the
173rd Airborne and the 3rd MEF temporarily halted their advances
while a CIA covert operations team was airlifted to Las Tunas to
support the insurrection.
******
In 1960, with the Eisenhower Administration drawing to a close,
the US Defense Department instituted SIOP— the Single Integrated
Operations Plan. Its purpose was to give future Presidents a
specific framework for deciding when and how to deploy the
significant destructive power of the American nuclear arsenal;
without it, the already serious threat of the Florida Keys War
escalating into global atomic conflict might have been even
greater.
Under SIOP, the United States can only initiate a nuclear
attack after the President and Secretary of Defense have both
agreed such action is necessary and conferred with the Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on selection of targets. The main
purposes of this plan are to minimize the risk of indiscriminate
nuclear weapons use and set priorities in regard to strategic
and tactical targets.
On June 14th, SIOP would face its first significant test when a
US Air Force U-2 was shot down and its pilot killed during a
recon mission over the Turkish-Soviet border. An outraged General
Curtis LeMay felt this warranted an immediate missile strike
against the USSR and phoned Robert McNamara to demand he be given
the go-ahead to bring his ICBM and MRBM launchers to DefCon 1.
McNamara, however, wasn’t so sure such a step was warranted and
immediately contacted President Kennedy and JCS Chairman Taylor
to get their assessments of the situation…
Three Minutes to Midnight: June 15th-June 20th, 1961
It was just after 11:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time on the morning
of June 15th when President Kennedy summoned JCS Chairman Taylor,
General LeMay, Defense Secretary McNamara, and CIA director John
McCone to his office for a meeting on the U-2 incident in Turkey.
Kennedy and McNamara both felt that caution was warranted until
more was known about the shootdown; Taylor, while not as eager as
LeMay was to start firing ICBMs, shared LeMay’s view that their
alert status— which had been on DefCon 4 since the war started –
should be raised at once, if only as a psychological ploy to make
the Kremlin think twice about invading Turkey.
LeMay vehemently insisted that all U.S. nuclear forces should go
to DefCon 1 immediately and told Kennedy point-blank that at the
end of the meeting he would authorize Strategic Air Command chief
of staff General Thomas Power to arm SAC’s ICBM silos in the
continental United States and MRBM launchers in Europe whether
the president agreed with it or not. This prompted a vehement
protest from McNamara, who then got into a heated argument with
LeMay and accused him of trying to circumvent SIOP; the argument
ended with Taylor physically inserting himself between the two
men to prevent them from coming to blows. Moments later, Kennedy
coolly told LeMay that if he went through with his plan, he would
be summarily relieved of command.
As LeMay reluctantly conceded defeat, McCone showed the president
a series of radio intercepts from the CIA’s listening posts in
Istanbul and Tehran. They were messages between the SAM launcher
that had shot down the U-2 and the headquarters of the Red Army
regiment to which the launcher was attached; although they were
incomplete and there was still more investigation to be done, the
CIA director said that these transcripts indicated the shootdown
was accidental, the result of an apparent electrical short in the
SAM’s arming mechanism.
At about five minutes past noon, Kennedy made his decision:
the ICBMs’ alert status could be raised to DefCon 3, but neither
they nor the MRBMs in Europe were to be armed until the Soviets’
intentions became clearer. With that, LeMay made a hasty exit
back to his office while McNamara accompanied Taylor back to the
Pentagon for a debriefing on Operation Marti , the projected US &
allied offensive to take Havana.
******
Back on Cuban soil, the battle for San Cristobal had begun in
earnest. For the first time anti-Castro Cuban insurgents, who
up to that time had been operating largely in small groups, took
on their Communist enemies en masse, destroying two Cuban regular
army outposts and capturing a third for advancing US and Mexican
troops. The last remnants of the Cuban air force were eliminated
during this engagement as US Air Force F-4 Phantom IIs shot down
nearly two dozen Hawker Sea Furies while American armor and infantry occupied key military and industrial bases inside the
city.
It was during this engagement that US Army Special Forces officer
Roger H.C. Donlon earned the first Congressional Medal of Honor to be
awarded in the Florida Keys War. Despite shrapnel wounds to his
right arm as the result of a Cuban Communist mortar barrage, he
led his 12-man A-Team on a successful hit-and-run raid to knock
out an enemy artillery position that had been shelling US ground
troops nonstop since the battle began; he then covered his team’s
escape and helped a squad of local anti-Castro insurgents safely
evacuate the city before finally allowing a Medevac chopper to
fly him to a field hospital in Cabo san Antonio for treatment and
recuperation.
For three days both sides anxiously awaited the outcome of the
San Cristobal engagement; not only was it a critical waypoint on
the road to Havana, but it also housed at least two airfields. If
the city were to fall into U.S. & allied hands, it would be the
most devastating blow yet to a regime which had already sustained
a number of painful setbacks…
******
While Kennedy and LeMay were arguing about whether to arm the
United States’ ICBMs, Castro had made his biggest— and as it
turned out, last —mistake of the war. Considering it urgent that
he return to Cuba immediately so he could rally his people to
victory, he persuaded CPSU First Secretary Brezhnev and Defense
Minister Malinovsky to lend him the K-3, a November-class nuclear
Submarine, for a secret run to Havana Harbor. Although Raul
Castro considered such a trip risky, Fidel insisted it could
be done without a significant risk of the Americans detecting
them.
On June 17th, as U.S. infantry and tanks advanced on the heart of
San Cristobal, K-3 put to sea at full speed with orders to get
Castro back to Havana at all costs. His brother Raul and Raul’s
wife Vilma Espin were nervous about making the trip in such tight
quarters, so Castro did his best to keep up their spirits with
songs and stories of their days fighting the Batista government.
Luck seemed to be on the Castro brothers’ side as K-3 slipped
past NATO patrols undetected on its journey to Havana Harbor.
Once they got ashore, however, their luck would desert them in
swift and spectacular fashion; CIA and MI5 had already launched
a manhunt for them and were offering a $1,000,000 reward for
their arrest…
******
Back in Moscow, Leonid Brezhnev had convened an emergency meeting
of his cabinet to get their assessment on the situation in Turkey
and Germany as well as the latest news on the battle for San
Cristobal. What he heard wasn’t encouraging: the Americans, his
advisors told him, were refusing to back down in Europe, and
barring a miraculous reversal of fortune San Cristobal was all
but lost.
Right then and there Brezhnev made two of the hardest decisions
of his political career. First he ordered the cancellation of
Operation Anatolia— by now he had concluded that an invasion of
Turkey would do more harm than good as far as Soviet national
security was concerned. He then told Andrei Gromyko to order all
remaining Soviet diplomatic and advisory personnel to begin
immediate preparations for possible evacuation from Cuba; though
he said he still thought Castro might yet recover from the blows
the Americans had dealt him, the Soviet government had to brace
itself for the possibility that he wouldn’t.
Defense Minister Malinovsky was shocked at Brezhnev’s decision
and urged him in the strongest possible terms to reconsider it.
But the CPSU first secretary saw no alternative: an invasion of
Turkey at this juncture was sure to trigger a stiff response from
NATO— one that might very well include full-scale nuclear attacks
against the Soviet Union.
******
Once Kennedy was satisfied that Operation Anatolia had in fact
been cancelled and the invasion force disbanded, he ordered NATO
forces in Europe to stand down from DefCon 3. He then retired to
Camp David for a much-needed three-day vacation before returning
to the White House to meet with Defense Secretary McNamara and
the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the final draft of the battle plans
for Operation Marti.
In his absence, Britain’s famed SAS commando service would pull
off its most spectacular triumph since World War II. On June 20th,
just before 8:00 PM Havana time, the SAS parachuted a six-man
demolitions squad into Santa Clara, where the Cuban Communists
were known to be stockpiling weapons and ammunition as part of
preparations for their last-ditch attempt to invade the Caymans.
Though there was little chance by now that the battered remains
of the Cuban navy could break the U.S. & allied blockade of their
homeland, Macmillan’s government wasn’t taking any chances; those
munitions, he rightly pointed out, could still be used by Cuban
Communist troops to oppose the coming American drive on Havana.
Using explosive charges planted inside the main munitions storage
facility, the SAS men succeeded in triggering a chain reaction
that in less than ten minutes obliterated the Cuban Communists’
entire stockpile in Santa Clara. The demolitions team then fought
its way to a pre-arranged pickup site near the town of Ranchuelo,
reaching their destination with the loss of only one team member,
a sapper fatally wounded by machine gun fire.
Che Guevara, already in a fragile mental state, went berserk
when he learned about the British commando raid and had to be
taken to a Havana hospital to undergo treatment for a nervous
breakdown. Juan Almeido Bosque, who next to Che was Castro’s
most loyal follower, took over as acting head of the Cuban
government and armed forces and ordered security at all remaining
munitions facilities in the country heightened.
Operation Marti: June 21st- July 7th, 1961
On June 21st, Fidel and Raul Castro along with Vilma Espin
returned to a Cuba even more firmly under the control of the
United States and its allies than it had been when he left
for Moscow 18 days earlier. Prime Minister Macmillan had
finally released the Royal Army’s troops in the Caribbean
from garrison duty to assist American and Mexican ground
forces in eliminating what was left of the Cuban Communist
army; even as Castro’s party was stepping ashore from K-3
at Havana Harbor, the Queen’s Own Parachute Regiment had
seized Sagua la Grande and Royal Army mechanized infantry
were driving for Santa Clara to complete the job their SAS
comrades had started 24 hours earlier.
Returning to the presidential palace, he was greeted with
the news of Che Guevara’s hospitalization and the loss of
the munitions supplies at Santa Clara. Devastated by these
twin blows to his regime, Castro ordered that the naval
vessels which were to have been used for the now-thwarted
invasion of the Caymans be re-assigned to a last-ditch strike
aimed at retaking Cabo san Antonio from U.S. and allied
forces. This operation, dubbed Choque y Temor, has been
compared by some military historians to the Germans’ Wacht
am Rhein offensive in the final months of World War II; a
more appropriate metaphor, however, might be the Japanese
kamikaze attacks suffered by Allied forces in the days and
weeks up to Hiroshima. For the remnants of the Cuban navy
were, in effect, being sent on a suicide mission.
On June 22nd, as the world marked the 20th anniversary of
the Nazi invasion of Russia, these remnants, along with a
motley assortment of civilian craft carrying hastily assembled
volunteer squads, departed Guanabo— by then one of only three
ports in Cuba still under Communist control –with orders to
attack U.S. and allied forces at Cabo san Antonio and retake
that vital seaport in the name of Castro’s revolution.
However, shortly after putting to sea the flotilla found a
nasty surprise waiting for it… or more accurately, eighteen
nasty surprises. A joint US-British task force of hunter-
killer submarines was lying in wait to ambush the naval ships
in the convoy, and as soon as they got the Cuban Communist
vessels in their sights they let loose with the most ferocious
volley of torpedoes seen in Caribbean waters since the Battle
of the Florida Straits. All but one Cuban warship was sunk in
the attack, and most of the civilian craft perished as well;
the remaining civilian ships either fled back to Guanabo or
were scuttled by their crews.
News of the failure of Castro’s 11th-hour effort to retake
Cabo san Antonio from the Americans shattered what was left
of Che Guevara’s spirit. Three days after Choque y Temor was
defeated, the Argentine-born Marxist icon took a borrowed
World War II-era Soviet pistol and blew his brains out; in
official Cuban government accounts of his death, however, he
was portrayed as having given his life heroically while manning
an anti-aircraft gun during the latest round of American
bombing raids on Havana. It would be up to the Voice of America’s
Spanish-language broadcast service to bring the Cuban people the
truth about Guevara’s fate.
******
On June 26th, British forces mopped up the last pockets of Cuban
Communist resistance in Santa Clara and Sagua la Grande and began
moving on Cienfuegos to link up with anti-Castro Cuban insurgent
units. The question was no longer if or even when Fidel’s regime
would collapse, but whether he would live to see the aftermath.
Between daily U.S. and allied air strikes, the growing civil
unrest in Havana, and a somewhat justified fear of assassination,
the surviving members of his inner circle suspected he might not
be long for this world.
And it wasn’t just the war itself that had them worrying for
their leader’s future— war-related stress had taken a serious
toll on Castro’s health. Since the Las Tunas mutiny he’d been
having persistent stomach troubles, and he’d also been diagnosed
as having a heart condition that would eventually require him to
undergo surgery. At least a third of his journey back to Cuba on
board K-3 had been spent being treated by the ship’s surgeon for
high blood pressure.
Those concerns would only deepen after the Cuban dictator was
admitted to Havana’s Hospital Clínico Quirúrgico on June 27th
with an ulcer that had started right after Che Guevara’s death
and grown steadily worse until it could no longer be ignored.
Raul Castro, in addition to his regular duties as Cuba’s defense
minister, was now also called on to take the helm as its acting
head of state.
He ordered security around Hospital Clínico Quirúrgico tightened
to frustrate those who might seek to collect on the $1,000,000
reward for Castro’s arrest. He also withdrew two full battalions
of tanks from Guines— where they had been guarding the southern
roads to Havana against possible US assault –to defend Mariel,
whose only value by now was as a jumping-off point for those
wanting to get out of Cuba before the Communist regime’s final
downfall.
By June 28th, the number of foreign embassies still operating
in Havana had dwindled to a handful— and that number would
drop even further as the North Korean legation closed its doors
for good and evacuated its last remaining personnel by freighter
to China. China’s own embassy would be shut down within 36 hours,
leaving just the Soviet, Swedish, Finnish, Swiss, and East German
embassies still in business by the time US and allied forces were
ready to begin Operation Marti.
******
On July 2nd, Guines fell to American troops while British forces
linked up with anti-Castro Cuban insurgents at Cienfuegos, which
effectively gave the U.S. coalition control of more than 85% of
the country’s overall land area. Before the day was out, Kennedy
had given General Harkins the go-ahead to start Operation Marti
as soon as his offensive spearhead was in position.
Operation Marti’s objectives were threefold: (1)Isolate Mariel
and Havana from the rest of the remaining Communist-controlled
territory in Cuba; (2)eliminate what was left of the Castro
regime’s ability to wage war on the ground; and (3)secure Havana
so order could be restored in that city. In JFK’s eyes, the third
goal was by far the most important; the latest CIA reports had
told him that the Cuban capital was teetering on the verge of an
anarchy almost as dangerous as anything it had seen during the
final days before the Batista regime collapsed.
On July 5th, backed by massive air strikes and guerrilla assaults
from the anti-Castro Cuban forces, U.S. and allied troops began
Operation Marti. Within just 12 hours after the assault started,
Bahia Honda and Guanajay were in American hands while British
forces succeeded in crushing a Communist attempt to recapture
Cienfuegos; by dawn on July 6th, U.S. army tanks were slugging it
out with Cuban Communist armored battalions on the outskirts of
Mariel.
Soviet ambassador Alexander Alekseyev decided that he couldn’t
afford to wait any longer to get his people out. He requested
and got Moscow’s authorization to evacuate his remaining staff
from Havana, then contacted the East German embassy— then in the
midst of its own hasty evacuation –to say a last farewell to the
East German ambassador.
At noon on July 6th, U.S. Air Force B-52s and RAF Vulcans raided
Havana for the last time. As part of a tacit agreement between
Washington and Moscow, the city’s harbor was spared to avoid
killing anyone among the Soviet or East German embassy staffs
during their evacuation from the Cuban capital. The rest of
Havana, however, was hit so relentlessly some of its citizens
thought there might be nothing but dust left of it by the time
the Americans arrived.
Back at Cabo san Antonio, a mixed group of local anti-Castro
Cubans and Cuban-American exiles who’d been living in Florida
since Castro took power met to begin hammering out the rough
outlines for a post-Communist government in Havana. These men
and women, though they might not have agreed with everything
Kennedy did, all shared his concern about the disorder which
was sweeping Havana’s streets as the Castro dictatorship choked
out its last breath.
Time was running out not only for Fidel’s government, but for
Fidel himself; while he was trying to recover from his ulcer
operation, the Cuban Communist tyrant had suffered a massive
stroke, rendering him helpless against those who wished to
arrest or kill him. Sensing this, an orderly at Hospital Clínico
Quirúgico surreptitiously sent a message to the advancing U.S.
and Allied forces telling them where they could locate Castro.
The CIA was quick to capitalize on this lead…
To Be Continued
The Florida Keys War
Part 1
Adapted from material originally posted at Othertimelines.com and Changingthetimes.net
The Two Toughest Kids On The Block: April 30th-May 16th, 1961
On the surface it looked like Cuban Communist overlord Fidel Castro had achieved his greatest political triumph since his
overthrow of the Batista regime two years earlier. He’d faced
down and defeated an attempt by CIA-backed counterrevolutionary
troops to land an invasion force at the Bay of Pigs and given
President John F. Kennedy a black eye in the process. Now, it
seemed, his grip on power was secure and the Americans would
think twice before challenging him in his own backyard again.
In reality, though, the Bay of Pigs incident had sparked a
chain reaction that would ultimately spell the doom of the
Castro regime and deal a sharp blow to the global prestige of
his chief foreign ally, the Soviet Union. For the Cuban ruler,
convinced the United States was a pushover, made an ill-advised
decision to retaliate for the invasion by mounting an attack of
his own against the islands of the Florida Keys.
On April 30th, 1961, two weeks after the Bay of Pigs assault,
Castro ordered his top generals to draft plans for a combined
air and sea attack on the western tip of the Keys; his intent
was to occupy them as part of a bold gambit in which he would
use the Keys as a bargaining chip to force JFK’s administration
to close the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay.
The proposed assault, code-named Operation July 26th, was set for
late May and involve 13 warships and 160 aircraft. Besides the
Florida Keys operation, there were provisions for diversionary
attacks against the Guantanamo Bay installation to keep American
forces off-balance.
Convinced that his patrons in Moscow would share his desire to
capitalize on his victory at the Bay of Pigs, Castro phoned the
Soviet embassy in Havana in early May and invited the embassy’s
military attaché to accompany him on an inspection tour of the
Cuban bases from which Operation July 26th would be launched. The
attaché’s reaction was not what Castro had expected, however: he
told the Cuban leader in no uncertain terms that the invasion
should be postponed until the Soviets could muster a sufficiently
large military force in the area to back the landings up.
But Castro wouldn’t hear of it; the Yanquis were ‘paper tigers’,
he asserted, and would quickly grow tired of the fight. Operation
July 26th would go forward, and it would be a smashing success.
*****
As distressed as the Soviet military attaché in Havana was about
Castro’s stubbornness, he would have been truly alarmed had he
known that word of the planned attack was already starting to get
back to the White House through the CIA. Even as Castro and his
generals were laying the foundations for Operation July 26th, a
mole at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City had cabled Washington
that Havana was in the first stages of preparing an assault on
the Florida coast.
About the same time as Castro and the Soviet attaché were on
their inspection tour, President Kennedy began holding a series
of late-night conferences with his top military and diplomatic
advisors to discuss what measures could be taken to stop the
looming invasion in its tracks. Though there were some disputes
as to what specific steps to take, Kennedy’s aides were united
on three crucial points: (1)the United States could not afford
to show even the slightest sign of hesitation or weakness in the
face of the invasion threat; (2)whatever action was going to be
taken to stop Operation July 26th had to be taken quickly; and (3)
further evidence of Cuba’s aggressive intentions would have to be
obtained and presented to the UN if Washington hoped to gain any
foreign support for its response to Castro’s actions.
Fortunately for the White House, such evidence wasn’t long in
coming. On May 8th, a U-2 dispatched from Homestead Air Force Base
in Florida brought back photos clearly showing a massive buildup
of ground and air forces along Cuba’s eastern tip; two days later
CIA sigint personnel intercepted a cablegram from Castro to the
Cuban embassy in Moscow instructing his ambassador there to meet
with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and work to change the CPSU
general secretary’s attitude regarding Operation July 26th.
On May 11th, American ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson showed
both the photos and the cablegram to the General Assembly. The
Soviet delegates, understandably chagrined to realize that Moscow
and Havana had been metaphorically caught with their hands in the
cookie jar, made no comment throughout the entire session; the
Cuban delegation, on the other hand, vehemently denounced the US
ambassador as “a verminous little liar” and gave further vent to
their displeasure by walking out of the session in protest. At
7:30 PM US Eastern time that evening, President Kennedy delivered
a televised speech in which he announced the establishment of a
‘tripwire’ air and naval defense line along the Florida coast; if
any Cuban ships or aircraft crossed that line, he said, it would
be regarded as an act of war against the United States to which
his administration would respond by authorizing air strikes on
every major military and industrial facility in Cuba. A similar
‘tripwire’, involving Marine air and ground personnel, would be
set up at Guantanamo Bay.
Kennedy’s proclamation was greeted with apprehension in Moscow;
for all his bluster about burying the West, Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushchev understood that the slightest miscalculation by the
Cuban government— or his own —could have fatal consequences for
the socialist bloc. In addition to having what was widely seen as
the world’s best conventional military, the United States also
held a considerable edge over the Soviet Union in nuclear arms,
particularly when it came to ICBMs.
On May 13th, at Khrushchev’s request, the Soviet embassy in
Havana again urged Castro to postpone Operation July 26th; he
dismissed their worries with an overconfident smile and told
the embassy’s third secretary that ‘my troops will march all
the way to Miami if they have the chance!’.
Kennedy, and his Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General
Maxwell D. Taylor, were determined to make sure Castro’s army
never got that chance. Not only were all Air Force bases in
Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana on full alert, but every Navy
submarine which could be spared from patrol in the Atlantic
was included in the Florida ‘tripwire’ line; furthermore, the
Army’s famed 101st Airborne Division had been activated and
the 82nd Airborne was being held on standby reserve pending
further orders.
The day after Castro’s meeting with the Soviet embassy staff
in Havana, Kennedy approved Operational Plan 307, a strategy
for a combined land, air, and sea campaign against Cuba. This
plan, of which the projected Air Force raids on major Cuban
military and industrial targets was to be a major component,
would be activated at the first sign of a Cuban move against
the Florida Keys or Guantanamo.
At 11:56 PM on May 16th, the main assault force for Operation
July 26th departed from Cabo san Antonio; it consisted of six
destroyers, eight corvettes, twenty patrol boats, nine diesel
submarines, and an indeterminate number of landing craft. Most
of the ships in the landing force were of Cuban or Soviet
manufacture, but many were, ironically, US-built vessels that
had been sold to Cuba back when Batista was still in power.
While this armada was traveling the 90 nautical miles which
which separated Cuba from Florida, 3 squadrons of Cuban MiG-17
fighters were escorting an equal number of Il-28 bombers towards
the edge of U.S. airspace; to confuse American radar personnel,
the Cuban planes flew in an irregular pattern over as wide an
area as possible, and when they reached U.S. soil they would
drop to treetop level to deny anti-aircraft defenses any chance
to hit them before they struck their designated targets.
Everything seemed to be going according to plan...
The Tripwire Crossed: May 17th-May 21st, 1961
...but as the old saying goes, sometimes the best-laid plans of
mice and men go astray. At 12:42 AM on the morning of May 17th,
the Skipjack-class nuclear submarine USS Scorpion detected the
Cuban Communists’ Florida Keys invasion force on their sonar
screens 40 nautical miles south of Key West. They immediately
reported the sighting to the aircraft carrier USS Ranger, the
designated flagship for the naval task force assigned to monitor
the Florida ‘tripwire’ perimeter. Ranger, in turn, contacted the
US Atlantic Fleet headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia; within less
than fifteen minutes word of the sighting had reached the White
House.
At 1:00 AM US Eastern time, President Kennedy phoned Defense
Secretary Robert S. McNamara with a single terse directive:
“Activate Op Plan 307.” No sooner had he hung up than both
the naval and air components of the Florida ‘tripwire’ sprang
into action. The Ranger and her sister ship Indepedence, along
with the Midway-class carrier USS Coral Sea, scrambled planes
to stop the invasion force while land-based F-102s moved to
intercept the Il-28s and their MiG escorts.
What followed was the biggest air and sea battle fought by
American forces since Midway. The Cuban surface ships and
their American foes traded salvo for salvo while the waters
beneath them churned as both sides’ respective submarines
unleashed furious torpedo volleys; one of the Il-28 squadrons
was diverted from its original targets on land in a desperate
attempt by the Cubans to neutralize the American carriers. At
1:10 AM the Ranger’s captain ordered all his ship’s available
strike aircraft launched against the Cuban task force.
By this time, US Air Force chief of staff General Curtis LeMay
had authorized his SAC squadrons in Florida, Georgia, and
Alabama to begin hitting Cuban military and industrial targets
as outlined in the air component of Op Plan 307. “Bomb the SOBs
back into the Stone Age” was his succinct directive to the
bomber units, and they were more than happy to oblige— for the
B-52 and B-58 crews, already hopping mad at the Communists to
begin with, Castro’s attempt to invade the Florida Keys was the
last straw.
At 2:17 AM, air raid sirens abruptly broke the nighttime silence
in Havana as the first wave of B-52s came in at treetop level and
began bombing the Cuban capital’s factories, naval outposts, and
anti-aircraft batteries into rubble. The second wave came in just
fifteen minutes later and took out of most of Havana’s airfields
and utility plants. Though the Cubans managed to shoot down five
aircraft and capture their crews, for the most part they’d been
caught napping.
Shortly after the second wave of B-52s made its run on Havana, US
Chief of Naval Operations Admiral George W. Anderson visited the
White House to debrief Kennedy and McNamara on what was already
being called the Battle of the Florida Straits. While it would be
some time before the full results of the engagement were known,
he had received confirmation that five of the six destroyers in
the Cuban landing force, including its flagship the Project 7-
class destroyer Bayamo , had been sunk along with seven patrol
boats and all but one of the submarines. The total number of
Cuban landing craft sunk, he admitted, could not yet be reliably
calculated, but he was confident that his task force had made it
very difficult if not impossible for the invasion force to mount
even a token assault on the Florida Keys.
US air defenses, meanwhile, had shot down 80% of the Il-28s and
55% of the MiGs committed to the Florida Keys assault, and of
the planes that weren’t shot down at least a third returned to
Cuba so badly damaged they would require days if not weeks of
repair work before they could be put back into operation. “Now
we’re eyeball to eyeball with Castro.” Kennedy told White House
assistant counsel Kenny O’Donnell when the debriefing was over.
“It’s just a question of who blinks first.”
*****
It was 10:30 AM Moscow time when Nikita Khrushchev first learned
of the battle raging in the Florida Straits and the American air
strikes on Havana. An aide to the Soviet military attaché had
phoned the CPSU general secretary with a rough précis of Castro’s
invasion attempt and Kennedy’s response; just as Khrushchev had
feared would happen, his Cuban allies had taken a severe beating
in their attempt to invade the Florida Keys. Of the 100,000 Cuban
troops assigned to the first wave of the planned Keys assault, at
least 80,000 were known to have been killed in the Battle of the
Florida Straits and another 1500 had been reported missing.
To make matters worse, the losses which the Cuban air force had
sustained in the Florida Straits clash and the B-52 raids on
Havana were being compounded by tactical strikes on other Cuban
air bases. A-6 Intruders out of Pensacola Naval Air Station and
F-100 Super Sabres from Homestead had started bombing fighter
airfields all over western Cuba, and Soviet intelligence reports
indicated that there was a possibility of additional strikes out
of MacDill and Patrick within the hour.
In a blind fury, the CPSU general secretary phoned the Cuban
ambassador in Moscow and assailed him with a torrent of epithets
more befitting a Minsk factory worker than the leader of the
world’s most powerful socialist state. In less-than-polite terms,
Khrushchev made it clear that he considered the Florida Keys
invasion a catastrophic mistake for which the entire socialist
bloc would inevitably pay; he also made at least one unflattering
remark about Castro’s family background.
When Khrushchev’s two-hour harangue was finally over, the Cuban
ambassador said to an aide in a dry understatement: “The General
Secretary seems less than pleased with the way the fighting down
in Key West is going.”
*****
General LeMay’s decision to eschew his B-52 squadrons’ normal
high altitude tactics in favor of treetop-level attacks during
the first American raids on Havana has long been a subject of
heated debate among Cold War scholars. LeMay’s critics argue
that by ordering them to fly in at low altitude for those first
raids on Cuba, he exposed his flight crews to unnecessary risk
while at the same time increasing the likelihood of civilian
casualties.
But his defenders assert that the change in tactics actually
worked to the bombers’ advantage; they argue that the switch
disoriented the Cuban air defense forces and denied them any
opportunity to mount a coherent opposition to the B-52 and B-
58 raids. Furthermore, they suggest that a lower altitude
meant the bombs would reach the ground faster, which according
to their viewpoint would decrease the risk of civilian losses.
In any event, General LeMay felt that he had little choice in
the matter— two weeks prior to the Battle of the Florida Straits
his own staff had warned him that if the Cubans went ahead with
their invasion plans most of the Air Force’s tactical assets
would initially be needed to suppress the landing force. The
bombers, they suggested, would have to wait until at least the
third day of the war before they could resume their customary
high-altitude attacks.
At 3:00 AM US Eastern time President Kennedy gave the go-ahead
for the 101st Airborne to begin making airdrops on Cabo san
Antonio and Isla de la Juventud. Simultaneously the 82nd Airborne
was activated and given orders to secure a beachhead at the port
of Cárdenas. While this was going on, elements of the 3rd Marine
Expeditionary Force were en route to Guantanamo Bay to strengthen
its defenses against a possible Cuban ground attack.
The remnants of the Florida Keys invasion force staggered back
to Cabo san Antonio just in time to see the main advance units of
the 101st Airborne descending on the very harbor from which they’d
set out on their assault attempt less than five hours earlier. A
brief but ferocious firefight ensued which ended with most of the
Cuban sailors being taken prisoner.
With many of Havana’s phone lines knocked out by the B-52 and B-
58 raids, Castro’s generals found it difficult to co-ordinate any
sort of effective counteroffensive against the US paratroopers
entrenched at Cabo san Antonio or Isla de la Juventud. More to
the point, their enforced delay in responding to the initial US
air and ground assaults gave the 3rd MEF critical extra time to
strengthen the ‘tripwire’ line at Guantanamo Bay. When the attack
on Guantanamo finally came, it would meet such bitter opposition
from the Americans that one full division of the Cuban army would
literally be wiped out to the last man.
Vice-President Lyndon Johnson was at his ranch in Texas when he
first learned the United States was at war with Cuba. Just after
5:00 AM Eastern time, he flew back to Washington on Air Force Two
and drove to the Pentagon for a full debriefing on the initial
clash between US and Cuban forces at the Florida Straits; shortly
after the debriefing he met with President Kennedy at the Oval
Office and strongly recommended that the chief executive and his
entire family and staff be prepared to evacuate the White House
if the Soviets showed any intention of using nuclear weapons to
respond to the American ground and air offensive. Kennedy felt a
full evacuation was premature but did accede to Johnson’s advice
to have First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and her children Caroline
and John Jr. flown by helicopter to the Kennedy family estate at
Hyannisport. He also authorized the relocation of part of his
cabinet to the Mount Weather underground bunker in West Virginia.
At 6:05 AM Eastern time, as his family was boarding Marine One,
Kennedy made a televised speech from the Oval Office formally
declaring that as of 1:00 AM a state of war now existed between
the United States and the Republic of Cuba.
*****
Next to General Taylor— and President Kennedy himself —no man
in JFK’s administration had a tougher task than Secretary of
State Dean Rusk, who had the twin daunting assignments of (1)
delivering the message to Castro’s Soviet patrons that America
would not back down from defending its interests and its honor
and (2)lining up foreign support for the US military campaign
in Cuba. Ironically, America’s longtime ally Great Britain was
the toughest nut to crack when Rusk sought international backing
for military action against Cuba— then-prime minister Harold
MacMillan was still somewhat bitter about the part that Kennedy’s
predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, had played in stopping Britain’s
intervention in the Suez crisis five years earlier, and some of
the more left-leaning members of Parliament felt that what was
happening in the Florida Straits was nothing more than Washington
getting its just deserts for its actions during the Bay of Pigs.
Even setting those factors aside, there was the stark truth that
Britain had already made extensive commitments to NATO and was
just beginning to rebuild Malaya after that country’s vicious 12-
year-long guerrilla war. Thus, MacMillan was understandably less
than enthusiastic about committing British ground troops to yet
another regional conflict in a tropical country.
Rusk, however, succeeded in persuading MacMillan to send air and
naval forces to the Bahamas and Jamaica to assist US personnel in
Cuba; in return, MacMillan obtained from Rusk a guarantee of US
financial aid to Britain’s reconstruction efforts in Malaya.
Mexico’s co-operation was the easiest to obtain; the government
of Adolfo López Mateos was tired of the Castro regime’s constant
attempts to foment insurrection among the Mexican working class,
and they also feared that if Castro succeeded in his Florida Keys
venture he might go after Mexico’s oil fields next. A force of
5,000 troops and 150 combat aircraft was assembled and sent to
Cabo san Antonio to support the US landings in that region.
*****
By noon on the first day of the Florida Keys War, American troops
at the western tip of Cuba had advanced as far as Mantua; in the
east, the 3rd MEF had not only repulsed Cuban attempts to capture
Guantanamo Bay but were cutting off Cabo Maisi and the town of
Baracoa from the rest of the country. Meanwhile, at Cárdenas, the
82nd Airborne was steadily expanding its beachhead and tanks were
being offloaded there in anticipation of a possible armored push
against Matanzas.
That push came at 7:30 AM on the morning of May 18th as three
Army and two Marine tank battalions initiated a four-column
thrust on the Cuban seaport. The Cubans struck back with a
fierced armored assault of their own; the boldness of their
attack briefly forced the Americans into retreat.
However, Kennedy had learned many critical lessons from the
Bay of Pigs disaster, the most important of those being not to
give in to the temptation to quit at the first sign of Cuban
resistance. The American tank forces soon dug in their heels,
and by 10:30 AM they were on the outskirts of Matanzas chasing
their Cuban counterparts towards Santa Cruz del Norte.
Castro and his brother, then-Cuban defense minister Raul Castro
Ruz, were alarmed at the way the situation was developing-- this
was most certainly not how they’d expected things to turn out
when they first thought of Operation July 26th. Less than 36 hours
after their invasion fleet had departed Cabo san Antonio, Cuba’s
armed forces had lost 47,836 men, 320 combat aircraft, and 67
warships; American losses by contrast totaled just 1841 men, 51
aircraft, and 6 warships.
And the Castro regime’s troubles weren’t over yet; even as the
first American tank shells were exploding in front of the Cuban
defensive lines at Matanzas, Mexico’s expeditionary force to Cuba
had already established its headquarters in Cabo san Antonio and
a British task force of 23 ships and 145 aircraft was preparing
to depart from the Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow. Headed up by
the Audacious-class aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, this group, designated “Special Operations Unit Caribbean” by the Ministry of
Defense, would have the responsibility of not only supporting the
US-Mexican coalition’s operations in Cuba but also guarding the
Cayman Islands against possible Cuban attack.
Though certain cynics on both sides of the Atlantic questioned
the legitimacy of MacMillan’s (admittedly reluctant)support for
Kennedy’s actions vis-à-vis Cuba, Britain did have real interests
to protect in the Caribbean. Many of the islands adjacent to Cuba
were or had been members of the Commonwealth of Nations, and just
about all of them still had close ties with London; furthermore,
these islands were home to tens of thousands of British nationals
who had to be protected. Finally, MacMillan and his Secretary of
State for War, John Profumo, shared the uneasy feeling that if
Castro were to succeed in his Florida Keys venture, his Soviet
benefactors would feel encouraged to expand their then-token
military presence in Cuba— which might trigger a chain of events
pushing the world into full-scale nuclear war. Castro, MacMillan
and Profumo decided, had to be nipped in the bud.
*****
American forces reached San Juan y Martines early on the morning
of May 20th. Matanzas had already surrendered by then, and the 3rd
MEF was taking up positions on the outskirts of Baracoa. Despite
the Castro regime’s iron-fisted control over Cuba’s broadcast and
print media, hints of the military catastrophe being inflicted on
its armed forces were trickling back to the Cuban public with a
small bit of help from Voice of America’s Spanish-language radio
service.
Around 7:00 AM Eastern time air elements of the 3rd MEF, working
with US Air Force fighter jets out of southern Florida, started
bombing Cuban defensive positions on the outer edge of Baracoa.
Half an hour later, the 3rd MEF’s ground contingent made contact
with the Cuban regular army and a firefight ensued the likes of
which American soldiers hadn’t experienced since the first wave
hit Omaha Beach on D-Day. The Cuban ground forces, motivated
both by Communist zeal and national pride, opposed the 3rd with
everything they had. A Soviet journalist attached to the Cuban
garrison at Baracoa commented in his account of the engagement
to the official government newspaper Pravda: ”After a certain
point, I found myself wondering whether this battle was being
fought by men or demons.”
In the end, however, the American advantage in numbers and
equipment would tip the scales in the 3rd’s favor, and around
2:27 PM that afternoon Baracoa was secured. For the next 24
hours after that, there was little if any ground fighting in
Cuba as both sides paused to consolidate their supply lines
and regroup their forces. The air war was a different story; it
continued without letup, particular the B-52 raids on Havana and
the F-100 strikes on Cuban bases near San Cristobal.
Indeed, even as the last pockets of Cuban resistance in Baracoa
were being mopped up, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had given their
consent for tactical strikes against industrial and military
targets in the vicinity of Cuba’s second largest city, Santiago
de Cuba. The raid was scheduled for 8:30 AM on the morning of
May 21st…
*****
At 8:00 AM Moscow time on the morning of May 21st, 1961, KGB
Chairman Alexander Shelepin received an urgent phone call from
his station chief in London. He had a feeling it would be bad
news, and sure enough the station chief’s first words confirmed
his fears: “The British task force to Cuba put to sea two hours
ago…”
John Bull Enters The Fray: May 21st-May 30th, 1961
Like swarms of locusts, the F-100s and F-8U Crusaders started
descending on Santiago de Cuba, unloading bombs wherever any
military or industrial targets were found. Cuban anti-aircraft
gunners were helpless to do much to stop them, and the MiG
squadrons assigned to defend the city were caught so far off-
guard that a quarter of their number were destroyed before the
raid was ten minutes old.
From their barracks on the outer edge of town, the men of the
city’s Soviet advisory contingent could hear the rumble of
distant explosions as the American bombs found their mark. It
sounded like, as one of the men would later describe it, “an
erupting volcano”.
The bombing kept up for nearly two hours before the raiders
turned for home to re-fuel and re-arm; they left behind them
800 Cuban military personnel injured or dead, 65 Cuban fighter
aircraft destroyed, and more than a dozen factories in ruins.
But oddly enough, this would not be regarded as the most worrying
development of the day for the Cuban general staff; as they were
meeting to work out a plan for a counterattack against American
troops occupying Baracoa, they were informed via coded dispatch
from the Soviet embassy in Havana of the departure of Special
Action Group Caribbean from Scapa Flow.
******
Though most of the aircraft attached to Special Action Group
Caribbean belonged to the Royal Navy, the RAF had a number of
planes of its own in the expeditionary force. Chief among these
were eight Vulcan Mk. 2 strategic bombers whose assigned role
would be to take some of the burden off the Americans’ B-52
force in attacking industrial and command/control facilities; a
pair of Vickers Valiant tankers accompanied them on the journey
to Cuba, keeping them going until they could reach one of the air
bases secured by American troops.
The British task force’s approach was greeted with considerable
trepidation by Castro’s generals— having to fight the Americans
and Mexicans was bad enough, but dealing with Britain as a foe on
top of that was almost more than they could stomach. Even though
MacMillian had flatly stated that there would be no ground troops
in Special Action Group Caribbean, then-Cuban defense minister
Raul Castro Ruz was convinced that British soldiers would be
marching alongside the Americans when they moved on Havana. The
Cuban embassy in Moscow pleaded with Soviet defense minister
Radion Malinovsky to make a move against NATO bases in Turkey or
West Germany so that London and Washington would be forced to
divert their attention from Cuba and Havana could at least start
to catch its breath.
Though Malinovsky was skeptical about the idea of British troops
fighting in Cuba, he did agree that action needed to be taken if
Fidel were to be kept in power. On May 23rd, while the lead ships
for Special Action Group Caribbean were making a refueling stop
at the US naval base in Jacksonville, Malinovsky met with the top
generals of STAVKA to ask for their opinions on where the most
vulnerable points lay in US and NATO defenses.
Expecting them to suggest a blockade of Berlin, he was surprised
when they instead recommended an occupation of Turkey. There were
fewer US personnel in Turkey, one Red Army general explained, and
the Turks’ attention was focused mainly on their neighbor Greece,
with whom Turkey had a long-standing feud. Therefore, a Soviet
invasion could expect greater success there than in Berlin, where
NATO was likely to launch a fierce counteroffensive.
******
Though MacMillan had declined to attach any ground troops to
Special Action Group Caribbean per se, that did not preclude him
from sending Royal Army garrison battalions to reinforce the
defenses of Britain’s most loyal Caribbean allies, Jamaica and
the Bahamas; he also consented to the deployment of a detachment
of Royal Marines to the Cayman Islands.
These battalions’ mission was strictly defensive, but in the
first of a series of judgement errors that was to plague the
Cuban military for the rest of the war, Cuban army intelligence
officers assumed they were the vanguard of a British invasion
force and urged Castro to approve an attack on the Bahamas. He
did, with ultimately fatal consequences for his army and his
regime.
On May 24th, as American and Mexican forces were mopping up
the last pockets of Cuban resistance in San Juan y Martines,
Castro’s general staff hurriedly drafted a plan for putting an
occupation force ashore at the southern tip of Andros Island.
The hope was to gain a foothold before the garrison battalions
could arrive, thus giving(or so Castro’s inner circle thought)
the Cuban military the upper hand against the United States and
its allies.
Their plans would backfire in the most ironic way imaginable:
when word of the occupation plans got back to London courtesy
of MI6, Prime Minister MacMillan quickly ordered the Queen’s
Own Parachute Regiment detached from its normal duties as part
of the British NATO contingent in Europe and airlifted to the
Bahamas; by 5:00 PM London time that evening, the regiment was
being flown en masse to the islands’ regional capital, Nassau.
Later that same night the vanguard of Special Action Group
Caribbean reached Cabo San Antonio, now under American control
and being used to deploy men and supplies to both the eastern
and western battlefronts in Cuba.
On May 27th, the air arm of Special Action Group Caribbean
mounted its first major tactical operation as Royal Navy Sea
Vixens, backed up by RAF Lightning interceptors, bombed Cuban
air bases near the town of Pinar del Rio. These strikes came
just in the nick of time, given that the bases in question
were to have provided air support for the proposed invasion
of the Bahamas.
******
By May 29th, US and Mexican forces, with British naval support,
had captured Puente de Cabezas and Minas de Matahambre and were
making good progress towards Pinar del Rio. The sector controlled
by the 82nd Airborne now extended as far south as Colon, while the
3rd MEF was beginning to engage Cuban regular forces in the Sierra
Maestra mountains. The RAF Vulcans posted to SACG made their own
presence felt too, striking the port of Sagua la Grande at least
twice a day; on the tactical level, Hawker Hunters were proving
to be just as much of a thorn in Castro’s side as the Americans’
F-100s and F-8Us.
On May 30th, Castro reluctantly called off the proposed landings
at Andros Island. The Caymans, however, were still up for grabs;
with a little luck, he concluded, it might still be possible to
yank victory from the jaws of defeat…
Target Camaguey: May 31st-June 8th, 1961
The Florida Keys War marked television’s coming of age as a
broadcast medium; though it had been a part of American life
since at least the early 1950s, its capabilities had not been
fully tapped until the war broke out. Now, as an entertainment
source and a news-disseminating tool, TV would begin asserting
the predominant place it has held in popular society ever since.
Talk show hosts like Jack Paar were quick to grasp the draw of
guests who had even tenuous connections with the fighting in the
Caribbean; indeed, for one Tonight Show broadcast he literally
pulled a guest in off the street because that guest had made
cargo flights to Homestead Air Force Base around the time of the
Battle of the Florida Straits. Sitcom writers would tailor their
jokes to work in topical references to the war. Twilight Zone,
widely regarded as the best fantasy series of the era, aired at
least four episodes which touched on the war; the soap opera
As The World Turns struck ratings gold with a storyline about
one of its younger female leads volunteering for front-line duty
as an Army nurse.
The modern network newscast was, in many respects, a child of
the Florida Keys War. From the moment the first hints had leaked
out about Operation July 26th, America’s three major networks had
all worked aggressively to ensure their news bureaus in Miami
would be ready to cover the action when the shooting started. CBS
in particular had worked closely with its Miami and West Palm
Beach affiliates to guarantee that its national news programs
would have up-to-the-minute information on the impending clash
between the United States and Cuba; it had also expanded its
Washington, D.C. bureaus to enable them to keep pace with ever-
changing developments at the White House and the Pentagon.
Douglas Edwards, the network’s chief anchorman since 1949, would
prove to be the ultimate beneficiary of these efforts; though his
ratings had been in a sharp decline before the war began, they
would soar upwards again as millions of viewers came to rely on
his clear, concise accounts of the battles being fought on Cuban
soil and in the waters of the Florida Straits.
Rarely would his strengths as an anchorman be more in evidence
than on the afternoon of June 1st, 1961, when he announced that
the US Army’s newly activated 173rd Airborne Brigade had attacked
Camaguey, Cuba’s third-largest city.
******
The Camaguey assault was, to say the least, fraught with risk.
For starters it was being mounted by a unit which had only come
into existence less than a month earlier; furthermore, the men
charged with conducting the operation were making the attack with
much of eastern Cuba still under Communist control— a potentially
fatal problem if the assault force came under siege. Last but not
least, there were more than a hundred Soviet advisors in Camaguey
who, though they had no heavy weapons or air support to speak of,
were perfectly willing— with or without orders from Moscow— to
fight the Americans to the last man.
However, General Taylor felt the risk was worth taking; with
Cuban Communist forces gearing up for a counterattack against
US positions at Santiago de Cuba, he believed an assault on
Camaguey might take some of the wind out of their sails and
split them in half long enough for the 3rd MEF to breach the
enemy’s rear flanks and advance all the way to Las Tunas. His
top field commander on the island, General Paul D. Harkins, was
in favor of the plan as well: a protégé of the legendary George
S. Patton, Harkins was eager to stick it to Castro’s army at any
time and place the opportunity presented itself.
At 1:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time on June 1st, the first advance
units of the 173rd Airborne landed at Camaguey and established
a defensive perimeter on the western edge of the city. A second
wave touched down half an hour, and by 2:00 PM both groups had
made contact with Cuban regular forces and their Soviet advisors.
What followed was, as one Cuban soldier would later describe it,
“hell come to earth” . The two sides exchanged automatic weapons
fire in the start of what would turn out to be a lengthy siege;
with the U.S.-led coalition enjoying a decided advantage in air
power, however, there was little the Communist forces could do to
exploit the weaknesses in the 173rd’s perimeter.
******
On June 3rd, making what would turn out to be his last visit to a
foreign capital, Fidel Castro flew to Moscow in hopes of securing
a personal guarantee from Khrushchev that the USSR would deploy
combat troops to Cuba to halt the American-led invasion. To throw
U.S. and allied interceptor squadrons off the scent, he had three
decoy planes take off on wildly divergent flight paths while his
own aircraft, an unmarked Tupolev Tu-114 transport, slipped past
the Yanquis in the ensuing confusion. Once the Tu-114 had cleared
Cuban airspace, it was able to fly undisturbed across the North
Atlantic and make refueling stops in Sweden and Finland before
reaching the Soviet Union. But no sooner did Castro’s plane touch
down on the main runway at Sheremetyevo Airport than he learned
that fate had dealt the Communist bloc another setback.
Khrushchev had been stricken with a heart attack shortly before
Castro’s Tu-114 crossed the Polish-Soviet border. Nobody knew for
sure how serious it was, but it was generally agreed the attack
had been brought on by a telegram the CPSU general secretary had
received from Soviet ambassador to Cuba Alexander Alekseyev which
bore dire news about the Camaguey situation. The message reported
that the city’s entire Soviet military advisory team had been
arrested by American troops and forcibly sent home on a charter
transport plane; given the steady stream of bad news which was
already pouring in from Cuba, this latest fiasco had proved to be
the straw that broke the camel’s back for Khrushchev.
His main political rival, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, moved quickly
to take over as acting CPSU general secretary; when Castro’s Tu-
114 landed in Moscow, Brezhnev personally met the Cuban leader at
Sheremetyevo and apprised him of the situation in Moscow. It was
during this impromptu debriefing that Castro first heard about
Soviet plans to invade Turkey. The Cuban president, convinced
his country was in mortal jeopardy, was baffled and disappointed
by the news. What did Turkey have to do with anything?
Brezhnev, however, pointed out that Western strategists did not
consider Turkey as high a priority as, say, Berlin or South
Vietnam. A Soviet invasion would catch NATO off-guard and
force the United States to redirect most of its forces towards
halting the offensive, thus allowing Cuba to catch its breath
and stage a counterattack that would push U.S.-led occupation
forces off the island. He was also quick to mention that Cuba’s
own ambassadors in Moscow had suggested a move on Turkey as a
possible countermeasure to the US invasion of their island.
In theory, the Soviet plan was ingenious, and it might have
worked but for the actions of a disgruntled GRU colonel…
******
On June 4th, as the 173rd Airborne was digging in against an
expected Cuban Communist counteroffensive in Camaguey, a dark-
haired man in a nondescript-looking three-piece suit handed a
package wrapped in brown paper to a secretary from the American
embassy in Moscow. Though no one knew it at the time, the package
contained preliminary Soviet battle plans for the invasion of
Turkey, code-named Operation Anatolia.
Oleg Penkovsky’s once-bright promotion prospects had vanished
when his superiors learned that his father had fought for the
monarchist White Army during the 1918-21 civil war. That, along
with nagging fears that the growing tension between Washington
and Moscow could eventually lead to nuclear holocaust, drove
Penkovsky to become a double agent for the West. It was in that
capacity that he alerted the White House to the impending Soviet
attack on Turkey; when a CIA mole in the upper echelons of the
Red Army confirmed Penkovsky’s information, Kennedy immediately
dispatched Robert McNamara to NATO headquarters in Brussels to
confer with European defense officials about what could be done
to meet this potential threat to NATO’s southern flank.
To bolster the 250,000-man Turkish army, elements of the US
Army’s 11th Armored “Black Horse” Cavalry regiment were sent
to Turkey’s Black Sea coast as a safeguard against possible
Soviet amphibious assault while two West German infantry units
took up defensive positions around Istanbul. RAF Fighter
Command sent three Gloster Javelin squadrons to aid Turkish
air defense units in guarding against Soviet bombing raids.
Even Greece, Turkey’s traditional nemesis, came to her aid by
deploying a naval flotilla that included two guided missile
frigates capable of hitting Soviet bases on the Black Sea.
******
To Brezhnev’s dismay, he realized that not only had the West
been tipped off to his strategy, but that Operation Anatolia
might not even have that much effect on the war in Cuba. Even
as the Turkish-Soviet standoff was brewing, American troops in
eastern Cuba had captured Holguin and Bayamo and were on the
outskirts of Manzanillo; in western Cuba US and Mexican forces
had been sighted in Pinar del Rio’s outer districts while the
strategically import port of Mariel was being bombed by American
and British tactical fighters.
June 7th saw US and Mexican forces in western Cuba achieve their
most significant land victory yet as the last pockets of Cuban
Communist resistance in Pinar del Rio collapsed. Che Guevara, who
had been entrusted with the task of directing the Cuban armed
forces in Castro’s absence, was at his wits’ end trying to keep
up the flagging spirits of his troops and cope with what seemed
like an invincible war machine which now occupied close to 50% of
his homeland; it was only his Marxist zeal and passionate hatred
of the West that kept him from giving up the fight.
He immediately ordered a three-column attack by Cuban Communist
regular forces and civilian militias against American positions
at Pinar del Rio and Puente de Cabezas. The offensive was a total
disaster; the first wave was wiped out literally to the last man,
while the second wave fled towards Havana in a chaotic retreat.
Little wonder, then, that General Harkins said in his post-battle
report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “The time until this war is
over can be measured in days, if not hours.” Discipline within
all sectors of the Cuban regular armed forces was disintegrating
like the sugar cane fields Communist troops were burning as they
retreated; in Havana, ordinary Cuban citizens were beginning to
do the unthinkable and openly criticize the Castro regime. The
situation was especially dire in Camaguey, with the 173rd Airborne
Brigade controlling all but two blocks of the city and starting
to move east toward Las Tunas for a linkup with the 3rd MEF.
Early on the morning of June 8th, a brief radio announcement from
the BBC World Service brought all activity in Cuba to a sudden
halt: “Radio Moscow is quoted as saying that Nikita Khrushchev,
first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party since 1955 and
premier of the Soviet Union since 1958, died late last night of
complications resulting from heart failure.” With that single
sentence, the entire complexion of the war— and world politics as
a whole –was radically changed.
Eyeball to Eyeball: June 9th-June 15th, 1961
Though he’d disliked the man in life, Leonid Brezhnev went out
of his way to honor Nikita Khrushchev in death. He declared a
three-day national mourning period for Khrushchev in the USSR
and ordered a full military funeral in recognition of his late
predecessor’s service as a commissar in the Red Army during
World War II. This was partly a political tactic intended to
strengthen his claim on the reins of power in the Kremlin, but
it was also a shrewd means of rallying the masses to support
the coming Red Army push into Turkey.
He needed all the support he could get; Marshal Andrei Grechko,
Warsaw Pact forces C-in-C for the Red Army, had expressed grave
doubts to Defense Minister Malinovsky about Operation Anatolia.
Any NATO counterattack against the invasion forces, he warned
Malinovsky and Brezhnev, could conceivably include the use of
American MRBM launchers in that country. There was also the
danger that NATO might retaliate for the Turkish invasion by
sending an invasion force of its own into East Germany.
Grechko’s fears were not unfounded; President Kennedy had
already given his missile commanders in Turkey orders to
go to DefCon 3 as the Red Army continued its buildup in
preparation for Operation Anatolia. And even as mourners
were filing past Khrushchev’s casket in Moscow, Prime Minister
MacMillian— finally forced to admit that he’d have to commit
his ground troops to the war whether he wanted to or not –
had placed the Army of the Rhine on full alert and sent five
Territorial Army divisions to bolster their numbers. Some of
the B-52, B-58, and Vulcan squadrons that had been raiding Cuban
military and industrial targets were reassigned to “fail safe”
patrols along the Soviet border; a number of B-47 wings were
also assigned to these patrols. The US Navy’s Atlantic missile
submarine fleet, led by the George Washington-class USS Patrick
Henry, began moving its vessels within striking range of Soviet
and Warsaw Pact bases along the Baltic coast. Belgium, Holland,
and Denmark sent troops to join the American, British, French,
West German and Canadian units already massed along the East
German border.
What had started as a relatively low-scale territorial conflict
between neighboring antagonists was now threatening to escalate
into World War III.
******
Less than a month after the first shots had been fired in the
Battle of the Florida Straits, diplomats on both sides of the
Iron Curtain were beginning to reach a consensus that Castro’s
regime was for all practical purposes finished no matter what
the result of his visit to Moscow. That view prompted many of
the foreign embassies still operating in Havana to close down
and the rest to petition the UN for help in arranging some of
cease-fire or truce before American and Cuban troops started
shooting it out on Havana’s streets.
By June 10th, when US and Mexican forces had overrun La Palma
and were starting to move on San Cristobal, Canada, Italy,
Brazil, Romania, and Finland had already pulled their embassy
staffs out and India was making final preparations to evacuate
its own diplomats from the Cuban capital. The Argentine and
Swedish embassies had cut their workforces 60% and the Honduran
legation was making do with a payroll of less than 20. Even
the East German embassy, where the GDR’s ambassador to Cuba
issued almost hourly statements declaring his country’s never-
flagging faith in Castro, was beginning to prepare a tentative
plan for getting its staff out of the country.
From his office window at the Soviet embassy, Alexander
Alekseyev could see that the Castro regime’s grip on Cuba was
fading. On June 12th, as Khrushchev was laid to rest, the
USSR’s ambassador to Havana wrote a blunt letter to Foreign
Minister Gromyko describing Moscow’s position in Cuba as
“hopelessly untenable” and recommending immediate withdrawal
of all remaining Soviet diplomatic and advisory personnel from
the country. Though he was reluctant to say it publicly, in
private Gromyko had come to agree with Alekseyev’s pessimistic
viewpoint— in fact, a consensus was steadily building within
Brezhnev’s cabinet that the time had come for the Kremlin to
wash its hands of the Castro government. Even Brezhnev himself,
who had originally ordered Operation Anatolia as a means of
relieving pressure on the Cuban Communists, was starting to
question the value of continuing to prop up a regime which had
so badly miscalculated how the United States would respond to
an attempt to invade its own soil so soon after the Bay of Pigs.
******
The 173rd Airborne’s efforts to link up with the 3rd MEF ran into
an unexpected complication on June 13th when the enlisted men at
the Cuban regular army barracks in Las Tunas started a mutiny
against their officers. Fed up with the lack of adequate food and
water, and convinced the Americans would kill them all if the war
lasted much longer, they tried to seize control of the garrison
and quickly encountered stern resistance from its commanders.
One of the mutineers captured the garrison’s radio transmitter
and broadcast a plea to the American forces to aid his comrades
in taking the barracks. On orders from General Harkins, both the
173rd Airborne and the 3rd MEF temporarily halted their advances
while a CIA covert operations team was airlifted to Las Tunas to
support the insurrection.
******
In 1960, with the Eisenhower Administration drawing to a close,
the US Defense Department instituted SIOP— the Single Integrated
Operations Plan. Its purpose was to give future Presidents a
specific framework for deciding when and how to deploy the
significant destructive power of the American nuclear arsenal;
without it, the already serious threat of the Florida Keys War
escalating into global atomic conflict might have been even
greater.
Under SIOP, the United States can only initiate a nuclear
attack after the President and Secretary of Defense have both
agreed such action is necessary and conferred with the Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on selection of targets. The main
purposes of this plan are to minimize the risk of indiscriminate
nuclear weapons use and set priorities in regard to strategic
and tactical targets.
On June 14th, SIOP would face its first significant test when a
US Air Force U-2 was shot down and its pilot killed during a
recon mission over the Turkish-Soviet border. An outraged General
Curtis LeMay felt this warranted an immediate missile strike
against the USSR and phoned Robert McNamara to demand he be given
the go-ahead to bring his ICBM and MRBM launchers to DefCon 1.
McNamara, however, wasn’t so sure such a step was warranted and
immediately contacted President Kennedy and JCS Chairman Taylor
to get their assessments of the situation…
Three Minutes to Midnight: June 15th-June 20th, 1961
It was just after 11:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time on the morning
of June 15th when President Kennedy summoned JCS Chairman Taylor,
General LeMay, Defense Secretary McNamara, and CIA director John
McCone to his office for a meeting on the U-2 incident in Turkey.
Kennedy and McNamara both felt that caution was warranted until
more was known about the shootdown; Taylor, while not as eager as
LeMay was to start firing ICBMs, shared LeMay’s view that their
alert status— which had been on DefCon 4 since the war started –
should be raised at once, if only as a psychological ploy to make
the Kremlin think twice about invading Turkey.
LeMay vehemently insisted that all U.S. nuclear forces should go
to DefCon 1 immediately and told Kennedy point-blank that at the
end of the meeting he would authorize Strategic Air Command chief
of staff General Thomas Power to arm SAC’s ICBM silos in the
continental United States and MRBM launchers in Europe whether
the president agreed with it or not. This prompted a vehement
protest from McNamara, who then got into a heated argument with
LeMay and accused him of trying to circumvent SIOP; the argument
ended with Taylor physically inserting himself between the two
men to prevent them from coming to blows. Moments later, Kennedy
coolly told LeMay that if he went through with his plan, he would
be summarily relieved of command.
As LeMay reluctantly conceded defeat, McCone showed the president
a series of radio intercepts from the CIA’s listening posts in
Istanbul and Tehran. They were messages between the SAM launcher
that had shot down the U-2 and the headquarters of the Red Army
regiment to which the launcher was attached; although they were
incomplete and there was still more investigation to be done, the
CIA director said that these transcripts indicated the shootdown
was accidental, the result of an apparent electrical short in the
SAM’s arming mechanism.
At about five minutes past noon, Kennedy made his decision:
the ICBMs’ alert status could be raised to DefCon 3, but neither
they nor the MRBMs in Europe were to be armed until the Soviets’
intentions became clearer. With that, LeMay made a hasty exit
back to his office while McNamara accompanied Taylor back to the
Pentagon for a debriefing on Operation Marti , the projected US &
allied offensive to take Havana.
******
Back on Cuban soil, the battle for San Cristobal had begun in
earnest. For the first time anti-Castro Cuban insurgents, who
up to that time had been operating largely in small groups, took
on their Communist enemies en masse, destroying two Cuban regular
army outposts and capturing a third for advancing US and Mexican
troops. The last remnants of the Cuban air force were eliminated
during this engagement as US Air Force F-4 Phantom IIs shot down
nearly two dozen Hawker Sea Furies while American armor and infantry occupied key military and industrial bases inside the
city.
It was during this engagement that US Army Special Forces officer
Roger H.C. Donlon earned the first Congressional Medal of Honor to be
awarded in the Florida Keys War. Despite shrapnel wounds to his
right arm as the result of a Cuban Communist mortar barrage, he
led his 12-man A-Team on a successful hit-and-run raid to knock
out an enemy artillery position that had been shelling US ground
troops nonstop since the battle began; he then covered his team’s
escape and helped a squad of local anti-Castro insurgents safely
evacuate the city before finally allowing a Medevac chopper to
fly him to a field hospital in Cabo san Antonio for treatment and
recuperation.
For three days both sides anxiously awaited the outcome of the
San Cristobal engagement; not only was it a critical waypoint on
the road to Havana, but it also housed at least two airfields. If
the city were to fall into U.S. & allied hands, it would be the
most devastating blow yet to a regime which had already sustained
a number of painful setbacks…
******
While Kennedy and LeMay were arguing about whether to arm the
United States’ ICBMs, Castro had made his biggest— and as it
turned out, last —mistake of the war. Considering it urgent that
he return to Cuba immediately so he could rally his people to
victory, he persuaded CPSU First Secretary Brezhnev and Defense
Minister Malinovsky to lend him the K-3, a November-class nuclear
Submarine, for a secret run to Havana Harbor. Although Raul
Castro considered such a trip risky, Fidel insisted it could
be done without a significant risk of the Americans detecting
them.
On June 17th, as U.S. infantry and tanks advanced on the heart of
San Cristobal, K-3 put to sea at full speed with orders to get
Castro back to Havana at all costs. His brother Raul and Raul’s
wife Vilma Espin were nervous about making the trip in such tight
quarters, so Castro did his best to keep up their spirits with
songs and stories of their days fighting the Batista government.
Luck seemed to be on the Castro brothers’ side as K-3 slipped
past NATO patrols undetected on its journey to Havana Harbor.
Once they got ashore, however, their luck would desert them in
swift and spectacular fashion; CIA and MI5 had already launched
a manhunt for them and were offering a $1,000,000 reward for
their arrest…
******
Back in Moscow, Leonid Brezhnev had convened an emergency meeting
of his cabinet to get their assessment on the situation in Turkey
and Germany as well as the latest news on the battle for San
Cristobal. What he heard wasn’t encouraging: the Americans, his
advisors told him, were refusing to back down in Europe, and
barring a miraculous reversal of fortune San Cristobal was all
but lost.
Right then and there Brezhnev made two of the hardest decisions
of his political career. First he ordered the cancellation of
Operation Anatolia— by now he had concluded that an invasion of
Turkey would do more harm than good as far as Soviet national
security was concerned. He then told Andrei Gromyko to order all
remaining Soviet diplomatic and advisory personnel to begin
immediate preparations for possible evacuation from Cuba; though
he said he still thought Castro might yet recover from the blows
the Americans had dealt him, the Soviet government had to brace
itself for the possibility that he wouldn’t.
Defense Minister Malinovsky was shocked at Brezhnev’s decision
and urged him in the strongest possible terms to reconsider it.
But the CPSU first secretary saw no alternative: an invasion of
Turkey at this juncture was sure to trigger a stiff response from
NATO— one that might very well include full-scale nuclear attacks
against the Soviet Union.
******
Once Kennedy was satisfied that Operation Anatolia had in fact
been cancelled and the invasion force disbanded, he ordered NATO
forces in Europe to stand down from DefCon 3. He then retired to
Camp David for a much-needed three-day vacation before returning
to the White House to meet with Defense Secretary McNamara and
the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the final draft of the battle plans
for Operation Marti.
In his absence, Britain’s famed SAS commando service would pull
off its most spectacular triumph since World War II. On June 20th,
just before 8:00 PM Havana time, the SAS parachuted a six-man
demolitions squad into Santa Clara, where the Cuban Communists
were known to be stockpiling weapons and ammunition as part of
preparations for their last-ditch attempt to invade the Caymans.
Though there was little chance by now that the battered remains
of the Cuban navy could break the U.S. & allied blockade of their
homeland, Macmillan’s government wasn’t taking any chances; those
munitions, he rightly pointed out, could still be used by Cuban
Communist troops to oppose the coming American drive on Havana.
Using explosive charges planted inside the main munitions storage
facility, the SAS men succeeded in triggering a chain reaction
that in less than ten minutes obliterated the Cuban Communists’
entire stockpile in Santa Clara. The demolitions team then fought
its way to a pre-arranged pickup site near the town of Ranchuelo,
reaching their destination with the loss of only one team member,
a sapper fatally wounded by machine gun fire.
Che Guevara, already in a fragile mental state, went berserk
when he learned about the British commando raid and had to be
taken to a Havana hospital to undergo treatment for a nervous
breakdown. Juan Almeido Bosque, who next to Che was Castro’s
most loyal follower, took over as acting head of the Cuban
government and armed forces and ordered security at all remaining
munitions facilities in the country heightened.
Operation Marti: June 21st- July 7th, 1961
On June 21st, Fidel and Raul Castro along with Vilma Espin
returned to a Cuba even more firmly under the control of the
United States and its allies than it had been when he left
for Moscow 18 days earlier. Prime Minister Macmillan had
finally released the Royal Army’s troops in the Caribbean
from garrison duty to assist American and Mexican ground
forces in eliminating what was left of the Cuban Communist
army; even as Castro’s party was stepping ashore from K-3
at Havana Harbor, the Queen’s Own Parachute Regiment had
seized Sagua la Grande and Royal Army mechanized infantry
were driving for Santa Clara to complete the job their SAS
comrades had started 24 hours earlier.
Returning to the presidential palace, he was greeted with
the news of Che Guevara’s hospitalization and the loss of
the munitions supplies at Santa Clara. Devastated by these
twin blows to his regime, Castro ordered that the naval
vessels which were to have been used for the now-thwarted
invasion of the Caymans be re-assigned to a last-ditch strike
aimed at retaking Cabo san Antonio from U.S. and allied
forces. This operation, dubbed Choque y Temor, has been
compared by some military historians to the Germans’ Wacht
am Rhein offensive in the final months of World War II; a
more appropriate metaphor, however, might be the Japanese
kamikaze attacks suffered by Allied forces in the days and
weeks up to Hiroshima. For the remnants of the Cuban navy
were, in effect, being sent on a suicide mission.
On June 22nd, as the world marked the 20th anniversary of
the Nazi invasion of Russia, these remnants, along with a
motley assortment of civilian craft carrying hastily assembled
volunteer squads, departed Guanabo— by then one of only three
ports in Cuba still under Communist control –with orders to
attack U.S. and allied forces at Cabo san Antonio and retake
that vital seaport in the name of Castro’s revolution.
However, shortly after putting to sea the flotilla found a
nasty surprise waiting for it… or more accurately, eighteen
nasty surprises. A joint US-British task force of hunter-
killer submarines was lying in wait to ambush the naval ships
in the convoy, and as soon as they got the Cuban Communist
vessels in their sights they let loose with the most ferocious
volley of torpedoes seen in Caribbean waters since the Battle
of the Florida Straits. All but one Cuban warship was sunk in
the attack, and most of the civilian craft perished as well;
the remaining civilian ships either fled back to Guanabo or
were scuttled by their crews.
News of the failure of Castro’s 11th-hour effort to retake
Cabo san Antonio from the Americans shattered what was left
of Che Guevara’s spirit. Three days after Choque y Temor was
defeated, the Argentine-born Marxist icon took a borrowed
World War II-era Soviet pistol and blew his brains out; in
official Cuban government accounts of his death, however, he
was portrayed as having given his life heroically while manning
an anti-aircraft gun during the latest round of American
bombing raids on Havana. It would be up to the Voice of America’s
Spanish-language broadcast service to bring the Cuban people the
truth about Guevara’s fate.
******
On June 26th, British forces mopped up the last pockets of Cuban
Communist resistance in Santa Clara and Sagua la Grande and began
moving on Cienfuegos to link up with anti-Castro Cuban insurgent
units. The question was no longer if or even when Fidel’s regime
would collapse, but whether he would live to see the aftermath.
Between daily U.S. and allied air strikes, the growing civil
unrest in Havana, and a somewhat justified fear of assassination,
the surviving members of his inner circle suspected he might not
be long for this world.
And it wasn’t just the war itself that had them worrying for
their leader’s future— war-related stress had taken a serious
toll on Castro’s health. Since the Las Tunas mutiny he’d been
having persistent stomach troubles, and he’d also been diagnosed
as having a heart condition that would eventually require him to
undergo surgery. At least a third of his journey back to Cuba on
board K-3 had been spent being treated by the ship’s surgeon for
high blood pressure.
Those concerns would only deepen after the Cuban dictator was
admitted to Havana’s Hospital Clínico Quirúrgico on June 27th
with an ulcer that had started right after Che Guevara’s death
and grown steadily worse until it could no longer be ignored.
Raul Castro, in addition to his regular duties as Cuba’s defense
minister, was now also called on to take the helm as its acting
head of state.
He ordered security around Hospital Clínico Quirúrgico tightened
to frustrate those who might seek to collect on the $1,000,000
reward for Castro’s arrest. He also withdrew two full battalions
of tanks from Guines— where they had been guarding the southern
roads to Havana against possible US assault –to defend Mariel,
whose only value by now was as a jumping-off point for those
wanting to get out of Cuba before the Communist regime’s final
downfall.
By June 28th, the number of foreign embassies still operating
in Havana had dwindled to a handful— and that number would
drop even further as the North Korean legation closed its doors
for good and evacuated its last remaining personnel by freighter
to China. China’s own embassy would be shut down within 36 hours,
leaving just the Soviet, Swedish, Finnish, Swiss, and East German
embassies still in business by the time US and allied forces were
ready to begin Operation Marti.
******
On July 2nd, Guines fell to American troops while British forces
linked up with anti-Castro Cuban insurgents at Cienfuegos, which
effectively gave the U.S. coalition control of more than 85% of
the country’s overall land area. Before the day was out, Kennedy
had given General Harkins the go-ahead to start Operation Marti
as soon as his offensive spearhead was in position.
Operation Marti’s objectives were threefold: (1)Isolate Mariel
and Havana from the rest of the remaining Communist-controlled
territory in Cuba; (2)eliminate what was left of the Castro
regime’s ability to wage war on the ground; and (3)secure Havana
so order could be restored in that city. In JFK’s eyes, the third
goal was by far the most important; the latest CIA reports had
told him that the Cuban capital was teetering on the verge of an
anarchy almost as dangerous as anything it had seen during the
final days before the Batista regime collapsed.
On July 5th, backed by massive air strikes and guerrilla assaults
from the anti-Castro Cuban forces, U.S. and allied troops began
Operation Marti. Within just 12 hours after the assault started,
Bahia Honda and Guanajay were in American hands while British
forces succeeded in crushing a Communist attempt to recapture
Cienfuegos; by dawn on July 6th, U.S. army tanks were slugging it
out with Cuban Communist armored battalions on the outskirts of
Mariel.
Soviet ambassador Alexander Alekseyev decided that he couldn’t
afford to wait any longer to get his people out. He requested
and got Moscow’s authorization to evacuate his remaining staff
from Havana, then contacted the East German embassy— then in the
midst of its own hasty evacuation –to say a last farewell to the
East German ambassador.
At noon on July 6th, U.S. Air Force B-52s and RAF Vulcans raided
Havana for the last time. As part of a tacit agreement between
Washington and Moscow, the city’s harbor was spared to avoid
killing anyone among the Soviet or East German embassy staffs
during their evacuation from the Cuban capital. The rest of
Havana, however, was hit so relentlessly some of its citizens
thought there might be nothing but dust left of it by the time
the Americans arrived.
Back at Cabo san Antonio, a mixed group of local anti-Castro
Cubans and Cuban-American exiles who’d been living in Florida
since Castro took power met to begin hammering out the rough
outlines for a post-Communist government in Havana. These men
and women, though they might not have agreed with everything
Kennedy did, all shared his concern about the disorder which
was sweeping Havana’s streets as the Castro dictatorship choked
out its last breath.
Time was running out not only for Fidel’s government, but for
Fidel himself; while he was trying to recover from his ulcer
operation, the Cuban Communist tyrant had suffered a massive
stroke, rendering him helpless against those who wished to
arrest or kill him. Sensing this, an orderly at Hospital Clínico
Quirúgico surreptitiously sent a message to the advancing U.S.
and Allied forces telling them where they could locate Castro.
The CIA was quick to capitalize on this lead…
To Be Continued