The Bay of Pigs by Jones Howard;
Author:Jones, Howard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2008-03-01T16:00:00+00:00
III
Who bore responsibility for this debacle? The president? The CIA? The Joint Chiefs of Staff? Or Castro? As in most events that shape history, everyone involved shares some degree of accountability.
Many participants vented their anger on President Kennedy. One of the American pilots, Albert Persons, criticized him for switching the invasion from Trinidad to Zapata and then refusing to take decisive military action. Persons exonerated the CIA by asserting that the Cuban invasion "was allowed to fail." The fiasco stemmed from "timidity, indecisiveness and poor judgment at the highest, policy-making levels of government—which is at the White House, in the White House staff and the President's cabinet." After changing the invasion site and ordering a night-time landing, Kennedy reduced the scale of the D-2 raids, canceled the D-l and D-Day strikes, and sent the brigade ashore without adequate air protection. Captain Edward Ferrer of the rebel air force concurred, expressing the commonly held views of his Cuban colleagues that President Kennedy's decision to call off the D-Day strikes "doomed the invasion to failure." Esterline had earlier given this same gloomy assessment, and Hawkins added another dimension to this explanation by claiming that the State Department "crippled and destroyed" the operation by convincing the president to terminate the air strikes.38
Brigade commanders likewise attributed the failed expedition to President Kennedy's decision to call off the D-Day strikes. "Without air support," Pepe moaned, "we were sure of going to our death." They had received assurances that the planes would destroy all of Castro's defense capabilities. But that did not happen. Another Cuban leader noted that the planes were to take out the airfields and the tanks. "That was the initial plan, so why didn't they tell us we couldn't carry on with the invasion because the air strikes were stopped?" U.S. jets could have helped. "We could have arranged to take all the insignia off." Without air defenses, "it's just like sending a bunch of human beings to get killed."39
A consensus quickly developed that the lack of air support proved pivotal to the failure. Lynch asserted that the men could have made it ashore despite the enemy's B-26s and Sea Furies, if they had had air protection against the T-33s. General Thomas White, air force chief of staff, thought the D-Day strikes critical to the plan and argued that, without them, the D-2 raids served only to warn Castro of the invasion. It was "difficult to say what an air strike on D-Day at dawn would have done, but it might very well have made the difference." Burke had counted on the air force to disable Castro's planes, and Hawkins insisted that "the real key was control of the air." In a perplexing change of form, Bissell, who had put up only token resistance to both reducing the D-2 strikes and canceling the D-Day raids, joined military figures in considering the air war a decisive factor. Instead of more than forty sorties before the invasion, the number catapulted down to eight and became "the operation's death sentence.
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