Essay: BAY OF PIGS REVISITED: Lessons from a Failure

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With the U.S. caught in the act of sponsoring the first B-26 raid, reports Schlesinger, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, backed by McGeorge Bundy, convinced the President that the D-day morning raid "would put the U.S. in an untenable position." Everyone, says Sorensen, would have regarded it as "an overt, unprovoked attack by the U.S. on a tiny neighbor." Kennedy canceled the second strike; he changed his mind later, but after the strike was reinstated, it was rendered useless by bad weather. Sorensen carefully points out that Kennedy did not—as is often maintained—"cancel U.S. air cover" for the landing, for the simple reason that such U.S. air cover had never been planned; the cancellation involved only the second strike against Cuban airports.

The results of this cancellation are in dispute. Schlesinger says that the "second strike might have protracted the stand on the beachhead from three days to ten." Sorensen writes that "there is no reason to believe that Castro's air force, having survived the first air strike and been dispersed into hiding, would have been knocked out by the second one." But Richard M. Bissell Jr., at the time of the Bay of Pigs the CIA deputy who planned the operation, takes another view —as do most professional military men. Now a United Aircraft Corp. executive, Bissell argued last week in a Washington Evening Star interview that the scrub of the second strike may have made the critical difference: "If we had been able to drop five times the tonnage of bombs on Castro's airfields, we would have had a damned good chance."

Apart from the unsuccessful effort to knock off Castro's little air force before the battle began, it was well recognized that the invasion force would require its own air cover. For that, Kennedy at first stipulated that those same, Cuban-piloted B-26s do the job. On D-day plus one, it became clear that the invasion force was desperately pinned down on the beach by unexpectedly stiff fire and Castro air attacks. Then, in a post-midnight meeting, Kennedy, as Sorensen says, "agreed finally that unmarked Navy jets could protect the B-26s when they provided the cover the next morning." Schlesinger elaborates a bit: the President authorized "a flight of six unmarked jets from the Carrier Essex over the invasion area . . . Their mission would be to cover a new B-26 attack from Nicaragua. They were not to seek air combat or ground targets, but could defend the Cuban brigade's planes from air attack."

That was cutting it pretty close. Anyhow, it didn't work; through some sort of slipup, the U.S. Navy jets arrived on the scene about an hour after the Cuban exiles' B-26s, which by then had mostly been shot down.

Questions of Commitment