The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

by Max Boot

When the operation went ahead anyway, it would amply vindicate Lansdale’s warnings. The plan had been for brigade B-26 bombers flying out of Nicaragua to destroy Castro’s air force on the ground. But at the last minute President Kennedy became worried about exposing American complicity and ordered three-quarters of the initial air strikes canceled. Lacking air cover, the invaders were trapped in the open on a beach where, as Lansdale had predicted, they were “clobbered” by twenty thousand Cuban troops equipped with tanks, machine guns, artillery, and aircraft. On April 17, Kennedy relented and allowed the B-26s to fly again, but many of these slow, propeller-driven aircraft were blasted out of the sky by Castro’s T-33 jet trainers, which, unbeknownst to the Americans, had been equipped with 20-mm cannons. On April 19, after the invaders had already suffered a shellacking, Kennedy reluctantly authorized six unmarked Navy jets to spend exactly one hour over the beachhead without, however, giving them authorization to shoot down Cuban aircraft. By April 20, it was all over. Only a few of the exiles escaped to sea to be rescued by the U.S. Navy; 114 men were killed, and almost all of the rest (1,189) captured. That Castro’s forces suffered heavier casualties was no consolation. It was, as the historian Theodore Draper wrote a few weeks later, “one of those rare politico-military events—a perfect failure.”