Playa Girón

Show notes

The CIA officer who ran the paramilitary side, Jack Hawkins, wrote the operator’s after-action on May 5, 1961: “Troops commenced landing at 0100.” The underwater demolition team found a coral reef about a hundred yards off Blue Beach — Playa Girón — and then a jeep’s headlights found them. The CIA’s later Battle Report put it plainly: “whether or not surprise had been lost before, it was certainly lost now.” The Barbara J, an infantry landing craft, escorted the Houston — carrying the 2nd and 5th Battalions Reinforced — up the bay toward Red Beach at Playa Larga, where the recon team walked into an enemy force the Americans estimated at 800 troops and 12 tanks; 270 brigade men got ashore anyway.

At 0149, headquarters flashed a warning the fleet would spend the day wishing it had heeded sooner: Castro’s air force had not been destroyed. Every transport except the Río Escondido was ordered south; she stayed at Blue Beach to unload “vital reserve supplies.”

“Enemy air attacks against the invasion force commenced at 0630 and continued all day.” The first ship they found was the Houston. Hawkins: “The HOUSTON was hit by rockets from enemy aircraft at 0630.” Her rudder destroyed, she lost steerage and her captain grounded her about a hundred yards off the beach. The pilot, the CIA’s official history confirms, was Enrique Carreras Rojas — the name we use all season.

The Houston’s details won’t settle. The April 25th Taylor Committee reconstruction said she was hit by a bomb, with approximately 130 personnel aboard — and CIA officer Grayston Lynch’s May 4 after-action agrees. Hawkins said rockets; the Battle Report says about 220 men aboard. The record holds both and reconciles neither. What is settled: she was beached, not sunk — though at 10:17 that morning the CIA told the Joint Chiefs both ships had been sunk, and the correction came only from the participants weeks later.

Hawkins: “This ship, with ten days reserve supplies on board was sunk by enemy air attack at 0930.” Carreras, rearmed with eight five-inch rockets, put them into the Río Escondido, and the official history says she “went up with a bang and down like a rock.” Every man aboard was rescued; the cargo — 15,000 rations, 170 tons of gasoline, 380 tons of ammunition — was virtually all lost. The Taylor Committee, two months later: “The ammunition shortage was the proximate cause of defeat.” Cuban-published manifests give their own figures for the two ships’ cargoes — worth hearing, because at least one famous memoir later collapsed both cargoes into a single ship carrying everything.

At Red Beach the 2nd Battalion beat off successive militia attacks — 500–600 in the morning, 1,500 in an ambush at 1400, five enemy tanks destroyed — at the cost of 25 of its own killed and its ammunition “gravely depleted.” The airborne drop is three versions of one event: four of five drop zones per CIA records, an all-at-the-near-end jump under fire per the Battle Report (“at least ten men were killed before they reached the ground”), and Lynch on the beach writing only that “little detailed information is available.”

Washington spent the day nearly blind. At 9:11 a.m. Bundy told Rusk: “not too much is coming in from there — can’t tell too much about what is happening.” The afternoon’s rules of engagement for the U.S. carriers — 50 miles off, 15-mile aircraft line, attack only on bomb-bay-doors or a strafing run — reached the admiral on the scene 81 minutes after they were sent, and carried the deniability clause: “If unfriendly aircraft is shot down every effort shall be made to hide the fact that such action has occurred.” By 6 p.m. the four surviving ships were 55 miles off the bay, heading south at five knots. That evening’s telegram ordered the Barbara J to attempt one more Blue Beach offload, then retire by 0700 Zulu — 2 a.m. local — toward Point Zulu; it closed, tellingly: “Request latest situation report.”

The Taylor Committee blamed the ammunition shortage. The Agency’s DDP rejoinder blamed the policy that left Castro’s jets alive: “its ammunition was lost at sea to Castro’s T-33 jets — aircraft that the Agency had planned to destroy but was not allowed to attack at the critical moment.” The Inspector General judged the Agency had gotten so wrapped up in running the operation it failed to appraise its chances realistically. And Taylor himself, eleven years later, disagreed with his own committee: the operation’s “fundamental weaknesses made for a fragility which invited disaster with the first adverse turn of luck.” The paper never picks one.