“Now operating from “Punto Uno”, Castro made his next telephone call to the air force base at San Antonio de los Banos where the exiles’ B-26s had attacked on Saturday. Poised on the runway were two Sea Furys, two B-26s, and three T-33 jet trainers. And the T-33s were Fidel’s secret weapon in the context of his very imaginative overall aerial strategy. He had decided that the rocket-equipped Sea Furys would concentrate on attacking the eight-vessel invasion fleet to sink as many as quickly as possible while the three T-33s [one was destroyed on Saturday] were to neutralize enemy aviation. CIA and Pentagon planners had assumed that Castro’s small air force would be destroyed on the ground, and it had never occurred to them that whatever planes were left would be used against the ships. The vessels therefore had no anti-aircraft weapons. As to the jet trainers, the Americans never suspected that Castro had them armed with two .50 caliber machine guns each. With this armament and a jet’s maneuverability and speed, the T-33s were vastly superior to the lumbering B-26s that began at first daylight flying exhausting round-trip combat missions between Nicaragua and the Bay of Pigs. In this fashion the little jets played a key role in Castro’s victory, depriving the brigade of air support, and allowing the Sea Furies to go unchallenged after the ships. Testifying in May before a presidential inquiry board, the Air Chief of Staff, General Thomas White, remarked, “Well, I really believe that the Cuban air force had a whale of an effect on the bad outcome. . . . I was surprised to find that [the T-33s] were armed. He acknowledged that the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not consider the T-33s to be “combat aircraft.” National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy wrote in a formal statement to General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the inquiry board, that “one startling omission . . . is the failure of any of the President’s advisers to warn of the danger of the T-33s.” Castro made a point of personally urging his pilots to find and destroy the ships, impatient over every minute elapsing. He knew the pilots from earlier visits to the base, and he wanted to impress on them how vital it was to deprive the invaders of the ships still carrying weapons, ammunition, food, and stores; this was consistent with his plan of isolating the brigade on the beachhead and then smashing it. His greatest concern was that the exiles might succeed in establishing positions on the high ground in the Zapata swamps beyond the beachhead and controlling the three paved highways linking the Bay of Pigs with firm land in the north and east. If they achieved it and continued to be supplied from the sea, it might have become impossible to dislodge them. Castro correctly guessed the enemy plan, and acted accordingly. At 4:30 A.M., Fidel called the air base and demanded to talk to Captain Enrique Carreras, the senior pilot, who had been sitting strapped inside the cockpit of his single-seat Sea Fury. Carreras raced to the phone to hear Castro tell him, “chico, you must sink those ships for me! . . .” At the first light, minutes before 6:00 A.M., Carreras took off in his Sea Fury armed with rockets and four 20mm canon, followed by another Sea Fury and a B-26. Reaching the Bay of Pigs, Carreras saw landing craft moving towards the beaches, and a large freighter approaching Playa Larga. He missed on the first pass, but on the second pass his rockets hit the freighter, which was the Houston carrying the Brigades Fifth Battalion and its equipment, and seconds later the second Sea Fury scored, too. At 6:30 A,M., the Houston ran aground five miles south of Playa Larga, and the battalion could never land to join the fray. Barbara J, a landing craft infantry [LCI] serving as a CIA command vessel, was damaged by Sea fury machine-gun fire, began to take water, and fled for the open sea. Carreras returned to San Antonio to refuel and rearm, and he was back over the Bay at 9:30 A.M., this time hitting and sinking the freighter Rio Escondido, which carried ten days supply of ammunition for the Brigade and essential communications gear. At that juncture, other invasion ships steamed out of the bay, leaving some 1,350 Brigade men stranded on shore. Not even Castro understood it yet, but the battle of the Bay of Pigs was won by the Sea Furys eight hours after the first landings. Captain Carreras was hit in an engine from fire from a Brigade B-26, but he limped home to San Antonio where ground crews rushed to repair the plane. Then the T-33s took to the air to cope with the exile’s B-26s , shooting down four of them during the day. Castro lost two Sea Furys [not Carreras’s; twenty-five years later he is still flying, now as an airline pilot out of Havana] and two B-26s, but strategically it no longer mattered. His aerial secret weapons had accomplished their mission.”
Excerpted from “Fidel, A Critical Portrait”. Author, Tad Szulc. Publisher: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 105 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016.
The B26s were flown by American mercenaries. Islander.