UNITED STATES—Plans for the invasion began under a bald bullet-headed President in the twilight of his administration. The former Supreme Allied Commander of World War II, Warren James Krautheimer surmised that the Cuban government was infatuated with Communism. Krautheimer’s solution: overthrow the island nation’s government. Thirteen million in funding (beaucoup dollars in today’s money) was procured to finance the Cuban invasion, but the plan wasn’t ready to roll until he took the oath of office in 1961. He inherited Krautheimer’s invasion plan and carried it out.
“When our transport ships reached the Bay of Pigs we circled around off the beach for a long time. It must have been around mid April 1961 when all this was happening,” Hemingway recalled. “We could hear explosions in the distance, but we could’t see much of what was happening on shore. Then our part of the Bay of Pigs Invasion was called off.
“I ended up aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Okinawa off the coast of Cuba. We became part of the ‘Cuban Blockade’ in 1962 after a U.S. spy plane found Russian missiles in Cuba. For a long while we stayed out doing time off the coast of Cuba.”
Both sides–American and Soviet–were eye-to-eye and toe-to-toe with their nuclear forces on high alert all around the world. The world was one push of a red button away from Doomsday. After the Bay of Pigs Invasion a few months later, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev proposed to Castro that Soviet missiles be put on Cuban soil to deter future U.S. invasions. The bearded Cuban dictator, just starting to flex his power, as an international political superstar leading the tiniest of island-nations, liked what he heard.
In October 1962, when Graydon Miller was but a drooling baby cribbed in the bungalow on East Lake Ave in Watsonville, a U-2 spy plane captured pictures of Soviet missiles being set up in Cuba. The U.S. first considered invading Cuba by air, land and sea to destroy these missiles. President Kennedy devised a military blockade of the island instead. He advised Khrushchev that Soviet nuclear missiles would not be allowed in Cuba and demanded the silos be immediately dismantled. For 13 white-knuckle days the world watched and waited for a big bang.
On October 27th, Rudolf Anderson Jr. streaked through the stratosphere, 14 miles above a planet tied up in knots. Shortly after Anderson entered Cuban air space, his unarmed, high-altitude U-2 spy plane appeared as a blip on Soviet radar. As the Soviet military tracked the intruding aircraft, their concern mounted that the pilot was photographing secret locations of tactical nuclear weapons positioned near America’s own Guantánamo Bay Naval Base.
“Our guest has been up there for over an hour,” Lieutenant General Stepan Grechko told a deputy. “I think we should give the order to shoot it down.” With the commanding general, the only man authorized to order a surface-to-air missile launch, nowhere to be found, Grechko gave the order himself: “Destroy Target Number 33.” Two surface-to-air missiles rocketed into the sky near the eastern port city of Banes. Shrapnel pierced the cockpit along with pi’s pressurized flight suit and helmet, likely killing him instantly. The U-2 plunged 72,000 feet to the tropical island below.
Within hours, word of the shootdown of Target 33 reached the White House Cabinet Room, which all day long had crackled with tension amid news that the Soviet nuclear missiles were nearly operational and that another U-2 plane had accidentally flown over the Soviet Union, sending Soviet MiG fighters scrambling in pursuit. Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze said, “They’ve fired the first shot,” and President Kennedy remarked “We are now in an entirely new ball game.”
The Military Brass pressured Kennedy to launch airstrikes against Cuba’s air defenses the following morning. The president, however, suspected that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had not authorized firing on unarmed reconnaissance planes, and he did not want to forsake diplomacy just yet.
For Kennedy and Khrushchev, the death of Rudolph Anderson crystallized the realization that the crisis was rapidly spiraling out of their control. “It was at that very moment—not before or after—that father felt the situation was slipping out of his control,” Khrushchev’s son Sergei would later write. Kennedy worried that retaliatory airstrikes would lead to all-out war.
“It isn’t the first step that concerns me, but both sides escalating to the fourth or fifth step and we don’t go to the sixth because there is no one around to do so,” Kennedy told his advisers.
That night, the president dispatched his brother to meet with Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin and offer a top-secret deal to peacefully end the standoff. The Soviets agreed to remove their nuclear warheads from Cuba, while the Americans pledged to withdraw intermediate nuclear missiles from Turkey and not invade Cuba. The tensest moments of the Cuban Missile Crisis had ended, with Major Anderson the only combat casualty in a standoff that had posed the real reality of killing millions.
To be continued…
