Thirty years ago the Soviet Union, under Nikita Khrushchev, supplied Fidel Castro's regime with materials to build missile launching sites on Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. In response to what was seen as a direct threat to U.S. security, President John F. Kennedy directed the U.S. Navy on 24 October 1962 to institute a quarantine of the island.
The following excerpts are firsthand accounts by naval officers involved with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Each man's memoirs are part of the Naval Institute’s oral history collection and can be borrowed by writing: Director of Oral History, U.S. Naval Institute, 118 Maryland Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21402-5035, or phoning (410) 268-6110, ext. 255.
This Joint Chief Took a Bolder Stance
By Admiral George W. Anderson, Jr., U.S. Navy (Retired)
One of the most important aspects of my tour as Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Early in 1962 it was quite apparent that the United States as a whole, and the Navy in particular, was extremely disappointed with the outcome of the Bay of Pigs fiasco the year before. It had been a matter of continuing concern, and I personally sensed a high manifestation of the competitiveness of President John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy to make up for what had gone on.
As a matter of fact, as soon as I became a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in August 1961, it was clear that there was a weekly meeting at the higher political State Department policy level as to what could be done to redress the situation. Indeed, solicitations were being made quietly as to any idea that could be offered to provoke Cuba into giving the United States an excuse to take appropriate action.
These meetings continued, and then along in the month of September 1962, there came an increasing number of reports—voiced particularly by Republican Senator Kenneth Keating of New York— about the buildup of Russian forces in Cuba, including missiles. The fact that Fidel Castro had gone to Moscow in July was regarded as a significant event by the Joint Chiefs, because the rapid buildup seemed to come out of that.
We in the military were more or less sympathetic toward what Keating was saying. On the other hand, the actions of the administration—and remarks by administration spokesmen—emphasized again and again that only defensive weapons had gone into Cuba.
At the time, we were trying to get surveillance of Cuba through our U-2 photo reconnaissance activities and from other intelligence sources. There was somewhat of a hiatus in U-2 flights and, therefore, it was not until October that we had clear evidence that, indeed, the Russians had put surface-to-surface missiles in Cuba. Well, you might say that Washington went immediately to general quarters, and for a period of days the Joint Chiefs were meeting regularly. General Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Chiefs, was meeting with the special group, and he would report to us what they wanted in the way of information and what their opinions were.
But the other members of the JCS felt that, for one reason or another—partially, perhaps, because of General Taylor’s hearing impediment—we were not getting the full story, as it were. Perhaps he was so busy with a great variety of things that he didn’t realize that he wasn't telling us everything, though he thought he probably was. There was an inadequacy, in my opinion, in that flow of information to the Chiefs. In any event, we in the Chiefs deliberated at great length on what the options were, what could and should be done, and there was, admittedly, a variation in the actions that we believed should be taken.
At the same time, there was a tremendous buildup of military forces in the environs of Cuba and south Florida and the Caribbean. We in the Navy were reasonably fortunate that we had forces available at that time to make redeployments. We were prepared for any one of the contingency situations that had been voiced or considered in any way by the JCS or, as we heard, were being considered by the special group.
We were able, quietly at first and then more dramatically, to get ships to sea and to move airplane squadrons, particularly Marine battalions. We had alerted Marines from the West Coast, from the Pacific Fleet, to be able to move to the Atlantic Coast. We had reasonably accurate timetables of what each course of action or each plan would require in the way of time. Preparatory steps were being taken because we didn’t know just what course of action would be developed.
There was, of course, the idea of a quick air strike, advocated the most by General Curtis LeMay, Air Force Chief of Staff. There were also the ideas of perhaps an all-out invasion of Cuba, or a blockade—we didn’t use the term “quarantine” in the initial stage. We recognized that the decisions that were to be made were going to be made by the President, and we hoped that the input of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be completely and adequately considered. That, of course, had to be presented by JCS Chairman Taylor, although later on during the crisis we all met with President Kennedy.
We had very good intelligence reports at every JCS meeting, especially during the September and October period. Tom Hughes was over in the Defense Intelligence Agency and regularly presented photographic intelligence that was available to us. And, of course, we had the special intelligence that came in.
I personally felt that we should use this particular crisis to solve the Cuban problem. That, in my mind, was a primary consideration. We’d had Castro come in, we’d had a Communist-Marxist government established 90 miles off the coast of Florida, we’d had increased involvement in Cuba in the Soviet Communist empire, you might say. I saw it as a portent of further involvement of Communist domination in Latin and Central America, the threat to the Panama Canal, control of the Caribbean, and, in my opinion, that threat should be removed as rapidly as we could.
A second concern of mine was the security of our people on the base at Guantanamo at the eastern end of Cuba and the importance of retaining that base for the Navy for the future. We didn’t want to give a sign of weakness or an indication that we were going to give up Guantanamo prematurely, yet we didn’t want dependents there at the time any guns might be fired. We worked that out very well; actually, the whole evacuation at Guantanamo did not receive too much publicity because we did it swiftly, and it was well organized. We used the ships and the airplanes that had brought in additional reinforcing Marines to take the dependents out.
I would have liked to see, first, a dramatic buildup of our forces in Guantanamo Bay and second, a massive invasion of Cuba coupled with a massive propaganda campaign of all sorts—leaflets, radio broadcasts—to get the support of the Cuban people over the Soviet domination of Castro’s government. And I would have followed up the invasion, which would have been amphibious and airborne, with a large civil defense program, medical aid, food, and so forth, and reestablishment, forthwith, of a free Cuban civilian government.
I don’t think I espoused that actively enough, because it was overtaken by the actions up at the White House level. I also did not feel that this thought was adequately put forth by either Chairman Taylor or Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. We were prepared to do whatever we were told, however.
Finally, we met with the President, and he said that he understood that there were differences of views among the Joint Chiefs of Staff about what he had decided to do, but he had decided to take this initial step of quarantine. This did not preclude other actions that might be necessary if that didn’t work, however. As we left the White House after that particular meeting, the President said to me, “Admiral, this is up to the Navy,” to which I replied, “Mr. President, the Navy will not let you down.”
I came back, and Secretary McNamara said—I think it was directly, or it may very well have been through General Taylor—that he ordered the Navy to take care of the blockade, or the quarantine, and that General LeMay would take care of reconnaissance, of the flying. So I went back to the CNO’s office, and I took the three most reliable senior officers I had to maintain a round-the-clock watch in the office when I was not there and to maintain continuing liaison with the flag plot, where we had our central command and control.
We had a pretty formidable position at that time. For example, we had all our available Polaris submarines at sea, we had a defensive submarine barrier across the Atlantic, and we had our patrol squadrons scouring the Atlantic from the best available bases for reconnaissance of ships, particularly for Russian submarines. We had some 11 Marine battalions committed in varying degrees of proximity to Cuba, from on the scene in Guantanamo to those moving down from the San Diego area toward the Panama Canal. They were all in a high degree of readiness.
I was determined that we were not going to let any Soviet submarines get in and start operating out of bases in Cuba. We concentrated our whole antisubmarine coverage to the point that every Soviet submarine in the western Atlantic was made to surface at least once, and several times in some instances. I had excellent cooperation from Admiral Robert Dennison, Commander-in-Chief Atlantic Fleet, in that regard. We were 100% successful.
We had adequate naval forces on active duty ready to cope with any situation in that area. I had no apprehension that the Navy could not cope with any eventuality that might evolve. In one incident, we knew where one nuclear-powered Soviet submarine was located. We had a destroyer sitting on top of it. One evening. Secretary McNamara, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, and an entourage of his press people came down to flag plot. In the course of their interrogations, they asked why that destroyer was out of line. I tried to pass it off because not only were some of McNamara’s people not cleared for this highly classified intelligence information, but also some of my own watch officers in flag plot were not cleared.
After some discussion, I said to Secretary McNamara, who kept pressing me, “Come inside.” I explained the whole thing to him, and to his satisfaction as well. As we walked down the corridor, I said, “Well, Mr. Secretary, you go back to your office and I’ll go to mine, and we’ll take care of things,” or words to that effect. Apparently, this was the wrong thing to say to somebody of McNamara’s personality. I heard nothing of it until after my disagreements with McNamara over the development of the TFX fighter plane. Then the story was leaked to the press through McNamara’s own public information people that I had insulted him by making this remark over the incident in flag plot. It’s still there, and they’re still correcting it in most stories that come out about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
There was no real concern in those initial stages about what the land-based planes in Cuba might be able to do against the fleet. But this did arise when we were establishing the so-called quarantine line. From a naval point of view, I wanted the line far enough out so that land-based planes, especially the fighter-type planes that the Cubans had, could not interfere with the surface ships from a practical point of view. In other words, we would have a measure of security wherever the line was established. On the civilian side, the idea was to move the line back toward Cuba to delay a confrontation with the Soviet ships that had been steaming there. Actually, I think the line was set up at about 500 miles from the eastern end of Cuba, which was not too bad.
I wasn’t particularly concerned that they were going to really damage our ships, but it made our whole operation a lot more manageable. We didn’t have to put fighter cover over all these destroyers, for example, out on the line. It would have been better if we’d had it where the Navy had proposed, but it wasn’t a matter of vital concern. They wanted to delay any confrontation so that the word could get back to the Soviet Union that they’d better call it off and then, in turn, get the word back to the ships.
I felt, and I still feel, that we had an opportunity then to get rid of the intrusion of Communism that had taken place in Cuba on a massive scale and, therefore, prevent it from spreading in other areas of Latin America and, although we didn’t realize it at the time, Cuban intervention later in Angola and Ethiopia.
This is what I tried to emphasize to Secretary McNamara, personally, but he was really preoccupied with something else, I guess, at the time, and I didn’t get it across to him. What I would have done is pose a major challenge to Cuba and a secondary challenge to the Soviet Union. In other words, if the Soviets kept out, we were not going to attack them. We would let them get out afterwards, but we were going after Cuba, as such, and I don’t think under those circumstances the Russians would have intervened—if we’d done it in the right way.
We in the Chiefs, particularly General LeMay and myself, would have liked more reconnaissance than was permitted, particularly low-level reconnaissance. This was restrained by the White House. Every flight had to be justified to a great degree. They were trying to exercise too much detailed control.
For example, I sent out a directive to make sure that there were qualified Russian-language officers on each ship involved in the quarantine, in case there had to be interrogation. I made Russian-language people from the Naval Academy available to Admiral Dennison. We gave them temporary duty. As CNO, I didn’t go around and personally try to check on every ship to find out if a Russian-language officer was on board. After all, I had a four-star, experienced commander- in-chief in Admiral Dennison. I had no thought of saying, “Well, did you carry out my order? Did each one arrive on each ship?” Dennison said he’d get them on there, and that was enough for me. But Secretary McNamara wanted me to get into every detail; he wanted me to interrogate each ship. This is an over-preoccupation of detail that I don't think the civilian authorities should get into in a case of this sort.
In my second year in office, I endeavored to emphasize the importance of people in the uniformed services maintaining their integrity, recognizing properly their responsibilities to the Congress, to the civilian authorities. I was very, very careful how I set these things forth: to be proper but forthright through the whole experience.
In the spring of 1963 I was invited to attend the annual Navy League Convention in Puerto Rico. During the course of my speech. Secretary of the Navy Fred Korth received a message from my public relations officer that he had a telephone call from Washington. Immediately thereafter, he wanted to know where he could find a telephone to make some special calls. Secretary Korth went into Rear Admiral Allen Smith’s office and picked up the red telephone. Unbeknownst to him, every time the red phone is lifted, a flash goes on the flag plot in the Navy Department situation room, and the officer of the watch is instructed to monitor the call.
Secretary Korth was calling Admiral David McDonald in London with instructions to get back to Washington, in civilian clothes, and not to let the CNO know that he was coming. When the message was delivered, the CNO duty officer called his boss, who was Admiral Don Griffin, who phoned Captain Ike Kidd in my office, who called me in Puerto Rico. I knew immediately what was going on, because we had other sources of information over many, many months. I learned that Korth and Gilpatric were coming around to my house on Sunday to inform me that I would either be fired or not be reappointed.
I flew back to Washington Saturday morning and debated the desirability of getting to the President first. But I decided not to make a statement to the President at that point. So when I got a call saying that the Secretary of the Navy and the Deputy Secretary of Defense would like to come around to my quarters Sunday afternoon, I was all set to receive them. I greeted them at the door very cordially, took them out on the porch, sat them down in comfortable chairs, and said to Korth, “I understand that you’ve come to tell me I’m fired.”
Amphibious Commander at the Ready
By Admiral Horacio Rivero, Jr., U.S. Navy (Retired)
On 12 October 1962 I was detached from my duty as deputy chief of staff of the Atlantic Fleet and the (unified) Atlantic Command, and on the following day I became Commander Amphibious Force Atlantic Fleet (ComPhibLant). At that time, an amphibious exercise was planned for around the 23rd to the 25th of October in Vieques Island, off the east coast of Puerto Rico, in which we would land a reinforced battalion of Marines. Three days after I took command, I sailed from Norfolk in charge of the forces that were going to be in that exercise. I had, of course, a nucleus from my Amphibious Force staff on board the flagship.
Having been involved in the planning for possible operations against Cuba, I knew that I had to be prepared to go to Guantanamo, if ordered, to evacuate the dependents and possibly to land some of the Marines that we had on board to reinforce the Marines already there. That would have caused a cancellation of the exercise, but I couldn’t tell anybody. So we proceeded down to Vieques, and I had the problem of how to be in a position to carry out the landing on time— including the rehearsals to be done the day before the scheduled day for the landing, with newspapermen on board—while at the same time not being too far out of position to rush to Guantanamo and evacuate the dependents. All this without being able to disclose the possibility to anyone on board.
I tried to keep an equal distance between Guantanamo and Vieques as long as I could. And then, when I got down near Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo, instead of heading directly for Vieques, I went down between the two islands and operated from the south of Santo Domingo, steaming in one direction at night toward Guantanamo, and during the day toward Vieques. That way I would always be in the proper position to make the distance to Vieques in time to conduct the rehearsal, while not getting very far from Guantdnamo. It was tricky.
I got away with it because none of the journalists thought of looking at the navigation charts in the ship’s bridge. I couldn't have kept the secret much longer, but I was saved by the fact that the President came on the air on 22 October and announced the actions that we were prepared to take in connection with Cuba. As a result of that, the rehearsal was canceled. I don’t know if the exercise was ever formally canceled or not. It wasn’t held, I think, because by that time I had to dispatch a couple of ships to Guantanamo.
So I returned to Norfolk, and by then the fact that the preparations for Cuba were under way was an open fact. I realized that my staff was inadequate to conduct the kind of operation that we might have to do. There was no time to go through the normal procedure to get a proper staff. What I did on the way back from our trip to Vieques was to have my staff draw up plans for an organization which would be suitable to conduct a real amphibious operation on the island of Cuba with the Fleet Marine Force.
They came up with what I thought was too limited a number of people, so I told them to multiply that by three, which they did. Then I think I processed that through channels. In the meantime, I had to get going, so I raided the amphibious ships that were in overhaul, or on restricted availability, and also the staff of the amphibious training commander. Gradually, I acquired a suitable staff to conduct operations.
Since I felt I had to go to sea as soon as possible with the amphibious force, I asked Admiral Robert Dennison, the fleet commander-in-chief, for permission to make Rear Admiral Jim Dempsey, the commander of the Amphibious Training Command, deputy ComPhibLant. Admiral Dennison approved. I gave Dempsey orders to deal with the Marines and arrange for their embarkation, so that I didn’t have to worry about that phase. He did a very fine job. I took care of sharpening up the planning and getting ready to go to sea with the fighting force.
Vice Admiral Alfred “Corky” Ward was at sea in charge of the quarantine as Commander Second Fleet, so it fell on me to do the planning, not only for the amphibious forces of which I was the commander and the planner, but also for the naval task force, which the commander of the Second Fleet would have normally commanded. The amphibious force was part of the naval task force, which would also include a carrier task force, submarines, and the logistics force, plus 100 or so merchant ships that were supposed to participate, carrying supplies and so forth. That was a very major operation, the planning for which had been so sketchy up till then. It was adequate for the peacetime purpose, but you have to get into details and expand the planning in a time of crisis.
I embarked and went to sea with a large part of the Fleet Marine Force that had been loaded at Morehead City, North Carolina, and Norfolk. It was a sizable force. The Marines even brought a battalion that had been in Quantico, and they incorporated it into the Fleet Marine Force. In the meantime, the Joint Chiefs had decided to send a force from the West Coast and an amphibious group under Rear Admiral Nels Johnson, in command at Coronado. A brigade of Marines came around through the Panama Canal embarked or) 20-knot amphibious ships and joined us eventually near Cuba.
Now, in getting prepared for the operation, there was the problem that Soviet submarines might come in. So I steamed around the Bahama Islands for a while. Although I was concerned about submarines, I was not concerned at that particular time about an imminent attack. Since we had not been committed to an operation, there had been reports of sightings, but not in the area. I looked over the charts and found places off Florida where we could operate within the ten-fathom curve, so that we would be out of the operational water for submarines. I planned on using natural protection as our best antisubmarine protection.
As time went on, I sent some ships into port to give the Marines some exercise, but I always kept us in a state of readiness, so that we could move in and get to the landing area. The way I organized the force, I had two amphibious group commanders. One was to be assigned the task of supporting the Army at the port of Mariel—just to the west of Havana—by bringing in all the Army tanks from the armored division at Fort Hood, which had been brought by train to Florida. They were to embark at Fort Lauderdale and then operate around Key West from where they would proceed to Mariel. The main force under me would make an amphibious landing with the reinforced Marine division to the east of Havana at Varadero Beach.
Then the Army 2nd Division would make an unopposed landing of supplies and reinforcements; they would pass through the Marine lines after the landing. At the same time as the amphibious landing in Varadero Beach, the Army Airborne Corps would drop two divisions, one of them by the airfield southwest of Havana and one of them near Mariel. The tanks of the armored division would provide protection for the airborne.
Another Army division would come in after the 2nd Division. Of course, there were about 1,000 Air Force airplanes in Florida by that time, and I had two carriers assigned to me, one being the Enterprise (CVAN-65). She was to operate south of Cuba. There was to be another carrier north of Cuba. This was a huge force, practically the whole Atlantic Fleet.
Fortunately, at that time I had only two amphibious ships in overhaul, an APD and an AGC; 98% of the amphibious force was ready and at sea, which was fortuitous and made me feel very good. I remember at one point I sent Admiral Dennison a message: “Now I’m ready to conduct the operation in four days.” That was based not only on the preparation of the Marines, but also on my preparations with respect to the steaming distance, the disposition of forces, and so forth.
When Admiral Johnson came aboard, I gave him the job of planning a number of subsidiary landings. I wanted to have a flexible plan so that if I needed to, I could land those 10,000 Marines in Mariel to support the Army, the airborne, and the armored divisions. He also made another plan to land in support of an augmentation of the main amphibious landing in Varadero, and a third plan to land around Santiago or Guantanamo, in case we needed to make a diversionary move. I kept him busy planning, and he did a good job.
The evacuation of people from Guantanamo had been done, largely by air, because there was plenty of time then. But I think some of them were evacuated by amphibious ships. At the same time, a whole regiment of Marines was flown in from the West Coast to reinforce Guantanamo. So they were in pretty good shape there.
I think that when Fidel Castro took over, we started getting worried about the defense of Guantanamo. There was concern about the water supply and attacks on the base. It would have been rather easy to attack it before we built some fortifications, but the fortifications that were built later, and the additional reinforcements, helped the situation enormously. So we really didn't have to worry seriously about Guantanamo, once the dependents were evacuated.
I remember going down to Fort Bragg to talk to Lieutenant General Hamilton H. Howze. He was the commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, which had the two airborne divisions—the 82nd and the 101st—that were to participate in the operation. He explained that I was to support him by bringing the Armored Division into Mariel with the tanks. He said to me, “I must have this armor within 14 to 20 hours, because there’s a lot of artillery and tanks there, and my paratroopers just won’t be able to hold out without some armor for very long. It is necessary that you get that armor into Mariel.”
The harbor at Mariel has a very narrow entrance, and there was a possibility that the ships that were in the harbor might get under way at the time of an invasion and perhaps sink themselves at the entrance and block the harbor, which would have made it impossible for me to bring the LSTs—there were 15 of them—with the armor into Mariel.
I told Howze that I’d like to have some Navy sailors jump in the first wave of paratroopers into Mariel and parachute into the water to do two things: to capture the ships alongside the pier and immobilize them so they could not go out and sink themselves at the entrance; and to rescue paratroopers who might fall in the water, because if they fell, they’d drown since they’d be so loaded with equipment that they couldn’t float very long. I had about 50 sailors in the SEAL teams in my command. They’d been trained to jump and to operate in the water. Admiral Dennison also got me all the SEAL teams of the Pacific Fleet amphibious force. I had plans to drop 100 of them with the first wave of the airborne drop into Mariel Harbor. It’s interesting how these things are not foreseen, so you have to improvise.
Of course, the invasion didn’t take place. I think the decision that President Kennedy took was the correct one. It would have been wrong for us to invade that little country. I think our world image would have suffered. I think we might have been embroiled in a very painful guerrilla-type conflict for a while—not for very long. I think we would have knocked it out eventually because there was no way for the Cubans to get help. We could have kept them from getting it. But there would have been resistance, more than just the military resistance. The organized military resistance would have been overcome quickly without any question. We had such an overwhelming force that probably the military resistance would have collapsed and we probably wouldn’t have had too many casualties on our part. But I think there might have been more sniping as time went on, and it would have been difficult to get out once we were in.
We might have created even greater problems, too. Russia would have been faced with something which they had to react to in some form somewhere, perhaps Berlin. It would have been easy for them. And then we wouldn’t know what would happen next.
Waiting in the Wings: The USS Enterprise
By Vice Admiral Kent L. Lee, U.S. Navy (Retired)
I assumed command of Carrier Air Group Six in early July 1962. We were the first permanent air group of the USS Enterprise (CVAN-65), a brand-new ship, just back from Guantanamo. I relieved Commander James Holbrook; Vince de Poix was the captain and Max Hamish the executive officer. Later on, Rear Admiral John T. Hayward became the carrier division commander.
I had had the group only about a month when we moved on board the Enterprise for some exercises. We spent August and September of 1962 in the Mediterranean. The idea was to show off the Navy’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in that region. Hayward, who had been a three-star admiral in the Pentagon, came down to two stars to take this carrier division command. He wanted a sea command. The Enterprise was an ideal choice.
The Enterprise was a great ship in every way. She had a big, square bridge, because it had those phased-array antennas. She was equipped originally with SPS-32 and SPS-33 radars with fixed, rather than rotating, antennas on the four faces of the island structure. She was longer than any other carrier by 50 to 100 feet, and heavier by 10,000 tons or so. She also had more flight deck space, more hangar deck space. Everything was absolutely first-rate. Plying the waters on the Enterprise was a magnificent show.
We came home in late September for about ten days—no more—then were unceremoniously loaded back on board the Enterprise, heading south for Cuba. We loaded our complete air group aboard with the exception of the A-5s, which we left ashore. We took some extra A- 4s aboard—a Marine squadron—for a total of three A-4 squadrons, one F-4, one F-8, and one A-l for the Cuban operation. We had an extra A-4 squadron instead of the A-5 squadron, which had as its mission the delivery of nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union.
We went down to Cuba and were keeping track of what was going on down there. We got all the photography we needed and made plans to attack the missile sites in Cuba. We had lots of practice, usually at sea: loading weapons and dropping them on practice runs and attacks. We put together teams to attack these missile sites, which we studied assiduously.
Survivability was our main concern. We wanted to destroy the missile sites, but we did not have any guided standoff weapons in that period. Our plan was to go in low, beneath the umbrella of the missiles, beneath their altitude capability, and attack the missile site and pull out. That was our basic plan: go in low, using strictly conventional, non-nuclear weapons.
We had very little intelligence on the Cuban antiaircraft capability. What the intelligence folks did paint was an ominously grim picture for us pilots going in there. We always tend to make the enemy ten feet tall. We had pictures of surface- to-air missile sites that the Russians were putting in for the Cubans. We also had pictures of the ballistic missile sites they were putting in. We made plans to attack all of those. We were just standing by on a day-to-day basis to go hit them.
Every day we would stream a sled behind the carrier as our target and practice our bombing. On 26 October I went flying in a VA-66 A-4. We were to make runs on the sled. After I’d been airborne maybe half an hour, one of my division pilots said that I was smoking and burning. And, sure enough, I was. So I came down to perhaps 10,000 feet and about 20 miles south of the Enterprise. My red fire warning light came on, and I found it very difficult to leave that airplane. I’d been flying around in these airplanes for 20 years or so, never had a problem, and there it looked like I was going to have to leave this one. That was a difficult decision—to eject or not.
I slowed the plane down to about 200 or 250 knots, somewhere in that range, and at 10,000 feet I decided that I’d really better go. I could move the stick all around and there was no response. I knew the control lines had burned through. I said to myself, “Here goes.” I reached up and pulled the face curtain, and there was a tremendous thud. The face curtain comes down over the pilot’s face and ignites the ejection seat. You really don’t know what’s going on. You feel this tremendous thud, and the world kind of blacks out for a minute, and you feel the parts flying every which way.
Just about the time that you become oriented, the parachute opens—it’s all done automatically—and, once again, the jolt is such that you become disoriented. Then in a very few seconds, of course, you get oriented again. When I was fully oriented, there I was at about 9,500 feet or so, drifting down in a parachute to land in the water, south of Cuba.
I then began to take stock of all my survival lessons. I remembered that, above all, you never release yourself from the parachute until your toes touch the water, because you have no depth perception over an ocean. Pilots have done that, thinking they were right at the water, and they released themselves and plunged 200 or 300 feet to their death. Then, when your toes hit the water, you release your parachute. If you don’t, it will act like a sail and pull you through the water and drown you.
I hit the water feet first and went down pretty far; it takes an eternity to bob to the surface. But I came up by and by and inflated my Mae West, and I also had a life raft with me. Before I ejected, I had alerted my division mates, who had alerted the Enterprise, so it wasn’t long before they sent a helicopter after me. I was in the water maybe half an hour.
After I ejected, the airplane was still burning fiercely. It just rolled over and plunged into the sea. I was about 20 miles south of the Enterprise, and there was nothing down there. I hadn’t wanted to get the plane up around the formation; it might hit a ship. After I landed in the water, I realized I was not injured, but I think every joint and every muscle in my body was sore. It’s a wild ride, believe me.
I was helicoptered back to the ship and piped aboard by Captain de Poix—“CAG RETURNING,” BONG-BONG, BONG- BONG—and they made a big joke of it. That was on 26 October, and we stayed down there through most of November. The Cuban Missile Crisis was eventually settled. All that time we were down there with Hayward aboard as Task Force commander.
One of the problems with carrier aircraft duty is how to spend your time at this constant state of readiness without wearing too thin. We tried to fly as much as possible. Got everybody in the air, kept our planes ready to go. We put out a sled every day. But it’s difficult to be in a high state of readiness for two months, just operating south of Cuba, no ports. So what we did was as much training as possible, as much flying as possible, and we had movies every night. But it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, especially when you face a potential danger in which you know you’re likely to lose some people.
We didn’t realize that we were not going to have to attack Cuba until John F. Kennedy had settled with Nikita Khrushchev. We stayed down there a week or ten days after the settlement to make sure that the Russians removed their missiles, which was part of the agreement. We had airplanes observing this. In late November 1962 the Enterprise once again headed for Norfolk after roughly two months in the Cuban area. In view of what we learned in Vietnam about the effectiveness of surface-to-air missiles. I’m just as glad things turned out the way they did.
Of Missiles, Blockades, and Parleys
By Vice Admiral William P. Mack, U.S. Navy (Retired)
When I was asked to go to Washington in June 1962, I was assigned to the office of the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency, Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). This position had been formed only two or three months before as an office designed to cut across all sections of the JCS staff. President John F. Kennedy was extremely interested in it, and he put Lieutenant General Victor Krulak of the JCS staff in as the first special assistant. He coordinated with the White House’s special group for counterinsurgency, headed by General Maxwell Taylor.
Whenever General Krulak worked a paper, the rest of the staff was told to give him anything he wanted; all the persons working for him had the same key. When you had a paper, you could ask to see anything that was in anybody’s office or desk or in any of the files. When you had a paper and you wanted help, you just went to J-3 of the Joint Staff, and the people there would give you anything you wanted. We had a very high priority because anything we wanted to do was obviously being done for the White House or for a special reason, and nobody ever argued about what we did.
There were four of us in General Krulak’s office when I arrived: two naval officers, one Air Force colonel, and an Army colonel. Within four months, there were about 30 colonels and captains. But before we got very big, in the first few months, this was exciting and interesting, mainly because I had two jobs. One was liaison with the CIA concerning Cuba, and the other was keeping the books on Vietnam and working on all papers regarding Vietnam, which was beginning to get hot. So I had probably the two most interesting jobs in that section.
One of the first things I did under my Cuban hat, having access to all the Cuban papers, was to investigate what had happened in the spring of 1961 at the Bay of Pigs. I went into all the papers that were hidden; I got them out and read them to see what my destroyer squadron had done that they couldn’t tell me about. I found out that we were standing by to assist in the invasion of Cuba, in the Bay of Pigs, if so ordered by the President. In other words, they had everything marked out, special ammunition on board. Their primary mission would have been to control aircraft on the carrier that was with them in case the carrier was ordered to support the invasion.
Apparently, the chairman of the JCS didn’t know what he had in his files; he gave orders to the services but forgot to give them to his own file system, so the JCS copies were still there. On frequent occasions, I drew upon these papers as I began to work on a paper concerning the next Cuban crisis, when the Soviets tried to and did insert missiles into Cuba.
That was my area, so again I used to go down to the Atlantic Fleet staff quite frequently to talk to the operators and planners. Many of the jobs I had concerning Cuba were to plan for an invasion, if one were to take place, and to let the general public know that a tremendous plan was put forward to invade Cuba. It would involve actually moving Marines through the canal in transports, stacking up hundreds of aircraft at Opalocka Air Base in Florida. A good part of this was to be preceded by covert operations that were, of course, the province of what was called SACSA, the acronym for this office I was in.
SACSA was responsible for planning the covert operations that were to precede this sort of thing, and they involved equipping a large airplane with a television broadcast system and loudspeakers. This was to fly over Cuba, and it could transmit pictures that would apt- pear on Cuban television screens. This involved inserting various agents in Cuba through the CIA, so I used to go out and discuss with them where we wanted various agents put and what we wanted them to do. We also had to arrange safe areas for aviators, in case they invaded and came down in Cuba and they wouldn’t know where to go. So we’d insert agents and provide places for the aviators to go.
While all of this was happening. Senator Kenneth Keating (R-NY) was publicly discussing the buildup of the Russians in Cuba. We were more involved with what was actually going on. To have him talking about it didn’t matter. He began to talk a little later on about what we were doing: supposedly highly secret information about moving troops and moving aircraft and people from Fort Bragg and Hawaii. Actually, getting ready to invade Cuba is what we were doing, and he began to talk about that. What he was saying didn’t bother us too much because we thought this was probably good. It would condition the people of our country to the fact that we had a severe problem here, and it would make it easier if we had to go to war or mobilize or something else.
When the operation started, with our destroyers actually blockading the Cuban area and stopping the Soviet missile ships from coming in, the Joint Staff went to a sort of general quarters operation wherein many of us had to be there all night. I was actually in our section there day and night for about ten days. We had to be in the building, so we’d sleep on the desk and eat peanuts out of a machine. For about ten days we were there all the time, communicating with CinCLantFlt. Occasionally, I’d leave to go to Fort Bragg and talk to the special group that was going to be inserted into Cuba, or out to Langley to talk to the CIA, but most of the time I was in the Pentagon during the time this operation was going on.
Among the things I had to do was write the President’s speech that he was to give on a special television broadcast. General Krulak and I spent two or three nights and days doing that. The general was a very vigorous person, a perfectionist. He wrote extremely well himself, and he spoke very well. But he liked to use unusual phrases, unusual wording, and various kinds of syntax which were not normal in the military system, or in any other system! There was no end to it. I’d write his speech, send it in to General Krulak, and he’d send it back with corrections, insertions, and changes. I’d rewrite it and send it back, and he’d send it back again. About the fourth or fifth time, I recognized things that I'd put in and he had changed, then he wanted to change it back to what it was before.
There was absolutely no way of finishing this speech; we never did finish it until about an hour before it went to the White House. General Krulak just grabbed the last draft he had and took it over. Whether it was because President Kennedy didn’t like what we wrote or whatever happened, his speech was only about half of what we wrote. He put his own words into it, adopting his own way of finally telling the American people what we had known for weeks on end.
Photo Reconnaissance Over Cuba
By Captain William Ecker, U.S. Navy (Retired)
About 14 October 1962 the Air Force’s U-2s started bringing home some information. Soon thereafter, certain intelligence jaygees started to arrive at the Naval Air Station, Jacksonville, bringing target folders and tubes with the U-2 photos in them. We then had an idea of what each target might look like, but they were high-altitude photos; all we could do was chart the targets on a map and fly headings until we got there and saw the terrain. We identified the Cuban targets and assigned them to individual pilots. As the old man, I picked the number one priority target, San Cristobal. Each pilot chose three targets; then we made sure each target was covered with at least two or three pilots. That way, if one couldn’t go on that particular mission, there would always be another one available who was familiar with it.
About noon on Friday the 19th, the squadron was ordered to “stage to Key West,” less than 100 miles from Cuba. For the moment the squadron was on standby. The government’s reasoning was that it didn’t want us to go over the island with a chance of getting shot down prior to the time the President declared the quarantine of the island.
At 2000 on 22 October, President John F. Kennedy went on TV and made his declaration that he was going to institute a quarantine at 1000 on the 24th. We commented amongst ourselves that things would probably be getting hotter. The next morning we reported down to the ready room. At about 1000 the telephone rang and this voice said, “Execute 1, 5, and 32,” to which I answered, “Interrog at 32.”
“Stand by,” the voice commanded.
After we had gone through authentication procedures to establish that the order was genuine, we headed for the planes: RF-8A Crusaders, which were F-8 fighters that had been equipped with cameras for photo recon duty. The mechanics, plane captains, and photographer’s mates had already done their checks, and we trusted them. Those birds were ready to go. We hit the four steps up into the cockpit, strapped in, and went through the start procedure. It only took about a minute to run through 50 items.
My wingman, Bruce Wilhemy, and I took off as the first section; we had six planes in that first flight. It took us only about ten minutes to make landfall on Cuba, which was about 90 miles away. After flying through some rain showers, I popped out into beautiful sunlight. The first thing I saw was the skyline of Havana. I corrected my navigation and soon afterward spotted my initial landmark, the port of Mariel. It really wasn’t on the targeting, but we turned on our cameras anyway as we flew over. We found out later that that was where all the missiles were being unloaded at night and trucked out to the various sites. But there was nothing there.
After two more minutes of flying at an elevation of about 400 feet, we got in behind a range of small mountains or hills. All of a sudden I was right on course and I started seeing the targets coming. I called to Bruce to spread out so that we could avoid duplication and get better photo coverage. Within a matter of just eight or ten seconds, we were over the mass of equipment; much of it was covered with camouflage netting. Then we were gone, real fast, turning back on a northwesterly heading, our cameras running to pick up some residual information. We went feet wet and immediately started to climb to 40,000 feet. The sky over Florida was pitch black.
I decided, rather than try to fly through a thunderstorm and get torn to pieces and lose the film and the pictures, to go to a lower altitude and try and get under it and still penetrate it. We got down low, and the lousy visibility improved. The sun appeared, and I called to Bruce, “Burner, now,” and we got through it, bursting right out into beautiful sunlight. Then we took time enough to look each other over and see if we had any bullet holes. Everything was operating all right.
By the time we got back to Jacksonville, the other aircraft were already there. We taxied in and they stripped the film out right away. I started to get out of the airplane when Commander Bob Koch climbed up on the side of the cockpit and said, “Stay put. You’re going to Washington.”
I said, “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “They want you up there, though.”
“Well, what am I going to do? I’ve got no clothes,” I protested.
“I’ll give you my shirt.”
“But I’ve got no pants,” I objected.
“I draw the line there,” he said laughingly.
So I sat there and talked to him while they were refueling my aircraft, and I said, “Have you got me all filed?”
“Here,” he replied. “You’re cleared, all the way. Nobody’s going to bother you today.”
It took me only 58 minutes to fly to Washington at Mach .8. I taxied in, and two Air Force helicopters were sitting there, both of them turning up. After I got into one of the choppers, I took off my G- suit and torso harness, and tried to relax for the few minutes it took to come from Andrews into the Pentagon. We landed at the helo pad and climbed out of this thing; a big black limousine was waiting there. As it started to move from the helo pad at the west side of the Pentagon and come around to the river entrance, a colonel in the car grabbed and shoved me down on the floor. I said, “What the hell is going on?”
“There are a couple hundred reporters up there and TV cameras and I don’t want them to see you here in flight gear ’cause it’ll open Pandora’s box.” We went down into the garage area of the Pentagon, got out, and went over to a small elevator that we rode for just a few seconds. As we got out, we were met by a Marine guard. He stuck his head in a small room, and within minutes, out came George Anderson, the Chief of Naval Operations. As we walked into the room, I dropped my flight gear into a convenient comer, and my Air Force escort said in a stage whisper, “Take off the gun.”
About that time this four-star Army general came over to congratulate me; it was Maxwell Taylor, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Then I realized I was in “the tank,” which is a secure area for the meetings of the Joint Chiefs. The thing that surprised me was that only half the people in there were in uniform. I was ushered into a chair along the square table next to this Air Force four-star who was kind of sprawled out, his feet underneath my chair. I said, “Pardon me. General, I’m kind of smelly and sweaty.” He took a cigar out of his mouth and said, “God damn it, you’ve been flying an airplane now, haven’t you? You ought to sweat and smell. Sit down.”
It was General Curtis LeMay. That was my first meeting with him. As I sat down there, he kind of ignored me because I’m Navy, and he was starting to see the picture, I think, that the Navy was stealing the show from the Air Force. Our little recon outfit—one of a kind on the East Coast—had been the first one over the island of Cuba.
I started to hold up my map to show them the route I had flown. General Taylor took the other half of it so everyone could see it. Some of the people in civilian clothes asked some irrelevant questions. I wondered who they were. They must have been under secretaries or something. Others asked, “Did you see this?”
I said, “To be honest with you, I can’t identify this stuff. You’ll see everything in a matter of an hour or so, everything that I saw down there.”
And it was just that way. Within just a little over an hour, the Joint Chiefs had those pictures. The developed film had been given a cursory analysis and a few updates of where everything was, then it was shoved right into a straight fighter and was up there at Andrews. I couldn’t give them much more information. After maybe 15 minutes. General Taylor said, “Thank you. Commander,” and out I went.
I got back to the squadron the next day, and we found out that the Air Force had blown it and we were on an alert for the next morning. But I already had the pilots and planes in position.
Every morning about 0400, depending on how many planes I already had at Key West, I’d send some more airplanes down with no film and we’d land down there and then decide how many airplanes we needed. We would refuel them, then the last thing before a mission, the photo mates would grab the film out of the refrigerators and come out and slap the canisters into the camera bay in the nose of the plane. So we had fresh cold film when we took off. That was another factor that contributed to our success.
Up through the 28th, of course, it was pretty hectic. We really stayed right on the firing line the whole time. I don’t know whether we got shot at the first day or not—none of us saw anything. But frequently we would see popcorn in the mirrors: you know, that 37-millimeter flak tracking behind us. The Cubans weren’t too good. They’d have never hit any of us anyway. I don’t think anybody ever got knocked down. The only casualty we suffered was when one of my pilots, Newby Kelt, hit an albatross. He got home safely, but that airplane never did smell right after that, as you can well imagine.
I made just two flights: the first and the last ones. On the second one I went into a place called Remedios. Bert Larkin was my wingman on that. We flew down the Florida Straits, then made a hard right turn at a certain point. I had timed it so that I would have a straight shot into the target and just be over the land for a minimum period of time.
We hit the target and knew that there were missile batteries. We knew pretty much right where they were and what we had to fly as a flight pattern to stay out of the missile envelope. As we came around in a port turn to try and head back out of Cuba, up ahead were about two dozen great big vultures soaring around for some reason. I hollered to Bert not to try to dodge them. We both yanked our visors down in case we hit them. You can imagine that if you’re smoking along at 450 to 500 knots, and you ever hit one of those birds, he’d take your wing off, or whatever he had to do. Just as we came up to them, they collapsed their wings and plummeted just like a pelican does when he makes a dive. I often said after that, that one way to protect the target from low-altitude reconnaissance is to put a bunch of dead mules around out there because that would draw the vultures.
As I briefed the other squadron pilots for their flights, I told them to vary their approaches. For instance, we’d fly halfway around the island sometimes in order to come in backwards. We knew where most of the missile sites were, and by coming in so quickly and so low, below radar detection, we were on them and gone usually before they could fire on us. We liked to shoot between 1000 and 1400 hours to get the sun highest and have the least shadows, so that the interpreters could read the stuff better. That’s, again, why we used coming in backwards or sideways on the targets. We’d do anything just to be unpredictable, and we never got hit, and we didn’t lose any airplanes. And we got the pictures every time.
As soon as we got our pictures, we’d hit that after-burner and “smoke on” out of there. That burner is the greatest quarter inch in naval aviation. You can’t argue with success.
