Many of the officers on board the
The assault over Red beach and neighboring Blue beach would take the form of a classic amphibious landing, in the tradition of Normandy and Okinawa. The attack would begin with naval gunfire and air strikes. Underwater demolition teams would clear the beach area of mines. Amphibious tractors would arrive carrying troops, followed by larger landing craft, including the flat-bottomed Higgins boats familiar from D-Day. The Marines would link up with helicopter-borne assault troops landing inland to occupy roads and high ground.
The planners had given barely any thought to the possibility that the enemy might use tactical nuclear weapons to wipe out the beachheads. Defenses against 'nuclear, chemical, and biological' attack consisted of face masks and chemical agent detector kits. Otherwise, troops were instructed to clearly mark 'contaminated areas' and report burst and yield data for 'every delivered nuclear fire' to higher headquarters. The seemingly routine task of drawing up a nuclear/chemical defense plan was given to a somewhat dim-witted major who 'spent his time on things that were not the highest priority.'
Whatever happened, casualties were likely to be heavy. The Marines were prepared for five hundred dead the first day alone ? mainly on Tarara beach ? and a further two thousand injured. Total casualties during the first ten days of fighting were estimated at over eighteen thousand, including four thousand dead. The Marine Corps would account for nearly half.
And that was without the participation of Soviet combat troops or the use of nuclear weapons.
At the Pentagon, reporters had convinced themselves that an interception of a Soviet ship was imminent. Tension had been mounting all day, and officials would reveal nothing about the movement of Soviet ships. The president had ordered 'no leaks.'
The Pentagon spokesman was Arthur Sylvester, a former journalist who had spent thirty-seven years on the
Finally, late in the afternoon, McNamara authorized a cautiously worded statement. 'Some of the Bloc vessels proceeding toward Cuba appear to have altered course. Other vessels are proceeding toward Cuba. No intercepts have yet been necessary.'
Soon, Walter Cronkite, dubbed by opinion polls 'the most trusted man in America,' was delivering a special report on CBS News in his rich baritone. He, too, stalled for time. 'It was beginning to look this day as though it might be one of armed conflict between Soviet vessels and American warships on the sea-lanes leading to Cuba. But there has been no confrontation as far as we know.'
Correspondents were standing by at the United Nations, the White House, the Pentagon. None of them knew very much. 'There is still considerable belief that the confrontation in the Caribbean could come tonight,' reported George Herman from outside the White House. 'Everybody's lips are sealed,' said Charles Von Fremd at the Pentagon. 'We are under what amounts to a wartime censorship system.'
'There is not a great deal of optimism tonight,' concluded Cronkite, his tiredness visible in the heavy lines under his eyes.
Castro exuded calm resolve when he arrived at Soviet military headquarters at El Chico. Dressed in a combat jacket and peaked cap, he shook hands briskly with his hosts. He then spent an hour and a half listening to their reports, jotting down notes on a memo pad, and asking questions through an interpreter. He struck one of the Soviet generals present as 'purposeful and completely unruffled, as though war were not imminent and his life's work not at risk.'
The
It was difficult for Castro to know whether the Soviets would ever use the nuclear warheads that remained under their tight control. He knew what he would do if the decision was up to him. If he had learned anything from his exhaustive study of revolutionary movements and his own experiences as a revolutionary, it was that it was suicidal to wait for the enemy to attack. From the capture of the Bastille onward, fortune had always favored the bold. 'A force that remains in its barracks is lost,' Castro had concluded, after witnessing the failure of an antigovernment insurrection in Colombia in 1948.
Fidel would not just wait for the Americans to invade. He would find a way to seize the initiative.
President Kennedy dined at the White House that evening with a small group of intimates that included Bobby and Ethel Kennedy and his journalist friend Charles Bartlett. At one point, Bartlett suggested a toast to celebrate the turnaround of the Soviet ships, but Kennedy was not in the mood. 'You don't want to celebrate in this game this early.'
Bundy popped in and out with news from the quarantine line. 'We still have twenty chances out of a hundred to be at war with Russia,' Kennedy muttered.
His dark forebodings were reinforced by a rambling, toughly worded message from Khrushchev that began churning out of State Department teletypes late that night. The Soviet leader accused the president of everything from 'outright banditry' to 'pushing mankind to the abyss of a nuclear war.' He pointed out that the United States had 'lost its invulnerability' to nuclear attack. The Soviet Union would neither withdraw its missiles nor respect the American quarantine.
'If someone tried to dictate similar conditions to you, the United States, you would reject them. And we also say 'Nyet,'' Khrushchev wrote. 'Naturally, we will not simply be bystanders with regard to piratical acts by American ships on the high seas. We will be forced to take the measures we deem necessary and adequate to protect our rights.'
Perusing the message after his guests had gone home, Kennedy picked up the phone and called Bartlett. 'You'll be interested to know that I got a cable from our friend,' he told the reporter. 'He said those ships are coming through.'
Had Kennedy known what was happening in Cuba that night, he would have been even more alarmed. Special emissaries had fanned out across the country to deliver top secret targeting data to the three R-12 missile regiments. Rehearsals were being held under cover of darkness to make sure that the missiles were ready for launch. The R-12 missile had a longer range than American intelligence analysts believed. In addition to reaching Washington, Soviet targeteers operated on the assumption that they could also hit New York. The CIA had informed Kennedy that New York was beyond the range of the R-12.
The targeting cards contained detailed instructions for launching the missile. The most important variables were elevation, azimuth, range, length of time the rocket was under power, type of explosion, and size of the nuclear charge. The cards were the product of weeks of painstaking geodesic research and complicated mathematical calculations. In contrast to a cruise missile, which is powered throughout its flight, a ballistic missile is only powered for the first few minutes after takeoff. It then follows a trajectory that can be calculated with varying degrees of accuracy. Mechanical gyroscopes kept the R-12 missile to its assigned path.
To aim the rockets properly, the Soviet targeteers had to know the exact location of the launch sites, including height above sea level. Detailed geodesic surveys had never been done in Cuba, so they started almost from scratch, building a network of towers across the country to gather topographic data. They laboriously adjusted the Soviet system of coordinates to the American system to make use of the old 1:50,000 American military maps that Castro had inherited from Batista. For precise astronomical observations, they needed a clock that was
