by
Warren Trest and Don Todd
After nearly four decades of government denial, the deeds of four Alabama Air National Guardsmen who died at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 have been made public and their names memorialized at the CIA's Wall of Honor in Langley, Virginia. Their stories can now be told. Drawing upon a variety of sources, including recently declassified documents and personal interviews with guardsmen who were there, the authors have pieced together the heretofore secret story of the Alabama Air National Guard's clandestine role in the Bay of Pigs invasion. The four guardsmen who died flew with a group of Alabama volunteers to secret CIA bases in Guatemala and Nicaragua to train Cuban exiles to fly B-26 bombers in support of the invasion forces. When the small group of exhausted pilots could no longer sustain the air battle, seven Alabama Guardsmen flew with them into combat on the final day of the invasion in a futile attempt to stave off defeat at the embattled beachhead. The body of one of these men, Thomas W. "Pete" Ray, remained in Cuba until 1978 where it was frozen as a war trophy and as evidence of U.S. complicity in the failed 1961 invasion.
Read an excerpt from Wings of Denial
April 2001
Military History
Trade paper, 176pp, 5.375 X 8.375, photos
1-58838-021-1
$17.95
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