October 26, 2007

More on the Bay of Pigs commemoration in Alabama

The Birmingham Weekly has an article on the painting unveiled last week at the Southern Museum of Flight in Birmingham, Alabama. Here's a taste:

The exile ground troops, called Brigade 2506, were being pushed back into the water by Castro’s forces, and most of the Cuban pilots -- physically and emotionally drained after days of flying -- were unable to fly cover over the beachhead.

As a result, eight pilots and crewman from the Alabama Air Guard flew into combat, and four men -- pilots Thomas “Pete” Ray and Riley Shamburger, and their crewmen, Leo Baker and Wade Gray -- were killed.

Last Thursday night, at the Southern Museum of Flight in Birmingham, more than 200 people gathered to honor the members of the Alabama Air National Guard and the other American and Cuban air and ground crews who participated in this doomed invasion.

I think I echo everyone's sentiments (except the Camelot-worshipping assholes) when I say thank you to the brave men who survived and to those who, as Lincoln wrote in 1863, "gave the last full measure of devotion" to a noble cause. God bless them all.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by George Moneo at October 26, 2007 11:13 AM

Comments

Camelot? Try Cacalot, or Cagalot. JFK and his "legend" are essentially fraudulent. They are triumphs of carefully crafted and zealously maintained image over reality. The faithful cosmetologists did a bang-up job; even the "Che" mythmakers might be tolerably impressed.

Posted by: asombra [TypeKey Profile Page] at October 26, 2007 01:13 PM

Camelot? I'll never forget a man I worked with years ago who told me he was driving in his car somewhere in Texas when he heard on the radio that JFK had been shot. He pulled into a gasoline station, and asked the attendant "Did you hear the President has been shot?" to which the attendant responded "Somebody should have shot that SOB a long time ago!"

Posted by: omar [TypeKey Profile Page] at October 26, 2007 01:37 PM

The '60 election was very close and there were those electoral "irregularities" in Chicago and West Virginia. If not for them, Nixon would have been president in '61.

I suspect he would not have called off or otherwise fatally weakened something like the Bay of Pigs once he set it in motion -- and that the tenacity and ferocity of the air cover would have been a lot more like Linebacker II in '72, though obviously on a smaller scale.

Posted by: Zhangliqun [TypeKey Profile Page] at October 26, 2007 03:58 PM


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