The Bay of Pigs is remembered as a landing that failed on the beach. It was lost in the air. Over five days in April 1961, a handful of Cuban pilots in old British piston fighters and American-built jet trainers beat a CIA air force, sank the ships the invasion depended on and killed four Americans who were never supposed to be there.

The story of how that happened runs through two decisions: a strike that was too small, and a second strike that was cancelled the night before the landing.

Operation Puma: the strike that wasn't enough

At about six in the morning on 15 April, eight B-26B Invaders of the exile air force, flown by Cubans from Puerto Cabezas in Nicaragua and painted in fake Cuban markings, hit three airfields: San Antonio de los Baños, Ciudad Libertad in Havana and Antonio Maceo airport in Santiago. The idea was to destroy Fidel Castro's small air force on the ground before the brigade landed.

It did not. According to the detailed loss lists, several Cuban B-26s, a Sea Fury and a T-33 were destroyed, but enough aircraft survived to matter. A ninth B-26 landed in Miami with a pilot posing as a Cuban defector, its engine cowling shot up beforehand to fake battle damage. At the United Nations, US Ambassador Adlai Stevenson repeated the cover story.

British Pathé newsreel from April 1961: "Rebels Invade Cuba".

The night the second strike died

Dawn strikes on Cuban airfields were planned for D-Day, 17 April. On the evening of 16 April they were called off. In a memo written three weeks later, CIA Deputy Director Gen. Charles Cabell recorded that at about 9:30 p.m. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy told him the strikes were off, and that Secretary of State Dean Rusk later cited political considerations. Cabell and his colleague Richard Bissell argued against it.

At 4:30 a.m. on 17 April Cabell tried again, asking for protection for the invasion ships. Rusk put him on the phone to President Kennedy. The answer was still no.

The surprise in the sky

What Castro had left was small: by most counts three or four Sea Furies, four or five T-33s and a few B-26s. But the CIA planners had missed one crucial detail. The T-33s, American-built jet trainers, had been armed with .50-calibre machine guns. A jet faster than anything the brigade could put in the air was now hunting slow, unescorted bombers.

At daybreak on 17 April the Cuban aircraft went for the ships. The after-action report records that the Houston was hit by rockets at 06:30 and run aground. At about 09:30 the Río Escondido, deck-loaded with aviation fuel and carrying ten days of reserve supplies and the brigade's radio link, blew up and sank. The CIA's own official history credits Sea Fury pilot Enrique Carreras Rojas in both attacks, though other accounts spread the credit among several pilots. CIA records show four brigade B-26s shot down that day.

The Operations Room's animated account of the opening of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

The Alabama airmen

By 19 April the brigade was collapsing, and the CIA let Americans fly. About 60 members of the Alabama Air National Guard had been recruited to train and support the exile air force. That morning, according to the CIA history, nine Americans took off in B-26s for the last missions over the beachhead. Four did not come back.

Riley Shamburger and Wade Gray were shot down into the sea; a CIA cable reports that Shamburger was hit by T-33s and radioed "We've been jumped". Thomas "Pete" Ray and Leo Baker were brought down near the Central Australia sugar mill, where Castro had his command post. Accounts differ on exactly how they died. Navy Skyhawks from USS Essex, which had been told not to engage, arrived about an hour too late, possibly because of a time-zone mix-up. The brigade surrendered the same day.

Cuba kept Pete Ray's body for about 18 years before returning it in 1979, after a campaign by his daughter, Janet Ray Weininger. In 1978 the CIA had quietly awarded all four men its Distinguished Intelligence Cross. The agency's own historian later called the defeat a shared responsibility, and put much of the blame for the air failures on the decisions made in Washington.

The Operations Room on how Castro's forces struck back.

Sources: CIA Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, Vol. I (Pfeiffer); Foreign Relations of the United States 1961-63, Vol. X; Encyclopedia of Alabama; Smithsonian Air & Space; National Security Archive; Wikipedia