This is part 2 of my series of blog posts in honor of my late father, Francisco Guerra, a veteran of Brigade 2506, Sixth Battalion.

Invasion Day, Afternoon of 17 April

As I mentioned in my previous post, the Sixth Battalion landed at Playa Girón (code name: “Blue Beach”) during the pre-dawn hours of 17 April, but their mother ship, the Rio Escondido, was hit by an enemy rocket and sank in the morning hours of D-Day (at approximately 9:30 AM). In fact, the Rio Escondido was actually the second brigade ship that was lost that morning. The Houston, which was carrying the members of the Second and Fifth Battalions (Note #3), ran aground in the Bay of Pigs after she was attacked by enemy aircraft three hours earlier. (See Wyden 1979, pp. 228-229.)

(Note #3: The Second Battalion had already disembarked at its designated landing site on Playa Larga — code name: Red Beach — when the Houston was hit by enemy forces, but most of the men of the Fifth Battalion were still aboard. They just barely escaped with their lives into the Zapata swamp area, a few hundred feet from their lost ship.)

The entire invasion force, however, was able to land ashore and most of the men of the Brigade were able to regroup. I say “most” because the Fifth Battalion never joined the fight. Their cowardly battalion commander, Montero Duque, refused to obey orders from Erneido Oliva to join forces with the Second Battalion at Playa Larga. (See Lynch 2000, p. 98.) Yet, despite these serious setbacks (the loss of two ships and an entire battalion), by sundown of 17 April the invasion force as a whole had made some significant gains: “… the brigade had seized a beachhead forty-two miles long and twenty miles deep, at the cost of less than a dozen men killed or wounded.” (Lynch 2000, pp. 159-160.) But a major battle was about to begin at Playa Larga/Red Beach, just 40 kilometers north from the Sixth Battalion’s trenches at Blue Beach: the Battle of the Rotunda …