Wings of Denial
The Alabama Air National Guard's Covert Role at the Bay of Pigs
Warren Trest and Donald Dodd

NewSouth Books
978-1-58838-021-0
ebook ISBN: 978-1-60306-072-1
$19.95 paperback
5 ½ x 8 ½ 
160 pages
41 b&w photographs
History

The year 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs incident and the timely reissue of Wings of Denial (NewSouth Books, 2001). After nearly four decades of government denial, the deeds of four Alabama Air National Guardsmen who died at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 were made public and their names memorialized at the CIA’s Wall of Honor in Langley, Virginia. Their stories are told in Wings of Denial.

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 those men, Thomas W. “Pete” Ray, remained until 1978 in Cuba, where it was frozen as a war trophy and as evidence of American complicity in the failed 1961 invasion.