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View full sizeFidel Castro inspects the B-26 shot down near his field headquarters on the final day of the Bay of Pigs invasion. (Special/Southern Museum of Flight) Aiabamians Pete Ray and Leo Baker survived the crash but were killed by Cuban soldiers.

They were like brothers, the men of the Alabama Air National Guard's 117th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing.

They had knocked heads on the football field in Tarrant, and thrown back beers at their off-duty hangout at the Airport Inn.

And in the spring of 1961, without telling a soul, not even their wives and children, they assumed secret identities for their undercover roles in a CIA-backed attempt to overthrow Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro.

Through no fault of the airmen's own, though, the Bay of Pigs, as that infamous mission became known, would turn out to be one of their country's most humiliating defeats.

"The sad thing about it is the loss of the four men from Birmingham," says John Patterson, the former Alabama governor who gave the CIA his OK to recruit the Alabama airmen. "I knew them all and had even partied with a couple of them. I miss those guys. I think about them all of the time."

Fifty years ago this Tuesday, on April 19, 1961, on the third and final day of the Bay of Pigs invasion, those four airmen -- Leo Baker, Wade Gray, Riley Shamburger and T.W. "Pete" Ray -- boarded their B-26 bombers for one last, gallant mission.

They would not return.

Shamburger and Gray's plane was hit by a Cuban T-33 jet fighter and plunged into the Caribbean Sea, their bodies never found. Ray and Baker survived a crash landing after their plane came under heavy fire, only to be shot and killed by Cuban soldiers on the ground.

Four other Alabama airmen did return safely from that mission, including Joe Shannon, a former World War II fighter pilot his fellow airmen respectfully called "Shaky Joe" because, under fire, he was anything but shaky.

Shannon, who flew into the blinding sun to evade that same T-33 that shot down his buddy Shamburger, died last year at 88, the last surviving pilot from the Alabama guard who saw combat at the Bay of Pigs.

Over the ensuing years, the rest of the original 39 members of the 117th who volunteered for the mission, including air technicians and ground personnel, has dwindled to about 15.

"All of the guys that I was with I feel close to," says Hoover dentist Charles Yates, who had joined the Alabama Air National Guard when he was 17. "It's been an honor to be with them, to be one of their friends and to be part of them."

'No doubt I was going'

It began in the fall of 1960, when the air guard's Gen. Reid Doster and a representative from the CIA requested a private meeting with Patterson in the Governor's Mansion in Montgomery.

The CIA was plotting to help a group of Cuban exiles invade Cuba and oust Castro, and they needed some experienced U.S. pilots and mechanics to help them carry out their mission.

The Alabama airmen were hand-picked because they had been among the last to fly the World War II-era B-26 bombers that the CIA planned to use in the attack, disguising them with Cuban markings to make it appear the exiles had stolen them from Castro's air force.

Assured that the air guardsmen would be used only to train and support the Cuban exiles -- and would not see any action -- Patterson offered his enthusiastic support.

"I was gung-ho and anxious to get involved in overthrowing a dictator," he recalls.

Roy Wilson, a flight engineer from Pinson who had flown with the Air Force in Korea, jumped at the opportunity when Doster called to recruit him.

"I was very excited because of the money," Wilson remembers. "I made $2,850 a month, and that was good money back then. And I got $500 a mission.

"We were really soldiers of fortune, for what it amounted to," he adds. "I was young then. I didn't care."

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View full sizeRoy Wilson, left, and Charles Yates, shown here at the Southern Museum of Flight, served together in the Alabama Air National Guard during the Bay of Pigs in 1961. "We got to be friends and have remained that way for years," Yates says. (The Birmingham News/Joe Songer)

Yates, a sheet-metal specialist in the guard who was waiting to start dental school the following fall, left a meeting with Doster all fired up and ready to go, too.

"There was no doubt I was going," he says. "My friends were going, and I wanted to be there.

"We all wanted to serve the United States in any way, or we wouldn't have been in the guard."

The only thing his wife knew was that he would be going away on guard duty for a while, and he wasn't sure when he would be back.

"Nobody knew we had left the country," Yates says. "And you couldn't prove who you were if you got in trouble."

The airmen were given new names and fake IDs, and they were told to go shopping for new clothes without any U.S. labels.

Wilson became Roy Waggenhoffer from El Paso, Texas, and Yates became Charles Yaden from Yankton, S.D.

"I didn't believe there was such a place, but there was," Yates says. "I looked it up on the map."

'Those four fine Alabamians'

In the weeks leading up to the invasion, the airmen trained the Cuban exiles at a secret field in Guatemala and later at another base they called "Happy Valley" on the coast of Nicaragua.

As the invasion date drew near, though, President John F. Kennedy, who had been in office less than three months, started to worry that such a well-organized plan would have the United States' fingerprints all over it, and not look like a revolt led by the anti-Castro liberation force. He ordered the CIA to scale back the operation.

The landing area was moved from Trinidad, where the CIA believed opposition to Castro ran high, to the Bay of Pigs, which was in the middle of swampland. The fleet of B-26s was cut in half, from 16 to eight. And, at the last minute, promised air support from a nearby Navy carrier was called off.

The Cuban exiles, known as Brigade 2506, suffered heavy casualties, and by the end of the second day, their pilots were exhausted.

On the third day, even though the invasion appeared to be a lost cause, the Alabama airmen volunteered to go in.

"They asked for volunteers, and that's when the guard pilots stepped forward and volunteered," says Air Force historian Warren Trest of Montgomery, who co-wrote "Wings of Denial," a book about the air guard's role in the Bay of Pigs.

"They had gotten close to these guys that they were training, and they thought maybe they could go in and save them."

Without the additional air support, though, the clunky B-26s didn't stand a chance against Castro's quicker T-33s.

"Looking back on it, it was a fiasco, but the air guard is not what made it that way," Don Dodd, Trest's co-author, says. "The air guard did a great job of training Cubans in a short period of time, and when the going got rough, some of 'em got rough with the going."

Wilson, who had flown two missions as a flight engineer aboard a C-54 supply plane, was one of the first Birmingham airmen to come back home.

"The sad part about it is, I lived about a block and a half from one of the boys that got killed, T.W. Ray," he remembers. "His mother knew that I was with him and she asked me, 'Where's Pete?'

"And I told her, 'Miss Ray, I can't talk to you.'"

Patterson, who had gotten to know many of the guardsmen during his cleanup of Phenix City in 1954, felt misled by the CIA and by his president.

"Deniability," Patterson says. "I learned a new word during that time. Always have deniability, always make up a story that you can deny that you were involved. This is the way the CIA operated."

Three weeks later, at a bill-signing ceremony at the White House, Patterson says, Kennedy confided that he was sorry for the loss of "those four fine Alabamians" and said he hoped to live long enough to do something to recognize what they did.

'He was just my dad'

Nine-year-old Janet Ray, Pete Ray's little girl, was getting on a school bus one November day in 1963 when she heard someone say that President Kennedy had been assassinated.

"I don't know how to say this because I don't want it to sound bad, but I remember feeling not happy, not sad, but just at peace," Ray, who now lives in Miami, recalls.

"What went through my mind was, 'God has punished you because you didn't give my dad a chance and now the same thing has been done to you.'

"Some people think that's horrible, but when you're a little kid and have that if-you-sin-God-will-punish-you mentality that I was raised on, that's what went through my mind."

Her father's body had not been returned, and Ray never could get anyone to tell her what really happened to him.

So in the sixth grade, she started going to the library to look at newspaper and magazine stories about the Bay of Pigs. And in high school and college, she began bombarding everyone from her congressman to Castro with letters, pleading with them to bring her father's body home.

"He was just an average ol' guy from Alabama, nothing special about him," she says. "He wasn't a super fighter pilot. He was just my dad, and I loved him."

Her father, she later learned, had been executed, and Castro had kept his body frozen in a Havana morgue, using it as a "trophy" to prove that the United States had been involved in the Bay of Pigs.

Although people had told Ray she was crazy to think she would ever get her father's body back, her persistence paid off. In December 1979, more than 18 years after Pete Ray's plane went down, she brought him home.

"When a commander sends his men in harm's way, he has a moral duty to bring $?'em home to their family for a proper burial," she says.

"Somebody forgot the code of loyalty, but I didn't. And you know, I'm very proud of that."

The body of Ray's flying mate, Leo Baker, was believed to have been buried in a common grave in Havana, and was never returned.

Ray was buried in a family plot at Forest Hill Cemetery near the airport, not far from where he earned his wings with the Alabama Air National Guard.

Roy Wilson, who used his GI Bill to get an associate degree in mortuary science, helped prepare his buddy's body for burial.

'Those old feelings'

In 1978, the CIA posthumously awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Cross, its highest award for bravery, to the four Alabama airmen killed at the Bay of Pigs -- Baker, Gray, Shamburger and Ray -- but asked family members not to say anything about how they died.

And in 1999, 38 years after the fact, the CIA finally acknowledged publicly that they had been killed on a mission for the agency.

Two years later, on the 40th anniversary of the invasion, CIA representatives came to Birmingham to present the agency's Seal Medallion to Shannon and his flying mate Carl "Nick" Sudano, as well as posthumous medals to the families of airmen Billy Goodwin and Dalton Livingston.

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Finally, recognition had come.

"There was no doubt that it was a fiasco and a tragedy, the Bay of Pigs was," Trest, the Air Force historian, says. "But these men are to be honored."

Wilson, now 82, and Yates, 74, attended a dedication ceremony in Miami last year for the 2506 Assault Brigade Liberation Air Force Memorial, honoring the four Alabama airmen and the Cuban exiles who died during the Bay of Pigs.

As they reconnected with some of the Cuban airmen they had befriended back in '61, the memories came flooding back.

"You get in those situations, and there is a lot of esprit de corps," Yates says. "Then you get some of those old feelings back again.

"It was good to see some people," he adds. "We're all older. The sheet-metal man from Cuba, he was looking me up, and I was looking for him."

Had Kennedy not ordered the CIA to scale back the mission, Wilson and Yates know things would have turned out differently.

Instead of mourning the loss of their fellow airmen, they might be celebrating a victory.

"I don't think there's any doubt in anybody's mind that was on that mission that it would have been successful," Yates says. "We would have been parading down Main Street in Havana."

Leo Francis Baker