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Grenada, one of the smallest independent nations in the Western
Hemisphere and one of the southernmost Caribbean islands in the
Windward chain, has an area of only 133 square miles. The population
is 110,000. But size is not necessarily the determining factor
when governments consider strategic military locations. The Cuban
government knew the value of Grenada's location when it decided
to utilize the former British colony as a holding place for arms
and military equipment, complete with a major airport. Eastern
Caribbean nations fully understood the implication of the communist
threat and called upon the United States for help. The response
was Urgent Fury, a multinational, multiservice effort.
Not until about 40 hours before H-hour were commanding officers
of the US Navy ships told what the mission in Grenada would be--to
evacuate U.S. citizens, neutralize any resistance, stabilize the
situation and maintain the peace. That didn't leave much time
to get the ships ready.
On board USS Guam (LPH-9), flag ship of Amphibious Squadron
Four, Aviation Ordnanceman Third Class George Boucher Jr. staged
ammunition for vertical replenishment to the other four ships
of the Marine amphibious group--USS Barnstable County (LST-1197),
USS Manitowoc (LST-1180), USS Fort Snelling (LSD-30)
and USS Trenton (LPD-14). He wondered why Marine CH-46
pilots were flying in unfavorable winds on that dark night of
Oct. 24; the helicopters had trouble lifting the pallets as the
ships rushed through the water.
Down in the flag spaces, the operational commander, Vice Admiral
Joseph Metcalf III, and his staff studied the plan for Operation
Urgent Fury.
In the hangar bay, ammunition stacked to the overhead and machine
guns laid in rows were ready to be in stalled in choppers. Forces
of the 2d Battalion, 8th Marines, packed their field gear and
cleaned weapons.
Stateside, Army Rangers and 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers
assembled and prepared for departure to Grenada.
Out of sight in the darkness, the USS Independence (CV-62)
task group, including USS Richmond K. Turner (CO-20), USS
Coontz (DDG-40), USS Caron (DD-970), USS Moosbrugger
(DD-980), USS Clifton Sprague (FFG-16) and USS Suribachi
(AE-21), steamed into position off the coast of Grenada.
Toward midnight, Hull Technician Second Class Timothy Stevens
descended one of Guam's fireroom ladders to weld a leaking
economizer on a boiler. He didn't mind that reveille would sound
in a little more than two hours; he was going to be up anyway.
At the 2 a.m. reveille, Mess Management Specialist Seaman Stephen
Green started serving breakfast to the first few officers who
trickled into the wardroom, His counterparts on the mess decks
fed Marines and ship's crew. No one expected the lines would remain
open for the rest of the day--and for the next five days.
The first heliborne landing force launched before dawn from Guam's
flight deck. Marines of Echo Company huddled in the helos,
wondering what kind of resistance they would encounter. Many had
been in the Corps for less than a year.
When the helicopters touched down at Pearls Airport at 5 a.m.
on 25 Oct., the PRA--People's Revolutionary Army--greeted
the Marines with bursts from small arms and machine guns. In pairs,
the Marines scrambled out of the helos and immediately dug in,
waiting for the choppers to leave.
Three Soviet-made 12.7mm guns on a nearby hill fired at helicopters
bringing in the second assault--Marines of Fox Company--to the
town of Grenville, just south of Pearls, at 6 a.m. Sea- Cobra
[two-bladed, single turbine engine] attack helicopters were
called in to silence the guns and Fox Company landed amid light
mortar fire.
Echo and Fox companies moved slowly and cautiously after their
landings; after a couple of hours, most of the resistance at Pearls
and Grenville was beaten down.
"Commanders were directed to ensure minimum casualties to
both friendly and Grenadian people," said Commodore Robert
S. "Rupe" Owens, Commander in Chief Atlantic, deputy
chief of staff for operations. "We didn't want to go down
there and tear the island apart. We had to move slowly, making
sure we had good defensive positions, and not exposing ourselves."
Army Rangers, arriving at the airfield at Point Salines at dawn
the same day in [four-engine turboprop] C-130 [Hercules] aircraft,
met much stiffer resistance than the Marines were encountering
at Pearls. To avoid the anti-aircraft fire, the Rangers jumped
from a very low altitude--500 feet. Machine-gun fire blasted at
aircraft and Rangers on the ground. But US Air Force [four-engine
turboprop] AC-130 [Spectre] gunships silenced the hostile fire
with devastatingly accurate blasts.
"The Cubans and PRA were very well placed," said Captain
Thomas Scott, CinCLant [Commander-in-Chief Atlantic] assistant
chief of staff for current operations. "They had occupied
the high ground and strategically placed their anti-aircraft positions
around the airfield before the initial assault by U.S. and Caribbean
forces. They were probably where we'd have been if we'd been on
the resisting side."
The airfield at Point Salines was blocked, a clear sign an assault
was expected.
"There were reports in the press on Saturday (Oct. 22) that
the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States had met," Scott
said. "Right after that meeting, someone passed the word
to Grenada that the United States and a Caribbean peacekeeping
force would invade, probably within 24 or 48 hours. In fact, word
was put out on Grenada radio that the invasion would occur on
Sunday."
On Sunday, however, the United States was still discussing the
risks of the operation and trying to ascertain how much resistance
the Caribbean peace keeping force would meet.
"Three or four dozen Cuban Army regulars were in Grenada,"
said Captain Thomas A. Brooks, CinCLant assistant chief of staff
for intelligence. "They were not organized into a regular
military unit, but were primarily advisers and instructors to
the Grenadian military.
"In addition to those people, there were a handful of paramilitary
Cubans--such as police and secret service types.
"There were also about 600 Cuban construction workers. Contrary
to what people might have read, we knew the construction workers
were all militarily trained, that they were armed and that they
practiced with their weapons. We anticipated that if the PRA elected
to oppose the intervention of American and Caribbean peacekeeping
forces, the Cubans might fight against us, too."
Brooks added that the Cuban construction workers were lightly
armed with personal weapons.
"They were not very effective," he said. "Within
a couple of hours most of them had thrown down their arms and
surrendered."
Even before securing Point Salines airfield on the first day,
Rangers had moved to evacuate American students at the True Blue
campus of St. George's Medical Center. The campus, located at
one end of the 10,000-foot runway the Cubans had been building,
was reached easily and the students were rescued. A second campus
at Grand Anse was farther away, and retreating Cubans and PRA
units blocked the Rangers from the students.
By afternoon the Point Salines air field was secured from all
but sporadic mortar and small arms fire, and Rangers were moving
against PRA positions near St. George's, the capital. Other Rangers
removed obstacles on the Point Salines runway, and elements of
the 82nd Airborne Division flew in to add more people and heavier
weapons to the assault.
Meanwhile, Fox and Echo companies merged north of St. George's
and secured a flat, stadium-like area called the Queen's Racecourse,
which the Marines dubbed "LZ Racetrack" (LZ standing
for landing zone). The battalion landing team commander set up
headquarters there.
"We did a lot of humping today," said Marine Captain
Mike Dick, Fox Company commander, after the first day of the operation.
He looked over his men and added in a low tone, "It's quite
a bit different from Camp Lejeune. We're doing this for real and
for keeps.
"The performance of these young Marines has gone one step
beyond professionalism. That's a factor of their training and
maturity."
During the evening, Marines of Golf Company, from the tank landing
ships Manitowoc and Barnstable County, landed at
Grand Mal beach, just north of St. George's, with 13 amphibious
vehicles and five tanks.
Throughout the first night, a constant stream of logistics aircraft
landed and took off from the partially completed runway at Point
Salines. Gunfire roared from ships and aircraft. "Kamikaze"
flies, mites and gnats with "teeth like the great white shark"
added to everyone's discomfort.
The night was as hot as the day had been. The Caribbean air was
thick with salt and humidity. Dawn greeted the is land with a
burning, bright sun.
At first light on the second day, Marine armor supporting the
Rangers and 82nd Airborne began final assaults on Cuban and PRA
positions around St. George's. With close air support from Navy
attack aircraft from Independence, Golf Company captured
the governor's residence at 7:12 a.m., freeing several civilians
and Sir Paul Scoon, governor-general of Grenada and representative
of Queen Elizabeth.
At Point Salines airfield, soldiers with faces painted green peered
out of foxholes. Jeeps crisscrossed the runway breakneck speeds.
The noise was unceasing: the steady whine of [four- engine long
range transport] C-141s [Starlifter], the constant thumping of
helicopters, the scream of a Navy A-6 Intruder [two-seat
subsonic, carrier-based attack aircraft] , sharp staccato
bursts of strafing fire, and the low hum of a circling AC-130
gunship. Occasional bomb bursts and mortar fire echoed in the
distance. The popping small arms fire came from just over the
hills to the north and west.
But the loudest sounds of all were the cheers of rescued medical
students. Casually dressed, they carried only what they had grabbed
at a moment's notice. Looking more like tourists than refugees,
they cheerfully boarded C-141 aircraft ready to fly to the United
States.
In the meantime, students at the Grand Anse campus were still
trapped inside a wall of PRA soldiers and Cubans.
"Marine helicopters and Rangers were combined to outflank
the line of resistance," said Scott. "We did a vertical
assault--or vertical rescue--and inserted Rangers behind the line.
The students were taken out by helicopter while the resisting
forces were beaten down."
Late in the second afternoon the Marines captured Fort Frederick,
where they found the PRA's command and control system plus a room
full of automatic weapons.
"We stomped the heart of the resistance here," said
Marine Colonel James P. Faulkner, the Marine amphibious unit commander.
"Thereafter, resistance was disorganized."
On the morning of the third day of operations, Rangers and Marines,
with close air support from the carrier Independence, attacked
heavily fortified positions at Fort Adolphus, Fort Matthew and
Richmond Hill prison above St. George's. U.S. aircraft flying
in the vicinity during the first two days had met a torrent of
anti-aircraft fire; three helicopters had been shot down.
One of the heavily defended positions in the area later turned
out to be a hospital.
"That was a physically co-located defensive position for
the PRA," Scott said. "It was advertised by flag and
by gunfire to be an enemy position." At about noon, Golf
Company secured Fort Matthew, and about a half hour later they
took Richmond Hill prison.
When Fox Company marched into Fort Rupert on the second day, they
found so many communist weapons that a squad was left behind to
guard them.
Echo Company marched north of Pearls Airport and seized Soviet-made
AK-47s [7.62 mm Kalashnikov assault rifles] and rocket launchers,
along with three 12.7mm guns. While moving inland, Marines clashed
with an enemy patrol.
"The Marines banged up that squad to a point that they headed
the other way," Faulkner said.
Meanwhile, the 82nd Airborne, with close air and naval gunfire
support, moved against the Calivigny military barracks east of
Point Salines. The assault completed the last major objective
for the peacekeeping forces. After wards, the Rangers were airlifted
out of Grenada.
The next day--Oct. 28--the 82nd Airborne and Marines linked forces
at Ross Beach. They secured St. George's and began mopping up
the last few pockets of resistance scattered around the island.
In St. George's the peacekeeping forces encountered the biggest
surprise of the operation: the civilian population.
"We expected that the people would at least passively accept
the situation," Scott said. "After all, they had been
under a 24-hour shoot-on-sight curfew for several days before
we got there."
But the reception the Grenadians gave the peacekeeping force was
anything but passive.
"The thing that is most indelibly in scribed in my mind,"
said Brooks, 'in regard to Grenada, was how incredibly happy they
were to see us." Brooks, on the fourth day of the operation,
flew into Grenada with Admiral Wesley L. McDonald, Commander in
Chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, who had over all command of
Urgent Fury.
"The people came up to Admiral McDonald--and they had no
way of knowing who he was--shook his hand and said, 'Thank you
and God bless you.' We encountered this all through St. George's,"
Brooks said. 'People were leaning Out of windows and saying 'God
bless America.'
"As we were passing a street corner, three ladies were dressed
up in their Sunday best. One of them held up her index finger
and said, 'Reagan number one.' Then the ladies had a brief confab
and I guess it must have been ladies day, because then one of
the others said, 'Eugenia Charles (prime minister of Dominica)
number one; Reagan number two!"' Brooks said, laughing.
"Uniformly and universally, they were very, very happy to
see us there," he said. "I thought it must have been
like it was a generation earlier, when Europe was liberated during
World War II. We hadn't anticipated anything like that."
The Grenadians showed their appreciation with more than words.
They gave away fresh fruit, ice water and cases of soft drinks.
At Pearls Airport, they cooked rice, meat and fruit for the Marines.
The gratitude of the people was a great reward for the members
of the peacekeeping force. It made the hard ships endured worthwhile
and made the troops feel they had done something very noble, that
they were very much needed and appreciated.
"Morale is sky high," Faulkner said proudly. "One
reason is how well we were received by the Grenadians. We were
not treated as conquerors, but as friends of the people."
In fact, according to a survey done by an independent Caribbean
firm, 87 per cent of the Grenadians believed the intervention
by the Caribbean peacekeeping force was a "good thing."
Only three percent didn't believe the intervention was justified.
That positive reaction came despite a heavy anti-American campaign
by the New Jewel Movement.
"The Grenadians had obviously been fed a lot of anti-American
doctrine," Brooks said. "We saw a lot of that down there.
But it didn't take, which must have frustrated the Marxist leadership."
Fortunately, the Grenadians were so glad to see the Caribbean
peacekeeping force that they turned in suspected PRA soldiers,
and helped lead their rescuers to hidden arms caches. The PRA
soldiers were questioned and, unless they were part of the upper
echelon of the Grenadian military establishment, were released.
The remaining Cubans who had not been captured fled to the Cuban
or Soviet embassies and were later flown to Cuba.
By Nov. 2, all military objectives had been secured. Next day,
hostilities were declared to be at an end. Grenadians went about
putting their country back in order--schools and businesses reopened
for the first time in two weeks or more.
Urgent Fury was a success, but not without the inevitable tragedies
of battle. People did get hurt and die. In the full light of morning
on the first day of the operation, helicopters transported wounded
to Guam. As the helos landed, teams of hospital corpsmen
rushed to help carry stretchers. A triage area was set up in the
hangar bay. The ship's doctor, Lt. Dan Walsh, flight surgeons
and corpsmen prepared patients for surgery.
As the first casualties were taken to sick bay, an Army [twin-engine]
UH-60 Blackhawk [helicopter] gunship approached Guam.
The pilot had been shot through the left leg and was bleeding
profusely. Anti-aircraft fire had damaged the engine controls.
The co-pilot fought the helicopter to the flight deck, but couldn't
shut the engines down.
Chief Aviation Boatswain's Mate (Hydraulics) Walter Anderson reacted
instantly. On his command, a water hose was rushed to the helicopter
where a stream of water was directed into the engine's intakes.
The rotor blades stopped and two aircrewmen aboard the Blackhawk
scrambled out, beaming with relief. Hospital corpsmen helped
the wounded pilot onto a stretcher.
By noon it was obvious to the sailors on Guam that the
Army, landing at Point Salines, had encountered the heaviest resistance.
All the medevacs up to that point had been Army soldiers.
At the end of the operation, 18 American men had died and 116
were wound ed. Guam had treated 77 wounded, and many others
had been sent to Roosevelt Roads Naval Station, Puerto Rico.
Other statistics illustrating the intensity of Urgent Fury were
recorded on Guam's flight deck: 1,214 launchings and landings;
103,422 gallons of aircraft fuel consumed; 186,968 pounds of car
go lifted; and 13,775 pounds of mail delivered.
Urgent Fury had lived up to its name. But it was only the first
stage of what was to become a long deployment. The Marines returned
to their ships and Phibron Four and the Independence task
group set course for Beirut, Lebanon.
On Jan. 24, 1984, Admiral McDonald summed up the success of Operation
Urgent Fury in an address before the House Armed Services Committee.
"In summary, history should reflect that the operation was
a complete success," he stated. "All phases of the as
signed mission were accomplished. U.S. citizens were protected
and evacuated. The opposing forces were neutralized. The situation
stabilized with no additional Cuban intervention. U.S. students
have returned to resume their studies at the medical school and
tourism is steadily increasing. And, most importantly, a lawful,
democratic government has been restored."
4 February 2000