(2 of 8)
"I shall be with you very soon," Castillo Armas radioed to the Guatemalan people. Then he strapped a string of hand grenades around his waist and clapped a steel helmet on his head. Unopposed, his men quickly crossed the border, seized Esquipulas with its famed old church.
The Other Colonel. In Guatemala City, that day, another colonel strode tight-lipped along the underground tunnel that leads from the executive mansion via an elevator to the presidential office on the second floor of the city's avocado-green National Palace. President Jacobo Arbenz, the stubborn, enigmatic career soldier who had started the trouble in the first place by flinging wide the palace doors and welcoming Communists into his government, had plenty to think about. But he may have taken a moment to recall that Castillo Armas had once been a school mate, a fellow graduate of the country's West Point, the Escuela Politecnica.
For the first day or two, Arbenz seemed curiously unwilling to move his troops or put his army officers to the test. Reports indicated that officers and men alike were being confined to barracks. Finally Arbenz made his decision, announced that he was taking personal command of the armed forces. He cautiously organized a picked force of 500 men from the three forts within the capital, put a trusted colonel in command, and started them off in slowly crawling trucks toward Zacapa, 70 miles away. With that spearhead force on the way, he gave command of his field force to a St. Cyr-educated officer, and hoped for the best.
Once off the road, the army forces might have trouble keeping contact with the rebels. This would be particularly true if the rebels tried to avoid combat and play for time in the hope that throngs of Guatemalans within the country might be won over to them. As a hedge against that, the government passed out guns to some of its Red-led unions of workers and peasants, and sent them to police roads and villages in the interior.
Grenades & Thunderbolts. In the air, meanwhile, Castillo Armas' pilots were scoring successes. His air force was tiny but effective. It took only a small Cessna plane, carrying hand grenades and a light machine gun, to blow up the gasoline tanks at the Pacific port of San Jose, thus forcing Arbenz into immediate and drastic gas rationing. F47 Thunderbolts —Castillo Armas would not say where they were flying from—strafed Guatemala City and Puerto Barrios. Arbenz was embarrassingly unable to fight back. His air force, made up of a few lightly armed trainers, was no match for F-47s, even if he could trust his pilots. But four of them, at least, had defected, taking refuge in the Salvadoran Embassy.