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By late Thursday, Atlantic Fleet Commander Admiral Wesley McDonald later reported, "all major military objectives in the island were secured." But on Friday, he said, "scattered pockets of resistance" remained "and fighting is still in progress." By then 5,000 paratroopers, 500 Marines and 500 Rangers were on Grenada. Captured Cuban documents, McDonaid said, showed that as many as 1,100 Cubans had been there. Only 638 were in the custody of the invading forces. Many of the others, he suggested, may have fled to the interior mountains.
Administration officials were eager to detail the surprisingly large Cuban presence. According to McDonald, captured Cuban records showed that Fidel Castro planned to send 341 officers and 4,000 soldiers to the island, increasing the total of armed Cubans there to a force of 6,800. Six warehouses north of the Point Salines airstrip had been found with Soviet and Cuban arms. A Pentagon spokesman said this was "far above what any island this size would need for self-defense." However, TIME Correspondent William McWhirter, who visited the warehouses, found the supplies "more of a hodgepodge of wholesale weaponry than a sophisticated armory." Also overrun by the Americans was what McDonald described as a "command and control position" with all the radios, counterintelligence gear and cryptography equipment needed to run a clandestine government.
While not excessive for such an operation, the human cost was high. At week's end the count of dead U.S. servicemen stood at eleven. An additional seven were missing. At least 67 were wounded, some seriously. One of the secrets in the heavily censored little war was the extent of casualties inflicted on the enemy. U.S. officials refused to provide even the roughest estimate of Cuban and Grenadian deaths.
The decision to strike the tiny Caribbean island had been made swiftly; the haste worried some top U.S. military planners. But the concern in Washington over the Marxist ideology of the former British colony's erratic leaders and their growing chumminess with Cuba and the Soviet Union had been festering for years. Relations with the U.S. had been good after Britain granted Grenada independence in 1974. The leader, Prime Minister Eric Gairy, wielded his constitutional power with repressive and corrupt tactics, but demonstrated strong anti-Communist fervor. He was overthrown in a bloodless coup on March 13, 1979, by Maurice Bishop, then 34, a charismatic leader of the leftist New Jewel Movement. Within three days, a Cuban ship carrying Soviet weapons and ammunition arrived in Grenada.
Grenada remained a member of the British Commonwealth. Scoon, a Grenadian knighted by Britain, represented the Queen in the post of Governor-General. But Cuba's influence grew steadily. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter warned Bishop that his government could expect no more economic aid from the U.S. if it aligned itself with Cuba. Bishop protested this U.S. "interference." Carter and his security aides considered covert action to dislodge Bishop, but decided instead to treat him with hands-off hostility.