Grenada Invaded: U.S. Restores Order After Coup

Seven thousand American troops and a token contingent from six Caribbean nations landed on the island of Grenada before dawn on October 25, 1983, in Operation Urgent Fury, the first major U.S. military intervention since Vietnam. President Ronald Reagan ordered the invasion six days after a Marxist faction within Grenada's own revolutionary government had seized power and executed Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. Grenada, a spice-producing island of 110,000 people in the southeastern Caribbean, had been governed since 1979 by Bishop's New Jewel Movement, which had close ties to Cuba and the Soviet Union. A faction led by Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard, who considered Bishop insufficiently revolutionary, placed him under house arrest on October 13. When Bishop's supporters freed him on October 19, soldiers loyal to Coard opened fire on the crowd, killing dozens, and then executed Bishop by firing squad. The new military junta imposed a shoot-on-sight curfew. Reagan cited the safety of approximately 800 American medical students on the island as the primary justification for intervention, along with a formal request from the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States. Critics argued the students were never in serious danger and that the real motive was to eliminate a Soviet-Cuban foothold in the Caribbean. The operation itself exposed serious coordination problems between the branches of the American military, including incompatible radio systems that forced one unit to call in an airstrike using a civilian telephone and a credit card. Fighting lasted three days. American forces encountered heavier resistance than expected from Grenadian troops and several hundred Cuban construction workers who had been building a new airport. Nineteen Americans were killed along with 45 Grenadians and 25 Cubans. The invasion proved overwhelmingly popular with the American public and with most Grenadians, who largely welcomed the removal of the Coard junta. Elections were held in 1984. Urgent Fury's military lessons directly influenced the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, which restructured the Department of Defense to improve joint operations between service branches. For Reagan, Grenada restored a measure of American military confidence that had been eroded by Vietnam, the Iran hostage crisis, and the Beirut barracks bombing just two days earlier.