citizens, neutralize any resistance, stabilize the situation and maintain the peace. 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. The response was Urgent Fury, a multinational, multiservice effort. Eastern Caribbean nations fully understood the implication of the communist threat and called upon the United States for help. 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.

But size is not necessarily the determining factor when governments consider strategic military locations. 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.