Thirteen Soldiers

by John McCain

  Others were not as resolute in maintaining their positions under such duress. The 71st New York Volunteer Infantry, part of General Hamilton Hawkins’s 1st Infantry Brigade, was ordered to the front. When the New Yorkers emerged from the jungle into massed rifle and artillery fire, they broke and fled back down the trail. Recalled one of them, “It seemed that if one stuck out his hand, the fingers would be clipped off. We huddled within ourselves and bent over to shield our bellies.” Other calamities struck during the agonizing wait at the bottom of the hill. The 3rd Infantry Brigade’s commander, Colonel Charles Wikoff, was shot and killed by a Spanish sniper, and his second- and third-in-command were wounded and carried from the field.

  The 10th Cavalry’s commander, Colonel Theodore Baldwin, was riding in the front of the regiment’s lines when an artillery shell injured him and his horse. His sergeant major, Baker, ran to his side. Baldwin assured him he was all right and told him to return to the river crossing to hurry the rest of the men across. The observation balloon was still aloft at this point. Crouching troopers were pushing past dead bodies floating in the river when another raking volley of Mauser fire sent them scrambling for less exposed positions. Baker took cover in the bush with several other troopers, who attempted to return fire on their unseen enemies. “The atmosphere,” Sergeant Jacob Clay Smith remembered, “seemed perfectly alive with flying missiles from bursting shells and musketry.”

  Baker was still crouched there when he heard the sound of a man in distress coming from the river. Private Lewis Thompson was wounded and floundering in the water, his heavy pack threatening to drown him. No one could do anything for him. The fire was so thick and constant at that point that anyone who put his head up was likely to have it shot off for his trouble. The fire was also “a trifle high,” Baker remembered, so everyone near the ford was lying frozen on the ground. He described one trooper who let a poisonous snake “crawl over him while dodging a volley from the Spanish Mausers.”

  Nevertheless when Baker heard Thompson groaning, he got up and started toward him. The men nearest Baker tried to restrain him, but he wouldn’t be dissuaded. He raced to the injured man as “another of those troublesome shells passed so close as to cause me to feel the heat.” He was struck by shrapnel twice in his arm and shoulder. Somehow he managed to reach Thompson, drag him from the river, and help get him to the surgeon. When you read citations for decorated soldiers, the heroism described usually begins with something like “With little regard for his own safety.” That’s what “little regard” looks like. To the men who witnessed it, Baker’s action was certain to get him killed. That it didn’t they credited as miraculous. He would receive the Medal of Honor.

  Minutes after Baker rescued Thompson, the observation balloon finally met its overdue fate, its occupants dazed but otherwise unhurt by their rapid descent. Baker, his wounds presumably dressed, helped Colonel Baldwin and another man cut breaches in the barbed wire strung along the base of the ridge. Then they waited for the order to charge. Just before they received it, Baldwin was wounded again and carried from the field, the first of many officers in the regiment who would be lost that day.

  THE SPANISH HAD STRONGLY fortified El Caney and now stoutly defended it with not much more than five hundred men to Lawton’s sixty-five hundred. They were aided immensely by their Mausers’ longer range, the difficulty of the terrain, the barbed wire stretched low to the ground that was instrumental in checking American advances, and the nearly constant exposure to fire their attackers faced. Americans remembered the scene as “Hell Caney.” The first infantry assault, led by the 2nd Massachusetts Volunteers, was repulsed. Sergeant Major Pullen passed the defeated volunteers as the 25th Infantry made its way to the front. “They were completely whipped,” he recalled, “and took occasion to warn us, saying: ‘Boys, there is no use to go up there, you cannot see a thing; they are slaughtering our men!’ ”

  But the 25th did go up there. After repeated attacks had buckled under devastating fire, the division’s artillery battery, commanded by the fallen Captain Capron’s father, had managed to breach a stone fort that was critical to the Spanish defenses. The 25th and the 12th U.S. Infantry were ordered to make the final assault. Pullen described the grim reality of their advance:

  This particular charge was a tough, hard climb, over sharp, rising ground, which, were a man in perfect physical strength, he would climb slowly. Part of the charge was made over soft, plowed ground, a part through a lot of prickly pineapple plants and barbed-wire entanglements. It was slow, hard work, under a blazing sun and a perfect hailstorm of bullets, which, thanks to the poor marksmanship of the Spaniards, “went high.”

  The charge may have been slow and fiercely resisted, but it was relentless. And it succeeded: they drove the Spanish from El Caney, albeit about seven hours behind schedule. Soldiers in the 25th were the first to enter the fort and capture the enemy’s colors, though white soldiers of the 12th claimed the credit. The cost of the victory totaled eighty-one killed and 360 wounded.

  Well before their triumph, Shafter had accepted that Lawton might not join the attack on the San Juan Heights. Casualties among infantry and cavalry, officers and men, were mounting, exceeding 5 percent, and not a single soldier had started up the hill yet. That number didn’t include soldiers who lay prostrate in their wool and flannel uniforms, victims of heat stroke. Shafter’s officers urged him to let them begin the assault rather than continue being shot to pieces while they waited in the sweltering heat. Continuing to hold their exposed positions or even retreating could prove almost as dangerous as a charge. Finally, sometime between noon and one that afternoon, Shafter ordered, “The Heights must be taken at all costs,” and four Gatling guns began firing on the Spanish entrenchments as American infantry and cavalry shouted their approval.

  As welcome a sound as the Gatlings were, Shafter still hadn’t said when his corps would take the Heights, seemingly leaving it to his subordinate commanders to decide when to start. Everyone knew how it would have to be done, of course: an ascent over open ground and a frontal attack on the Spanish lines. But who would order it? Accounts of the Battle of San Juan Heights vary depending on which participant is reporting. Thirteen regular army regiments and two volunteer regiments were involved in the battle, each with a parochial regard for its own importance to the outcome. But there does seem to be a consensus about how the charge began.

  A young lieutenant in General Hawkins’s 1st Infantry Brigade, Jules Ord, is said to have volunteered to lead the charge. “I would not ask any man to volunteer,” Hawkins is said to have replied. “Well, then, if you do not forbid it, I will start it,” a presumably frustrated Ord replied. “I will not ask for volunteers, I will not give permission and I will not refuse it,” Hawkins explained, underscoring his implicit approval with a “God Bless and good luck!” Ord, shirtless and brandishing his sword, gave the order to charge, and the soldiers of the 6th Infantry Regiment rose to their feet and followed him. The attack stirred other regiments into action. The 2nd and 10th Infantry advanced on the left. To the right the cavalry started up Kettle Hill, and Teddy Roosevelt dug his spurs into Little Texas and raced ahead of his men.

  There was very little military order in the spontaneous general assault that commenced. Regiments that were already losing some of their cohesion in the long wait under constant fire became thoroughly mixed with each other. The Buffalo Soldiers of the 24th charged past regiments in front of them to join the attack on San Juan, sweeping along with them elements of the 9th and 13th Infantry and leaving behind the 71st New York Volunteers, still shell-shocked from their earlier exposure to combat. Buffalo Soldier Herschel Cashin remembered General Kent pleading with the New Yorkers to join the charge, “with tears streaming down his cheeks, begging, admonishing, persuading, and entreating,” but to no avail. The New Yorkers remained in the rear, while the 24th, according to Cashin’s description, “rushed . . . wildly across the open field, attracting the attention of the entire Spanish line and
drawing concentrated fire.”

  Some troops in the 10th Cavalry joined the charge up San Juan with the 6th Infantry. The rest of the regiment “advanced rapidly” up Kettle Hill with the Rough Riders “under a galling, converging fire from the enemy’s artillery and infantry,” as Baker recalled. Troops from the 6th, 3rd, and 9th regiments in the 1st Brigade merged with each other and with the Rough Riders and other regiments in the 2nd Brigade as they navigated their way through barbed wire and the hailstorm of bullets and shells. Frank Knox, a Rough Rider and future secretary of the navy, found himself fighting in a troop of Buffalo Soldiers and later professed, “I never saw braver men anywhere.”

  Adding to the chaos was the confusion caused by casualties among the officers before and during the charge, which were many. Lieutenant Pershing, who was with the 10th during the charge, put their losses at “20 percent killed and wounded—50 percent of the officers were lost, a fearful rate.” The assault upon the San Juan Heights continued relentlessly in the teeth of fierce opposition, led as much by sergeants and corporals as lieutenants, captains, and colonels, white man and black man advancing over the steep, stony ground shoulder to shoulder. Buffalo Soldiers in G Troop of the 10th suddenly found themselves marching directly into the Spanish guns. Their sergeant, Saint Foster, suggested to Lieutenant W. H. Smith they take an alternative route up the hill. Smith abruptly rejected the advice. “All right, sir,” Foster responded, “we’ll go as far as you will.” Seconds later Smith was killed. Foster took over command of G Troop and brought it to the crest without losing another man. He was commended in an after-action report for having “displayed remarkable intelligence and ability in handling the troop during the remainder of the day.”

  Pershing described the integrated cavalry charge that stormed Kettle Hill:

  Each officer or soldier next in rank took charge of the line or group immediately in his front or rear and halting to fire at each good opportunity, taking reasonable advantage of cover, the entire command moved forward as coolly as though the buzzing of bullets was the humming of bees. White regiments, black regiments, regulars and Rough Riders, representing the young manhood of the North and the South, fought soldier to soldier, unmindful of race or color, unmindful of whether commanded by ex-Confederate or not and mindful only of their common duty as Americans.

  The 3rd Cavalry’s color bearer was shot and killed during the charge. The color sergeant for the 10th, George Berry, a thirty-year veteran of the regiment, saw him fall, retrieved his colors, and shouting “Dress on the colors, boys,” carried both standards to the top of the hill, where he planted them.

  Kettle Hill cost the cavalry thirty-five dead and several hundred wounded. Roosevelt was one of the first men to reach the top, but he wasn’t the first. Some reports credit Color Sergeant Berry. Roosevelt was a conspicuously brave soldier that day, and an inspiration. But he wasn’t the only one, although he adroitly managed—and we write this as his admirers—to make himself the hero of San Juan Hill. That was a disservice to the other Americans, black and white, who fought so heroically there.

  After they drove the Spanish off Kettle Hill, the cavalry turned their attention to the Spanish on San Juan Hill, which had yet to be taken by Kent’s infantry. Roosevelt ordered a charge, raced down the slope of Kettle under fire, and had just gotten over a barbed-wire fence and started up San Juan when he discovered only five men had followed him. Infuriated, he abandoned the idea and returned to his exhausted regiment. San Juan soon fell to the infantry. Lieutenant Ord, whose actions had triggered the advance of the American line, was one of the first men to reach the top, where he was shot and killed minutes later.

  Two hundred five Americans died taking El Caney and the San Juan Heights, and almost twelve hundred men were wounded. Twenty-six of the dead were Buffalo Soldiers. Baker described their suffering and sacrifice:

  Men shot and lacerated in every conceivable manner; some are expressionless; some just as they appeared in life; while others are pinched and drawn and otherwise distorted, portraying agony in her most distressful state. Of the wounded, in their anguish, some are perfectly quiet; others are heard praying; some are calling for their mothers, while others are giving out patriotic utterances, urging their comrades on to victory, or bidding them farewell as they pass on to the front. July 1, in passing a wounded comrade, he told me that he could whip the cowardly Spaniard who shot him, in a fair fist fight.

  The capture of the San Juan Heights and El Caney exposed Santiago to siege. The Spanish squadron anchored there attempted a breakout on July 3 and were destroyed in detail by Admiral Sampson’s fleet. Though some intermittent skirmishing continued, the war in Cuba was effectively finished. Yellow fever and malaria drove most Americans home, including Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, leaving behind an occupying force under Colonel Wood. As he bade farewell to his regiment, Roosevelt had a few words of praise for the heroism of the Buffalo Soldiers:

  Now, I want to say just a word more to some of the men I see standing around not of your number. I refer to the colored regiments, who occupied the right and left flanks of us at Guásimas, the Ninth and Tenth cavalry regiments. The Spaniards called them “Smoked Yankees,” but we found them to be an excellent breed of Yankees. I am sure that I speak the sentiments of officers and men in the assemblage when I say that between you and the other cavalry regiments there exists a tie which we trust will never be broken.

  HOWEVER, HE TOOK A different tack in his war memoir, faulting the resolve of some of the Buffalo Soldiers on Kettle Hill:

  None of the white regulars or Rough Riders showed the slightest sign of weakening; but under the strain the colored infantrymen (who had none of their officers) began to get a little uneasy and to drift to the rear, either helping wounded men, or saying that they wished to find their own regiments. This I could not allow, as it was depleting my line, so I jumped up, and walking a few yards to the rear, drew my revolver, halted the retreating soldiers, and called out to them that I appreciated the gallantry with which they had fought and would be sorry to hurt them, but that I should shoot the first man who, on any pretense whatever, went to the rear.

  IN LATER PRESS INTERVIEWS Roosevelt suggested that while black troops would fight bravely, they couldn’t be relied on without white officers commanding them.

  A sergeant from the 10th, Presley Holliday, disputed Roosevelt’s criticism in a lengthy letter to the New York Age, an African American–run newspaper. He reminded Roosevelt that at Las Guásimas and Kettle Hill, Buffalo Soldiers had come to the aid of the 1st and had led the final assault on El Caney after many of their officers had been killed or wounded or were missing. That black soldiers looked to return to their regiments after they reached the top of the hill did not necessarily make them shirkers. Their action was likely nothing more than an attempt to find order in chaos. He mentioned also that when Roosevelt drew his revolver, his own Rough Riders had defended the Buffalo Soldiers. “You won’t have to shoot those men, Colonel,” Holliday reports them saying. “We know those boys.” He also alleges that Roosevelt apologized the next day to the men he threatened.

  Holliday closed the letter by endorsing the demand to have black officers commissioned for black regiments: “Our motto for the future must be: No officers, no soldiers.”

  Some Buffalo Soldiers were given commissions after the war, but they were restricted to service in volunteer regiments. Baker was commissioned a first lieutenant in the 10th U.S. Volunteer Infantry, an all-black regiment recruited for war with Spain, although he spent the first months after he returned from Cuba at a quarantine camp in Montauk, New York, recovering from his wounds and illness. His old regiment, the 10th Cavalry, was posted briefly in Alabama and then at several camps in Texas. The “colored” regiments had received widespread praise in the newspapers for their heroics in Cuba. Yet that hadn’t changed how they were treated in the Jim Crow South. Baker spent only a few months with the Volunteers in Macon, Georgia, before the regiment was mustered out. He return
ed to the 10th Cavalry in San Antonio, Texas, and his old rank, sergeant major.

  In late 1899 he received another commission, a captaincy in the 49th Volunteer Infantry, one of two all-black volunteer regiments recruited to fight in the Philippines. He commanded Company L, with two other veteran Buffalo Soldiers serving as the company’s first and second lieutenants. As usual his impeccable conduct made lasting impressions on his superiors, who frequently commended him in their reports. Major General Elwell Otis, military governor for the Philippines, recommended that forty-two black officers in the volunteer regiments serving in the war be given second lieutenant commissions in the regular army. His recommendation was ignored.

  Baker anticipated that outcome, and after he returned to the States he petitioned for a commission in the Philippine Scouts, an indigenous army Congress created in 1901 to fight Philippine insurgents. He solicited several high-level endorsements, including one from the old rebel general Fighting Joe Wheeler. He also wrote directly to the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt.

  He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Scouts in 1902 and spent the next seven years in command of remote posts on the islands of Luzon and Samar. He never lived with his wife and children again, and something happened to him during those seven years of lonely and difficult frontier service. A soldier who in his more than two decades in the army had received only effusive praise from men who had served above and below him, whose admirers included the last commanding general of the army, Nelson Miles, and the incumbent president of the United States, a soldier who was routinely described as “sober,” “intelligent,” and “exemplary” became an alcoholic, and his superiors began to doubt his fitness for continued service. In 1909 he resigned his commission in the Scouts. In recognition of his many years of exemplary service, the army that could never bring itself to give him the commission he deserved allowed him to reenlist and retire in 1910 as a quartermaster sergeant.