Maria tightened her grip and blurted out, “Juanito! What of him?”
“I’ve heard nothing. He’s likely safe. I doubt Juanito ever learned what happened to Francisco. The newspaper reported a Franciscan priest had been killed by bandits on a road outside the city. It’s what most people assume. I also think, at this point, it is better he doesn’t know. Juanito’s young, and might do something rash.”
“But if Marrón went after Francisco, he could go after Juanito. We have to get him out of Cuba! I need to go and talk to him. I can convince him to return to Spain.”
I couldn’t tell Maria that I’d been interrogated by Juanito the same day Francisco had been seen dead in the ditch at Cabaña. It was obvious to me Marrón, for some reason unknown to me at the time, wasn’t after the younger brother, or he would’ve had him arrested also.
“No, Maria. Juanito is safe and you need not worry about him. Don’t concern yourself about Marrón either. He can’t hurt anyone, anymore. Marrón died the night before I left the island. Because he either ordered or allowed a priest to be killed, I think his secret unit probably is under intense scrutiny, for I believe the senior Spanish authorities have been told what happened.”
She didn’t ask how I knew such things. Instead, her voice trailed off. “Then the world will never learn the truth about my poor Francisco. He was such a lovely baby, such a good boy who always wanted to help people. . . .”
“The Spanish authorities will never admit what happened. But God knows. I believe He’s already welcomed Francisco home and told him, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant.’ ”
Through her tears, she murmured, “Book of Matthew. Chapter twenty-five, verse twenty-three.”
We spoke no more that night, the pain was beyond the power of words. I held my wife long after the lamp ran out of oil, until we fell asleep in each other’s arms.
The Monday I was to return to duty, the last day of February, dawned bitter cold and raining. The front yard was full of slush and mud, adding to the funereal melancholia of the scene. Rork arrived in a coach to fetch me to the station and the short train ride back to Washington. Our reunion was mostly silent, for he saw the sorrow in my home was palpable. This time my absence would have no time limit attached. It was for the duration of the war, which hadn’t even officially begun yet.
My wife and I kissed, but it yielded no passion, a pro forma performance done by rote. As Rork and I climbed into the coach and headed off, Maria stood watching from the porch, her anguished expression knifing through me. For a long time, I sat wordless as we clopped down the road past the bleak landscape, feeling a cad for abandoning my beloved Maria. She had sacrificed her comfortable life for one of a naval wife. What had I done for her?
A disturbing debate gripped me. Should I quit the navy and return home to the woman I desperately loved? My pension would be minimal, but her money could carry us through. I knew with every fiber of my being Maria needed me to hold her another week, another month, to get past the torment in her heart. I was partly responsible. My presence in Havana had pushed Marrón to do the unthinkable—kill a priest.
“None o’ this is your fault, Peter. Not a wee bit,” said Rork, penetrating my despondency as only he can. “Marrón an’ his ilk’re the villains in this. An’ there’s no more you can do for her. Your lady’s smart an’ strong, an’ she’ll come out o’ this. She just needs a bit o’ solitude to let out her heartache.”
“But I shouldn’t leave her alone, Sean. It’s a cruel thing to do, leaving her like this.”
“Aye, for an average man, there’d be the truth. But you an’ me’re no average men, Peter. Maria’s always understood we’ve responsibilities others don’t. Goes with the profession, lad.”
He let that sink in, then switched to his bosun voice. “An’ now Captain Wake, we’ve a hellova lot to do, with damned little time to do it. Concentrate on your orders, `cause this whole bloody war mess’ll be out o’ control by next week.”
“Yeah, you’re right on that,” I admitted. “And I have a nasty feeling we’ll be right in the middle of it.”
38
Outwitting the Parasites
Brooklyn Navy Yard
March 1898
A week after the train brought Rork and me back to work with Roosevelt in Washington, we departed yet again, this time for the Brooklyn Navy Yard, our new base of operations. Plunging into our unusual mission, it began to progress as I’d conceived. Traveling around New York and New England, we inspected several yachts offered for sale to the government by Roosevelt’s rich friends and found them suitable. This was the easy part.
The hard part, necessitating long hours of paperwork, meetings, and bargaining, was the daunting task of preparing the yachts’ conversion to warships. It couldn’t actually start yet, but I reserved the necessary armaments from the yard’s ordnance officer and lined up the yard facilities to fit them aboard the vessels with the repair officer. I could tell neither of them thought my plan would come to fruition and they’d ever actually have to fulfill their commitments.
Next came officers and men for the ships. Using friendships, animosities, and quid pro quos, enough were found and tentatively allocated. Arrangements for provisions, fuel, medicines, equipment, and a hundred other things, dominated the final phase. All this effort was done without excessive press attention, a key factor I insisted upon, and one of the reasons we were successful to date. The final obstacle was the funding approval from Congress. Once voted, the preparations could be set into motion.
On the seventh of March, Theodore cabled me a dire message. His dear Edith’s long illness had turned deadly. He feared cancer. That afternoon the doctors operated on her in an effort to ascertain the cause. Rork and I were anxious, for we knew dynamic Theodore Roosevelt was nothing without Edith. By the grace of God, his next cable relieved our fears. Theodore reported they found a large abscess near her hip and determined it was not cancerous. The surgery was successful. She would recover.
Meanwhile, a State Department friend visiting New York passed along to me the startling news that President McKinley had secretly offered $300 million to buy Cuba from Spain, in an effort to avoid war. The Spanish refusal didn’t surprise me. The situation had gone beyond reason. National ego was everything now.
On the eighth of March, Congress unanimously authorized fifty million dollars for emergency acquisition of ships, munitions, provisions, and fuel for the navy, as well as some funding for the army. Roosevelt instantly sent out orders for me to execute the waiting contracts, demanding the squadron to be fully operational within two weeks. We had carefully organized each of the professional components in the project to that very end. But I forgot a salient factor—human nature.
When the news of fifty million dollars being given for war preparations went out by telegraph across the nation, parasitical commercial and naval rats emerged from the shadows to get their nibbles. Within hours, they insinuated themselves into the decision-making at Washington and New York.
At the end of the day, I received an apologetic cable from Roosevelt. From the seven large and fast yachts already chosen, the squadron was reduced to four slow yachts and a freighter. I was ordered to continue to get the vessels converted into warships and operational as quickly as possible.
With a condescending sneer, the commandant of the yard informed me the next morning of what he’d heard from his cronies. Several unassigned high-ranking naval officers at headquarters had learned of my assignment, jealously watching my steady progress. Since they had connections in Congress and wanted command of my fast yachts, they got them. Since none of them wanted to command the slow yachts and the freighter, I was left with those vessels. The arrogant ass further explained this development reflecting the fact that I was the only officer left in the navy who had never graduated from the academy, adding I shouldn’t expect to compete equally for decent ship commands.
One can imagine my reaction, but I didn’t succumb to temptation and deck the conceited bastard. There wasn’t time for that luxury. We were going to war, he wasn’t. The next three weeks were a blur of begging, coercion, trickery, and outright larceny on my part, none of it pleasant or worthy of reporting in detail. It matters only that in the end I successfully outwitted the self-righteous snobs in navy blue and the profiteering parasites in three-piece gray. My ships were converted.
By the end of March, the unusual squadron was commissioned, armed, manned, equipped, fueled, and provisioned. Far more importantly, I kept many of the petty officers and junior commissioned officers I’d wanted all along, for when the word went out about my command they volunteered. Unfortunately, the squadron was still scattered between naval stations at New York, Newport, and Boston, and had yet to train together as a fighting unit.
During this time, Theodore Roosevelt, who at forty years of age was far younger than most men he dealt with, came into his own. While others shrank from the building tension, Theodore reveled in it. Freed of fear for Edith, he spent every waking moment asking questions, inspecting ships, issuing orders, promoting scientific innovations, spurring on the clerical staffs—in general, running a wartime navy for Secretary Long.
As war loomed closer, the navy secretary grew content with lending absentminded approval to his vigorous assistant’s decisions and ideas, some of which were considered bizarre by the establishment. Two of those notions merit mention here, for they are examples of how Theodore was far ahead of his time in the field of naval sciences. One was John Holland’s newest submarine, which at Roosevelt’s insistence I personally observed in operation off Brooklyn that March. Seeing it in action ended my earlier doubts as to its capabilities, and I became convinced such a unique weapon could be a deciding factor in harbor and coastal defense.
Roosevelt’s curiosity extended into the air as well. I found this understandable, given his gifts as a lifelong ornithologist. His old friend Professor Langley’s latest aerial machine, of which many in the navy were skeptical, was tested that spring off a specially adapted houseboat on the Potomac. Theodore was a witness, afterward sending me a note enthusiastically reporting the contraption had potential as a fleet gunnery lookout and scout.
On the twentieth, the New York newspapers reported the battleship Oregon had gotten under way from San Francisco, bound on a 14,000-mile voyage around the continent of South America for action with the North Atlantic Squadron. My son, Lieutenant Sean Wake, her assistant gunnery officer, was going to war. Pride and worry for my son quietly tore at me as I waited for word from Washington about my own fate.
On the twenty-eighth, the official naval inquiry ruled Maine’s destruction was caused by a Spanish mine. I remained uncertain, but it didn’t matter anymore. The press and Congress clamored for war.
On the twenty-ninth, the American government demanded Spain leave Cuba, knowing it was a moot point.
On the final day of March, 1898, our waiting ended when orders from Roosevelt arrived. They were simple, and ominous.
XXX—ASSUME WAR STATUS—X—READY ALL SHIPS FOR ACTION—X ASSEMBLE SQUADRON AT CTB—X—SUGAR ORDERS FORTHCOMING—XXX
CTB was the rendezvous point. Plan SUGAR was my squadron’s attack on Isabela and the subsequent inshore blockade on the central north coast of Cuba.
I wasted no time in sending off telegrams to the rest of the squadron at Newport and Boston. My captains had been ready and waiting for the word. They would leave port the next dawn, and set a course for CTB, Congo Town, at Andros Island in the Bahamas.
I had arranged the rendezvous location at a cocktail party in Manhattan the week before, while renewing my acquaintance with Admiral Jackie Fisher, commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy’s North America and West Indies Station. We’d first met in 1874 off the coast of Morocco, where Rork and I had managed to become prisoners of a local corsair. Fisher, a young ship captain at the time, liberated us in a nasty little fight.
We kept a periodic correspondence during the next twenty-four years and occasionally saw each other in person, the previous time being at Washington six months earlier. Upon seeing me again in New York and hearing my request, he was only too happy to oblige, since it was within his area of responsibility.
The site was perfect for my purpose—remote enough to train our people in secret, yet close enough to the enemy to enable us to strike the instant war was declared. No one, save Fisher, my captains, Roosevelt, and two others at naval headquarters, knew where we were going.
At dawn on April first, my commodore’s pennant broke out at the main mast as we steamed out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard basin. Dock workers and sailors cheered us as we slid past my dear old ship, Newark. It had been over a year since I’d left her in the care of the yard. Her refit was scheduled to last two years, but with the coming conflict that timetable had been erased. Now she was crawling with workmen hurrying to get her ready as soon as possible.
We turned to port and made our way down the East River, bustling with ships and boats, toward the Brooklyn Bridge, where my career had nearly ended. Pedestrians on the bridge waved and shouted encouragements to our strange-looking warship. A ferry dipped her ensign and sounded a long salute on her steam whistle, the men aboard applauding us. Some of the women were weeping as they waved.
The transit down the upper bay was helped by a strong ebb tide, and before long we were well beyond the city with its smoke and noise, surging past Fort Hamilton and The Narrows. A land breeze piped up from the east, clean and warm. Spring had arrived, and not a cloud cluttered the sky in the lower bay and ocean beyond.
There was a leftover swell rolling up from the south. Our bow knifed through it at eight knots, fans of mist bursting up into the air, creating miniature rainbows. I heard banter from my position on the starboard bridge wing and looked down to the foredeck where two young seamen were securing the ready anchor cable and capstan. Their good humor gave me a smile. I was back at sea, far away from the stifling atmosphere and contemptuous scrutiny of dull-minded naval aristocrats.
Rork was standing alone farther aft on the main deck, swaying easily with the motion of the ship as the wind whipped his gray hair. He was watching the low line of Sandy Hook fade away in the distance, the last land we’d see for a thousand miles.
39
The Squadron
U.S.S. Kestrel (Flagship)
Special Service Squadron 2
North Atlantic Ocean
The ships and men under my command were designated Special Service Squadron 2. My flagship was U.S.S. Kestrel, formerly the yacht Gertrude, of New London, Connecticut. Built in 1894 for a wealthy shipping mogul, her measurements were: length 221 feet, beam 40 feet, draft 16 feet, and her single triple expansion engine drove her at a top speed of 15 knots. Her bunkerage was expanded by sacrificing four of her posh guest cabins, allowing a 1300-mile range at eight knots. Her two masts could set enough sail to provide four knots on a broad reach in moderate winds. Kestrel’s armament consisted of two six-pounder rapid fire guns mounted fore and aft, and two Colt machine guns mounted on either side amidships. The additional weight of coal and guns had slowed her a bit from her yacht speed of eighteen knots, but it was a trade-off I judged worth it. She carried five officers and fifty-nine men.
My pen cannot describe my profound gratitude when several of my previous shipmates, upon hearing the gossip about my enterprise, insistently volunteered to serve with me. This came at a time when others were clamoring to get aboard the big ships which were certain to see battle glory.
Senior among these loyal souls was Commander James Southby, who the reader has already met as executive officer of Newark. Having decided to remain in the navy for the duration of the pending war, he was still at Boston Navy Yard when he wrote the Navy Department volunteering to join my squadron. I was subsequently asked by Roosevelt my opinion, and enthusiastically requested Southby as Kestrel�
�s commanding officer, and also my squadron chief of staff. In addition, Roosevelt secured his promotion to the rank of captain, even though the secondary nature of the squadron required the chief of staff have only the rank of commander.
My other squadron staff consisted of Lieutenant Grover Yeats, a smart and resourceful young officer I knew from my years as captain of Bennington, who would be my flag lieutenant. Chief Boatswain Sean Rork was my petty officer aide, and Boatswain’s Mate Willy Mack, from my time aboard Chicago, his assistant. Mack was a quiet professional with the distinction of being one of the few black deck petty officers left in the navy.
The rest of my ship commanders were middle-aged gentlemen, completely unknown to me prior to forming the squadron. I was slightly wary of their lack of experience aboard proper naval vessels until Rork reminded me of my own convoluted past.
U.S.S. Osprey, the former coastal freighter Dunwoody, built in 1888, was commanded by Lieutenant Socrates Bilton, a Massachusetts Naval Militia officer brought into active service by the recommendation of Commander Southby. In his civilian life Bilton was a coastal steamer captain plying the New England coast. Osprey’s particulars were: length of 184 feet, beam of 37 feet, draft of 14 feet, speed of 12 knots, carrying four officers and forty-four men. Her armament was the same as Kestrel, as was her steaming range.
U.S.S. Harrier was the former yacht Constance Marie, and commanded by Lieutenant Howard Farmore, also of the Massachusetts Naval Militia, one of Boston’s gilded elite and a yachtsman of some renown. His position had been secured by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s close friendship with Roosevelt. Harrier was the smallest and slowest of my ships, having a length of 164 feet, beam of 34 feet, draft of 13 feet, and speed of only ten knots. She carried one six-pounder gun, two four-pounder guns, two Colt machine guns, three officers, and 43 men, mostly naval militia reservists. Due to her lack of fuel capacity, she would be stopping at Norfolk en route for coal.
An Honorable War Page 18
