Roach may well have been innocent of the corruption alleged in angry editorials, and the four boats he was building—Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and Dolphin, known to history as the “ABCD ships”—were eventually completed. But Whitney’s investigation revealed that neither the Republican-administered Navy nor Roach had been trying to produce anything like up-to-date fighting ships.
Foreign naval experts judged the ABCD ships’ designs comical at best. The U.S. Navy was just beginning its steel-ship education, and Whitney had discovered that no company in the United States—not even Roach & Sons, which had its own steel mills—could produce military-grade steel for guns or armor. Our guns and armor were either antique, inferior, or purchased from Britain, which was in no hurry to fulfill our armaments orders.
Whitney suspended the Roach contracts—eventually driving the company into receivership—and issued an 1886 annual report declaring it “a most lamentable circumstance that a country like ours, with its immense products of iron and steel, should be content to be dependent upon the manufacturers of any other nation for the fabrication of armor and high-power guns, both of which are now essential and in indispensable parts of a modern fighting ship.”
The navy secretary committed the nation to self-sufficiency in the production of armor plate and big guns, explaining that it would delay the new fleet’s debut by several years but eventually put the nation “in a much stronger position in every respect.”
Whitney ensured the cooperation of U.S. steel manufacturers by canceling all foreign contracts for guns and armor and bundling the Navy’s immediate steel needs into a single contract worth at least four million dollars. The Bethlehem Iron Company won the bid and began building the required ultrasophisticated furnaces in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Armor plate also required a special quality of iron ore, but Bethlehem Iron had been fortunate enough to partner with a start-up concern, the Pennsylvania Steel Company, in the exploitation of a new source of Bessemer-grade ore. Their joint venture, the Juragua Iron Company, was pulling more than a hundred thousand tons a year out of the hills east of Santiago de Cuba.
At the end of Whitney’s service as navy secretary, the modern navy and, by necessity, the United States’ modern military-industrial complex were beginning to take shape. Completed or under construction were the ABCD ships and five better-designed protected cruisers, four new gunboats, five improved monitors, and a torpedo boat, as well as the experimental dynamite-gun platform Vesuvius. Bethlehem Iron had experienced many difficulties and delays, but Whitney felt sufficient confidence in the eventual supply of steel to contract for two armored cruisers, Texas and Maine.
These two vessels—eventually classified as the United States’ first battleships, second class—weren’t commissioned until 1895, nine years after authorization. Neither was of the dreadnought class. Both were undergunned, underarmored, and awkward. In the context of the global arms race, they were already obsolete when the champagne splashed on their prows.
Still, they were proof that the United States had at last begun building a modern navy. The slow-starting program soon picked up momentum, turning out a small but respectable fleet’s worth of up-to-date battleships and cruisers. Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power had lit a fire under official Washington, just as it had poured kerosene on the already blazing naval ministries of London and Berlin, Tokyo and St. Petersburg.
Many histories insist that William McKinley was opposed to war with Spain. That may be, but his antiwar feeling never caused him to do anything that might have made war the slightest bit less likely. On the contrary, soon after his inauguration in March 1897, President McKinley appointed no less a sea hawk than Theodore Roosevelt to be assistant secretary of the Navy.
Predictably, Roosevelt wrested control from his boss, John D. Long, whose management style could be described as “early retirement.” After only two months in office, while tensions over Cuba and the possible annexation of Hawaii hit new heights, the assistant secretary of the Navy authorized himself to deliver a major military and foreign policy speech at the Naval War College. Calling for immediate acceleration and enlargement of the shipbuilding program, he justified his demands with thoroughly researched facts and figures. The U.S. Navy was still very small, and it would be at least another year and a half before it could resist a determined attack by some more modern power. Historical examples—the War of 1812 prominent among them—demonstrated the virtues of preparedness. But the essence of his argument was philosophically questionable and overwhelmingly emotional.
It is through strife, or the readiness for strife, that a nation must win greatness … [We] feel that no national life is worth having if the nation is not willing, when the need shall arise, to stake everything on the supreme arbitrament of war, and to pour out its blood, its treasure, and its tears like water, rather than submit to the loss of honor and renown.
As Edmund Morris, Roosevelt’s most eloquent biographer, points out, the assistant secretary’s “words were obviously intended to create, rather than just influence, national foreign policy … The isolationists in the Cabinet never quite recovered from Roosevelt’s blow, and its shock effects were felt in every extremity of the Administration.” Yet neither Long nor McKinley reproved him for telling the world that the United States would arm itself to the teeth and go looking for a fight.
McKinley gave Roosevelt everything he’d asked for and more. Within days, for example, McKinley approved a Hawaii annexation treaty for submission to the Senate. Everyone in the United States and abroad knew that Hawaii was important, not merely as a sugar and pineapple plantation, but also as a crucial way station to naval dominance in the western Pacific. The Japanese certainly took notice of this bellicose move and felt understandably threatened.
Over the next several months, Roosevelt directed offensive-minded revisions of Navy war plans. The assistant secretary’s strategy for a Spanish war cocked the Navy like a pistol with a hair trigger, ready to strike swiftly in both the Atlantic and Pacific. Roosevelt personally briefed the president on these undeniably aggressive plans. McKinley approved them without reservation.
Was William McKinley really opposed to war and overseas expansion? Did he really want peace but lack the force of will to keep it … or was he using the expansionists as his stalking horse?
McKinley had been elected on a promise to stabilize the economy, and much of the mainstream business community thought war would do it no good. On the other hand, Cuba was becoming a national obsession. The War of 1895 was entering its third year. Newspaper readers were appalled by accounts of Spanish atrocities. American investments on the island weren’t likely to be safe anytime soon. Roosevelt and his fellow “large policy” expansionists—a strategically placed network of remarkable men, including Senators Lodge and Beveridge and their colleagues William Chandler (former secretary of the Navy), J. Donald Cameron (chairman of the Committee on Naval Affairs), and William P. Frye (Senate president pro tempore) as well Commander Charles H. Davis, chief of naval intelligence, New York Sun editor Charles A. Dana, and John Hay, U.S. ambassador to Great Britain—saw a war with Spain as the necessary next step in creating a global empire.
McKinley refrained from committing himself to either isolationism or expansionism. He could err by failing to prepare, by seeming to run from a fight, or by seeming too eager for one. He had nothing to lose by letting Roosevelt do the blustering while the president maintained a reluctant-warrior pose. If the nation lost interest in Cuba libre, only the jingoes would lose face. And McKinley couldn’t do himself any harm by talking peace while facilitating the buildup. It would only make him seem more of a statesman, if and when the nation demanded a war.
While the United States taught itself how and why to build a modern navy, the same period saw no equivalent increase in funding for the army. Though a war over Cuba seemed the hypothetical conflict most worth planning for, no one seemed to care that Spain had nearly two hundred thousand well-armed veteran troops on the island, while th
e entire U.S. Army just barely topped twenty-eight thousand men with no experience of modern war and very little up-to-date equipment.
But the ideology driving the arms race—Mahan’s sea power doctrine—declared armies all but irrelevant. The United States didn’t need a big army, since it was at last committed to a bignavy policy. Spain’s big army in Cuba was, by contrast, only a symptom of a war that couldn’t be won by a country that couldn’t make up its mind. Since the collapse of the short-lived First Spanish Republic in 1874, Spain had been ruled by the restored Bourbon dynasty as a constitutional monarchy. Guided by that constitution’s author, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the country had ended seventy-five years of civil strife between conservatives and reformers by creating turnismo, a bizarre political system mandating that Castillo and his Conservatives “take turns” with Práxedes Mateo Sagasta’s Liberal Party. As the two bosses alternated in the office of prime minister, so the two parties shared in the perks of power. This sham of republican government depended on institutionalized voter fraud, a corruption so thorough it rotted every political and bureaucratic function. By appeasing the powerful, turnismo bought Spain nearly six decades’ respite from civil war, but the cost was six decades of incoherent, often contradictory policy that solved none of the nation’s long-standing problems. Turnismo might support sending any number of men and rifles to Cuba, but it couldn’t sustain a realistic assessment of the chance for victory. It could encourage bluster about Spanish imperial pride, but it couldn’t commit to paying for a navy that could sustain an empire.
U.S. naval intelligence reports suggested that Spain’s navy was in no better than fair-to-middling condition, but the spy service was as inexperienced as the rest of America’s armament. Only one thing seemed certain: A great many men in positions of power on both sides of the Atlantic believed the next war would be settled by U.S. and Spanish ships fighting a classic fleet action on the high seas.
Spain’s Rear Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete was not a believer. When war finally came in 1898, he protested that his broken-down squadron was hardly capable of crossing the Atlantic, let alone fighting a battle on the other side.
Cervera’s four armored cruisers were mostly old, slow, and deficient in both guns and armor; the U.S. fleet outnumbered and outgunned them in every category of ship and shot. His strongest ship, the cruiser Cristóbal Colón, might have put up a good fight if it had possessed its main guns, which were not yet aboard when the admiral was ordered to sail for the Antilles. She wore wooden dummy guns in their place. The flotilla’s three destroyers were up-to-date torpedo-delivery platforms, but too few and far too small to even up the sides.
When do wars begin? Perhaps it’s impossible to say when a war becomes inevitable. Maybe we can only identify the moment when we begin to see the war that it will be.
On May 17, 1898, Admiral Cervera sailed his squadron—the destroyers Pluton, Furor, and Terror, and the cruisers Cristóbal Colón, Almirante Oquendo, Vizcaya, and his flagship, Infanta Maria Teresa—under the guns of El Castillo de San Pedro de la Roca, through the narrow cut in the cliffs and on into Santiago Bay.
If Cervera had cut his fast destroyers loose to raid the United States’ Eastern Seaboard, he might have forced the U.S. Navy to scatter into so many pursuit squadrons that even his four old cruisers could have hoped to ambush some weak detachment. By choosing to hide in Santiago Bay, however, Cervera turned his united force into an outright liability. As Spain’s only threat to U.S. ports and vessels, his ships were the sole object of the U.S. Navy’s frantic searching. When Commodore Winfield Scott Schley’s Flying Squadron located Cervera at last, on May 29, it took up a blockading position and sent for the rest of the North Atlantic Squadron, commanded by Admiral William T. Sampson.
Sampson arrived off El Morro on June 1 and soon ordered a bombardment of the castle and outlying batteries.
El Morro, the Upper and Lower Socapas, and the deeper-in batteries of La Estrella and Punta Gorda had, among them, twenty-four guns pointing toward the sea. Of those, fourteen were muzzle loaders, antiques of puny range and still less punch. Some were brass relics of the previous century. The Spanish had only ten modern, breech-loading guns, and of these the two largest were a pair of 6.3-inch tubes at Upper Socapa.
By comparison, the battleships in Sampson’s command—Oregon, Massachusetts, Iowa, Indiana, and Texas—could train twelve thirteen-inch, six twelve-inch, thirty-two eight-inch, eighteen six-inch, and scores of smaller guns on the Spanish batteries.
Sixty-eight guns bigger than the Spaniards’ two largest. Eighteen of them twice as big.
Just the battleships.
Sampson’s tremendously superior combined force—the battleships plus armored cruisers New York and Brooklyn, protected cruiser New Orleans, auxiliary cruiser Harvard, unprotected cruiser Marblehead, and converted yacht Mayflower—could have pulverized the ancient castle. But Sampson never brought the big ships in close, never pressed the attack. Having sent some masonry flying ashore, and without having incurred a single casualty afloat, he called off the bombardment and settled down to a blockade.
His passivity was influenced, in part, by the generally prevailing belief that warships were for fighting other warships, not for fighting forts. Guns afloat were supposed to have decisive power. Land defenses were comparatively irrelevant, which made them, nonsensically, too dangerous. Out here on the tattered edge of a threadbare empire, there was hardly any chance that the Spanish had guns that could seriously damage a battleship. But even the slightest danger revealed the fearful importance of capital ships in Mahan-era thinking. Battleships were so crucial to the race for ship-to-ship dominance, many strategists couldn’t imagine risking one for a lesser tactical purpose. Consequently, naval commanders such as Sampson evinced both a ship-versus-ship chauvinism and a remarkable lack of curiosity about what their guns might accomplish against targets on land.
Sampson was realistic enough to know that the guns commanding the harbor entrance weren’t all that big. What really worried him were the little things: mines and torpedoes. Once a big ship entered the narrow and crooked channel between the cliffs, it surrendered maneuverability. There was only one way to go, and that way was sure to be mined. He couldn’t know how many mines the Spanish had deployed—there were thirteen, a belt of seven and a belt of six, each belt controlled from one of the batteries—or precisely where they lurked.
Then there was the awkward fact that the entrance is only squeezed between cliffs for about half a mile inland before opening into a maze of little bays, shallows, reefs, and an island then known as Cayo Smith. From out on the open Caribbean, Sampson’s ships could peer into the cleft, looking north well up toward Santiago Bay, but they couldn’t see what was waiting behind the island or in the bays and side channels hidden behind the cliffs. Big ships that succeeded in pushing half a mile into the maze might be attacked with torpedoes by smaller ships—perhaps even Cervera’s destroyers.
Fearing the same hazards, the War Department was all for blockading Cervera’s fleet. It seemed the right and cautious thing to do: imprison the Spanish squadron at no risk to the U.S. flotilla.
Sampson had come from Key West, where he’d received Schley’s news, already planning to sink one of his support ships, the collier Merrimac, in the harbor entrance. In the dark morning of June 3, a brave young engineer, Lieutenant Richmond Pearson Hobson, led six volunteer seamen on that exploit. Spanish cannon fire smashed the Merrimac’s rudder and cut away its anchors. It drifted out of the channel and sank without posing a hazard to navigation. Hobson and crew were captured and imprisoned in El Morro.
The Merrimac play was Sampson’s first, last, and only attempt to challenge the forts, enter the harbor, and break the strategic tie.
With Cervera hiding in Santiago Bay and Sampson’s ships waiting out in the Caribbean like a herd of cats staring at a mouse hole, the war stopped being the war everyone had imagined, the war the United States had built its first modern warships to fig
ht. By day, Sampson’s blockading squadrons stalked well beyond range of the coastal guns; by night, they swung in closer, though still out of harm’s way, to play their great searchlights on the breach in the cliffs. The Americans had no intention of going in; the Spanish had no intention of coming out.
Even stuck in Santiago Harbor, Cervera’s squadron—or rather, the idea of Cervera’s squadron—was a hundred times more potent a weapon than it could possibly be in combat.
Even pacing back and forth in front of the same few miles of Cuban coastline, Sampson’s fleet—or rather, the idea of Sampson’s fleet—was ten times more potent than it would be if even a single battleship were lost to accident, mines, or torpedoes.
The idea of the influence of sea power was stronger than actual sea power.
Nations would go on believing in the decisive potency of battleships long after they’d been rendered obsolete by submarines, aircraft carriers, and planes. But in June 1898, Spain and the United States accidentally revealed a truth unsuspected by Mahan and the sea power enthusiasts. For the first time in history, mankind had created a weapon too expensive and too destructive for practical use. Far from being useful instruments for the confident projection of power, battleships were too costly and vulnerable to commit to battle, except in desperation. Worse yet, all the thirteen-inch cannons on Sampson’s state-of-the-art doomsday machines couldn’t do what a man with a rifle can do.
A man with a rifle can walk to the top of a hill.
Only an army of riflemen could land somewhere on Cuba’s coast and fight its way to a ridge from which it could direct artillery fire down into Santiago Harbor. Only an army of riflemen could threaten Cervera’s fleet with certain destruction.
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