Yankee Come Home

by William Craig

  The fantasy of decisive naval battle had run hard aground on the cliffs at El Morro.

  The Army was going to have to fight the real war.

  Chapter 5

  EL MORRO II: EL SQUEEZE PLAY

  In his year and twenty-one days as assistant secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt had all but reinvented the department. His comprehensive militarism had encompassed every aspect of modern war, from thorough investigation of dry docks and store yards to a publicity campaign that turned the nation’s new warships into steel-clad celebrities, their silhouettes as recognizable to grown-ups and schoolkids as the names on the home team’s starting lineup. The astonishingly energetic thirty-nine-year-old filled empty posts and sacked inefficient employees, slashed red tape, expedited ship construction, and advocated for new weapons, including fast torpedo boats and flying machines; he researched Navy personnel problems and wrote a report recommending a historic erasure of distinctions between line officers and engineers.

  Completely eclipsing both his civilian boss, Secretary Long, and the service’s top officers, Roosevelt took on logistical, bureaucratic, strategic, and tactical problems as if he were a oneman Navy. It was the assistant secretary who decided that a war-fighting navy needed target practice and talked Congress into a million-dollar ammo appropriation. He made sure the press knew how much he was getting done, and it wasn’t long before the nation began to think of the Navy as a barrel-headed man with flashing spectacles and a smile like a mouthful of mah-jongg tiles.

  While Navy men—including Alfred Thayer Mahan—contributed to the revision of war plans, Roosevelt preferred his own ideas. His scheme for the swift destruction of Spanish naval forces in the western Pacific had to account for the difficulty of intercontinental communications once war was declared. The U.S. Far Eastern Squadron would need a leader capable of independent command—or rather, independent execution of Roosevelt’s plan. When that post opened up in September 1897, the assistant secretary suppressed one powerful senator’s recommendation of a senior commodore and pulled another senator’s strings to lobby McKinley for his own man, Commodore George Dewey. Roosevelt trusted Dewey to shoot first and worry later.

  Weeks before the Maine’s demise in mid-February 1898, and months before McKinley asked Congress to declare war on Spain, Roosevelt succeeded in pressuring Long to call the Navy’s widely scattered ships together at Key West and Nagasaki. These orders put the Navy in strong position for offensive strikes.

  After the Maine disaster, Roosevelt went into overdrive, directing naval detachments all around the world to keep fueled and alert, reviewing war plans, ordering mountains of coal and ammunition, and getting Congress to authorize a full-speed recruiting campaign. On March 8, Congress said yes to McKinley’s “Fifty-Million Bill” for war preparedness. The Navy took the lion’s share of the fifty million dollars. Expecting war within weeks, Roosevelt bought every seaworthy warship available on the international market and snapped up merchant vessels suitable for quick conversion into auxiliary cruisers.

  This buying strategy made sense. The merchant vessels would undoubtedly prove handy for logistical support, troop transport, and light-combat errands. As for the secondhand warships, even if they never fought for our side, they’d be denied to Spain. (Not that Spain had the cash or credit to purchase ready-made reinforcements. In March, Cervera was still hoping for the delivery of the Cristóbal Colón’s missing main guns.)

  But if the purpose of the “Fifty-Million” was to prepare the United States for imminent war, the Navy’s most expensive purchases—three new battleships and thirty-four more fighting vessels—made no sense at all.

  The assistant secretary knew better than any man in America that if the war went as planned, not one of these ships would be ready before the fighting was many months over. He likewise knew that Spain posed no long-term threat to the United States and that the Navy had already grown big enough to overmaster any New World enemy.

  While the building boom would be of no help in fighting Spain, it would be essential to the plans of Roosevelt, Lodge, Beveridge, and other expansionists. They hoped that the war to come would endow the United States with a global empire. An expanded Navy would occupy new bases in America’s new, strategically placed dependencies. Hawaii and, it now seemed certain, Cuba would guard the western and eastern approaches to an ocean-bridging isthmian canal. A base in the Philippines would make the United States a great power in the western Pacific, guaranteeing a fair share in the exploitation of China’s resources and markets.

  When he wasn’t acquiring assets for the Navy, Roosevelt was lobbying for a declaration of war: making speeches, writing letters, giving interviews, buttonholing senators. He praised war, exalted war, demanded war, doing and saying everything in his power to bring it on.

  The nation naturally assumed that the bellicose assistant secretary would stay at his bureaucratic post, doing battle by telegram until the war was won. But Teddy saw himself in a different fight.

  While preaching “with all the fervor and zeal I possessed, our duty to intervene in Cuba,” Roosevelt “had determined that, if a war came, somehow or other, I was going to the front.” All the way to the front. Despite never having led troops or even served in uniform, he saw himself at the head of a cavalry regiment, leading a charge to glory.

  His dream was shared with a friend made in Washington, Army surgeon Dr. Leonard Wood. Currently the military medical adviser to President McKinley and Secretary of War Russel Alger, Wood was a veteran of the Apache wars who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor. He and Roosevelt had much in common, including Harvard educations and what Roosevelt described as “a keen longing for adventure.” Their friendship took the form of

  long walks together through the beautiful broken country surrounding Washington. In winter we sometimes varied these walks by kicking a foot-ball in an empty lot, or, on the rare occasions when there was enough snow, by trying a couple of sets of skis or snow-skates, which had been sent me from Canada.

  There’s something poignant in the image, something overgrown-boyish that makes Roosevelt’s next line all the more ominous.

  But always on our way out to and back from these walks and sport, there was one topic to which, in our talking, we returned, and that was the possible war with Spain.

  As war approached, the two friends looked for open positions in regular and National Guard units, but most had already been snapped up by other adventurers. Then McKinley finally came out foursquare for war, authorizing the 28,183-man Army to take on 125,000 volunteers, including three cavalry regiments recruited, in Roosevelt’s words, “from among the wild riders and riflemen of the Rockies and the Great Plains.” Roosevelt enjoyed a carefully cultivated national reputation as an outdoorsman and hunter. Wood’s prowess needed no embellishment. Secretary Alger gave them command of the first of the three “cowboy” regiments, with Wood as colonel and Roosevelt his second in command. The assistant secretary put in his last full day’s work on May 10. Five days later, he reported for duty in San Antonio as Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry.

  Secretary Alger had cooperated with Wood and Roosevelt, but he was as certain as the rest of Washington’s establishment—including the president, Secretary Long, and all of Teddy’s expansionist friends—that Roosevelt’s escape from the Navy Department on the eve of war was something akin to desertion of duty.

  Newspapers around the nation scolded Roosevelt for leaving Washington when the nation needed him most, but their anger only confirmed his fame as the man who’d made the country ready for war. And while some editorial writers fumed, the front pages were filled with exuberant coverage of Roosevelt’s every word and deed. He was the war’s first celebrity and he would stay its paramount personality, his image held aloft by a press corps in thrall to his unfailing quotability. Wood might be the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry’s commanding officer, but the nation knew his regiment as Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.

  Before
leaving the Navy Department, Roosevelt had the satisfaction of seeing his plans play out in the war’s first victory. On May 1, Roosevelt’s protégé Commodore George Dewey sailed the U.S. Navy’s Asiatic Squadron into Manila Bay and in four hours’ leisurely bombardment—made all the more enjoyable by a three-hour breakfast break—sank, burned, or smashed to pieces the entire Spanish Pacific Squadron.

  It’s almost exaggeration to call Manila Bay a “battle.” The West Point Atlas of American Wars refers to the Spanish squadron as “tiny.” Spain’s Admiral Patricio Montojo y Pasarón had two protected cruisers, five unprotected cruisers, and five peashooter gunboats, along with a transport ship and the alleged support of three forts and six batteries all around the bay. The largest of his vessels—his flagship, the unarmored cruiser Reina Cristina—was 278 feet and three inches long, displacing just 3,042 tons.

  That made her seventeen feet and five inches shorter than Dewey’s noncombatant coal hauler Nanshan, which also outclassed the Reina Cristina by 2,017 tons displacement.

  The Americans had fewer vessels than the Spaniards, but Dewey’s cruisers were some of the early, small fruit of the naval rearmament program. Though hardly cutting-edge, they were still fairly new and in excellent condition. Dewey’s flagship, the protected cruiser Olympia, 344 feet long and displacing 5,586 tons, would have been classed among the midgets of the North Atlantic Squadron, but it was more than a match for Montojo’s entire flotilla. The U.S. Asiatic Squadron numbered three more protected cruisers—Boston, Baltimore, and Raleigh—and the gunboats Concord and Petrel. In addition to the collier Nanshan, Dewey was accompanied by a supply ship and a little revenue cutter, McCulloch. He told these consorts to keep clear of the action, such as it was.

  Montojo’s force was obsolete, poorly maintained, and manned by inexperienced crews he couldn’t trust to fight and sail at the same time. While Spain’s leaders were deeply in denial as to their navy’s unpreparedness, commanders such as Montojo and Cervera knew that the only thing they might salvage out of any serious fight would be the bittersweet honor of pro patria mori. Montojo chose to make his one and only stand with all his vessels anchored at Cavite, a naval base several miles south of Manila. The downside of this decision betrays his hopelessness: the waters off Cavite weren’t covered by any of the coastal batteries that might have given his firepower a slight boost. (As on the cliffs at Santiago, most were antique muzzle loaders.) Clearly, Montojo didn’t think it could matter. On the upside, he could take credit for keeping Manila’s civilian population out of the line of fire. In addition, when his ships inevitably sank, his men would be in swimming distance of shore.

  The fighting really wasn’t. The Spanish started shooting at five fifteen A.M., when the approaching Asiatic Squadron was still out of range. Dewey was unimpressed. Born and raised in Montpelier, Vermont, he seems to have had a Yankee distaste for big emotions and small talk. He didn’t order Olympia’s skipper, Captain Charles Gridley, to shoot back until five forty-one A.M., at which point he allowed, “You may fire when ready, Gridley.” Well trained and exuberant, the American crews proceeded to shoot hell out of the Spanish squadron while steaming back and forth in almost perfect safety. None of the shore artillery could touch them, and Montojo’s ships were mostly outranged and entirely outgunned.

  Rather than surrender, however, the admiral proved his bravery and made his bid for the honor of his service by charging Dewey’s squadron aboard the Reina Cristina. If there’s honor in steaming out with four hundred men and no hope and sloshing back, minutes later, with two hundred casualties in a blood bucket so full of holes it has to be scuttled, Montojo earned it.

  On the U.S. side, after two hours of effortless slaughter, Dewey called a breakfast break. The Asiatic Squadron was nearly untouched, and most of the burning, broken Spanish ships had stopped shooting. The Americans got back to work at about ten thirty A.M, but there was little left to do. Montojo’s squadron was already beaten; the admiral ordered any of his ships that were still afloat to sink themselves. The Asiatic Squadron closed in and started pounding Cavite’s shore installations, which soon showed a white flag.

  The Spanish lost all their vessels except the gunboats, preserving honor at a cost of 161 dead and more than two hundred wounded.

  There were two small holes in Olympia; several U.S. sailors had suffered minor wounds.

  The Asiatic Squadron’s sole fatality was the death of Francis Randall, chief engineer of the McCulloch. Dewey had ordered the little revenue cutter to tread water in the middle of the bay, far from danger, but he couldn’t protect Randall from all the excitement. The engineer succumbed to a heart attack.

  By June 1, when Sampson settled in front of El Morro, dispatches from Manila Bay had provided strong evidence that Spain’s navy was poorly equipped and still worse trained, its admirals brave but inept.

  If Dewey’s far-off victory didn’t encourage Secretary Long and Admiral Sampson to be bold in confronting Spanish ships and fortifications, perhaps Lieutenant Hobson’s defeat should have. Almost every gun from El Morro’s highest rampart to the beach at Lower Socapa had blazed away at the Merrimac, which could not fire back. Eight remote-control mines had exploded, some directly under the collier. The Reina Mercedes and the Pluton had fired two torpedoes each and banged away with every gun that would bear. The range, from all directions, was point-blank.

  Still, the Merrimac only went under after an embarrassingly long bombardment, with considerable help from the charges Hobson and his crew exploded in their attempt to sink her more swiftly. Hobson and his six sailors suffered only scratches, bruises, and a few cuts.

  On the Spanish side, at least fourteen were killed and thirty-seven wounded. All by friendly fire.

  Hobson heard about the Spanish casualties when he was imprisoned at El Morro, where the wounded were being treated. These numbers may not have represented all those hurt on ships and in the other forts. Sampson wouldn’t have known about the Spaniards’ losses, but the chivalrous Spanish soon informed him that all seven Merrimac survivors were alive and well.

  None of this information convinced him that Spanish defenses were weak enough to risk an all-out attack.

  Neither did the pathetic Spanish response to a three-hour bombardment on June 6. A few of Sampson’s ships pulled in close enough to strike the batteries on either side of the harbor entrance and the Reina Mercedes within. Spaniards were killed in El Morro (by shots that menaced Hobson in his high cell) and elsewhere, and the Reina Mercedes was set on fire three times. No U.S. ships were touched.

  The Navy also had the cumulative experience of several cable-cutting, mine-clearing, and ship-to-shore fights, including Sampson’s own April 27 shelling of a battery at Matanzas and his May 12 surprise attack on San Juan, Puerto Rico. Casualties were minimal, and not a ship was lost. A May 11 attack on the Cuban port of Cárdenas went wrong when a Spanish shot smashed the steering gear of the torpedo boat Winslow. Before the other American ships could tow her out of danger, another Spanish shell killed Ensign Worth Bagley and two firemen, an oiler, and a cook. They were the conflict’s first U.S. combat deaths. Bagley was the only Navy line officer killed in the entire war.

  All these encounters suggested that the Navy might attempt a full-firepower suppression of the fort and batteries at El Morro. A heavier repetition of the June 6 bombardment could either sink or chase off Reina Mercedes and Pluton. If these measures succeeded, the mines could be cleared, the channel opened to Santiago Bay.

  The Navy chose not to try.

  It’s interesting to speculate on the fleet’s orders if Theodore Roosevelt had still been the Navy Department’s human dynamo. With so much intelligence declaring the weakness of Spain’s navy and naval defenses, would TR have been lobbying Long, McKinley, and the press to send Sampson in with everything, all guns blazing?

  But by the time Sampson arrived off El Morro, Teddy had been a Rough Rider for almost three weeks. Secretary Long and Admiral Sampson saw no reason for the Navy to ta
ke such risks. Why not take the cautious course and wait for the Army to clear the cliffs?

  Because there was nothing cautious about delaying an invasion of Cuba into summer, when nature defended Cuba with hurricanes and murderous tropical diseases, including yellow fever, dengue, and malaria.

  The hurricane season peaks in August, but superstorms can strike anytime after the end of May. Columbus met the Taino god Hurakán several times, most memorably while on his fourth voyage. In June 1502, the governor of Hispaniola—Columbus’s political enemy—ignored the Discoverer’s warning and dispatched the first Spanish treasure fleet. Columbus survived only by hunkering down in a river mouth; caught at sea, only four of twenty-eight treasure ships stayed afloat. Even in an age of iron ships, coal, and steam power, there was no guarantee that a blockading fleet could scurry to shelter ahead of a fast-rising hurricane.

  The history of warfare in the Caribbean is a history of disease. Among the more spectacular examples: Napoleon’s thirty-one thousand troops defeated Toussaint L’Ouverture’s Haitian peasants in early 1802, but when summer brought on yellow fever he lost half his army in two months. By autumn, fewer than ten thousand survived; yellow fever set Haiti free.

  Cuba’s scourges were no less powerful. In 1741, during the War of Jenkins’s Ear, British admiral Sir Edward Vernon determined that Santiago’s harbor defenses were too strong for his ships, a reasonable calculation in the age of oak and canvas. Vernon set up a blockade and landed General Thomas Wentworth at Guantánamo Bay, with orders to take Santiago by a march from the east. Wentworth’s corps of approximately thirty-four hundred troops and North American militia, one thousand Jamaican black auxiliaries, and six hundred prospective colonists from British North America dwarfed the defending force of 350 Spanish soldiers and perhaps six hundred Cuban guerrilla fighters. The English were well armed and well supplied, with a little over fifty miles to travel.