Impossible Victories

by Bryan Perrett

  The Tirah Field Force fought many more battles as it penetrated deeper into tribal territory, but none was as fiercely contested or as critical as Dargai. Early in November it reached its objective, the Tirah Maidan, a beautiful, fertile valley one hundred square miles in extent, flanked by pine-clad slopes and dotted with copses. There were numerous houses, each of which, significantly, was fortified against its neighbours. In the storerooms were piled high the fruits of the recent harvest – Indian corn, beans, barley, honey, potatoes, walnuts and onions. The entire valley was deserted, the inhabitants having taken their families with them into the hills. Lockhart despatched columns into every corner of the Tirah, where the resistance encountered clearly indicated that the tribes had no intention of submitting. Reluctantly, he decided that if they would not talk he would begin laying waste the valley. The troops, many of whom came from farming stock, did not enjoy the work, but the sight of groves being felled and columns of smoke rising from burning buildings produced the desired result. With the exception of the ungovernable Zakha Khel, who did not submit until the following April, the tribes sent in their leaders to a jirga where they accepted their punishment: they would give up 800 serviceable rifles, pay a fine of 50,000 rupees and return all the property they had stolen during the rising. On 7 December, with the worst of the winter snows approaching, the evacuation of the Tirah Maidan began. The withdrawal of the 1st Division was comparatively uneventful, but that of the 2nd Division was subject to constant ambushes and attacks that inflicted 164 casualties and were obviously not the work of the Zakha Khel alone. Nevertheless, so thoroughly had the rising been put down that during the next twenty years only five major punitive expeditions were required to police troublesome areas, and never again was fighting so widespread along the Frontier.

  It would be absurd to suggest that any love was lost between the British and the tribes, but there was a great deal of mutual respect and during both World Wars thousands of the latter volunteered for service with the Crown. There was even a sense of loss when the British left India, for now no one remained for their young men to prove themselves against, even their hereditary Hindu enemies having been removed far to the south of them by the creation of the Islamic state of Pakistan. Yet the world was to hear of them again, for when the Soviet Union launched its disastrous occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 the Frontier again became an arsenal and huge numbers crossed to fight alongside their co-religious kindred in the Mujahideen. For all its size, the Soviet Army was unable to cope. In the end, therefore, the mullahs’ promise of a successful jihad had been fulfilled, albeit a century after it was made and against a very different kind of infidel.

  Notes

  1. Kempster had an unfortunate personality and was so unpopular throughout the Tirah Field Force that its members coined the verb ‘to be kempstered,’ that is, generally mucked about. For all that, he was a capable enough officer in action.

  2. Later the Sherwoood Foresters.

  3. The Cock o’ the North was the nickname of the Duke of Gordon who had raised the regiment 104 years earlier.

  4. At the time the Victoria Cross warrant also incorporated a clause to the effect that in the event of subsequent ‘scandalous conduct’ the award would be forfeit. This rarely happened but when it did there was an understandable public outcry in protest. King Edward VII put an end to this sort of sanctimonious humbug.

  5. To quote from a footnote in Chapter 26 of the Gordon Highlanders’ regimental history, The Life of a Regiment: The incident of the wounded piper continuing to play, being telegraphed home, took the British public by storm, and when Findlater arrived in England he found himself famous. Reporters rushed to interview him; managers offered him fabulous sums to play at their theatres; the streets of London and all the country towns were placarded with his portrait; when, after his discharge, he was brought to play at the Military Tournament, royal personages and distinguished generals shook him by the hand; his photograph was sold by thousands; the Scotsmen in London would have let him swim in champagne, and the daily cheers of the multitude were enough to turn an older head than that of this young soldier. A handsome pension enabled Findlater to rest on his laurels and turn his sword into a ploughshare on a farm near Turriff. He re-enlisted for the Great War, though not fit for foreign service.’

  6. Throughout their subsequent history the Gordon Highlanders celebrated the anniversary of Dargai wherever they were stationed. Thanks to government economies that have reduced the Army’s strength to the lowest level for 300 years, the regiment no longer has an independent existence, having merged with the Queen’s Own Highlanders to form a new regiment, The Highlanders (Seaforth, Gordons and Camerons). This will, however, continue to celebrate the anniversary of the action.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Storming of San Juan Ridge

  – Cuba, 1 July 1898

  At 21:40 on the night of 15 February 1898 two explosions took place aboard the second-class battleship USS Maine, lying in Havana harbour. The first was comparatively small, but the second, which followed immediately, shattered the superstructure and blew out a large area of the hull’s starboard plating, sending debris and bodies soaring up to 200 feet in the air and illuminating the entire harbour with its flash. Very quickly, the Maine slid beneath the surface to settle in the soft mud below. Of the ship’s complement of 354 officers and men, 252 were either killed instantly or drowned and a further eight died in hospital.

  Although the Spanish authorities did everything in their power to assist, a suggestion by Captain Charles D. Sigsbee, the Maine’s commander, that the proximate cause of his ship’s destruction was external in source and could have been a mine electrically detonated from the shore, was eagerly seized upon by a virulently anti-Spanish press at home, to the extent that this explanation became an article of faith. John Harris, however, having scrupulously examined both sides of the argument in his book Without Trace , reached a more probable and certainly less emotive conclusion. Spontaneous combustion within coal bunkers, often accompanied by explosion if there was a concentration of coal dust in the air, was a sufficiently common danger for standard safety measures to have been introduced. Likewise, the deterioration of old munitions to a volatile state, especially in hot climates, was not thoroughly understood at the time and was to cause several major explosions aboard warships in the years following the loss of the Maine. It seems likely, therefore, that an explosion in a coal bunker triggered a sympathetic and infinitely more powerful detonation in a neighbouring magazine aboard the battleship.1

  Perhaps it is not altogether coincidence that Sigsbee attracted unfavourable comment for poor internal housekeeping while commanding the veteran Kearsage in 1886 and also, in later years, while commanding the battleship Texas.2 Again, the Spanish government, desperately anxious to avoid war with the United States, had nothing whatever to gain from the Maine’s destruction and no trace of any electric cable was ever found either by its own or the American courts of inquiry. The only possible beneficiaries of such an act would have been Cuban rebels anxious to inflame Spanish-American relations, and their participation in the tragedy has never been seriously considered. Be that as it may the American press, notably that section of it controlled by William Randolph Hearst, was convinced of foul play and exercised so strong an influence on public and political opinion that on 25 April 1898 President McKinley’s administration declared war on Spain.

  The origins of the American involvement in Cuba had their roots in events which had taken place 30 years earlier. In 1868, following the deposition of Queen Isabella II, the Cubans demanded their independence from Spain, which still supported slavery and imposed high taxes on them while denying them a share in their own government. A ten-year guerrilla war ensued, costing the lives of about 200,000 Cubans and Spaniards. The United States, while refusing to intervene directly, was sympathetic to the rebels and provided them with unofficial support. The war ended when Spain promised reforms but apart from the abolition of slavery in 1886
these did not materialise. Rebellion broke out again in 1895 and made considerable headway until General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, a veteran of the earlier war, arrived to take command of the Spanish troops. Weyler, a very capable general, brought the situation under control by subdividing the affected areas with lines of blockhouses and barbed wire to restrict the rebels’ mobility, and deprived them of food and support by removing the non-combatants from their homes to centralised ‘concentration’ camps.3 By the end of 1896 these measures had confined the insurgents to the eastern end of the island.

  Within the United States the Hearst group and other sections of the press generated a powerful ground swell of anti-Spanish feeling by their biased reporting of the war, feeding their readers with a diet of atrocities allegedly committed by Weyler and his men. Subsequent studies revealed that in the field the behaviour of the Spanish troops had been no worse than that of other armies in similar situations and that their officers had, in fact, exercised restraint on their men. What could not be denied was that thousands of non-combatants, including women and children, were dying in the ‘concentration’ camps, not as a result of deliberate policy, but because of poor administration, overcrowded accommodation, poor rations and bad sanitation, creating the very conditions in which diseases quickly reached epidemic proportions.

  The outraged American public, sensing the latent power of their young nation, brought immense pressure on the McKinley administration to intervene on behalf of the Cuban rebels; so, too, did the influential press barons. Strong representations were made to the Madrid government which, painfully aware that throughout the past 100 years Spain had declined to the level of a fourth-rate power, did what it could to avoid direct confrontation. During 1897 it ended the ‘concentration’ camp system, recalled Weyler and offered the Cubans home rule, none of which was reported in the American press.

  The effect of these concessions was most marked in Cuba itself, where the rebels, sensing Madrid’s weakness, believed that by continuing the war they could obtain full independence. For their part, Spaniards resident in Cuba and those Cubans who wished to retain the link with Spain bitterly resented the American intrusion into their affairs, to the extent that the US Consul General in Havana, General Fitzhugh Lee, a former Confederate cavalry commander and nephew of General Robert E. Lee, reported that American nationals in the island were in potentially serious danger. Furthermore, Lee doubted whether the rebels would be capable of forming a government and asked for the despatch of naval vessels for the protection of American interests. The idea found support in Washington, notably with Theodore Roosevelt, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and to avoid further injuring Spanish pride, it was decided that the exchange of friendly naval visits between the United States and Spain, suspended since 1895, would be resumed. A Spanish cruiser, the Vizcaya, was to visit New York, and the Maine would go to Havana, where she arrived on 25 January 1898 to a correctly courteous if not warm welcome.

  The subsequent destruction of the battleship destroyed any prospect of peace and the outbreak of war was greeted with scenes of wild enthusiasm in the United States. An increase in the regular army’s strength from 28,000 to 60,000 men was authorised and some 200,000 volunteers swamped the hastily set up recruiting offices. Volunteer units were formed, of which the most famous was the 1st US Volunteer Cavalry, otherwise known as the Rough Riders, in which Theodore Roosevelt, a man of immense energy with a firm belief in direct action and the quality of grit, served as a lieutenant-colonel.

  The problem was that the small regular army, which, since the end of the Civil War had been responsible for the security of the western frontier, was simply not equipped to cope with such a huge expansion. Everything was in short supply and even long-established regular units had to put up with what they could get. Thus, Captain W. C. Brown, commanding E Troop 1st Cavalry, was to note in his diary, ‘War was declared on April 25th, yet on the last day of May my troop was still in all respects on the reduced basis called for by a state of profound peace and, of the essentials needed to bring it to war strength, many of its recruits had not yet enlisted; its horses were still on the horse ranches of the West awaiting the arrival of the remount purchase; and its arms and equipment were still in the store houses at various arsenals, or in process of manufacture.’ It was, perhaps, typical of the times that the very next day, having been told that his troop was to fight dismounted, Brown received a substantial quantity of saddlery and tack, plus eight carbines, twelve revolvers, and fifteen sabres.

  The navy, on the other hand, was fully prepared and went into action immediately in accordance with the overall strategic aims of the war, which were to attack Spain’s major overseas possessions, namely the Philippine Islands in the Pacific, and Cuba. On 1 May Commodore George Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron destroyed the Spanish naval presence in the Philippines at the Battle of Manila Bay, clearing the way for an expeditionary force that reached the islands at the end of June. However, Rear Admiral William T. Sampson’s Atlantic Fleet, consisting of five battleships and two armoured cruisers, failed to prevent the arrival of Admiral Pascual Cervera with four modern cruisers and three destroyers at Santiago de Cuba on 19 May. Here, protected by forts covering the entrance to the deep natural harbour, the Spanish warships remained blockaded, their presence providing the Americans with an objective against which to strike. It was decided that the V Corps, commanded by Major General William R. Shafter, would effect a landing at Daiquirí, some miles to the east, and capture the city.

  Aged 63, Shafter had joined the army as a volunteer during the first year of the Civil War and had earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for gallantry. After the war he had been granted a Regular commission and served on the Frontier during the Indian Wars. He had attained the rank of brigadier-general only as recently as 1897, but his untarnished record, seniority and friends in the War Department ensured that on the outbreak of war he received a commission as a major-general of volunteers and with it his present command. He was, unfortunately, not a man to inspire confidence in his subordinates. As years of sedentary garrison duty had resulted in his weight rising to 300 pounds, he therefore possessed a somewhat gross appearance, and his understandable inability to move quickly was further aggravated by gout. Coarse mannered and inclined to bully, he alienated many of those with whom he came in contact. Despite this, his major deficiency as a commander was one which he shared with the majority of his contemporaries and for which he was not to blame – he had no experience whatever of handling large formations.

  V Corps consisted of three divisions and one independent brigade. The Cavalry Division, commanded by Major-General Joseph P. Wheeler, a former Confederate officer, contained two brigades each of three regiments;4 the 1st and 2nd Infantry Divisions, commanded respectively by Brigadier-Generals J. F. Kent and H. W. Lawton, each contained three brigades of three infantry regiments; the Independent Brigade, under Brigadier-General J. C. Bates, contained two infantry regiments. With the exception of 1st US Volunteer Cavalry in the Cavalry Division and one volunteer regiment in each infantry division, all of Shafter’s troops were regulars. The army’s standard weapon for infantry and cavalry alike was the .30-calibre Krag-Jörgensen rifle, which had been introduced in 1893. This had a five-round magazine into which rounds were loaded in succession, but the American musketry doctrine of the day stressed the importance of single aimed shots and discouraged the filling of magazines save when rapid fire was required to repel an attack. Although all of Shafter’s Regular units were equipped with the Krag-Jörgensen, the sheer scale of the Army’s expansion meant that there were not enough to go round, and because of this the volunteer units were armed with the old single-shot .45-calibre Springfield rifle. There was also a shortage of smokeless ammunition for the Krag-Jörgensens and none at all for the Springfields. V Corps’ artillery included two field artillery batteries with six 3.2-inch guns apiece, two batteries of assorted heavier weapons, and one four-gun Gatling machine gun battery. No smokeless propellant was a
vailable for the field batteries and this was to have serious consequences once battle was joined.

  Shafter’s command began assembling for its mission at Tampa, Florida, where chaos reigned supreme for several weeks. The local railway system, never having been designed to transport 17,000 men and everything they needed for a campaign abroad, all but collapsed under the strain placed upon it. Stores of every description, guns, ammunition and transport wagons jammed the quays and were loaded without thought of disembarkation requirements simply to make working space. Sufficient thought had been given to the problems of fighting in Cuba to recognise that the cavalry would have little opportunity for mounted action, but the troops were still being sent to do battle in tropical, humid heat wearing their blue woollen uniforms, the one exception being the Rough Riders, which had sensibly outfitted themselves in khaki cotton drill. This unit consisted mainly of cowboys and prospectors from Arizona, Montana, New Mexico and Oklahoma, with a leavening of Eastern college men who were regarded as dudes but secretly admired.

  At length, despite serious shortages of equipment, it was clear that V Corps was as ready as it would ever be. The troops, together with 272 teamsters and 107 stevedores to assist in unloading, were finally aboard the transports, in the holds of which were 2,295 horses and mules, 193 wagons, seven ambulances, sixteen 3.2-inch guns, four 7-inch howitzers, four 5-inch siege guns, eight 3.6-inch mortars, one Hotchkiss and four Gatling machine guns, and one dynamite gun.5 This, the largest military expedition ever to have left the shores of the United States, set sail under naval escort on 14 June and arrived off Santiago four days later. Together, Shafter and Admiral Sampson went ashore to confer with the local rebel commander, General Calixto Garcia, who confirmed that the Spaniards had constructed a number of blockhouses overlooking the intended landing place at Daiquirí, held by an estimated 300 men.6