On May 9, General Shafter in Tampa received orders to “seize and hold Mariel or most important point on north coast of Cuba and where territory is ample to land and deploy Army.” At the same time, Washington ordered the army to move volunteer forces at Camp Chickamauga, Georgia, and other locations in the South to Tampa for incorporation into the invasion force. These troop movements were to proceed “without delay.”
But delays proved unavoidable. First, the army scheduled its Cuban landing without giving the navy enough notice so its chartered convoy ships could be brought into position for the massive and complex transport operation. Long was outraged. “Our ships are all ready,” he complained in his diary, “but we must at least have notice when and where they are wanted.” He protested to McKinley, who authorized a delay until May 16. On May 13 word reached Washington that Cervera’s fleet had been sighted near Martinique, in the eastern Caribbean. Alger seized upon the report to press for another delay, thus receiving still more time to get the sputtering troop movement operation in shape. Roosevelt, working to outfit his Rough Riders, poured his frustration into his diary: “The blunders [and] delays of the ordnance bureau surpass belief. They express us stuff we don’t need and send us the rifles by slow freight! There is no head, no energy, no intelligence . . . in the War Dept.” Concerned about the lack of ammunition and water, Miles urged McKinley to put off the Cuba attack and instead invade Puerto Rico, an easier target. McKinley rejected the notion.
Then came word on May 19 that Cervera, seeking to evade Sampson’s nearby fleet, had led his squadron into the harbor of Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second largest city, with some 30,000 inhabitants, located in the southeast. This gave America a stunning military opportunity. If Sampson could bottle up Cervera’s ships within the harbor, and if Shafter could initiate a successful land offensive against the city, Santiago could be the locus of a dazzling U.S. dual victory on land and sea. The city lay isolated from the Spanish main force, defended by 10,000 or so Spanish regulars but cut off from the sea by the U.S. blockade and from the land by surrounding insurgent forces. The aim would be to overwhelm Santiago’s Spanish defenders and take control of the harbor’s commanding heights, thus allowing Sampson’s mine sweepers to clear the harbor for an American entry that would culminate in the destruction of Cervera’s aged and poorly outfitted warships. Then, bypassing Havana, U.S. forces could capture Puerto Rico as an added inducement to Spanish capitulation—and perhaps as a later indemnity prize. The plan had the added advantage of requiring fewer volunteer troops, which weren’t fully ready anyway.
On May 26 McKinley convened a White House war council to explore prospects for a new strategy. Present were Alger, Long, Miles, and the navy’s top brass. They didn’t take long to embrace the new plan. Miles detailed the concept in a series of memos that added new initiatives, including the seizure of most of the island’s deep-water ports, providing masses of materiel to the rebels through those ports, and initiating a U.S. Army march across the island to destroy Spanish outposts throughout the countryside. McKinley, drawing perhaps on his long-past Civil War experiences as well as his inherent sound judgment, promptly rejected these superfluous add-ons while approving the fundamental strategy.
During this period, the strains of McKinley’s job began to show once again, “the color having faded from his cheeks and the rings being once more noticeable about his eyes,” as Cortelyou observed in his diary. In addition to the momentous decisions facing him, he found himself mediating disputes among war leaders, a task he found distasteful. Cortelyou wondered if Alger had “risen to the full measure of success thus far in these trying times” and noted that “there are many who doubt whether he will do so in the remaining days of the war.” Long, he added, “moves along quietly,” but often seemed to lack decisiveness and “nerve.”
McKinley appeared to revive, though, when relaxing with friends, particularly Myron Herrick and his wife when they visited from Cleveland. After a late-May visit, with much casual conversation and poetry reading between the two couples, Cortelyou observed, “The President looked exceeding well to-night” when he stopped by late for a final war briefing. He also read letters from parents of servicemen begging him to keep their sons away from Cuba during the coming rainy season.
McKinley continued his attentiveness toward Ida, whose health went through a period of significant revival during this time. “Now she can almost walk alone,” wrote Cortelyou. In fact her solicitousness toward her husband sometimes seemed to exceed his toward her. During a New York visit, when a cousin reported from Washington that the president seemed “very tired and worn out,” she immediately wired him an admonition, “Do not expose yourself or work too hard.” She demanded a direct telephone connection between her Manhattan hotel and the White House so she could bypass central exchanges and diminish the risk of their conversations being picked up by nosy operators in league with anti-McKinley newspapers. But his own attentiveness never wavered. When she arrived at her New York hotel, there was his usual telegram of greeting waiting for her. And he continued to interrupt serious matters of state when the White House maid tapped on his door to say Mrs. McKinley wished to see him. As McKinley’s secretary Porter explained, “No matter how busy he may be, nor how deeply engaged in any subject, he invariably drops everything on the instant and goes into their own apartments.” But he made up for the interruptions by working regularly late into the night, usually well past eleven o’clock and sometimes past midnight.
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ON MAY 31, Adjutant General Corbin, acting under presidential instruction, sent orders to Shafter, commander of the Fifth Corps being organized at Tampa, to land a force near Santiago de Cuba and “capture or destroy the garrison there,” then assist Sampson in destroying the Spanish fleet. In many ways, Shafter, then sixty-three, seemed an unlikely choice for the command. A tower of corpulence who tipped the scales at more than 300 pounds and suffered from gout, he had difficulty just getting atop a horse—and quickly would wear down the animal in any event. With his lumbering walk, fleshy face, and weary-eyed gaze, he gave off an appearance of passivity. But he could be blustery, enjoyed a reputation for blunt honesty, and cared not a whit for political intrigues. Besides, he had been in line for promotion, and that’s how things were done in the army at that time. Both Miles and Corbin wanted him for the job, and McKinley went along with his generals.
But the massive challenge of preparing 50,000 troops or more for an amphibious assault on Cuba proved too much for Shafter. The result was a mess of chaos and wasted motion. Colonel Wood described it as “confusion, confusion, confusion. War! Why it is an advertisement to foreigners of our absolutely unprepared condition.” General Miles, arriving on June 1, discovered 300 railroad cars loaded with war materiel along the roads around Tampa. But the invoices had been lost, so officers were forced to “hunt from car to car to ascertain whether they contain clothing, grain, balloon material, horse equipments, ammunition, siege guns, commissary stores, etc.” While his volunteer troops were “suffering for clothing,” fifteen cars of uniforms languished on a railroad siding miles from the encampment. When Roosevelt brought in his Rough Riders after an arduous four-day ride from Texas, he discovered “a perfect welter of confusion . . . an almost inextricable tangle.” His troops were forced to buy food from local shops with their own money, as commissary operations had been overwhelmed by the numbers of arriving troops, up to five regiments a day.
McKinley followed all this “most earnestly and intently” from his War Room. “Only once in a while,” wrote Cortelyou, “does he show any temper.” But his patience was wearing thin. Through Alger and Corbin, he sent numerous wires to Shafter asking for status reports on when the army would be off and urging quick action. Twice in early June Miles and Shafter assured Washington that the expedition would leave on June 7. When that day unfolded without reports of a departure, McKinley and his War Department lost patience. At 7:50 p.m. Corbin wired Shafter that the president wanted him to proceed even if it
meant transporting as few as 10,000 men. An hour later, Alger preempted the previous order. “Since telegraphing you an hour since,” declared the war secretary, “the President directs you to sail at once with what force you have already.”
By the next afternoon Shafter had a 17,000-man advance force aboard thirty-five ships, along with 959 horses and 1,336 mules, 112 six-mule wagons, eighty-one escort wagons, and masses of armaments of every purpose and description. Given the haste and shortage of ships, not all the desired equipment could be taken. Some cavalry troops, including Roosevelt’s, even had to leave their horses behind. But the convoy finally was headed out of Tampa Bay, into the Gulf of Mexico, and toward Cuba. Then the general received an urgent message from Washington: “Wait until you get further orders before you sail. Answer quick.” It seems that U.S. vessels had spotted two Spanish men-of-war in the St. Nicholas Channel, off the northeastern coast of Cuba. With prospects seemingly high that the transport operation could be attacked, Washington ordered a delay until Sampson could reinforce the naval escort. “We mean to start this expedition as soon as convoy is strong enough,” the assistant naval secretary, Charles Allen, cabled an agitated Sampson, who didn’t believe any Spanish warships were in the vicinity.
Sampson was right. It turned out the sightings actually had been U.S. warships mistakenly identified as Spanish. This “ghost squadron” caused a six-day delay. Meanwhile thousands of troops languished aboard overcrowded ships in subtropical heat with barely sufficient comfort and provisions. Roosevelt reported to a friend from his anchored transport ship that “the interminable delays and the vacillation and utter absence of efficient organization are really discouraging.”
Finally, on June 14, the convoy set off, and five days later it reached its destination on Cuba’s southern coast. On June 20 Sampson sent his chief of staff, Captain French Chadwick, to see Shafter and discuss landing and battle plans. The shipboard conference produced an apparent misunderstanding of serious proportions. Chadwick anticipated that Shafter would attack Spain’s hillside forts at the mouth of the harbor so Sampson could clear mines, enter the harbor, and destroy the Spanish fleet. Based on the conversation, he thought Shafter agreed with this plan. But Shafter already had opted to march his army inland to Santiago, bypassing the areas of greatest support to Sampson’s squadron, and attacking the city from the east. The direct route to the mouth of the harbor, in Shafter’s view, posed too many obstacles of terrain and undergrowth, and hence he would face a large risk that he would get bogged down under withering fire from the surrounding heights. And with the yellow fever season approaching, he favored what he considered the fastest route to a Spanish surrender.
Based on conversations with rebel leaders, Shafter decided to land his army at a small coastal hamlet called Daiquiri, following a series of planned feints and bombardments designed to ease the way for the landing. As soon as he had sufficient troops at Daiquiri, about 6,000 men, Shafter sent a contingent of soldiers toward the coastal town of Siboney to the west. Dislodging about 600 Spanish troops there without much fight, the Americans added a new landing area. Shafter pulled together the regular forces of General Henry Lawton with volunteers under General Wheeler, the wizened Alabamian later described by Roosevelt as “a regular gamecock.” They were ordered to advance toward the town of Las Guasimas on a reconnaissance mission. Hungry for glory, Wheeler maneuvered his troops ahead of Lawton’s, then attacked the town’s Spanish defenders. Apparently forgetting in his exuberance where he was, the former Confederate general yelled after the retreating Spaniards, “We’ve got the damn Yankees on the run!”
The skirmish, with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders participating, had cost the Americans sixteen killed and fifty-two wounded. But it left U.S. forces in command of Las Guasimas, cleared the road to Santiago, and positioned the Americans for a march on the city. The Spanish general in charge, Arsenio Linares, had intended to retreat from Las Guasimas when the Americans arrived, but his withdrawal proved to be less orderly than he had planned. Over the next week Shafter sought to position and supply his troops for the coming assault against the San Juan Heights, seven miles ahead, a formidable Spanish line of defense protected by well-entrenched troops under Linares. Shafter fashioned a simple plan of attack that reflected his particular turn of mind. He would take the heights with a frontal assault while General Lawton, with an infantry division and light artillery battery, would capture the enemy redoubt at El Caney, six miles north of Santiago.
On June 30 the operation commenced, with Shafter’s troops marching all day toward the heights and getting to within a mile of the ridge. At daybreak the next morning Lawton began his assault on the Spanish position at El Caney, which proved highly fortified and resistant to American fire. Throughout the morning, Lawton pummeled El Caney, to little effect. This led to delays in the planned assault on the heights, which was supposed to commence only after El Caney had been taken. It was another Shafter blunder, since El Caney could have been sealed off with a much smaller force, thus making available a large portion of Lawton’s infantry and artillery units for the main assault on San Juan Heights.
Meanwhile the Americans began an artillery attack on the heights at 8 a.m. as infantry and unmounted cavalry soldiers pressed forward for a ground assault. The road leading to the battle area soon filled up with American soldiers caught in an ominous crunch. From the tallest peaks of the heights, San Juan Hill and Kettle Hill, came withering enemy fire, while the exposed U.S. advance force was frozen in place by more American soldiers pressing forward from the rear. “The situation was desperate,” wrote New York Herald reporter Richard Harding Davis. “Our troops could not retreat. . . . There was only one thing they could do—go forward and take the San Juan hills by assault.”
When Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, anchoring the right flank of the American line, received orders to attack at about 1 p.m., the impetuous New Yorker leaped upon his mount, Little Texas, and rode back and forth among his men, exhorting them to push forward through the barrage of enemy fire raining down upon them. Soon Roosevelt’s little regiment was so far ahead of the rest of the attack force that Davis, watching from a distance, concluded that “someone had made an awful and terrible mistake.” A foreign military observer called the assault “very gallant, but very foolish.”
But the Rough Riders kept going, and soon other units charged forward through waist-high grass to join the assault as Roosevelt’s men reached the top of Kettle Hill. Lieutenant John Pershing’s Tenth Cavalry, made up of well-trained black troops, joined the Kettle Hill attack, while Brigadier General Jacob Kent’s First Infantry Division moved up nearby San Juan Hill. Enemy defenders quickly abandoned both hills, and by 2 p.m. the Americans commanded the San Juan Heights, looking down upon Santiago de Cuba. With Davis poised to capture in prose the Rough Rider charge in all of its foolhardy glory, Roosevelt soon would become one of the country’s leading military heroes, a man to beguile the imagination of a galvanized nation.
In Washington, President McKinley received news of the battle in progress before he had finished breakfast. When Cabinet members arrived for the regular Friday meeting, the president briefed them on the state of the battle, as conveyed through the clicking telegraph machines in the nearby War Room. Such was the excitement and anticipation that the Cabinet was unable to consider any matters beyond the Santiago situation. Just before midnight the War Department received Shafter’s battle report from Siboney: “Had a very heavy engagement to-day, which lasted from 8 a.m. till sundown. We have carried their outer works and are now in possession of them. There is now about three-quarters of a mile of open between my lines and the city. By morning troops will be intrenched and considerable augmentation of forces will be there.” He added that Lawton had captured El Caney at 4 p.m. Casualties, he said, would exceed 400, mostly wounded. They ended up being 225 Americans killed and 1,384 wounded. Spanish casualties included 215 dead and 376 wounded.
At 2 a.m., with McKinley sitting up in anticipation of furthe
r reports, Shafter sent a cable that introduced an ominous note into the White House vigil. It said simply, “I fear I have underestimated today’s casualties. A large and thoroughly equipped hospital ship should be sent here at once to care for the wounded.” Then he fell silent for the next thirty-four hours, leaving his war secretary and president in the dark on his precise circumstances. Disturbing rumors about Shafter’s predicament began circulating around Washington in late afternoon, and at 1 a.m. Alger finally fired off a demand for information: “We are awaiting with intense anxiety tidings of yesterday.” McKinley stayed up past 4 a.m. awaiting a reply; when none came he finally went to bed.
Then, around noon on Sunday, July 3, Shafter sent a cable that left official Washington filled with foreboding. He said he could not conquer Santiago with available forces and likely would withdraw his troops to an outer perimeter five miles back, where rail lines would facilitate his supply operation. He expressed sorrow at his casualty rate and concerns about illnesses that had overtaken generals Wheeler and Samuel Young. Indeed, he added, he wasn’t feeling very well himself, though he remained in command. Although McKinley and his Washington advisers could only speculate at what was going on, the truth was that Shafter, having barely eked out his San Juan Heights victory, promptly lost his nerve. Wracked by fever and enervated by the exertions of command, he succumbed to fits of anxiety over all that could possibly go wrong in his theater of war.
This was a potential disaster. How could it be, McKinley wondered, that a small city of some 30,000 inhabitants and 10,000 defenders, totally cut off from the outside world, reduced to a state of near starvation, couldn’t be subdued by 17,000 well-armed American troops that stood poised on the high ground surrounding the city? If Shafter got himself bogged down five miles away and Santiago held out, the entire strategy was at risk. Spain would not capitulate, yellow fever would ravage the troops, and McKinley would take on the appearance of a wartime incompetent. The dejected president sat with his war advisers through much of Sunday pondering what to do. Washington, so far from the action, couldn’t take responsibility for the safety of the troops. The decision would have to rest with Shafter. The general was promised quick reinforcements if he would remain in place, and Alger warned him of the negative impact on the national mood if he pulled back.
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