“I had never seen a good road in a Spanish country, and Santiago did not disappoint my expectations,” Shafter announced from his horse as his eyes swept the landscape. The roads looked little better than bridle paths to him, except for the one running from El Caney and the San Juan River into Santiago. He had dispatched Lawton and Chaffee to make a more detailed reconnaissance in the area around El Caney, which Wheeler interpreted as an insult to him and a denigration of his earlier observations of the field. Lawton, too, took the opportunity to praise Chaffee at Wheeler’s expense—settling the score that had been mounting since Wheeler countermanded Lawton’s, and Shafter’s, authority a few days earlier.
“To General Adna R. Chaffee I am indebted for a thorough and intelligent reconnaissance of the town of El Caney and vicinity prior to the battle,” Lawton reported, stating that Chaffee was one of the best soldiers in the army. Lawton pointedly recommended Chaffee for special distinction in proposing a battle plan that made sense to everyone and for conducting himself admirably in the battle that followed. About General Wheeler, Lawton said nothing.
Chaffee’s battle plan was a long way from being adopted at this point, however. Shafter was still undecided about the best course of action to follow. At first he said he wanted to put a large force in El Caney and another farther to the west, near the pipeline running water to the city, making his main thrust of attack from the northeast and east. He wanted to “get the enemy in my front and the city at my back,” he said. A few days later he altered his strategy, stating he wanted to position an entire brigade on the road between Santiago and El Caney to keep the Spaniards from retreating into Santiago. Then he changed direction again, saying he would attack the Spanish enclaves around Santiago directly. Even then, he was not decided. He went back and forth between concentrating his main line of attack on El Caney, then perhaps on San Juan Hill, or maybe it was best to make a direct run at Santiago and forget about the other positions.
When Chaffee told Shafter that they should be able to capture El Caney in about two hours of fighting, Shafter finally made up his mind and adopted Chaffee’s strategy, agreeing to move his main forces against El Caney first, with Lawton directing the attack with the black Twenty-Fifth under his command. He would concentrate on the four wooden blockhouses on the west and north sides of the village, a stone church that had been converted into a fort with holes drilled for the Spanish to fire through, and El Viso about six hundred yards to the southeast. There were also the series of trenches around the village, barbed wire barricades, and rifle pits that had to be overcome.
And so the plan was set after several agonizing days of waiting while the Spanish built up their positions on the hills. Shafter came to the conclusion reached earlier by his subordinates that it was better to go straight at the Spanish on their northernmost encampments before attacking their main stronghold in Santiago. They all reasoned, erroneously as it turned out, that American losses would be kept at a minimum with that line of attack.
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Examining the terrain more closely, the officers noted that the trail to El Pozo resembled the handle of a pitchfork, with two prongs fanning in roughly parallel directions from where they left the handle at El Pozo. The right tine reached out past El Caney, and the left tine descended into the valley and then climbed into the hills of San Juan Heights. For six long days following the victory at Las Guasimas, the men bivouacked in the area, crowded together along a three-mile stretch like ants on a hill, as the weather alternated rapidly from drenching downpours to blistering tropical sunshine laced with high humidity.
While they waited for final orders, General Shafter took his most decisive action of the campaign so far on the afternoon of June 30, sending one of his aides, forty-four-year-old Captain Albert L. Mills, up the trail to confer with Colonel Wood in his tent. Mills informed Wood that General Wheeler and General Young had both become ill and relinquished their command. As a result, Colonel Wood and General Samuel S. Sumner would replace them immediately, Wood taking command of the white First and black Tenth regulars, and Sumner overseeing the rest of their men, which put Roosevelt in sole command of the Rough Riders. Although both Wheeler and Young did appear to have come down with symptoms of a tropical fever, this rearrangement of power was the official reason for the change in command.
“Much to his chagrin, General Wheeler was confined to his Spartan hammock and stretched wagon sheet, with an attack of malarial fever,” wrote Kennett Harris in the Chicago Record. “It was suicide, the division surgeon declared, for him to attempt to move.” But it was inevitable, given Shafter’s fury over Wheeler’s insubordination in particular, that speculation about other reasons for the abrupt change on the battlefield made the rounds among the men.
At three o’clock in the afternoon, Mills directed Wood to break camp and move forward an hour later. This gave the men little time to strike their tents, roll up their haversacks and blankets, and load their weapons and ammunition onto their backs. “It was as though fifteen regiments were encamped along the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue and were all ordered at the same moment to move into it and march downtown,” wrote Richard Harding Davis. “If Fifth Avenue were ten feet wide, one can imagine the confusion.”
At that hour, Shafter ordered into operation one of the more ill-advised military strategies attempted since the age of artillery and the machine gun: he launched over the heads of the men, high among the treetops, an enormous observation balloon manned by live soldiers. There it rose, a giant floating bull’s-eye, wafting above the jungle to get an aerial view of the Spanish emplacements—and, conversely, presenting a precise target and signal for the Spaniards to judge the paths taken by the attacking Americans. Shafter had imported the balloon from France, thinking it would make an ideal platform for aerial spying. The company’s manufacturers had assured him that the floating surveillance sphere would be impervious to enemy gunfire, since both the gas-filled conveyance and the basket carrying the men were swaying targets and hard to hit with gunfire from the ground. Nevertheless, the officers selected to ride above the treetops were not too keen on climbing aboard so close to the front lines.
To be fair, the idea did not originate with Shafter. The first hydrogen-inflated balloon was launched on June 5, 1783, in Lyon, France, by Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, who envisioned it as a way to capture Gibraltar. Benjamin Franklin became intrigued by the balloon’s military possibilities for reconnaissance and airborne assaults. “Five thousand balloons capable of raising two men each could not cost more than five ships of the line,” Franklin wrote. “Ten thousand men descending from the clouds might in many places do an infinite deal of mischief.”
At a height of about seventeen hundred feet, men in a balloon were capable of distinguishing objects as far as eighteen miles away. They could then communicate with troops on the ground using flag signals, or by sliding down messages inside sandbags attached by rings to the cables that stabilized the aircraft. The French used the first “air force” to good effect against a coalition of British, Hanoverian, Dutch, and Austrian soldiers on June 26, 1794, during the Battle of Fleurus. In September 1861, the Union Army raised a balloon to fourteen hundred feet over Fort Corcoran, Virginia, south of Washington, DC, spotting two Confederate camps miles away at Falls Church. Shortly afterward, in the James River, another balloon rose two thousand feet from the deck of a Union ship, a converted coal barge named the General Washington Parke Custis, turning it into the first “aircraft carrier.”
In at least two locations—Mechanicsville and Gaines’ Farm—the use of balloons allowed the Union to achieve victories by directing their artillery fire on the Confederates during the Battle of Seven Pines. The so-called Balloon Corps served the Union Army until 1863, when it was disbanded following the resignation of Lincoln advisor Thaddeus Lowe. The British used balloons successfully at the Battle of Suakin, in 1888, and the Battle of Omdurman, in 1898.
But not all military leaders were convinced of the balloons’ long-term efficacy
. Napoleon scorned them, and other military strategists thought them unfair. The International Peace Conference at The Hague actually banned dropping munitions from them in 1899, a year after the war in Cuba. In any event, the development of more advanced machine guns and artillery rendered the balloons militarily obsolete—until they were developed into the types of rigid dirigibles used in the early 1900s.
The great, glistening hulk of the balloon rose high above the treetops as the men plodded below along their assigned routes, many of them staring upward with their mouths open wide. The officers aloft in the balloon descended before the great battle began and described the terrain they observed from their aerial perch. They could see in detail the Aguadores River approaching El Caney from the east, the streams and trails that snaked through the brush, the hills dotting the undulating countryside, the San Juan River flowing north to south. Both rivers joined south of the hills and ran together to the sea.
Fourteen thousand troops trudged slowly beneath the balloon, stepping on one another’s heels as they slipped in three inches of muck, crammed together like sardines in a tin, inching ahead foot by foot until the sun sank below the trees and the moon ascended in the night sky to take its place beside the man-made sphere. It was an endless procession of men and beasts, mounted and dismounted soldiers, mules weighed down under their own loads, in what appeared at the moment to be a futile trek to nowhere. The procession moved forward at a snail’s pace until after midnight, when the men were ready to drop.
General Sumner, now in command of part of Wheeler’s and Young’s troops, pitched his headquarters tent on the right side of El Pozo, with a view of the mist rising in the moonlight from the basin below. Sumner had served on the side of the Union during the Civil War and remained in the army afterward, fighting as a cavalryman on the frontier during the Indian Wars in the early 1890s. He had risen to the rank of brigadier general by the time war broke out in Cuba.
On the ground around Sumner, nearly seven thousand men attempted to get a little sleep before the next battle. Most stared up from their blanket rolls at the pitch-black, star-strewn sky, as the rains had mercifully departed for a while. Off to their right, General Chaffee, who had reinforced Wheeler’s brigade with the black Ninth and some white divisions, camped among the bushes with his own men alongside the path to El Caney. The major surprise of the night occurred when Shafter’s adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel Edward J. McClernand, looked in on his boss’s tent at three o’clock in the morning and discovered him once again laid up with gout, complicated by fever and exhaustion from his struggle up the hill.
“He said he was very ill as a result of his exertions in the terrifically hot sun of the previous day,” McClernand reported, “and feared he would not be able to participate as actively in the coming battle as he had intended.” This meant that the bulk of battlefield generalship would fall primarily on Lawton, but also on Sumner, Kent, Wood, and Chaffee—a fragmented chain of command to say the least, since many of them had shown a tendency to go off in their own directions. When Roosevelt heard about it, he muttered, “The battle simply would fight itself.”
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General Lawton, Shafter’s next-in-command, made immediate plans to oversee the American assault on the Spanish positions—understanding that with so many idiosyncratic personalities in the field, it would be like trying to herd cats. To make matters worse, the morale of the American troops was increasingly challenged by the steady downpours alternating with blistering sunshine, unceasing harassment from assorted insects, and scant and inadequate food supplies. Their drinking water was contaminated, and with hardly enough time to boil it, the men were coming down with dysentery and other intestinal maladies.
On the Spanish side, General Linares was contending with his own array of problems. Cuban rebels were chewing up his reinforcements before they could reach the hills around Santiago to bolster his defenses. His stores of food and ammunition were low, and the soldiers under his command were dispirited and themselves prone to yellow fever, which was even more debilitating than malaria, the other major mosquito-spread sickness. More than one in ten had come down with the dreaded disease and were unfit for duty.
Linares remained convinced that the Americans would concentrate their primary assault on the old forts guarding the entrance to the harbor at Santiago, and he located the bulk of his able-bodied forces there. As a result, other vulnerable areas were less protected. On the slopes around El Caney, Linares had stationed only 521 infantrymen supported by two Krupp light artillery pieces; on San Juan Hill, he had 137 men, which he later bolstered to 461; another 324 men were placed between San Juan and Santiago; and 1,500 soldiers spread across his main line of defense around Santiago.
So, both sides confronted mounting challenges as they dug in for the most decisive battle of the campaign—Spain’s struggle to hang on to the vestiges of its crumbing empire, and America’s effort to replace it as a major player on the global stage.
Before dawn on July 1, Lawton broke camp at El Pozo and marched with 6,650 men up the right prong of the pitchfork toward the village of Marianage, roughly halfway along the route to El Caney. The men were divided in two brigades, each supported by two light 3.2-inch field guns, with the artillery commanded by Captain Allyn Capron Sr., the father of the young Rough Rider who had been killed at Las Guasimas.
A British military observer from the Royal Engineers noted that an eerie quiet prevailed in the moments before the battle. “There was no sign of life beyond a few thin wisps of smoke that curled from the cottage chimneys,” he reported. A few cattle grazed about in the valley, and on three sides around the men towered the peaks of the Sierra Maestra, glistening in the first rays of the rising sun.
Then, without warning, a great cacophony shattered the stillness. At around 7:30, the first shots of the battle boomed in the hills south of El Caney. Lawton had given Captain Capron permission to unleash his artillery at El Viso. The shells overshot their target, however, which turned out to be fortunate since, at that precise moment, a group of fifty Cuban horsemen was riding across the field of fire. The rebels had been scouting the area around El Caney to get a better fix on Spanish positions, but they sped away in fear of their lives when the shells from Capron’s guns roared overhead.
The black Twenty-Fifth marched with Lawton to Marianage, where Lawton called for a halt from 6:30 to 7:30 while he sent search parties to scout the area. About a mile north of Marianage, there was a house where Lawton wanted all the troops to rendezvous after El Caney was taken. Lawton sent another reconnaissance team ahead to get a clearer picture of the precise Spanish positions on the left side of El Caney. He directed some of his troops to the left and others, including the black Twenty-Fifth, to the right. They were all to converge in the center when the charge was launched.
The men advanced slowly beyond Marianage to a low hill covered with bushes, about a mile south of El Viso, the large fort situated on the southeast slope of El Caney. General Chaffee deployed the men under his direct command onto higher ground to the right of the fort. Other troops under brigade commander General William Ludlow circled around to the left. At the same time, Shafter directed General Henry Duffield from his sickbed to engage in a feinting action by marching twenty-five hundred men along the coast toward Santiago, where Linares expected the Americans to attack, while Admiral Sampson bombarded the area from the sea to reinforce the deception.
General Kent headed directly along the trail toward the San Juan Heights with fifty-two hundred troops, including the Rough Riders and the black Twenty-Fourth, along with General Sumner and his twenty-seven-hundred-man contingent of black and white regulars. The Rough Riders climbed up the trail toward San Juan with them, Roosevelt, mounted on his horse, at the lead of his men and yelling that he was having a “bully time.” He understood that Shafter intended for the main fighting to be done by Lawton and his soldiers, and that the Rough Riders were being used as a diversion. But in his own mind, Roosevelt had other ideas about what w
as likely to happen. In the heat of battle, who was to say which unit would swarm over the hill first?
The American lines of advance and chains of command were hardly models of organization. Anything could happen, and victory was the only thing that mattered. Roosevelt tied a blue bandanna with white polka dots around his neck in cowboy fashion and pushed his way ahead on the path he was assigned. He had been modest in accepting his new leadership role, saying that he wouldn’t have wanted to undertake it until he was sure he had had enough experience. But after his first combat engagement at Las Guasimas, he believed he could handle the responsibility.
Overhead, the huge observation balloon, with a couple of officers riding in the basket, hovered about a hundred feet above the men on the ground. It might as well have had a bull’s-eye painted on it, but even without one it made a perfect target for the Spanish defenders. “We did not like having that balloon over us, in range of the Spaniards’ guns,” wrote a colonel under Sumner’s command.
“Is there a general officer below?” one of the men in the balloon yelled to the troops on the ground.
No one answered.
“Is there a field or staff officer down there?” was the next question.
Still, no one replied.
“Is there any officer?”
“Yes, quite a few,” someone yelled back.
“I see two roads in front,” one of the observers reported.
“Where do they lead to?”
“I can’t tell.”
That was the extent of the information provided.
A moment later, a cascade of Spanish bullets directed at the balloon fell down on the men, and they immediately dove for cover, wondering what to do next. “We are ordered to remain here in reserve,” replied an officer, wishing he were somewhere else at that moment.
The storm of bullets missed the balloon, leaving it intact for a brief period, but its presence continued to take a horrifying toll on the men. From where the men at the front of the column lay on the ground and for a mile to their rear, hardly a yard of earth was outside the zone of Spanish fire. For a solid hour, the bullets poured in like cruel rain on the Americans, including the Rough Riders and the black Tenth, who were positioned near them. Dozens of troops were killed or injured, yet they were all under orders not to return fire until the command was given.
The Roughest Riders Page 11