In addition to the Massachusetts, the American armada consisted of the Gloucester, the Yale, the Windom, the Columbia, the Dixie, the Wasp, the Lampasas, the Unionist, the Stillwater, and the Specialist, plus two captured Spanish ships, the Rita and the Nueces. The black troops who were healthy enough to make the journey to Puerto Rico had been reorganized as Company L and incorporated into the Sixth Massachusetts Regimental National Guard. Miles sailed aboard the Yale. The Gloucester, a former yacht named the Corsair that had belonged to J. P. Morgan and was donated to the government, was the fastest in the fleet and the first to establish a beachhead. Twenty-eight sailors and marines lowered rafts into the water at 8:45 AM, set up a machine-gun nest when they hit the sand, and surrounded it with a ring of barbed wire.
López and his remaining militia opened fire on the machine-gun nest from three hundred yards away. The Americans responded in kind, supported by heavy shells directed at the blockhouse by the Gloucester. The land battle for Puerto Rico had now begun. One by one, the rest of the US fleet anchored in the harbor and began to lower rafts into the water for the troops to ride to the beach. The Sixth Massachusetts with its unit of Buffalo Soldiers hit the shore right behind the first wave of sailors and marines. The landing of troops onto the beach was concluded by 11:00 AM, and the initial skirmish was brief and conclusive. Six Spaniards lay dead with gunshot wounds, and López and three others suffered serious injuries. The rest of the militia, including lighthouse keeper Rivera, ran toward Yauco, a town located six miles to the north where a larger defense force was entrenched.
Yauco’s main industry was coffee, although tobacco, sugarcane, and fruit also grew throughout the area. The town, home to about twenty-two thousand inhabitants, was situated in a coastal plain, but the slopes of Puerto Rico’s central mountain range and a heavily forested region bordered it on the north. At the time of the invasion, 11 masonry houses, 166 wooden houses, 77 huts, a church, and the municipal building fleshed out the main part of the town. On the outskirts were several manufacturing plants producing furniture, crackers, pasta, chocolate, and other goods. The villagers had rebelled against the Spanish several times, most recently on March 24, 1897, when sixty armed insurrectionists commanded by Fidel Velez tried to topple the colonial regime. Most of the men who survived were taken prisoner.
In Guánica, the American troops lowered the Spanish flag, raised their own, and proceeded to build a landing dock to complete their debarkation. Seven companies of the Sixth Massachusetts, including the Buffalo Soldiers in Company L, and one from the Sixth Illinois left shortly after midnight in pursuit of the fleeing defenders. There were no American casualties during the brief encounter.
Alger was enraged when he first learned about the American landing at Guánica in an Associated Press report the next day. Miles had disobeyed his order to attack the area around San Juan, and had changed his battle plan without consulting with Alger beforehand. It was only when Miles cabled Alger three days later, after Miles was able to set up a telegraph connection to Washington, DC, that Alger realized the operation had gone smoothly. At that point, he decided to let the issue rest. “Spanish troops are retreating from southern part of Puerto Rico,” Miles reported. “The army will soon be in mountain region. Weather delightful; troops in best of health and spirit. Anticipate no insurmountable obstacles in future results. Results thus far have been accomplished without loss of a single life.” Had Miles botched the skirmish, there is little question that Alger would have slammed Miles with disciplinary action.
Walter J. Stevens, a corporal with Company L who claimed kinship with Crispus Attucks, the first man killed in the Boston Massacre in 1770, wrote later that while the American invasion force suffered no casualties at Guánica, the battle took its toll in other ways. Puerto Rico was teeming with typhoid, malaria, and yellow fever at the time. “Our boys also endured many other diseases and one of the things they suffered a great deal was diarrhea. Some died of this dreadful ailment and many of the men, including myself, contracted it and were eventually brought home to good old Boston on the hospital ship.” Of the battle itself, Stevens attributed the quick American victory to poor enemy marksmanship. They shot “haphazardly from the hip,” and most of their bullets flew over the heads of Company L as it lay in a wheat field.
Rivera and the retreating militia informed the authorities in Yauco that the Americans had landed and taken control of the harbor in Guánica. Captain Salvador Meca ordered the Third Company of his Twenty-Fifth Patria Battalion to march south and intercept the Americans before they could reach his garrison in Yauco. Meanwhile, along their way north, the pursuing Americans ran into some Puerto Rican units that jumped out of their hiding places with their hands raised and pledged their loyalty to the invaders. The Americans welcomed the locals and asked them to join forces against the Spaniards.
But not all of the islanders were hostile toward their Spanish overlords; many were loyalists who hated the Americans more than they did the Spaniards, with whom they at least shared a common language. This contingent of volunteers was known as the Puerto Rican Civil Guards, mounted guerrillas from Yauco and nearby villages. About three miles south of Yauco, Meca’s men were also reinforced by two companies of the Cazador Patria Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Puig. And so the stage was set for a clash not only between Spaniards and Americans but also between Puerto Rican collaborators and Puerto Rican rebels.
The Americans’ main objective was to capture the terminus of the rail line that ran between Yauco and Ponce, the largest city on the south side of the island, in an effort to cut off supplies and lines of communication. The main track, which extended across the island, cut east about six miles from Yauco to Ponce, which boasted a deeper harbor than the one at Guánica. If Miles could shut down that city, the conquest of the southern part of Puerto Rico would be all but assured. The combined forces of the Spanish and Puerto Rican defenses under Puig’s command positioned themselves on both sides of the main road leading from Guánica to Yauco, around a coffee plantation known as the Hacienda Desideria. The Puerto Ricans who had hooked up with the Americans knew precisely where the main lines of defense would be and warned the invaders beforehand, as they approached the area around 2:00 AM under the cover of night.
General George A. Garretson, who commanded the troops heading north, ordered three companies, including the Buffalo Soldiers of Company L, to branch off to the right and occupy the Seboruco Hills overlooking the hacienda. The sky was clear and glinting with stars, and despite the late hour, there was enough light to illuminate the movement of the oncoming Americans and alert the defenders. The Spaniards fired first, pouring in a fusillade of bullets from their smokeless repeating Mausers. Most of the shots missed their marks, and the Americans responded with a deadlier stream of firepower from their smoky Springfield rifles.
Garretson decided to seize the moment as soon as the first rays of sun painted a pink glow across the eastern horizon. Dawn had revealed the first enemy position on a slope just south of the hacienda, and he gave the order to charge. The companies of the Sixth Massachusetts sprang forward, spearheaded by Company L, and ran toward the gun emplacements in front of the building. The Spaniards fell back almost immediately, seeking cover behind the walls of the hacienda. Some of Puig’s men had deserted their positions during the night, and the remaining men began to panic when the reinforcements they expected from Yauco didn’t materialize. Rather than retreat in the face of the enemy attack, Puig tried a flanking movement around the charging Massachusetts and Illinois companies, temporarily taking the Americans by surprise. The Buffalo Soldiers and their white compatriots held their ground, however, and pressed forward, forcing the defenders to pull back farther along the road leading to Yauco.
By the time dawn had fully blossomed on the horizon, Meca’s and Puig’s soldiers were in full retreat. Sixteen had been killed or wounded, while the Americans suffered no deaths and only four minor injuries. All were racing north toward Yauco, wit
h Puig accepting most of the blame for his failed defense, since his men had been the first to face the enemy and the first to give up critical ground. In their panic, the Spaniards continued to retreat through Yauco, with Garretson’s troops closing in from behind.
Puig realized that his predicament had become hopeless; the Americans were rapidly narrowing the distance between them, leaving him with little or no opportunity to blow up the all-important rail line linking the village to the city of Ponce. In doing so he would have been fulfilling the Americans’ goal to do just that, but with the invaders poised to occupy both cities, Puig would be denying them the link that previously had benefited the Spanish. Company L and the other troops entered Yauco, surprised to hear the cheers from some locals who welcomed the American forces on their land. Garretson ordered the Buffalo Soldiers to secure and garrison the town. The Spaniards’ only option was to continue toward the next barrios up the line—Maricao, Lares, Adjuntas—abandoning their artillery and heavy equipment along the way.
The race continued through the afternoon and evening of July 26, throughout the night, and into the morning of the next day, with little time for sleep or rest. With Company L policing Yauco, the rest of Garretson’s troops pursued the Spaniards across the thirty-five-mile breadth of the island for the next two days until the remaining defenders—those who had not dropped out into hiding places in the fields, woods, and other remote areas—made it into Arecibo, on Puerto Rico’s northern coast, on July 29. The US troops, who had thoroughly routed Puig and his men, now controlled most of the southern part of the island. Four days later, Puig took the only course he deemed honorable for a military leader in his position: he raised his pistol to his head, pulled the trigger, and sent a bullet flying through his brain.
The battle for total control over the island of Puerto Rico was almost over, only a few days after it began.
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Puig’s suicide, as honorable as it seemed to him, turned out to have been a desperate act of misdirected idealism. No sooner had the Americans come storming through Yauco, the town Puig was entrusted with defending, than Yauco’s mayor, Francisco Mejia, switched sides and embraced the invaders as saviors. Their arrival was “an act of the God of the just,” he said.
“Today the citizens of Puerto Rico assist in one of her most beautiful festivals,” he pronounced in an address to the local populace. “The sun of America shines upon our mountains and valleys this day of July, 1898. It is a day of glorious remembrance for each son of this beloved isle, because for the first time there waves over it the flag of the Stars, planted in the name of the United States of America by the Major-General of the American army, General Miles.”
Around the same time that Mejia was extolling the virtues of the victors, new American ships carrying more troops arrived in the bay at Guánica with orders to proceed east toward Ponce with its deeper harbor. A column of troops marched in the same direction, tracking the progress of the reinforcements. The Spanish soldiers defending Ponce absconded to the north, while the Puerto Ricans formed a delegation to greet the Americans as soon as they entered the city. The troops aboard the newly arriving ships could see the US flag flying in Ponce’s harbor, as well as the flags of other nations except for Spain. Even before the American vessels had anchored offshore, the townspeople had gathered to celebrate their liberation from the Spanish stranglehold. Miles lost no time issuing guidelines for his men’s behavior on land, to ensure they did not jeopardize the trust of the locals. He then set up his headquarters, using the existing network of underwater cable lines to communicate directly with Washington, DC, which included a message to Alger informing him of his prior change in battle plans.
On July 30, the French ambassador to the United States, Jules Cambon, sent a message to President McKinley on Spain’s behalf to discuss peace terms. But McKinley was not yet ready to negotiate for peace. With the Buffalo Soldiers securing Yauco and the rest of Miles’s troops commanding most of the land in the south, a larger invasion force was closing in on Puerto Rico from the north. McKinley would not settle for anything less than unconditional surrender. Again, Fajardo was the target, with the conquest of San Juan as the ultimate goal.
The Spanish did not go down without a heroic struggle, even with most of the population turning against them and cheering on the Americans. Three US ships—the Amphitrite, Leyden, and Hannibal—passed along the coast near Fajardo on August 2 and could see the Stars and Stripes already flying from the lighthouse, raised high by the local citizenry. A reconnaissance party of American sailors and marines, plus Puerto Rican volunteers, quickly swarmed onto shore and moved within a half mile of the town center, located five miles from the coast.
There were only twenty-five Spanish soldiers on hand to defend the town, which they abandoned shortly after the invaders landed. A local civic leader, Dr. Santiago Veve Calzada, sent message after message to San Juan pleading for help to fend off the American attack. When it became clear that no assistance would be forthcoming, Calzada went to the American encampment by himself and asked for mercy for the townspeople, which the Americans were happy to provide. The Spanish subsequently made several attempts to recapture lost ground, suffering heavy losses for almost two more weeks, with town after town falling in the face of the American onslaught. Finally, on August 13, it was officially over when the warring parties signed the Treaty of Paris, which was ratified by the US Senate and signed into law by McKinley on February 6, 1899, and approved by Spain on March 19.
According to the terms of the agreement, Spain ceded Puerto Rico, its last colony in the Western Hemisphere, which was annexed by the United States. The war in Puerto Rico was costly to Spain in lives, prestige, and standing as a major global empire. The Spanish forces on the island totaled 18,000 men, and of that many, combined with their Puerto Rican allies, there were 105 casualties, including 17 dead and 88 wounded, with an additional 324 taken prisoners of war. The American losses were light by comparison, with 40 wounded and only 3 men killed of the 15,400 troop landed over the course of the campaign.
As a result of the victory in Puerto Rico, Nelson A. Miles became the Douglas MacArthur, so to speak, of an earlier generation. Just as MacArthur became ruler of Japan following its surrender in 1945, so did Miles serve as the first US military governor of Puerto Rico when the war ended in 1898. His change in military strategy was totally vindicated by his success, and it put to rest any question of disciplinary action by Alger, who basked in the reflected glory of Miles’s conquest of the island.
For the Buffalo Soldiers, the battle in Puerto Rico was a brief prelude to the struggle that was about to erupt on more distant soil. The Philippines, another region of the globe infested with a toxic variety of tropical diseases, was exploding. And, notwithstanding the ailments the black troops succumbed to in Cuba, the government of the United States still believed they could more readily withstand those diseases than their white counterparts.
This time around, the Buffalo Soldiers would be fighting not Spaniards but Filipino insurrectos, led by a fiery revolutionary named Emilio Aguinaldo, known among his men as Aquino. Aquino established his own ad hoc government in the northern region of Luzon and drew up plans to attack the American occupiers in and around Manila to the south. Admiral George Dewey had defeated the Spanish fleet protecting the Philippine Islands, but the United States failed to put enough boots on the ground to secure order throughout the Spanish colony.
Julius Caesar had articulated a formula two millennia earlier: if you want to totally shut down a country, you need to send in an occupying army equal to 2 percent of the population. The population of the Philippines in 1899 was about 7 million, which, by Caesar’s calculations, called for an American occupation force of 140,000 men, more than ten times the number the US government put in place.
Aquino and his followers didn’t care for American domination any more than they liked being trampled under the boot of Spain, and he raised an army of forty thousand men to clear their homeland of t
he twelve thousand US troops stationed there. Independence from foreign rule was what the insurrectos wanted, and they didn’t much care if the colonialists called themselves Spaniards or Americans. The Americans would soon learn that they were confronting a far more dangerous enemy in the Filipinos than they had against the Spaniards, especially as the locals’ tactics transformed from traditional military maneuvers to guerrilla-style fighting. American forces realized it would be a different experience to combat dedicated rebels rising up for liberty on their own turf—much as American revolutionaries did against the British—rather than to battle an occupying force of underequipped colonial soldiers.
Orders went out for the four contingents of Buffalo Soldiers that had fought in Cuba, plus two newly authorized volunteer black units—the Forty-Eighth and Forty-Ninth Infantries—to report to the Presidio in San Francisco, from which they would embark for the Philippines. The Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth were the first to arrive in San Francisco at the beginning of 1899, and they landed in the Philippines over the course of two days, July 30 and 31. The Ninth and Tenth were sent on the long journey across the Pacific Ocean as reinforcements, arriving in September, while the Forty-Eighth and Forty-Ninth completed the Buffalo Soldiers’ presence on the islands during a three-week stretch between February 2 and 25. Altogether, seven thousand Buffalo Soldiers would see combat in this remote corner of the globe.
The Roughest Riders Page 18