by Clay Risen
The day before the fleet passed Guantánamo Bay one of the transports, the City of Washington—a leased civilian liner that, coincidentally, had been the closest American ship to the Maine when it exploded in Havana Harbor, four months before—began to lag behind, dragged by a barge it was towing. The Yucatan, with the Rough Riders aboard, was ordered to fall back to accompany it as it plugged along, and assist if needed. As the Yucatan finally passed the mouth of Guantánamo Bay, a high-speed launch came out to greet it. The ship carried only minor news; its officers’ real reason for the mission was to meet Roosevelt, until recently their nominal boss in the Department of the Navy and a hero to naval officers worldwide for his reforms and advocacy of new ships and bigger budgets. From the boat’s deck, a smart-looking naval officer shouted, “I want to speak to the assistant secretary of the navy, Colonel Roosevelt.”
“Here I am,” Roosevelt shouted. “What’s the news?”
The officer told him about the recent fight, and assured him that everything was calm.
“Delighted to hear it. I hope we won’t be too late ourselves.”
The officer said the landing should be easy. But, he added, “We expect some very heavy fighting at Santiago de Cuba.”2
The fleet arrived off Santiago, where the blockade ships stood at station, about five miles off the coast, on the morning of June 21. Rather than begin the landing, though, they idled offshore while the Seguranca, Shafter’s flagship, sailed west, to a small coastal village called Aserradero, about thirty miles beyond the mouth of Santiago Harbor. He intended to find General Calixto García, the rebel leader in eastern Cuba. As the launch, which carried General Shafter, Admiral William Sampson, a few officers, Richard Harding Davis, and the British Army attaché, Arthur Lee—and no armed guard to speak of—neared the shore, a squad of Cubans onshore started cheering. Several of them stripped naked and waded into the surf to bring the boat in to land; a few of them lifted Shafter out of his seat and conveyed him to the dry beach on their shoulders. Lee was amazed, and a little dismayed, that Shafter would do something so brazen as come ashore, practically unarmed, so close to Santiago. “An enterprising Cavalry squadron could have captured the whole meeting without material risk,” Lee wrote.3
After a trudge up a steep, rough trail, Shafter’s party found García and his staff outside a hut, located within a grove of coconut trees. The general bid them to sit down, and aides brought out mangoes, limes, pineapple, coconut milk, and coffee while they all examined a map of Santiago. The American officers were stunned to see that García’s second in command, General Jesús Sablón Moreno, known by his nickname, Rabí, was a full-blooded Carib Indian, and that many of García’s trusted inner circle were black. A segregated army from a segregated nation had come to Cuba to fight alongside an integrated, multiracial rebel army to free the island’s people.4
General García himself cut a striking figure: Six foot four and wearing a white linen uniform, with white hair and a bushy, droopy white mustache and goatee, García looked, wrote a correspondent for the San Francisco Call, “like a Third Empire French marshal.” In the center of his forehead was a hole that he kept stuffed with cotton gauze; during the Ten Years’ War he had been on the brink of capture, and tried to defeat his would-be captors by shooting himself in the head. The bullet blew through his mouth and the front of his skull, somehow exiting without hitting a single major part of his brain. García told the Americans that Santiago and the surrounding towns held about 20,000 Spanish soldiers and volunteers, along with about 1,000 sailors and marines from the fleet (an exaggeration, or the result of poor intelligence; the total was closer to 12,000 Spaniards and pro-Spanish Cubans). Another several thousand were within a few days’ march at Holguín. García’s men, on the other hand, were brave and battle-hardened but also worn down by years of fighting and, more importantly, almost out of ammunition. With the Cuban rebels setting up a cordon around the west and north of the city to block reinforcements, García recommended that Shafter land troops on both sides of the opening to Santiago Harbor and then make a quick and relatively easy assault on the two fortresses that guarded each side of the entrance; once those fell, the American ships could sail into the harbor and capture the Spanish fleet—the overall objective of the campaign. But Shafter refused. He had been sent to capture the city, he said, and that is what he would do.5
Shafter conducted the Santiago campaign on two reasonable assumptions. The first grew out of his shipboard reading during the sail to Cuba: a history of the last time a foreign army tried to capture the city. In the summer of 1741, during the War of Jenkins’ Ear, English forces under Admiral Edward Vernon occupied Guantánamo Bay, but waited too long to assault Santiago. By the time he was ready it was the rainy season, and too many of Vernon’s soldiers had died of disease; eventually he was forced to withdraw. Shafter was intent on avoiding a repeat performance, which meant attacking the city as fast as possible and then, once it was secure, sending as many soldiers as possible back to the United States, before the heat and disease of summer set in. That required, first, making an unimpeded landing, which would allow him to organize his assault without getting immediately bogged down in combat. “There is no more use in thinking that men can go into that climate at that season of the year and escape distress, than there is that you can put your hand in a fire and escape burning,” he said. “I determined to rush it, and I did rush it.”6
Shafter also believed that the American people’s support for the war was superficial, and a difficult engagement with high casualty counts would rapidly turn them against the conflict. Shafter was no fool, at least in this regard—he had seen the imposing cliffs and massive stone fortress that towered over the entrance to Santiago, and knew that whatever García said, taking those heights would be a bloodbath. And so Shafter and his landing party returned to their ships, and the ships returned to the fleet, and preparations for the assault began.
• • •
On the afternoon of June 21, the fleet made a feint at Cabanas, two and a half miles west of Santiago Bay. Three small warships, the Texas, Vixen, and Scorpion, ran in close to shore and engaged the Spanish batteries, while ten transports, behind them, made exaggerated efforts to appear like they were preparing to land—dropping anchor, lowering boats, and so on. At the same time, 500 Cuban rebels attacked the Spanish line northwest of Santiago, as a ploy to divert attention from the Americans. Just before evening, the Bancroft, a gunboat, pulled up alongside the Yucatan. A young ensign came aboard and told a group of Rough Rider officers that the landing would commence in the morning. Roosevelt leapt with joy, sang “Shout hurrah, for Erin Go Bragh, and the Yankee Nation!” and danced a jig. Then, turning to Capron, who was watching his lieutenant colonel, mouth agape, Roosevelt said, “Come on, you old Quaker, let’s go to supper.” That night, tired of eating cold rations and feeling rebellious, several enlisted Rough Riders broke into the Yucatan’s galley and made biscuits, which they slathered with preserves they discovered in a cabinet.7
The actual landing took place the next morning at a tiny village called, grandly, Nueva Salamanca. But because it was also at the mouth of the Río Daiquirí, both Cubans and Americans called the landing site Daiquirí (many initial accounts referred to it as Baiquirí). The beach skirted a half-moon cove at the base of a string of low mountains centered on Mount Losiltires, a 1,000-foot cone. Shafter, recalling his days at the Presidio, compared it to the view across San Francisco Bay, to the Berkeley hills; Tom Hall, a New Jersey native, said the low mountains reminded him of the Catskills. Malcolm McDowell, a correspondent for the Chicago Record, wrote that Daiquirí itself “looks from a distance of a mile much like a Pennsylvania iron-mining town”—that is, until one noticed the dozens of Spanish forts and blockhouses that dotted the elevations behind it.8
Daiquirí was familiar to Richard Harding Davis. A decade earlier, at the very start of his career, he had accompanied an official from the Spanish-American Iron Company here. The company had ceased ac
tivity with the return of the war, but its facilities remained: a clutch of corrugated-zinc-roofed shacks on shore, and two piers—one for boats, the other, a forty-foot-high iron lattice, for loading ore into barges. On the latter that morning sat a pair of ore cars, in flames.9
The transports arranged themselves in a semicircle, five miles out, then moved in toward shore, hesitatingly. As they did, the warships undertook a thirty-minute bombardment. Yellow plumes of fire burst across the faces of the mountains in back and to the east of the site. “The marksmanship of the navy was fine and the way they put shells into a block house on a hill to the right of the town was wonderful,” wrote Tom Hall, the adjutant. The barrage destroyed most of the buildings in Daiquirí, knocked down a sizable section of the forest alongside them, and churned up massive piles of dirt and sand. “Should a Cuban wish to plant in Daiquiri, in the near future, he will hardly have to plow the ground,” one soldier said. The firing killed or wounded seven Cubans, but no Spanish; they had already largely withdrawn. The Americans could hear explosions from onshore—not the sound of Spanish cannons returning fire, as some thought initially, but of retreating Spanish soldiers demolishing bridges and buildings to impede the American advance. Eventually a lone Cuban rebel climbed out to the end of the iron pier, waving a white cloth to signal that the Spanish had left the scene.10
Shafter’s invasion force, called the Fifth Corps, was organized into three divisions. The First and Second, both infantry divisions, contained three brigades each, and each brigade contained three regiments (together, the two divisions comprised 10,709 enlisted men and 561 officers). The last division, the cavalry, led by General Joseph Wheeler, contained two brigades of three regiments each, totaling 2,875 men and 159 officers. The Rough Riders were placed in the Second Brigade—though, since most of the horses had been left in Tampa, Wheeler’s command was a cavalry division in name only, and the men fought on foot, just like the infantry divisions. The rest of the corps included artillery detachments, transportation units, and an “Independent Brigade” of two more regiments. On paper, it was all neat and tidy; as thousands of men tried to make their way ashore that morning, it was anything but.11
The landing began at 9:30 a.m. Immediately, there was a problem. During the voyage, a lighter and a barge, both of which were to take part in the landing, had been lost while being towed behind two transports; as a result, there were only enough boats to carry a quarter of the men at a time, and they piled into the craft until the water almost reached their gunwales. Soon, wrote the journalist Caspar Whitney, “The sea was literally alive with saucy little launches, carrying rapid-fire 1-pounders in their bow and the American ensign at their stern.” There was no coordination to the effort: Landing craft went at their own speed, with no respect for or even awareness of an overarching plan. Sailors dug into their oars, with enough effort to remind the Eastern college boys of crew races along the Charles or the Schuylkill. Boats crowded around the pier, wrote Whitney, like “the scramble for elevated railway tickets after a big football game in New York.” Things were more confusing onshore, where there was no one coordinating the landing or the disposition of supplies and equipment and men.12
One problem was the transport ships and their captains, who were responsible not to the Army but to their commercial owners, from whom the government was merely renting their services. The captains did not want to risk damage, so they remained three to twenty miles out from the coast—a decision, Davis wrote, “that should, early in the day, have led to their being placed in irons.” He claimed to have been on six transports that day, and “on none of them did I find a captain who was, in his attitude toward the Government, anything but insolent, un-American, and mutinous, and when there was any firing of any sort on the shore they showed themselves to be the most abject cowards and put to the open sea, carrying the much-needed supplies with them.” (To be fair, the Army had failed to take out insurance on the ships.)13
Davis assumed that he and the other correspondents would be allowed to land alongside the first waves of soldiers. But when the orders for disembarkation came around, they commanded that civilians stay aboard. Davis, standing on deck of the Seguranca, approached Shafter for an explanation. “General,” he said, “I see the order for disembarkation directs that none but fighting men be allowed in the boats of the first landing party. This will keep back reporters.” Shafter replied that it was for his own safety, and that there simply was not enough room for reporters to travel alongside the soldiers in the launches. Davis, apoplectic, replied that he was no mere reporter—he was a chronicler of history, a “descriptive writer.” Shafter scoffed: “I do not care a damn what you are. I’ll treat you all the same.” Davis got to shore eventually that day, but he never dropped his grudge against the general.14
As Wood and Roosevelt pondered the task of rowing 600 men several miles to shore, a small ship pulled up alongside the Yucatan. On board was Roosevelt’s former aide from the Department of the Navy, Lieutenant Alexander Sharp Jr., and alongside him stood a Cuban pilot whom Sharp said could get the Yucatan within a few hundred yards of shore. A few minutes later, as the boats approached land, Roosevelt marveled at their luck to be landing unopposed. “Five hundred resolute men could have prevented the disembarkation at very little cost to themselves,” he wrote. The Spanish commander in charge in Santiago, Arsenio Linares y Pombo, had thousands of men under his command, but he had more than the Americans to defend against: to the north and west were hundreds if not thousands of Cuban rebels, and the Spanish dared not take the risk of exposing the city to direct attack. Time and again during the campaign, this would be the story: The Spanish failed to take advantage of American weaknesses and mistakes, of which there was no shortage.15
To land, the men first had to lower themselves into bobbing, waiting launches and rowboats while carrying up to sixty pounds of gear. Hamilton Fish was the first of the Rough Riders to go, and timed his jump perfectly. The others followed suit, but getting into the boats was the easy part. The dock itself, where they disembarked, was deadly. Designed for larger boats, it was too high for the landing craft, except when a swell came along and lifted a boat, for just a second, high enough so that a few men could jump out. Because of the six-foot waves, the bow and stern ropes holding the boats to the dock had to be long, which meant that the boats pitched in and away as well as up and down. The men threw their gear onto the dock, then did their best to time their leaps. As one of the Rough Rider boats was disembarking at the dock, another, full of men from the 10th Cavalry, one of the segregated regiments, pulled up alongside. Suddenly an errant swell hit the two boats, and two of the men from the 10th, Corporal Edward Cobb and Private John English, fell into the water. Weighed down by their gear, they sank immediately. Buckey O’Neill and Charles Knoblauch, both excellent swimmers, dove in after them, fully clothed, but despite several attempts, couldn’t find them. Already wet, O’Neill and Knoblauch spent the next hour diving beside the dock, gathering up equipment and weapons that other troopers had dropped.16
Among the first Rough Riders to land were Henry La Motte, the regimental surgeon; Sergeant Albert Wright, the color bearer; and Clay Platt, a trumpeter. They could see, atop a steep hill looming over the cove, an empty Spanish blockhouse. Platt, in his sack, held the territorial flag given to the Arizona contingent by the women of Phoenix, less than two months before. They knew what to do.17
“All the way up we encountered pieces of shells, traces of the navy’s work of the morning,” La Motte wrote. In the blockhouse atop the hill, the trio found half-full cups, dirty plates, stores of food, and, on a desk, an order by General Linares in Santiago to hold the fort. Alongside it, almost complete but never sent, lay an officer’s reply, promising to singlehandedly push the Americans back to Florida. Soon the trio was joined by Edward Marshall, a correspondent for Hearst’s New York Journal, who had somehow managed to evade Shafter’s order to stay on the ships. He carried an American flag as well. After some effort, the three tied the
two flags to a makeshift flagpole and mounted the pole on top of the blockhouse. A minute later, the sound of a ship’s whistle rolled across the water, then two, then three, along with the faint but adamant roar of nearly 17,000 American soldiers.18
With the Spanish nowhere to be seen, the soldiers’ focus turned to the Cuban rebels who greeted them. They were of mostly of African and indigenous background, and many had worked in the nearby mines and sugar plantations before the war. Their bodies and clothing showed the strain of three years of Weyler’s war: A typical rebel wore only a loose pair of pants or just a thick thong; in either case, no one wore a shirt. Most were barefoot. For weapons some carried rusty Springfield rifles, though all of them had a machete tied with a string around their shoulders. Roosevelt called them “utter tatterdemalions.” William Davidson, a sergeant with the Rough Riders, was even less kind: “So that’s what we came to free? If the walking wasn’t so bad, I’d go home right now.”19
Not all the troopers were so dismissive of the Cubans. Several understood the rebels for what they were: a proud and accomplished but also exhausted force, men who had lost almost everything in their three years of fighting against a better-equipped but not better-skilled enemy. “These people, with the extreme odds against them, were putting up the most valiant fight for existence I have ever witnessed,” recalled another Rough Rider, David Hughes. Even adjutant Tom Hall, a martinet not noted for his emotional intelligence, wrote that while the Cubans might not have looked like a crack fighting force, “they kept three hundred thousand Spaniards guessing for three years—no slight achievement.” Frank Knox, the Michigan boy who had joined the regiment in Tampa, wrote in a letter to his family: “However disreputable their appearance may be the sacred flame of liberty must burn brightly in their breasts or they would have given up this uneven struggle long ago.” They were, however, clearly malnourished—Hughes could see their thin arms and legs, and count their vertebrae: “Our men looked at these people with silent and set faces, knowing within them that the time had come when someone had to pay for these conditions.”20