IV.

The Caribbean Theater

At the beginning of the war there were nearly 200,000 Spanish troops in Cuba. About 125,000 were regulars and the remainder were local volunteers. The regulars were well-trained men armed with up-to-date magazine rifles. The bulk of the troops were stationed at Havana in the western part of the island. Havana was linked by rail with the port of Cienfuegos on the south-central coast. The remainder of the island was accessible from Havana only by sea or by very mediocre roads, and the countryside swarmed with Cuban insurgents.

In contrast, the U.S. Regular Army had a total strength of some 25,000. These troops were scattered in small posts throughout the country. McKinley appealed initially for 125,000 volunteers, which he later increased to 267,000, but these men could not be trained into reliable fighting units for some time. Therefore, the cry of “On to Havana!” seemed unrealistic indeed to Nelson A. Miles, the commanding general of the U.S. Army. Miles proposed to concentrate all his regulars in one Army corps to take advantage of any opportunity that might develop from the Navy’s operations.

A.

Blockade of Cuba

The Navy’s basic job was to blockade the island of Cuba. If the Spanish army could be cut off from seaborne supplies from Spain, it could not maintain itself for long against the Cuban insurgents, let alone prepare to fight the U.S. forces. To maintain a successful blockade, the U.S. Navy would have to control the sea approaches to Cuba. To accomplish this, the United States determined that the Spanish navy had to be destroyed wherever it was found. Thus the U.S. war objectives were broadened to include an attack on the Spanish naval base in the Philippines and eventually the conquest of the Philippine islands themselves.

On paper the Spanish navy was formidable, but in reality many of its ships were not ready for sea. In the spring of 1898 a squadron of four armored cruisers and three destroyers was the only Spanish naval force in shape to proceed to the Caribbean. In actual fighting power, the U.S. North Atlantic Squadron of four battleships and two armored cruisers was overwhelmingly superior. Nevertheless, news that the Spanish squadron under Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete was sailing westward across the Atlantic Ocean from the Cape Verde Islands, off the western coast of Africa, caused a panic in U.S coastal cities. Such a clamor arose for protection that the commander of the North Atlantic Squadron, Rear Admiral William Thomas Sampson, was forced to leave half of his squadron at Hampton Roads, Virginia, to discourage the Spanish from bombarding U.S. seaports.

With his reduced forces, Sampson could not simultaneously watch the two major Cuban ports of Cienfuegos and Santiago de Cuba, located in southeastern Cuba. The Spanish squadron was prevented from slipping into Cienfuegos harbor in May 1898 only by the belated arrival of a squadron from Virginia. Sampson had finally pried this squadron loose after Civil War monitors—heavily armored ships used for coastal bombardment—had been substituted for the squadron’s ships in the harbors along the U.S. coast. These communities were reassured by the monitors, although there was no ammunition available for their muzzle-loaded guns. By June 1 Sampson’s fleet, reinforced by the battleship Oregon, had blockaded Cervera’s Spanish squadron in the port of Santiago de Cuba.

B.

Expeditionary Force

The U.S. Army had succeeded, after extreme difficulty, in collecting some 16,500 men at Tampa, Florida. This Fifth Army Corps was composed mainly of regulars, although there were also two National Guard infantry regiments and a regiment of volunteer cavalry, called the Rough Riders. This unit had been raised by Lieutenant Colonel (and future U.S. president) Theodore Roosevelt and commanded at first by Colonel Leonard Wood. When Wood was appointed brigadier general of volunteers in July 1898, Roosevelt was made a colonel and assumed command of the cavalry regiment.

The Fifth Army Corps left Tampa without much military order or discipline. Troops piled aboard the available ships in almost total disregard of any loading plan, if indeed one existed. Drinking water had to be rationed, the food was bad, and the congestion aboard the ships was incredible. But on June 20 they arrived off the coast of Cuba. After some bitter discussion with the civilian shipmasters, several of whom stoutly refused to bring their ships close to this “enemy shore,” men and supplies were bundled overboard into boats. It took five days to get all of the Fifth Corps landed in Cuba.

C.

San Juan Hill

The Rough Riders cavalry division, dismounted because the horses had been left behind, was the first to land and it quickly pushed ahead toward Santiago de Cuba. At Las Guásimas it fought the first land battle of the war, a sharp skirmish in which a somewhat superior Spanish force was driven from its positions. After several days of preparation, the U.S. division launched a general attack on the morning of July 1. The attack, which was badly coordinated, eventually took the Spanish positions at El Caney and on San Juan Hill. More than 280 U.S. soldiers were killed and over 1500 wounded in the fighting.

U.S. commanders were discouraged by the unexpectedly heavy losses and did not immediately follow up with further attacks. The Spanish captain general in Havana, however, was even more distraught. Convinced that Santiago de Cuba could not be held, Ramon Blanco y Erenas telegraphed Admiral Cervera, ordering him to take his ships to sea “to avoid being included in the surrender.”

D.

Victory in the Caribbean

Cervera knew he was being ordered to certain destruction but felt compelled to obey. He chose the morning of July 3 for a hopeless but gallant escape attempt. The Spanish ships had to emerge from the narrow harbor entrance one at a time, each in turn facing the concentrated fire of the U.S. ships. Cervera’s flagship, Infanta Maria Teresa, led the column and was taken under fire by the Iowa at 9:35 am. Within several hours, all seven Spanish ships in the squadron had either been destroyed or driven ashore.

The discrepancy in fighting power between the two squadrons is underlined by the casualty figures. The Spaniards reported casualties of 323 dead and 151 wounded. The Americans had 1 killed and 1 wounded. Cervera and more than 1700 of his officers and men became prisoners of war. The battle marked the end of the Spanish Empire in the Americas.

The Spanish garrison at Santiago de Cuba surrendered on July 17, after protracted negotiations and some intermittent shelling. On July 25, U.S. troops landed in Puerto Rico and took the island after encountering only token resistance. Hostilities in the Caribbean were now at an end.