Jack Dierks

I’ve been reading up on the Spanish-American War – possibly the least creditable of American conflicts – but all the books I’ve read so far concern the Philippine Campaign. A Leap To Arms is about Cuba. It’s dated (published 1970 – but, after all, it’s not likely that a lot of new information is going to turn up.


“God has a special Providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America” is usually attributed to Otto von Bismarck – although there’s no evidence that he ever said it. If Bismarck was following the events of 1898 – he died in July – he might have reflected on the accuracy of what he supposedly didn’t say. The United States of America really wasn’t prepared for a war, but muddled through anyway. Author Jack Dierks discusses the background – the war really was a creation of the newspapers – and independently confirms a cognitive-dissonance-inducing observation also made in books about the Philippine campaign – big business in the US was opposed to the war while college students supported it. Providence did seem to favor the US – or at least had something in for Spain – as the logistics and planning for the invasion of Cuba were nearly hopelessly muddled.


Having started the war, the newspapers were full of interesting suggestions on how to run: a special infantry unit composed of prizefighters, led by Bob Fitzsimmons and James Corbett; or dispatching Buffalo Bill Cody and 30000 Indian braves. Every small town on the US East Coast demanded its own naval protection; this turned out to be a major hindrance. Although the Navy wisely kept its major units together, local politicians were assuaged by widespread purchase of merchant vessels for conversion to armed auxiliaries. As troops and supplies showed up in trainloads at the embarkation camp in Tampa it turned out that there were practically no vessels available to move them to Cuba. Deluged by repeated orders from Washington to get going and by the lack of logistical organization, troops eventually broke the locks off boxcars, seized whatever supplies seemed useful, and boarded whatever ship seemed handy – for example, the 71st New York Volunteer Infantry and the First US Volunteer Cavalry were assigned to the same ship, the Yucatan; Colonel Roosevelt got there first.


Once some fraction of the force got underway, getting the widely disparate vessels into some sort of order was hopeless – the convoy soon stretched out over 40 nautical miles (the slowest ship was an old sidewheeler – towing a barge at that). The landing at Daiquiri went much better than it had any right to, as the Spanish retreated from what should have been an easily defensible position. The ships unloaded their horses by throwing them overboard and letting them swim to shore (helped out by cavalry buglers on the beach playing “Stables”). Army commander Major General William Shafter turned out to be not terribly competent but also never got close enough to the fighting to interfere with things; he weighed over 300 pounds and was gouty besides. The battles at San Juan Hill and El Caney mostly fought themselves, as the Americans got tired of being under fired and charged on their own. That left the Army in possession of the heights overlooking the port of Santiago de Cuba but not quite sure of what to do next.


In the meantime the Navy hadn’t done much either. Confusion over the whereabouts of Spanish Admiral Cervera’s squadron led to a number of fruitless sorties from Key West. Eventually Cervera was found at Santiago, allowing combination of the two American squadrons. The respective commanders, Rear Admiral William Sampson and Commodore Winfield Scot Schley, were not exactly hostile but weren’t a band of brothers either; Sampson was a cerebral type who had been active in ordnance development while Schley was a “fighting” commander. Nobody knows how Sampson would have done, since when Cervera was ordered to break out Sampson was away meeting with Shafter. Schley caused some consternation by a strange maneuver at the beginning; he took his flagship Brooklyn in a circle, initially away from the battle. He explained he wanted to get a proper position in line; Brooklyn was the fastest ship in the American fleet and if he had simply went dead ahead from his original position he would have out distanced all the other American ships and would have not been in position to send flag signals to the rest of the squadron. After the battle his critics suggested he was actually trying to flee; no evidence of that but it isn’t quite clear why he couldn’t have just reduced speed. As it was the circular maneuver caused a near-collision with the battleship Texas
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As it turned out, once the Americans got organized it was a forgone conclusion; not only did they outgun the Spanish squadron but they were also much better shots. The Cristóbal Colón might have been able to get away; at a nominal top speed of 20 knots she was faster than all the American ships except the Brooklyn, but she ran out of high-quality coal which slowed her down enough to get within extreme range of the Oregon. There’s a discrepancy in the book here; in his analysis of the battle Dierks says that none of the largest American guns (13 inch on the Indiana, Massachusetts and Oregon) ever hit a target but in the running account states it was a 13 inch shell from the Oregon that did for the Cristóbal Colón. Maybe it was a near miss; a puff of steam was seen from the Cristóbal Colón’s stacks and she turned toward the shore and beached; concussion might have broken a steam line. By the end of the battle, every Spanish ship was beached and on fire or blown up. The Reina Mercedes, immobilized under repair in the harbor, was taken as a prize and towed to Annapolis, where she was used as an accommodation hulk for years. In 1957 the Spanish government requested her return and the US agreed, but it turned out she was in too poor condition to make an Atlantic crossing and by the agreement of both countries she was scuttled instead.


Examination of the wrecks showed that only about 10% of American shells hit; given the firing techniques of the day that’s probably about as well as could be expected. Spanish gunnery was even worse; almost all Spanish shots were “overs”, leading the Americans to believe that the gunners had been given the range at the start of the battle and never received a correction as the fleets closed. There was exactly one fatality in the American fleet; a signalman was hit in the head by a large caliber shell. The Americans benefited from luck – or Providence – when a 8” shell from the Brooklyn hit the mouth of a 11” gun on the Almirante Oquendo. It probably would have disabled the gun in any case, but unfortunately for the turret crew they were in the process of loading, had the breech open, and had a shell and bagged charge ready to go. The explosion of Brooklyn’s shell communicated down the gun barrel through the open breech, detonated one or both, and incinerated the turret crew.


With the Spanish fleet gone, the Spanish commander ashore surrendered the island. The Americans were surprised to find that the Spanish troops across Cuba outnumbered them by almost a factor of 10, and military stores in Santiago de Cuba alone included millions of rounds of small caliber ammunition and several brand-new Krupp artillery pieces. The Spanish heart just wasn’t in it.


If anything, the internecine political battles fought in the press after the war over the merits of the American commanders were more violent than the war itself. General Shafter was vilified by many of his subordinates – including Teddy Roosevelt – as incompetent; he certainly wasn’t a master of logistics and didn’t really do very much one way or another to influence the land battles. Both Sampson and Schley had their detractors – Sampson was accused of cowardice for not attempting to force the batteries at the mouth of Santiago harbor (especially after it turned out that rather than the feared Krupp guns they were entirely equipped with bronze muzzle-loaders, including a gun made in 1688). Schley, in turn, never satisfactorily explained his strange turn at the start of the battle. Dierks makes the case that despite the apparent insignificance of the war it actually had quite a bit of influence on subsequent American military history. The United States Army decided that it would be a good idea to have a General Staff and a War College to avoid future logistical nightmares; the Navy decided it would be a good idea to switch to a better system of gunnery. Both services agreed that more cooperation might be a good thing. And you can say that one of the major outcomes of the war was to provide two still popular cocktails – the Daiquiri and the Cuba Libre.


No major flaws in the book as far as I can see. The maps are adequate; the naval battle of Santiago was a straightforward running engagement so the common problem of indicating successive ship positions in a more confused battle doesn’t apply. Some pictures of the participants might have been nice. AFAIK the Cuba campaign was the first ever to be recorded by motion picture cameras; I wonder if any film is still around. Dierks provides several appendices, including Order of Battle for the US Army and both fleets; one appendix discusses the Maine explosion, which at the time of publication (1970) was still believed to be caused by a mine. A 1974 re-examination ordered by Hyman Rickover concluded instead that spontaneous combustion in a coal bunker communicated to a magazine. The official position of the Cuban government is that the Maine was deliberately sunk to provide an excuse to annex Cuba.
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