Campaigning in Cuba

by George Kennan

During my absence at the front on Monday, the auxiliary cruiser Yale, with two or three regiments of Michigan troops on board, arrived off Siboney, and when I went on deck on Tuesday morning these reinforcements were just beginning to go ashore in a long line of small boats, towed by a steam-launch from one of the war-ships of the blockading fleet.

The landing of troops and supplies on the Cuban coast was the first serious difficulty with which General Shafter had to contend. The little cove at Siboney was wholly unsheltered; there was no wharf or pier at which a steamer might lie; a gale, or even a fresh breeze, from the southeast raised a heavy surf on the strip of sand in front of the village; the water deepened so suddenly and abruptly, at a distance of fifty yards from the shore, that there was practically no anchorage; and all men and stores had to be landed by putting them into small boats and running them up on the beach through the breakers. At Daiquiri, where General Lawton's division disembarked, the situation was a little better, for the reason that the Spanish-American Iron Company had built there a substantial pier, of which the army of invasion could make use. At that place, therefore, General Shafter disembarked a large part of his command, and unloaded all his wagons, siege-guns, light artillery, etc. The mules and horses were put ashore—or rather pitched overboard with the expectation that they would swim ashore—at Siboney; but, owing to unskilful management and lack of guidance, twelve per cent. of the mules—fifty out of four hundred and fifteen—perished. Some, instead of making for the shore, swam directly out to sea until they became exhausted and sank; while others attempted to land on the eastern side of the cove, where there was no beach, and were drowned under the rocks. Inasmuch as the total number of draft-and pack-animals loaded at Tampa was wholly inadequate to meet the necessities of such an expedition, the drowning of twelve per cent. of them, after they had reached their destination, was a serious and, it seems to me, unnecessary loss.

In the disembarkation of his troops, General Shafter had the assistance of skilled officers and well-drilled sailors from the blockading fleet, to say nothing of half a dozen steam-launches and fifty-two good boats; but when it came to unloading and landing stores, he had to rely on his own men and his own facilities, and it soon became painfully evident that they were not equal to the requirements of the situation. I watched the landing of supplies all day Tuesday, and formed the opinion that it was disorderly, unskilful, and unintelligent. In the first place, many of the steamers from which supplies were being taken lay too far from the beach; and there seemed to be no one who had authority or power enough to compel them to come nearer. As a result of this, the boats and lighters were unable to make as quick and frequent trips as they might have made if the transports had been within one hundred yards of the beach, instead of half a mile away.

In the second place, most of the boats and lighters seemed to be directed and handled by men who had had little experience in boating and no experience whatever in landing through heavy surf. As a result of this, boats were often stove against the timbers of the little pier which the engineer corps had hastily built; while the lighters, instead of being held by an anchor and stern-line as they went into the breakers, were allowed to swing around into the trough of the sea, where they either filled and sank, or drifted ashore, broadside to the beach, in such a position that fifty men could hardly turn them around and get them off.

Finally, the soldiers and Cubans who acted as stevedores, carrying the boxes from the boats and piling them on the pier, were not intelligently directed, and, consequently, labored without method or judgment—getting in one another's way; allowing the pier to become so blocked up with stuff that nobody could move on it, much less work; and wasting more energy in talking, shouting, and bossing one another than they utilized in doing the thing that was to be done.

If I had ever had any doubt with regard to the expediency of giving to the navy full and absolute control of the army and its supplies while at sea, such doubt would have been removed by one day's observation at Siboney. Army officers, as a rule, know nothing of water transportation, and cannot reasonably be expected to know anything about it; and to put them in charge of transports, lighters, and surf-boats is almost as inconsiderate as to put a sailor in charge of a farm and expect him, without any previous training, to run reaping-, binding-, and threshing-machines, take proper care of his live stock, and get as much out of the soil as an agricultural expert would. Every man to his trade; and the landing of supplies from thirty or forty transports, in small boats, on an unsheltered, surf-beaten coast, is not the trade of an army quartermaster. Lieutenant-Colonel Humphrey and Major Jacobs undoubtedly did all that they could do, with their knowledge and experience, and with the limited facilities that General Shafter had provided for them, to get supplies ashore; but the results were not gratifying, either to observers at Siboney, or to soldiers at the front. If officers of the navy had directed the loading of stores on the transports at Tampa, and the unloading and landing of them at Daiquiri and Siboney, there would have been a properly equipped hospital at the latter place five days sooner than there was; there would have been forty or fifty more mules in the army's pack-train; the beach would not have been strewn with the wrecks of mismanaged boats and lighters; and the transport-steamers Alamo, Breakwater, Iroquois, Vigilancia, and La Grande Duchesse would not have brought back to the United States hundreds of tons of supplies intended for, and urgently needed by, our soldiers at the front.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, June 28, one of the small vessels of the mosquito fleet arrived from Guantanamo Bay with a letter from Captain McCalla in which he said that General Perez had furnished a pack-train and an escort for the food that the Red Cross had promised to send to the Guantanamo refugees, and that he would like to have us return there as soon as possible and land five thousand rations. As our hospital work on shore was well under way, and Dr. Lesser and the nurses had been supplied with everything that they would need for a day or two, Miss Barton decided to fill Captain McCalla's requisition at once. Late Tuesday evening, therefore, the State of Texas left Siboney, and after a quiet and peaceful run down the coast entered Guantanamo Bay about six o'clock Wednesday morning. At half-past six Captain McCalla came on board to make arrangements for the landing, and in less than two hours there was a large lighter alongside, with a steam-launch to tow it to the place where an officer of General Perez's command was waiting for it with a pack-train and an escort. Before noon ten or fifteen thousand pounds of supplies, consisting principally of beans, rice, hard bread, and South American jerked beef, had been safely landed on the western side of the entrance to the lower harbor; and as we passed the point, on our return, we saw a large party of Cubans carrying the boxes and barrels up the bank.

We reached Siboney early that evening, drifted and rolled all night on a heavy swell, a mile or two off the coast, and at daybreak on the following morning ran close in to the beach and began landing supplies for several thousand destitute Cuban refugees who had assembled at the little village of Firmeza, three miles back of Siboney in the hills. In getting provisions ashore at Siboney, we encountered precisely the same difficulties that the army had to meet; but we fortunately had with us, as chief of transportation, a man who was familiar with boats and who had had large experience in handling them in circumstances and under conditions similar to those that prevailed on the Cuban coast. In proportion to our facilities, therefore, we got more stuff ashore in a given time than the army quartermasters did, and with fewer accidents. Mr. Warner, I think, was the first man to use, at Siboney, an anchor and a stern-line to prevent a boat or a lighter from broaching to in the surf. It was a simple enough expedient, but nobody, apparently, had thought of it. By dropping an anchor astern, just before the lighter reached the outer edge of the breakers, and then slacking off the line until the boat was near enough so that thirty Cubans could rush into the water, seize it, and run it up on the beach, a landing was effected without difficulty or risk. Then, when the supplies had been unloaded, the stern-anchor line could be used again as a means of pulling the lighter off through the surf into smooth water and preventing it from swinging around broadside to the sea while being launched. The best time for this work was between five and ten o'clock in the morning. After ten o'clock there was almost always a fresh breeze from the southeast, which raised such a surf on the beach that unless the landing of supplies was a matter of extreme urgency it had to be temporarily suspended. We succeeded in getting ashore on Wednesday food enough to satisfy the wants of the refugees at Firmeza, and Mr. Elwell was sent there to superintend its distribution.

Wednesday evening, as there seemed to be no prospect of an immediate engagement at the front, I decided to go to Port Antonio, Jamaica, with Mr. Trumbull White, on the Chicago "Record's" despatch-boat Hercules, to post my letters and the letters that had been intrusted to me by Colonel Wood and Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt, and to get some articles of camp equipment which I had ordered in New York, but which had failed to reach me before the State of Texas sailed from Key West.

We reached Port Antonio at eight o'clock on Thursday, spent the day there, and returned the next night to Siboney. Early Friday morning, as we were approaching the Cuban coast, the captain of the Hercules came down into the cabin with the astounding news that the blockading fleet had disappeared. "The jig is up, boys!" he exclaimed excitedly. "They've taken the city, and the fleet is inside the harbor. I can't see a sign of a ship anywhere along the coast."