Campaigning in Cuba

by George Kennan

3. The roads leading back into the interior in the direction of Santiago are generally narrow and bad; they traverse almost impenetrable jungles; and they are liable, at this season of the year, to be rendered impassable for wheeled vehicles by heavy and frequent rains.

4. The climate is unhealthful, and unless men from the North are well fed, suitably clothed, securely sheltered, and furnished with boiled water for drinking purposes, they are almost certain to suffer from calenture, the characteristic fever of the region, as well as from yellow fever and dysentery.

This, in the briefest possible summary, is the information that General Shafter had, or might have had, before he sailed from Tampa. What preparation did he make to meet the difficulties suggested by this knowledge, and how far is the influence of it to be traced in the organization and equipment of his command?

Take, first, the problem of disembarking an army of sixteen thousand men, with the supplies necessary for its maintenance, on an unsheltered coast.

In 1847, when General Scott had in contemplation the landing of an army of twelve thousand men on the open beach at Vera Cruz, he caused sixty-seven surf-boats to be built for that particular service, each of them capable of holding from seventy to eighty men. Every detail of the disembarkation had been carefully considered and planned; every contingency that could be foreseen had been provided for; and the landing was successfully made in the course of two or three hours, without a single error or accident.

When General Shafter sailed from Tampa, on June 14, with an army considerably larger than that of General Scott, his equipment for disembarkation on an exposed, surf-beaten coast consisted, according to his own report, of only two scows! One of these went adrift at sea, and the loss of it, the general says, "proved to be very serious and was greatly felt." I don't wonder! Two scows, for an army of sixteen thousand men and ten or fifteen ship-loads of supplies, was a sufficiently economical allowance; and when that number was reduced by half, and a whole army-corps became dependent upon one scow, I am not surprised to learn that "the disembarkation was delayed and embarrassed." There is a reference in the report to certain "lighters sent by the quartermaster's department," and intended, apparently, for use on the Cuban coast; but when and by what route they were "sent" does not appear, and inasmuch as they were lost at sea before they came into General Shafter's control, they can hardly be regarded as a part of his equipment. All that he had with him was this flotilla of two scows. I heard vague reports of a pontoon-train stowed away under hundreds of tons of other stuff in the hold of one of the transports; but whether it was intended to supplement the flotilla of scows, or to be employed in the bridging of rivers, I am unable to say. I do not think it was ever unloaded in Cuba, and I am quite sure that it never was used.

The almost complete absence of landing equipment, in the shape of surf-boats, lighters, and launches, eventually proved, as I shall hereafter show, to be disastrous in the extreme; and if the navy had not come to the rescue, at Daiquiri and Siboney, it is not at all certain that General Shafter could have landed his army. In a telegram to the War Department dated "Playa del Este, June 25," he frankly admits this, and says: "Without them [the navy] I could not have landed in ten days, and perhaps not at all."

Now, it seems to me that the responsibility for this lack of boats, which came near ruining the expedition at the outset and which hampered and embarrassed it for three weeks afterward, can be definitely fixed. The difficulty to be overcome was one that might have been foreseen and provided for. If General Shafter did not foresee and provide for it, as General Scott did at Vera Cruz, he, manifestly, is the person to blame; while, on the other hand, if he did foresee it, but failed to get from the War Department the necessary boats, the department is to blame. The committee of investigation which is holding its sessions at the time this book goes to press ought to have no trouble in putting the responsibility for this deficiency where it belongs.

Boats, however, were not the only things that were lacking in the equipment of General Shafter's army. Next in importance to landing facilities come facilities for moving supplies of all kinds from the sea-coast to the front, or, in other words, means of land transportation. In his official report of the campaign General Shafter says: "There was no lack of transportation, for at no time, up to the surrender, could all the wagons I had be used." If I were disposed to be captious, I should say that the reason why the general could not use the wagons he had was that a large number of them lay untouched in the holds of the transports. He might have said, with equal cogency, that there was no lack of food, because at no time could all the hard bread and bacon in his ships be eaten. The usefulness of food and wagons is dependent to some extent upon their location. A superfluity of wagons on board a steamer, five miles at sea, is not necessarily a proof that there are more than enough wagons on shore.

When the army began its march in the direction of Santiago, without suitable tents, without hospital supplies, without camp-kettles, without hammocks, without extra clothing or spare blankets, and with only a limited supply of food and ammunition, there were one hundred and eighteen army wagons still on board the transport Cherokee. When they were unloaded, if ever, I do not know, but they were not available in the first week of the campaign, when the army began its advance and when the roads were comparatively dry and in fairly good condition. It must be observed, moreover, that transportation is not wholly a matter of wagons. Vehicles of any kind are useless without animals to draw them; and General Shafter does not anywhere say that he had a superfluity of mules, or that he could not use all the horses he had. It was in draft-animals that the weakness of the quartermaster's department became most apparent as the campaign progressed. There were never half enough mules to equip an adequate supply-train for an army of sixteen thousand men, even if that army never went more than ten or twelve miles from its base. If it had been forced to go fifty miles from its base, the campaign would have collapsed at the outset.