Campaigning in Cuba

by George Kennan

In addition to all the unnecessary difficulties and embarrassments above described, there was another, almost, if not quite, as serious, arising from the manner in which the transports had been loaded at Tampa. Stores were put into the steamers apparently without any reference to the circumstances under which they would be taken out, and without any regard to the order in which they would be needed at the point of destination. Medical supplies, for example, instead of being put all together in a single transport, were scattered among twenty or more vessels, so that in order to get all of them it was necessary either to bring twenty steamers close to shore, one after another, and take a little out of each, or send rowboats around to them all where they lay at distances ranging from one mile to five.[13] Articles of equipment that would be required as soon as the army landed were often buried in the holds of the vessels under hundreds of tons of stuff that would not be needed in a week, and the army went forward without them, simply because they could not be quickly got at. Finally, I am inclined to believe, from what I saw and heard of the landing of supplies at Siboney, that there was not such a thing as a bill of lading, manifest, or cargo list in existence, and that the chief quartermaster had no other guide to the location of a particular article than that furnished by his own memory or the memory of some first mate. I do not assert this as a fact; I merely infer it from the difficulty that there seemed to be in finding and getting ashore quickly a particular kind of stores for which there happened to be an immediate and urgent demand. After the fight of the Rough Riders at Guasimas, for example, General Wood found himself short of ammunition for his Hotchkiss rapid-fire guns. He sent Lieutenant Kilbourne back to General Shafter at Siboney with a request that a fresh supply be forwarded at the earliest possible moment. General Shafter said that he had no idea where that particular kind of ammunition was to be found, and referred the applicant to Quartermaster Jacobs at Daiquiri. Lieutenant Kilbourne walked seven miles to Daiquiri, only to find that the quartermaster had no more idea where that ammunition was than the commanding general had. He thereupon returned to Guasimas, after a march of more than twenty miles, and reported to General Wood that ammunition for the rapid-fire guns could not be had, because nobody knew where it was. If the commanding general and the quartermaster could not put their hands on ammunition when it was needed, they could hardly be expected to find, and forward promptly, articles of less vital importance, such as camp-kettles, hospital tents, clothing, and spare blankets.

It would be easy to fill pages with illustrations and proofs of the statements above made, but I must limit myself to a typical case or two relating to medical supplies, which seem to have been most neglected.

In a report to Surgeon-General Sternberg dated July 29, Dr. Edward L. Munson, commander of the reserve ambulance company, says that for two days after his arrival at Siboney he was unable to get any transportation whatever for medical supplies from the ships to the shore. On the third day he was furnished with one rowboat, but even this was taken away from him, when it had made one trip, by direct order of General Shafter, who wished to assign it to other duty. Some days later, with the boats of the Olivette, Cherokee, and Breakwater, he succeeded in landing medical supplies from perhaps one third of the transports composing the fleet. "I appealed on several occasions," he says, "for the use of a lighter or small steamer to collect and land medical supplies, but I was informed by the quartermaster's department that they could render no assistance in that way.... At the time of my departure large quantities of medical supplies, urgently needed on shore, still remained on the transports, a number of which were under orders to return to the United States." "In conclusion," he adds, "it is desired to emphasize the fact that the lamentable conditions prevailing in the army before Santiago were due (1) to the military necessity which threw troops on shore and away from the possibility of supply, without medicines, instruments, or hospital stores of any kind; and (2) to the lack of foresight on the part of the quartermaster's department in sending out such an expedition without fully anticipating its needs as regards temporary wharfage, lighters, tugs, and despatch-boats."

Dr. Frank Donaldson, assistant surgeon attached to Colonel Roosevelt's Rough Riders, states in a letter to the Philadelphia "Medical Journal," dated July 12, that "a desperate effort" was made to secure a few cots for the sick and wounded in the field-hospitals at the front. There were hundreds of these cots, he says, on one of the transports off Siboney, but it proved to be utterly impossible to get any of them landed. Whether they were all carried back to the United States or not I do not know; but large quantities of supplies, intended for General Shafter's army, were carried back on the transports Alamo, Breakwater, Vigilancia, and La Grande Duchesse.

I do not mean to throw any undeserved blame upon the quartermasters and commissaries at Siboney. Many of them worked day and night with indefatigable energy to get supplies on shore and forward them to the army; but they were hampered by conditions over which they had no control, and for which, perhaps, they were not in any way responsible; they were often unable to obtain the assistance of steamer captains and other officers upon whose coöperation the success of their own efforts depended, and they probably did all that could be done by individuals acting as separate units rather than as correlated parts of an organized and intelligently directed whole. The trouble at Siboney was the same trouble that became apparent at Tampa. There was at the head of affairs no controlling, directing, and energizing brain, capable of grasping all the details of a complex situation and making all the parts of a complicated mechanism work harmoniously together for the accomplishment of a definite purpose.

III. The strategic plan of campaign and its execution.

As this branch of the subject will be discussed—if it has not already been discussed—by better-equipped critics than I can pretend to be, I shall limit myself to a brief review of the campaign in its strategic aspect as it appears from the standpoint of a civilian.

I understand, from officers who were in a position to know the facts, that the original plan of attack on the city of Santiago provided for close and effective coöperation of the army with the navy, and for a joint assault by way of Aguadores and Morro Castle. General Shafter was to move along the line of the railroad from Siboney to Aguadores, keeping close to the coast under cover of the guns of the fleet, and, with the assistance of the latter, was to capture the old Aguadores fort and such other intrenchments as should be found at the mouth of the Aguadores ravine. This, it was thought, might be accomplished with very little loss, because the fleet could shell the Spaniards out of their fortifications, and thus make it possible for the army to occupy them without much fighting. Having taken Aguadores, General Shafter was to continue his march westward along the coast, still under the protection of Admiral Sampson's guns, until he reached Morro. Then, without attempting to storm or reduce the castle, he was to go down through the ravine that leads to the head of the Estrella cove, and seize the submarine-mine station at the mouth of Santiago harbor. When electrical connection between the station and the mines had been destroyed, and the mines had thus been rendered harmless, Admiral Sampson was to force an entrance, fighting his way in past the batteries, and the army and fleet were then to advance northward toward the city along the eastern side of the bay.

This plan had many obvious advantages, the most important of which was the aid and protection that would be given to the army, at every stage of its progress, by the guns of perhaps thirty or forty ships of war. In the opinion of naval officers, Admiral Sampson's cruisers and battle-ships could sweep the country ahead of our advance with such a storm of shot and shell that the Spaniards would not be able to hold any position within a mile of the coast. All that the army would have to do, therefore, would be to occupy the country as fast as it was cleared by the fire of the fleet, and then open the harbor to the latter by cutting communication with the submarine mines which were the only effective defense that the city had on the water side. General Shafter's army, moreover, would be all the time on high, sea-breeze-swept land, and therefore comparatively safe from malarial fever, and it would not only have a railroad behind it for the transportation of its supplies, but be constantly within easy reach of its base by water.

Why this plan was eventually given up I do not know. In abandoning it General Shafter voluntarily deprived himself of the aid that might have been rendered by three or four hundred high-powered and rapid-fire guns, backed by a trained fighting force of six or eight thousand men. I do not know the exact strength of Sampson's and Schley's combined fleets, but this seems to me to be a conservative estimate. A prominent officer of the battle-ship Iowa told me in Santiago, after the surrender, that the fighting ships under Admiral Sampson's command, including the auxiliary cruisers and mosquito fleet, could concentrate on any given field a fire of about one hundred shells a second. This included, of course, small projectiles from the rapid-fire and one-pound machine guns. He did not think it possible for Spanish infantry to live, much less fight, in the field swept by such a fire, and this was his reason for believing that the fleet could have cleared the way for the army if the latter had advanced along the coast instead of going back into the interior. The plan of attack by way of Aguadores and Morro was regarded by the foreign residents of Santiago as the one most likely to succeed; and a gentleman who lived eight years at Daiquiri, as manager of the Spanish-American Iron Company, and who is familiar with the topography of the whole region, writes me: "I have always thought that the great mistake of the Santiago campaign was that they assaulted the city at its most impregnable point, instead of taking possession of the heights at Aguadores, which would have been tantamount to the fall of Morro, the possession of the harbor entrance and of the harbor itself. The forces of the Spaniards were not sufficient to maintain any considerable number of men there, and it seems to me that, with the help of the fleet shelling the heights, they could have been reached very easily along the Juragua Railroad. If General Duffield had pressed on when he was there, it is probable that he would have met with only a thin skirmish-line, or, if the fleet had done its work, with no resistance at all."