OFF FOR SANTIAGO
The most important event in the early
history of the war, and the event that controlled
the movements of the Red Cross steamer State of
Texas, as well as the movements of General Shafter’s
army, was the arrival of the Spanish fleet of cruisers
and torpedo-boats at Santiago de Cuba on May 19.
There had been skirmishes and bombardments before that
time, at Matanzas, Cardenas, and various other points
on the Cuban coast; but none of them had any strategic
importance, or any particular bearing upon the course
or the conduct of the war. It was the appearance
of Admiral Cervera at Santiago which determined the
field of action, and, to some extent, the plan of
campaign. The invasion of eastern Cuba had already
been under consideration, and when the Spanish fleet
took refuge in Santiago harbor the President and his
counselors decided, definitely and finally, to begin
operations at that end of the island, and to leave
the western provinces unmolested until fall. The
regular army, it was thought, would be strong enough,
with the aid and cooeperation of Admiral Sampson’s
fleet, to reduce the defenses of Santiago, and the
volunteers might be left in camp at Chickamauga, Tampa,
and Jacksonville, to get in training for an attack
upon Havana at the end of the rainy season.
The preparations for the invasion
of Cuba seemed, at that time, to be nearly, if not
quite, complete. The whole regular army, consisting
of seven regiments of cavalry, twenty-two regiments
of infantry, and fourteen batteries of artillery,
had been mobilized and transported to the Gulf coast;
the quartermaster’s department had, under charter,
twenty-seven steamers, with a carrying capacity of
about twenty thousand men; immense quantities of food
and munitions of war had been bought and sent to Tampa,
and there seemed to be no good reason why General
Shafter’s command should not embark for Cuba,
if necessary, at twenty-four hours’ notice.
On May 26, just a week after the appearance
of Admiral Cervera and his fleet at Santiago, the
President held a consultation at the Executive Mansion
with the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy,
and the members of the Board of Strategy, and decided
to begin the invasion of Cuba at once. Orders
were presumably sent to General Shafter to prepare
for an immediate movement, and Secretary Long telegraphed
Admiral Sampson as follows:
WASHINGTON,
May 27, 1898.
Sampson, Care Naval Base, Key
West:
If Spanish division is proved to be
at Santiago, it is the intention of the department
to make a descent immediately upon that port
with ten thousand United States troops, landing about
eight nautical miles east of the port. You
will be expected to convoy transports....
[Signed]
LONG.
Three days later General Shafter was
directed, in the following order, to embark his command
and proceed at once to Santiago:
WAR DEPARTMENT,
WASHINGTON, May 30, 1898.
Major-General William R. Shafter,
Tampa, Florida:
With the approval of the Secretary
of War you are directed to take your command
on transports, proceed under convoy of the navy to
the vicinity of Santiago de Cuba, land your force
at such place east or west of that point as your
judgment may dictate, under the protection of
the navy, and move it on to the high ground and bluffs
overlooking the harbor, or into the interior, as shall
best enable you to capture or destroy the garrison
there and cover the navy as it sends its men
in small boats to remove torpedoes, or, with
the aid of the navy, capture or destroy the Spanish
fleet now reported to be in Santiago harbor.
You will use the utmost energy to accomplish
this enterprise, and the government relies upon
your good judgment as to the most judicious use
of your command, but desires to impress upon you the
importance of accomplishing this object with the
least possible delay....
[Signed]
H. C. CORBIN,
Adjutant-General.
In view of the fact that General Shafter
had been nearly a month at Tampa, and of the further
fact that his command was composed wholly, or almost
wholly, of regular troops, who were completely equipped
for service when they left their stations, he should
have been able, it seems to me, to comply with this
order at once; but, apparently, he was not ready.
Day after day passed without any noticeable change
in the situation, and on June 7 the army at Tampa
was apparently no nearer an advance than it had been
when Cervera’s fleet entered Santiago harbor
on May 19.
Admiral Sampson, who was anxious to
strike a decisive blow before the enemy should have
time to concentrate and intrench, then telegraphed
Secretary Long as follows:
MOLE,
Haïti, June 7, 1898.
Secretary of Navy, Washington:
Bombarded forts at Santiago 7:30 A.
M. to 10 A. M. to-day, June 6. Have silenced
works quickly without injury of any kind, though stationary
within two thousand yards. If ten thousand men
were here city and fleet would be ours within
forty-eight hours. Every consideration demands
immediate army movement. If delayed city
will be defended more strongly by guns taken from fleet.
[Signed]
SAMPSON.
When this despatch reached Washington,
the Secretary of War sent General Shafter two peremptory
telegrams, as follows:
WAR
DEPARTMENT, June 7.
Major-General Shafter, Port
Tampa, Florida:
You will sail immediately, as
you are needed at destination at
once. Answer.
[Signed]
R. A. ALGER,
Secretary of
War.
EXECUTIVE
MANSION, WASHINGTON,
June 7, 1898,
8:50 P.M.
Major-General Shafter, Port
Tampa, Florida:
Since telegraphing you an hour
since, the President directs you to
sail at once with what force you have ready.
[Signed]
R. A. ALGER,
Secretary
of War.
Upon receipt of these “rush”
orders, General Shafter hastily embarked his army,
amid great confusion and disorder, and telegraphed
the Secretary of War that he would be ready to sail,
with about seventeen thousand officers and men, on
the morning of June 8. Before the expedition
could get away, however, Commodore Remey cabled the
Secretary of the Navy from Key West that two Spanish
war-ships an armored cruiser and a torpedo-boat
destroyer had been seen in Nicholas Channel,
off the northern coast of Cuba, on the night of June
7, by Lieutenant W. H. H. Southerland of the United
States gunboat Eagle. Fearing that these
Spanish vessels would intercept the fleet of transports
and perhaps destroy some of them, Secretary Alger
telegraphed General Shafter not to leave Tampa Bay
until he should receive further orders.
Scouting-vessels of the navy, which
were promptly sent to Nicholas Channel in search of
the enemy, failed to locate or discover the two war-ships
reported by the commander of the Eagle, and
on June 14 General Shafter’s army, after having
been held a week on board the transports in Tampa
Bay, sailed for Santiago by way of Cape Maysi and
the Windward Passage. The Spanish fleet under
command of Admiral Cervera had then been in Santiago
harbor almost four weeks.
It is hard to say exactly where the
responsibility should lie for the long delay in the
embarkation and despatch of General Shafter’s
expedition. When I passed through Tampa on my
way south in June, the two railroad companies there
were blaming each other, as well as the quartermaster’s
department, for the existing blockade of unloaded cars,
while army officers declared that the railroad companies
were unable to handle promptly and satisfactorily
the large quantity of supplies brought there for the
expedition. Naval authorities said that they had
to wait for the army, while army officers maintained
that they were all ready to start, but were stopped
and delayed by reports of Spanish war-ships brought
in by scouting-vessels of the navy.
That there was unnecessary delay,
as well as great confusion and disorder, there seems
to be no doubt. As one competent army officer
said to me, in terse but slangy English, “The
fact of the matter is, they simply got all balled
up, and although they worked hard, they worked without
any definite, well-understood plan of operations.”
The principal trouble seemed to be
in the commissary and quartermaster’s departments.
Many of the officers in these departments were young
and inexperienced; army supplies from the North came
down in immense quantities on two lines of railway
and without proper invoices or bills of lading; it
was often utterly impossible to ascertain in which,
out of a hundred cars, certain articles of equipment
or subsistence were to be found; and there was a lack
everywhere of cool, trained, experienced supervision
and direction. It was the business of some one
somewhere to see that every car-load of supplies shipped
to Tampa was accompanied by an invoice or bill of
lading, so that the chief commissary at the point
of destination might know the exact nature, quantity,
and car-location of supplies brought by every train.
Then, if he wanted twenty-five thousand rations of
hard bread or fifty thousand pounds of rice before
the cars had been unloaded, he would know exactly where
and in what cars to look for it. As it was, he
could not tell, often, what car contained it without
making or ordering personal examination, and it was
almost impossible to know how much of any given commodity
he had on hand in trains that had not yet been unloaded
or inspected. As the result of this he had to
telegraph to Jacksonville at the last moment before
the departure of the expedition for three or four
hundred cases of baked beans and forty or fifty thousand
pounds of rice to be bought there in open market and
to be sent him in “rush shipment.”
It is more than probable that there were beans and
rice enough to meet all his wants in unloaded trains
at Tampa, but he had no clue to their car-location
and could not find them. Such a state of things,
of course, is wholly unnecessary, and it should not
occur a second time. To take another example:
When our army embarked at Port Tampa
it was the business of some officer somewhere to know
the exact capacity of every transport and the numerical
strength of every regiment. Then it was some one’s
business to prearrange the distribution of troops
by assigning one or more designated regiments to one
or more designated steamers and giving necessary orders
to the colonels. As it was, however, according
to the testimony of every witness, a train-load of
troops would come to the docks at Port Tampa, apparently
without orders or assignment to any particular steamer,
and while they were waiting to learn what they should
do, and while their train was still blocking the way,
another train-load of soldiers would arrive in a similar
state of ignorance and add to the disorder and confusion.
As a natural consequence, men got on wrong steamers
and had to be unloaded, and often, after transports
had moved out into the bay, parts of companies and
regiments had to be transferred in small boats from
one vessel to another. These are examples of
what seems to have been bad management. In another
class of cases the trouble was apparently due to mistaken
judgment. To the latter class belongs the loading
and treatment of horses and mules. It would have
been much better and safer, I think, to load these
animals on vessels especially prepared for and exclusively
devoted to them than to put them into stifling and
unventilated holds of steamers that also carried troops.
If, however, this was impracticable, it was manifestly
best to load the animals last, so as to expose them
for as short a time as possible to such murderous
conditions. The mules, however, were loaded first,
and held in the holds of the transports while troops
were embarking. They began to die from heat and
suffocation, and then they were unloaded and reshipped
after the troops were on board. This caused unnecessary
delay, as well as the loss of many valuable animals.
Eighteen perished, I am told, on one transport while
the troops were embarking.
These cases of disorder and bad judgment
are only a few out of many which were the subject
of common talk among officers and civilians in Tampa.
I could specify many others, but criticism is at best
unpleasant duty, and the only justification for it
is the hope that, if mistakes and disorders are pointed
out and frankly recognized, they may be guarded against
in future.
The army of invasion, when it finally
left Tampa Bay for the Cuban coast, consisted of 803
officers and 14,935 enlisted men. With its animals
and equipment it filled thirty-five transports.
It comprised (in addition to regular infantry) four
batteries of light field-artillery, two batteries
of heavy siege-guns, a battalion of engineers, a detachment
of the Signal Corps, twelve squadrons of dismounted
cavalry, and one squadron of cavalry with horses.
All of the troops were regulars with the exception
of three regiments, namely, the First Cavalry (Rough
Riders, dismounted), the Seventy-first New York, and
the Second Massachusetts. The command was well
supplied with food and ammunition, but its facilities
for land transportation were inadequate; its equipment,
in the shape of clothing and tentage, was not adapted
to a tropical climate in the rainy season; it carried
no reserve medical stores, and it had no small boats
suitable for use in disembarkation or in landing supplies
on an unsheltered coast. Some of these deficiencies
in equipment were due, apparently, to lack of prevision,
others to lack of experience in tropical campaigning,
and the rest to lack of water transportation from
Tampa to the Cuban coast; but all were as unnecessary
as they afterward proved to be unfortunate.
When the army of invasion sailed,
the Red Cross steamer State of Texas, laden
with fourteen hundred tons of food and medical supplies,
lay at anchor in Tampa Bay, awaiting the return of
Miss Barton and a part of her staff from Washington.
As soon as they arrived, the steamer proceeded to
Key West, and on the morning of Monday, June 20, after
a brief consultation with Commodore Remey, we sailed
from that port for Santiago de Cuba. In the group
assembled on the pier to bid us good-by were United
States Marshal Horr; Mr. Hyatt, chairman of the local
Red Cross committee; Mr. White, correspondent of the
Chicago “Record,” whose wife was going
with us as a Red Cross worker; and Mrs. Porter, wife
of the President’s secretary, who had come with
Miss Barton from Washington to Key West in order to
show her interest in and sympathy with the work in
which the Red Cross is engaged. About ten o’clock
the steamer’s lines were cast off, the gang-plank
was drawn ashore, the screw began to churn the green
water into boiling foam astern, and, amid shouted good-bys
and the waving of handkerchiefs from the pier, we
moved slowly out into the stream, dipped our ensign
to the Lancaster, Commodore Remey’s flagship,
and proceeded down the bay in the direction of Sand
Key light.