A Sailor's History of the U.S. Navy (33 page)

The British strategy had been to come down the lake to the Hudson River and then proceed southward to New York, effectively cutting off New England from the rest of the colonies. But the presence of the American naval force at the southern end of Lake Champlain had forced the British commander to delay his advance. By the time the battle was over, winter had arrived, and the British commander decided to hold off any further advance until the following spring. This bought valuable time for the Americans and allowed them to gather the forces necessary to defeat the British at Saratoga the following year, which not only thwarted Britain's strategy of dividing the colonies, but also delivered a serious blow to British morale and convinced the French to enter the war as an American ally. While it would be several years before the full effects could be realized, that victory ultimately led to American independence. Clearly a strategic victory was realized despite a tactical defeat.

Strategy and tactics also had unexpected results in Vietnam in 1968. American forces were caught off guard in the early hours of the Tet Offensive, as Communist insurgents—the so-called Vietcong—rose up in many places all over South Vietnam during the celebration of the Vietnamese New Year and, in coordination with North Vietnamese forces, scored a number of tactical victories. They inflicted heavy casualties on American forces, managed to get several insurgents inside the walls of the American embassy compound, and seized the ancient and symbolic city of Hue.

American and South Vietnamese forces soon turned around these early tactical victories, however. The insurgents in the American embassy compound were killed before they could get into the embassy itself. Marines took back Hue City after a bloody siege. American naval forces operating on the rivers in the “brown-water” navy were credited with saving the strategically vital Mekong Delta in a series of battles along the twisting waterways. Army forces decimated the Vietcong, dealing them a defeat from which they would never recover; from that time forward, all serious opposition came from the North Vietnamese regulars coming into South Vietnam from strategic sanctuaries. Ultimately, it was clearly an overwhelming tactical victory for U.S. and South Vietnamese forces that, once they recovered from the initial surprise, fought courageously and effectively.

Further, Communist strategy had counted on a simultaneous uprising of the people of South Vietnam once the insurgent attacks had begun. This did not materialize. All things considered, it would seem that the American and the South Vietnamese forces had won both a strategic and a tactical victory in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive.

But this did not prove to be the case. The initial shock of the Communist attacks had so stunned the American people that what was actually a major victory was seen by many as a defeat. In the first days of the Tet Offensive, American media reported it as a major setback, which in many ways it had been. But in the weeks that followed, the resounding tactical victory for the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies was largely overlooked as the American media, the Congress, and the military leadership struggled to reassess the U.S. commitment in Southeast Asia. It was a classic case of perception overruling reality. With the American will shaken at home, a series of events over the next several years ultimately caused American military forces to come home from a war in which they had never lost a major battle, yet never achieved their overall strategic objective: the survival of South Vietnam as a democratic nation. Victory would be denied them because the Communist strategy of outwaiting their adversaries had prevailed.

While these examples demonstrate differences between strategy and tactics, they should not give the impression that the two are always at odds. Quite the opposite. In more cases than not, good tactics reinforce good strategy, so that important battles won ultimately lead to victory in war.

The Spanish-American War at the end of the nineteenth century illustrates the effects of good and bad strategy and tactics. In the events leading up to the war and in two major sea battles, strategic and tactical applications directly affected the outcome of the war as a whole.

For years, tensions had been building between the United States and Spain, mostly over the Spanish-owned island of Cuba, just a few miles off the coast of Florida. Cuban revolutionaries had long been trying to overthrow their Spanish overlords, and various U.S. interests were at stake. As the struggle between the two sides raged on, American plantations there had been taken, an American schooner was seized as a gunrunner, two American tourists were shot as spies, and various other incidents kept tensions high.

In January 1898, USS
Maine
was dispatched to Cuba to send a message of American determination to the Spanish government and to protect American citizens then in Havana. The strategy of sending a warship to an
area in crisis is often called “forward presence” or “showing the flag,” and the battleship
Maine
was in many ways an ideal way to accomplish this. She was an imposing sight for her day. Her hull, boats, and anchors were a gleaming white, her superstructure, masts, and smokestacks a reddish brown, and her guns and searchlights a foreboding black. From her varnished mahogany pilothouse, her officers could send orders to the coal-fired boiler rooms via specially designed telegraphs. Two 10-inch guns were mounted in a turret forward that was offset to starboard, and two more 10-inch guns were mounted in an after turret, offset to port. With this arrangement, the guns could fire through an unobstructed arc of 180 degrees on their respective sides and through an additional arc of 64 degrees on the opposite sides. This main battery was supplemented by an array of more than twenty smaller guns of various calibers and functions and by four torpedo tubes.

Apprentice First Class Ambrose Ham was signal boy of the watch when
Maine
made landfall on 25 January 1898. He had originally been assigned as a crew member in the captain's gig, but another young Sailor had convinced him to trade assignments. After getting approval from his division officer, Lieutenant Jungen, Ham made the switch, a choice that would later save his life.

Battleship USS
Maine
was sent to Cuba in 1898 to send a message of American determination to the Spanish government and to protect American citizens in Havana.
U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive

Tensions were high in
Maine
as she slowly steamed into Havana harbor, close aboard Morro Castle perched upon a high rock on the port side of the channel. Ordinary Seaman Frank Andrews wrote in a letter to his father: “As we steamed in under the guns of Morro we calculated how long it would take us to silence it. Our turret-gun crews were standing out of sight, of course, while the rest of the crew was around the deck. At the first shot from the Spanish they would have found their places.”

Ambrose Ham remembered that “as we entered the harbor everything looked peaceful.” But he heard another Sailor tell two friends, “We'll never get out of here alive.”

Arriving at mooring buoy number four, about four hundred yards from a wharf near the city's customhouse, the ship's anchor chain was detached from the anchor, passed through a ring on the buoy, and then brought back aboard the battleship and secured. Colors were shifted and
Maine
's crew settled in for a long stay.

Because of the high state of tension, the crew was not allowed to go ashore. Instead of the normal in-port watch, Captain Charles Dwight Sigsbee had ordered a quarter watch at night, so that a fourth of the crew was immediately available to man the guns should the need arise. Armed sentries manned the forecastle and poop deck during the hours of darkness, and the ship's gangways were guarded as well.

Ham noted that “time was beginning to drag.” He longed to go back to his home in Schenectady, New York, and spent much of the time thinking about that. There was not much in the way of entertainment, and every evening at sundown he watched the Spanish sailors on nearby ships “run up the masts and chase the devils out of the gear blocks. Some years ago a Spanish sailing ship got into a gale and when they tried to take in sail the blocks would not work. The ship capsized.”

For more than two weeks, the 358-man crew of USS
Maine
went about their routines, aware of their part in a tense international situation, yet unable to do anything other than show their flag and be ready for hostilities should they erupt. On the morning of 15 February, Ham was roused from a deep sleep at 0530 by the gravelly voice of a boatswain's mate announcing reveille. Ham rolled out of his hammock and began tricing it up, unaware that this was the day when the mind-numbing routine would finally end.

After a quick trip to the galley to get a cup of coffee, he joined his shipmates swabbing down the deck with fresh water from a lighter that had come alongside. The ship's medical officer had banned the use of the harbor's
water because of the foul smell it gave off. Breakfast at 0730 was followed by the 0800–1200 watch as signal boy on the poop deck. Normally, Ham's primary duty was to be available for wig-wag (semaphore) communications with other naval vessels, but because no other U.S. warships were in the harbor, there was no one to communicate with. Instead, he had been directed to keep a sharp lookout for any suspicious activity in the vicinity of the ship. There was none; at noon another apprentice relieved him, and Ham went down to eat dinner.

Ham spent the afternoon polishing brightwork and repairing torn signal flags. At 1730, the bugle sounded for supper, and half an hour later he was sweeping down the decks. He then watched several Sailors dance while one of their shipmates played the accordion. When the bugler sounded the call for hammocks, Ham went below and slung his so that it would be ready when he got off watch at midnight. He returned to the poop deck for the evening watch and began his vigil once again, this time staring into the gathering darkness.

Time crawled by. At 2110, the bugler sounded taps, and the decks emptied as Sailors headed to their hammocks in the stifling compartments below. A friend remained to talk to Ham for a few minutes but, afraid of being caught on deck after taps, he soon went below. The harbor was smooth as glass. Several boats passed by a few hundred yards away, but otherwise all was quiet and still. Like countless Sailors before him and since, Ham noted that night watches were a time of quiet reflection, when homesickness reared its unwanted head, when the unoccupied mind went to places better left alone.

Just a little after 2130, Ham engaged Landsman Thomas J. Waters of Philadelphia in conversation as a way of getting his mind off the creeping pace of time. Shrouded in the protective cloak of darkness, the two men spoke of things they might not have in the glare of daylight: family left behind and hopeful plans for the future. The talk had dwindled, and Ham was about to turn away and head aft, when a great flame shot up, engulfing the forward part of the ship. He heard what sounded like a shot, then a great roar followed, and a flying piece of debris struck him in the face, knocking him senseless.

In that instant, many of Ham's shipmates had perished, including Ordinary Seaman Frank Andrews. A huge explosion had originated somewhere forward, on the port side, ripping open the ship and curling her main deck back upon itself. Debris rained down into the harbor for hundreds of yards around the stricken vessel.

Once he recovered his senses, Ham headed for his old station as a member of the gig crew. The young apprentice who had switched duty with
Ham was killed in the explosion, so Ham helped a handful of other Sailors lower the gig into the water. He noted with dismay how quickly the boat had reached the water, a clear indication that
Maine
was sinking. He positioned himself in the boat's bow and began helping to pull men from the harbor as the gig moved slowly through the water. After a time, the gig returned to the ship to rescue those stranded on her gradually disappearing poop deck. Parts of the ship were on fire, and Ham worried that the flames might reach one of the magazines and cause another deadly explosion.

As they pulled up alongside, they found, among others, Captain Sigsbee. “I won't leave,” Sigsbee said, “until I'm sure everybody is off.” The after portion of the poop deck,
Maine
's highest remaining deck, was now at the same level as the gig's gunwale. As a Sailor handed the captain's dog, Peggy, to one of the men in the gig, Ham heard Lieutenant Commander Richard Wainwright, the ship's executive officer, whisper to Captain Sigsbee that the raging fire was very close to the forward magazine and that it might blow at any moment. Ham felt the nearly overwhelming urge to shout, “Let's get out of here,” but he sat quietly in the bow holding tightly to the bowline that tethered the small boat to the sinking, burning ship.