The Roughest Riders (16 page)

On June 27, General Shafter sent additional mule trains laden with ammunition, food, and medical supplies up the trail from the beach. The rotund old military man, however, had yet to set foot on Cuban soil himself, despite his desire to be among his men and get the lay of the land, as it were, from his own perspective. Until now,
he had been forced to rely on reports from his officers in the field, some of whom had a tendency to disobey his orders and establish their own rules of engagement. He was determined not to let that happen again and have command of the battlefield taken from him by insubordinate underlings.

Shafter's process of supplying the troops fell far short of expectations, adding to his unpopularity among the officers and men. The food he sent was mostly the same putrid fare on which they had been subsisting for days on end—hardtack, salt pork, and rancid coffee—while fresh fruit and vegetables lay rotting on the transport ships, thanks to Shafter's inability to get them unloaded. The more innovative among the men supplemented their rations with produce they slashed out of the jungle and cooked according to their own improvised recipes. “We have become experienced cooks,” one soldier wrote home. “Mangoes boiled in sugar is like applesauce; fried in sugar it is like sweet potatoes. We have hardtack fried in bacon grease which is as good as anything toasted. We also soak our hardtack in water until it is dough, add salt, then mix in some coffee, fry in bacon grease, put a little sugar on top and enjoy it.”

Staying clean was another problem, since sentries prevented the men from jumping into the stream and contaminating the water supply, but the tropical downpours intensified, alleviating the sanitary conditions. Electrifying flashes lit up the sky, accompanied by booming claps of thunder and cataracts of water drenching everything in the field. The men stripped down, passed bars of soap around, and showered in the deluge to clean off the grime. They fought among themselves for higher ground, since every depression in the earth churned with whirlpools of muddy rainwater. It rained mercilessly every day, pounding rain that dumped three or four inches an hour onto the trails. When the rain stopped, they busied themselves shoveling the water off the rutted trails so they could progress farther along.

Finally, on June 28, General Shafter hobbled down the gangplank of the
Seguranca.
His men hoisted him up onto his horse, and then he and his entourage slowly began to make their way up the path into the hills above the beach. Roosevelt couldn't resist chuckling that the absentee general probably outweighed the poor beast he rode on. The leader of the American forces arrived at El Pozo, where he saw with his own eyes the terrain that had been described in detail to him in dispatches from Wheeler and Lawton.

“I had never seen a good road in a Spanish country, and Santiago did not disappoint my expectations,” Shafter announced from his horse as his eyes swept the landscape. The roads looked little better than bridle paths to him, except for the one running from El Caney and the San Juan River into Santiago. He had dispatched Lawton and Chaffee to make a more detailed reconnaissance in the area around El Caney, which Wheeler interpreted as an insult to him and a denigration of his earlier observations of the field. Lawton, too, took the opportunity to praise Chaffee at Wheeler's expense—settling the score that had been mounting since Wheeler countermanded Lawton's, and Shafter's, authority a few days earlier.

“To General Adna R. Chaffee I am indebted for a thorough and intelligent reconnaissance of the town of El Caney and vicinity prior to the battle,” Lawton reported, stating that Chaffee was one of the best soldiers in the army. Lawton pointedly recommended Chaffee for special distinction in proposing a battle plan that made sense to everyone and for conducting himself admirably in the battle that followed. About General Wheeler, Lawton said nothing.

Chaffee's battle plan was a long way from being adopted at this point, however. Shafter was still undecided about the best course of action to follow. At first he said he wanted to put a large force in El Caney and another farther to the west, near the pipeline running water to the city, making his main thrust of attack from the northeast and east. He wanted to “get the enemy in my front and the city
at my back,” he said. A few days later he altered his strategy, stating he wanted to position an entire brigade on the road between Santiago and El Caney to keep the Spaniards from retreating into Santiago. Then he changed direction again, saying he would attack the Spanish enclaves around Santiago directly. Even then, he was not decided. He went back and forth between concentrating his main line of attack on El Caney, then perhaps on San Juan Hill, or maybe it was best to make a direct run at Santiago and forget about the other positions.

When Chaffee told Shafter that they should be able to capture El Caney in about two hours of fighting, Shafter finally made up his mind and adopted Chaffee's strategy, agreeing to move his main forces against El Caney first, with Lawton directing the attack with the black Twenty-Fifth under his command. He would concentrate on the four wooden blockhouses on the west and north sides of the village, a stone church that had been converted into a fort with holes drilled for the Spanish to fire through, and El Viso about six hundred yards to the southeast. There were also the series of trenches around the village, barbed wire barricades, and rifle pits that had to be overcome.

And so the plan was set after several agonizing days of waiting while the Spanish built up their positions on the hills. Shafter came to the conclusion reached earlier by his subordinates that it was better to go straight at the Spanish on their northernmost encampments before attacking their main stronghold in Santiago. They all reasoned, erroneously as it turned out, that American losses would be kept at a minimum with that line of attack.

E
xamining the terrain more closely, the officers noted that the trail to El Pozo resembled the handle of a pitchfork, with two prongs fanning in roughly parallel directions from where they left the handle at El Pozo. The right tine reached out past El Caney, and the left tine descended into the valley and then climbed into the hills of San Juan Heights. For six long days following the victory at Las Guasimas, the men bivouacked in the area, crowded together along a three-mile stretch like ants on a hill, as the weather alternated rapidly from drenching downpours to blistering tropical sunshine laced with high humidity.

While they waited for final orders, General Shafter took his most decisive action of the campaign so far on the afternoon of June 30, sending one of his aides, forty-four-year-old Captain Albert L. Mills, up the trail to confer with Colonel Wood in his tent. Mills informed Wood that General Wheeler and General Young had both become ill and relinquished their command. As a result, Colonel Wood and General Samuel S. Sumner would replace them immediately, Wood taking command of the white First and black Tenth regulars, and Sumner overseeing the rest of their men, which put Roosevelt in
sole command of the Rough Riders. Although both Wheeler and Young did appear to have come down with symptoms of a tropical fever, this rearrangement of power was the official reason for the change in command.

“Much to his chagrin, General Wheeler was confined to his Spartan hammock and stretched wagon sheet, with an attack of malarial fever,” wrote Kennett Harris in the
Chicago Record.
“It was suicide, the division surgeon declared, for him to attempt to move.” But it was inevitable, given Shafter's fury over Wheeler's insubordination in particular, that speculation about other reasons for the abrupt change on the battlefield made the rounds among the men.

At three o'clock in the afternoon, Mills directed Wood to break camp and move forward an hour later. This gave the men little time to strike their tents, roll up their haversacks and blankets, and load their weapons and ammunition onto their backs. “It was as though fifteen regiments were encamped along the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue and were all ordered at the same moment to move into it and march downtown,” wrote Richard Harding Davis. “If Fifth Avenue were ten feet wide, one can imagine the confusion.”

At that hour, Shafter ordered into operation one of the more ill-advised military strategies attempted since the age of artillery and the machine gun: he launched over the heads of the men, high among the treetops, an enormous observation balloon manned by live soldiers. There it rose, a giant floating bull's-eye, wafting above the jungle to get an aerial view of the Spanish emplacements—and, conversely, presenting a precise target and signal for the Spaniards to judge the paths taken by the attacking Americans. Shafter had imported the balloon from France, thinking it would make an ideal platform for aerial spying. The company's manufacturers had assured him that the floating surveillance sphere would be impervious to enemy gunfire, since both the gas-filled conveyance and the basket carrying the men were swaying targets and hard to hit with gunfire from the ground.
Nevertheless, the officers selected to ride above the treetops were not too keen on climbing aboard so close to the front lines.

To be fair, the idea did not originate with Shafter. The first hydrogen-inflated balloon was launched on June 5, 1783, in Lyon, France, by Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, who envisioned it as a way to capture Gibraltar. Benjamin Franklin became intrigued by the balloon's military possibilities for reconnaissance and airborne assaults. “Five thousand balloons capable of raising two men each could not cost more than five ships of the line,” Franklin wrote. “Ten thousand men descending from the clouds might in many places do an infinite deal of mischief.”

At a height of about seventeen hundred feet, men in a balloon were capable of distinguishing objects as far as eighteen miles away. They could then communicate with troops on the ground using flag signals, or by sliding down messages inside sandbags attached by rings to the cables that stabilized the aircraft. The French used the first “air force” to good effect against a coalition of British, Hanoverian, Dutch, and Austrian soldiers on June 26, 1794, during the Battle of Fleurus. In September 1861, the Union Army raised a balloon to fourteen hundred feet over Fort Corcoran, Virginia, south of Washington, DC, spotting two Confederate camps miles away at Falls Church. Shortly afterward, in the James River, another balloon rose two thousand feet from the deck of a Union ship, a converted coal barge named the
General Washington Parke Custis
, turning it into the first “aircraft carrier.”

In at least two locations—Mechanicsville and Gaines' Farm—the use of balloons allowed the Union to achieve victories by directing their artillery fire on the Confederates during the Battle of Seven Pines. The so-called Balloon Corps served the Union Army until 1863, when it was disbanded following the resignation of Lincoln advisor Thaddeus Lowe. The British used balloons successfully at the Battle of Suakin, in 1888, and the Battle of Omdurman, in 1898.

But not all military leaders were convinced of the balloons' long-term efficacy. Napoleon scorned them, and other military strategists thought them unfair. The International Peace Conference at The Hague actually banned dropping munitions from them in 1899, a year after the war in Cuba. In any event, the development of more advanced machine guns and artillery rendered the balloons militarily obsolete—until they were developed into the types of rigid dirigibles used in the early 1900s.

The great, glistening hulk of the balloon rose high above the treetops as the men plodded below along their assigned routes, many of them staring upward with their mouths open wide. The officers aloft in the balloon descended before the great battle began and described the terrain they observed from their aerial perch. They could see in detail the Aguadores River approaching El Caney from the east, the streams and trails that snaked through the brush, the hills dotting the undulating countryside, the San Juan River flowing north to south. Both rivers joined south of the hills and ran together to the sea.

Fourteen thousand troops trudged slowly beneath the balloon, stepping on one another's heels as they slipped in three inches of muck, crammed together like sardines in a tin, inching ahead foot by foot until the sun sank below the trees and the moon ascended in the night sky to take its place beside the man-made sphere. It was an endless procession of men and beasts, mounted and dismounted soldiers, mules weighed down under their own loads, in what appeared at the moment to be a futile trek to nowhere. The procession moved forward at a snail's pace until after midnight, when the men were ready to drop.

General Sumner, now in command of part of Wheeler's and Young's troops, pitched his headquarters tent on the right side of El Pozo, with a view of the mist rising in the moonlight from the basin below. Sumner had served on the side of the Union during
the Civil War and remained in the army afterward, fighting as a cavalryman on the frontier during the Indian Wars in the early 1890s. He had risen to the rank of brigadier general by the time war broke out in Cuba.