Part 12 (1/2)

CHAPTER XX

THE SANTIAGO CAMPAIGN (_Continued_)

When, on June 14, General Shafter's army sailed for the southeastern coast of Cuba, without adequate facilities for disembarkation, and without a sufficient number of mules, packers, teamsters, and army wagons to insure its proper equipment, subsistence, and maintenance in the field, it was, _ipso facto_, predestined to serious embarra.s.sment and difficulty, if not to great suffering and peril. No amount of zeal, energy, and ability on the part of quartermasters and commissaries, after the army had reached its destination, could possibly make up for deficiencies that should have had attention before the army sailed.

Boats, mules, and wagons were not to be had at Siboney, and when the urgent need of them became apparent it was too late to procure them from the United States. General Shafter cabled the War Department for lighters and steam-tugs almost as soon as he reached the Cuban coast, and General Miles telegraphed for more draft-animals before he had been in Siboney twenty-four hours; but neither the boats nor the mules came in time to be of any avail. Cuban fever waits for no man, and before the boats that should have landed more supplies and the mules that should have carried them to the front reached Siboney, seventy-five per cent.

of General Shafter's command had been prostrated by disease, due, as he himself admits, to insufficient food, ”without change of clothes, and without any shelter whatever.”[11]

But the lack of adequate land and water transportation was not the only deficiency in the equipment of the Fifth Army-Corps when it sailed from Tampa. It was also ill provided with medical stores and the facilities and appliances needed in caring for sick and wounded soldiers. Dr.

Nicholas Senn, chief of the operating staff of the army, says that ”ambulances in great number had been sent to Tampa, but they were not unloaded and sent to the front.” I myself pa.s.sed a whole train-load of ambulances near Tampa in May, but I never saw more than three in use at the front, and, according to the official report of Dr. Guy C. G.o.dfrey, commanding officer of the hospital-corps company of the First Division, Fifth Army-Corps, ”the number of ambulances for the entire army was limited to three, and it was impossible to expect them to convey the total number of wounded from the collecting-stations to the First Division hospital.”[12]

Lieutenant-Colonel Jacobs of the quartermaster's department, who was a.s.sistant to General Humphreys in Cuba, testified before the Investigating Commission on November 16 that he had fifty ambulances at Tampa, and that he was about to load them on one of the transports when General Shafter appeared and ordered them left behind.

The surgeon-general declared, in a letter to the ”Medical Record,” dated August 6, that ”General Shafter's army at Tampa was thoroughly well supplied with the necessary medicines, dressings, etc., for field-service; but, owing to insufficient transportation, he left behind at Tampa his reserve medical supplies and ambulance corps.”

General Shafter himself admits that he had not enough medical supplies, but seems to a.s.sert, by implication, that he was not to blame for the deficiency. In a telegram to Adjutant-General Corbin, dated ”Santiago, August 3,” he said: ”From the day this expedition left Tampa until to-day there has never been sufficient medical attendance or medicines for the daily wants of the command, and three times within that time the command has been almost totally out of medicines. I say this on the word of the medical directors, who have in each instance reported the matter to me, the last time yesterday, when the proposition was made to me to take medicines away from the Spanish hospital.... The surgeons have worked as well as any men that ever lived, and their complaint has been universal of lack of means and facilities. I do not complain of this, for no one could have foreseen all that would be required; but I will not quietly submit to having the onus laid on me for the lack of these hospital facilities.”

The state of affairs disclosed by these official reports and telegrams seems to me as melancholy and humiliating as anything of the kind ever recorded in the history of American wars. Three ambulances for a whole corps of sixteen thousand men; an army ”almost totally out of medicines”

three times in seven weeks; and a proposition to make up our own deficiencies by seizing and confiscating the medical supplies of a Spanish hospital! I do not wonder that General Shafter wishes to escape responsibility for such a manifestation of negligence or incompetence; but I do not see how he can be allowed to do so. It is just as much the business of a commanding general to know that he has medicines and ambulances enough as it is to know that he has food and ammunition enough. He is the man who plans the campaign, and, to a certain extent, predetermines the number of sick and wounded; he is the man who makes requisition upon the War Department for transports, mules, and wagons enough to carry the army and its equipment to the field where it is to operate; and he is the man who should consider all contingencies and emergencies likely to arise as a result of climatic or other local conditions, and who should see that ample provision is made for them.

General Shafter says that ”no one could have foreseen all that would be required.” That is probably true; but any one, it seems to me, could have foreseen that an army of sixteen thousand men, which was expected to attack intrenched positions, would need more than three ambulances for the transportation of the wounded, to say nothing of the sick. The same remark applies to medicines and medical supplies. Every one knew that our army was going to a very unhealthful region, and it was not difficult to foresee that it would require perhaps two or three times the quant.i.ty of medical supplies that would be needed in a temperate climate and a more healthful environment. The very reason a.s.signed for General Shafter's hurried advance toward Santiago is that he knew his army would soon be disabled by disease, and wished to strike a decisive blow while his men were still able to fight. If he antic.i.p.ated the wrecking of his army by sickness that could not be averted nor long delayed, why did he not make sure, before he left Tampa, that he had medical supplies and hospital facilities enough to meet the inevitable emergency? His telegram to Adjutant-General Corbin seems to indicate that he was not only unprepared for an emergency, but unprepared to meet even the ordinary demands of an army in the field, inasmuch as he declares, without limitation or qualification, that from June 14 to August 3 he never had medicines enough for the daily wants of his command.

It may be thought that the view here taken of the responsibility of the commanding general for everything that pertains to the well-being and the fighting efficiency of his command is too extreme and exacting, and that he ought not to be held personally accountable for the mistakes or the incompetence of his staff-officers. Waiving a discussion of this question on its merits, it need only be said that, inasmuch as General Shafter has officially recommended all of his staff-officers for promotion on account of ”faithful and meritorious services throughout the campaign,” he is estopped from saying now that they did not do their duty, or that they made errors of judgment so serious as to imperil the lives of men, if not the success of the expedition. The responsibility for the lack of medical supplies and hospital facilities, therefore, as well as the responsibility for the lack of boats, mules, and wagons, must rest either upon the War Department or upon the general in command.

If the latter made timely requisition for them, and for transports enough to carry them to the Cuban coast, and failed to obtain either or both, the War Department must be held accountable; while, on the other hand, if General Shafter did not ask for medical supplies enough to meet the probable wants of his army in a tropical climate and an unhealthful environment, he must shoulder the responsibility for his own negligence or want of foresight.

I shall now try to show how this lack of boats, mules, wagons, and medical supplies affected General Shafter's command in the field.

II. The landing at Daiquiri and Siboney.

The points selected for the disembarkation of the army and the landing of supplies were the best, perhaps, that could be found between Santiago harbor and Guantanamo Bay; but they were little more, nevertheless, than shallow notches in the coast-line, which afforded neither anchorage nor shelter from the prevailing wind. There was one small pier erected by the Spanish-American Iron Company at Daiquiri, but at Siboney there were no landing facilities whatever, and the strip of beach at the bottom of the wedge-shaped notch in the precipitous wall of the coast was hardly more than one hundred yards in length. The water deepened so suddenly and abruptly at a distance of fifty yards from the sh.o.r.e that there was practically no anchorage, and General Shafter's fleet of more than thirty transports had to lie in what was virtually an open roadstead and drift back and forth with the currents and tides. The prevailing winds were from the east and southeast, and the long swell which rolled in from the Caribbean Sea broke in heavy and at times dangerous surf upon the narrow strip of unsheltered beach where the army had to land. All of these local conditions were known, or might have been known, to General Shafter before he left Tampa; but when he arrived off the coast they seemed to take him wholly by surprise. He had brought with him neither surf-boats, nor steam-launches, nor suitable lighters, nor materials with which to construct a pier. How he ever would have disembarked his command without the a.s.sistance of the navy, I do not know. I doubt whether a landing could have been effected at all. Fortunately, the navy was at hand, and its small boats and steam-launches, manned by officers and sailors from the fleet, landed the whole army through the surf with the loss of only two men. The navy then retired from the scene of action, and General Shafter was left to his own devices--and deplorably weak and ineffective they proved to be.

The engineer corps found near the railroad at Siboney a few sticks of heavy timber belonging to the Iron Company, out of which they improvised a small, narrow pier; but it was soon undermined and knocked to pieces by the surf. The chief quartermaster discovered on or near the beach three or four old lighters, also belonging to the Iron Company, which he used to supplement the service rendered by the single scow attached to the expedition; but as he put them in charge of soldiers, who had had no experience in handling boats in broken water, they were soon stove against the corners of the pier, or swamped in the heavy surf that swept the beach. All that could be done then was to land supplies as fast as possible in the small rowboats of the transports. If General Shafter had had competent and experienced officers to put in command of these boats, and steam-launches to tow them back and forth in strings or lines of half a dozen each, and if he had made provision for communication with the captains of the steamers by means of wigwag flag-signals, so as to be able to give them orders and control their movements, he might have landed supplies in this way with some success. But none of the difficulties of the situation had been foreseen, and no arrangements had been made to cope with them. The captains of the transports put their vessels wherever they chose, and when a steamer that lay four or five miles at sea was wanted closer insh.o.r.e, there was no means of sending orders to her except by rowboat. The captains, as a rule, did not put officers in charge of their boats, and the sailors who manned them, having no competent direction, acted upon their own judgment. Finally, boats which could have made a round trip between the transports and the sh.o.r.e in half an hour if towed by a steam-launch often used up the greater part of two hours in toiling back and forth through a heavy sea under oars.

It is not a matter for surprise that, with such facilities and under such conditions, General Shafter found it almost impossible to land even food and ammunition enough to keep his army properly supplied. In his official report of the campaign he says: ”It was not until nearly two weeks after the army landed that it was possible to place on sh.o.r.e three days' supplies in excess of those required for daily consumption.”

In addition to all the unnecessary difficulties and embarra.s.sments 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 circ.u.mstances 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 a.s.sert this as a fact; I merely infer it from the difficulty that there seemed to be in finding and getting ash.o.r.e 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 n.o.body 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 s.h.i.+ps to the sh.o.r.e. 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 a.s.sign 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 a.s.sistance in that way.... At the time of my departure large quant.i.ties of medical supplies, urgently needed on sh.o.r.e, 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 sh.o.r.e 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 antic.i.p.ating its needs as regards temporary wharf.a.ge, lighters, tugs, and despatch-boats.”

Dr. Frank Donaldson, a.s.sistant 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 quant.i.ties of supplies, intended for General Shafter's army, _were_ carried back on the transports _Alamo_, _Breakwater_, _Vigilancia_, and _La Grande d.u.c.h.esse_.