Florida in the Spanish-American War by Joe Knetsch

Author:Joe Knetsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2013-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

General Nelson Miles was the leader of the American army when war came in 1898. He eventually led the forces that conquered the Spanish possession of Puerto Rico. Pictorial History of the Spanish-American War (1898).

The appointment of Nelson Miles as commanding general in October 1895 did little to centralize the institution’s chain of command. Miles did not relish the political maneuvering of his predecessors and continued the power struggles between the secretary of war and his office. Although Miles had many outstanding characteristics as a military man and was a force when commanding in the field, he failed to bargain effectively with the secretary of war. Time and time again—during the lead up to the war and even during the war—he made recommendations, many of which were quite sound, only to be overruled by the secretary of war, who more frequently listened to the Joint Military Board and the Naval Board.

There was no bureau in the army’s table of organization responsible for general mobilization or the rapid buildup of the army. The constant tensions between Miles and Secretary of War Russell A. Alger precluded the creation of such a department, which made planning for that eventuality impossible. Indeed, as Marvin Kreidberg and Merton Henry declared in their classic History of Military Mobilization in the United States Army, 1775–1945, “During the two years of steadily mounting tensions between the United States and Spain, no practical plans were prepared for a possible mobilization.”

When war came in 1898, Miles made one more recommendation to the secretary, and that was to concentrate the regular army troops into a single camp prior to embarking for Cuba. Miles wanted to give his commanders the opportunity to hold regimental- or corps-sized maneuvers in preparation for confronting the Spanish troops on the island. Instead of concentrating regular army units, the men were sent to four camps—Chickamauga, New Orleans, Mobile and Tampa. The cavalry and light artillery were sent to Chickamauga Battlefield, while the infantry regiments were assigned to the other campsites. Under such an arrangement, no combined training could take place, and the coordinated training of these units was ignored. The army, manning eighty or more posts prior to the 1898 war, had never conducted combined maneuvers where all units were represented. Indeed, the Spanish-American War provided the opportunity for the first time in years for members of the same regiments to meet and renew old acquaintances. Individual units, after years of fighting some of the best guerrilla fighters on the planet, were very capable, perhaps more so than any army in the world, but units larger than companies or battalions simply did not exist.

Because of the lack of combined-force training in the prewar years, smaller units learned to attack in squads or platoons. In confrontations between small army units and western Indians, commanders had developed the technique of using a system of staggered formations in which widely dispersed soldiers assaulted objectives without offering a single massed target. In the face of automatic weapons and more sophisticated weaponry,

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