A Hero to His Fighting Men by DeMontravel Peter R.;DeMontravel Nelson A.;

Author:DeMontravel, Peter R.;DeMontravel, Nelson A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Kent State University Press

– CHAPTER 13 –

The Surrender at Santiago and the

Puerto Rico Campaign

NEAR MIDNIGHT ON July 8, 1898, Miles sailed from Charleston for the Cuban battlefront aboard the trans-Atlantic steamer Paris, which had been converted into a cruiser and renamed the Yale. The Yale traveled in company with the Columbia, another former ocean liner. Now armed and carrying approximately fifteen hundred reinforcements for the Fifth Corps, the two ships reached Santiago de Cuba on the morning of July 11. Just three weeks earlier, on June 22, Shafter’s troops had begun to disembark at Daquiri following the discovery of Admiral Pascual de Cervera’s fleet of Spanish warships in the Santiago harbor by Commodore Winfield Scott Schley’s Flying Squadron on May 28.

A formidable fleet from the navy’s North Atlantic Squadron, commanded by Acting Rear Admiral William T. Sampson, joined the Flying Squadron’s blockade on June 1. It would have been foolhardy for the U.S. warships, now under Sampson’s orders, to risk the minefields and forts shielding the Spanish ships anchored within the harbor. Thus, while the navy bottled up Cervera’s fleet in Santiago, the army fought to expose those ships by neutralizing the harbor’s defenses. When Cervera’s squadron sought to flee from a no-longer-secure sanctuary on July 3, following the capture of El Caney and San Juan Hill by the Fifth Corps two days earlier, every one of his ships was destroyed by navy gunners. The task of capturing the city of Santiago still faced the men of Maj. Gen. William R. Shafter’s Fifth Corps, now disconcerted because the first cases of yellow fever had raised the fear of an epidemic.

The Yale and Columbia approached Santiago during a naval bombardment of the city’s defenses. In response to a message from Miles, however, Sampson interrupted his duties aboard his flagship, the New York, to meet with the commanding general on the Yale. At this conference, Miles proposed to capture Santiago by landing troops first on the west side of the harbor and then on the east side, and he received Sampson’s assurance that the fleet’s firepower would support the planned invasion. Following this meeting, Miles landed at Siboney, a port in American hands approximately nine miles east of Santiago. Here, he telegraphed Shafter that he would visit him at his headquarters the following day, the twelfth.1

The scene at Siboney must have disheartened Miles, in part because he saw the first signs of an epidemic that might endanger the Fifth Corps. His aide, Lt. Col. Marion Maus, noted that the hospital established for yellow fever victims already had several patients, including Brig. Gen. Henry M. Duffield, commander of a brigade of Michigan volunteers, and Adj. Gen. Henry C. Corbin’s son. A distressed Maus found the area “dirty and in disorder; tents containing disabled or sick soldiers were scattered about; the grounds had not been policed, and a number of old shacks were still standing, some of which had been infected with yellow fever.”

Maus described an incident in his report to Miles that reminded him “of the poor Greeks” whom they had observed in the 1897 war with Turkey.

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