San Juan Hill 1898 by Angus Konstam

Author:Angus Konstam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: San Juan Hill 1898: America’s Emergence as a World Power
ISBN: 9781472802088
Publisher: Osprey Publishing

THE SPANISH DEFENDERS AT EL CANEY

The Spanish garrison at El Caney was well ensconced in a network of trenches, rifle pits, barbed wire and blockhouses. Initial estimates that the assaulting American troops would clear the village in less than two hours proved to be hopelessly optimistic. The key positions in the defence works were the stone fort of El Viso and the scattering of wooden blockhouses that ringed the village. The attackers surrounded the village and while Capron’s battery shelled El Viso, the US infantry regiments exchanged fire with the defenders from as close as 200 yards away.

The Spanish inflicted so many casualties on the 22nd Massachusetts Volunteers that the regiment was pulled back into reserve. Smoke from their obsolete black-powder weapons had betrayed their positions to the Spanish, who could return the fire with greater accuracy. The struggle carried on for most of the day. Once the fort of El Viso had been captured by an American assault, the Spanish pulled back to a last line of defence in the village itself, and were only finally overcome after bitter fighting. Although hopelessly outnumbered, they had held up Lawton’s division long enough to prevent them from participating in the main battle for San Juan Heights.

Their guns were considered obsolete by contemporary military standards. Not only did they fire black-powder shells that created tell-tale smoke, giving away the battery position, but they were not self-recoiling, which hindered accuracy as well as speed of reloading: nor were they fitted with sights to allow indirect fire. As an American artillery officer put it: ‘Yet such was our backwardness in military science that the whole army was ignorant of the tremendous advance in Field Artillery that in 1898 was an accomplished fact.’

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