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| ISBN-13: | 9780307826381 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/05/2012 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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CHAPTER I
Corregidor Won
Corregidor and some 7,100 other large and tiny islands (only 400 of which are inhabited and only 460 of which are larger than one square mile) make up the Philippine Island archipelago. The Philippines came under the tutelage of the United States as a part of the settlement of the Spanish-American War.
That war was fought in naval and ground battles thousands of miles apart. Theoretically, the ostensible and much-publicized objective of the United States in the war was the liberation of Cuba from Spanish control, a hegemony that had been established while the Spanish were building their worldwide empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
By 1895, the Cubans had had their fill of autocratic Spanish rule. In that year, Cuban revolutionists rose up against the Spanish, and the resultant turmoil, unrest, and destruction caused heavy losses to American investments in the island. Beyond that, however, the United States, which was committed at that time to the building of the Panama Canal, recognized the strategic and commercial importance of Cuba as an independent nation, or better, a protectorate of the United States and, therefore, sided with the revolutionaries against the Spanish.
Two events triggered and inflamed the emotion of the United States toward Spain: one, with unbelievably bad timing for its international relations with the United States, the Spanish minister to the United States, Depuy DeLôme, wrote a letter that criticized and disparaged President McKinley, calling him “a weakling—a bidder for the admiration of the crowd” and “a would-be politician.” After its publication in the Hearst and Pulitzer papers on 9 February 1898, public indignation in the United States boiled high over the insult to the President and thus to his nation. With the subsequent fanning of the flames of war by the press, the people of the United States leaned more and more toward war with the Spanish. DeLôme’s resignation did not calm the fury.
The ultimate catalyst for causing the United States to take action against the Spanish was the mysterious explosion on and the subsequent sinking of a U.S. battleship, the USS Maine, in Havana Harbor on 15 February 1898, with the loss of 2 officers and 258 sailors. “Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!” very shortly became the battle cry of the newspapers and thereafter the people of the United States. A great many influential citizens now demanded that the United States retaliate against the Spanish. “There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight” became another people-rouser. Newspapers throughout the country demanded war.
After the Maine exploded, a disaster for which neither the Spanish nor U.S. investigators could fix responsibility, the United States summarily demanded that the Spanish withdraw from Cuba. To emphasize that demand, on 22 April 1898, the United States ordered Rear Adm. William T. Sampson to blockade Cuba. As expected, the Spanish did not withdraw from Cuba but declared war on the United States on 24 April. The United States followed suit and declared war on Spain the next day.
Prior to the declaration of war, Commodore George Dewey, commander of the six-ship Asiatic Squadron of the U.S. Navy, was in Hong Kong taking on provisions and coal in preparation for a quick run to the Philippines, where he knew there was a Spanish fleet. War with Spain would make every Spanish possession an objective. On the day the United States declared war against the Spanish, the British forced Dewey to leave the neutral port of Hong Kong. On that same day, the Navy Department sent Commodore Dewey a cablegram that stated: “Commence operations at once, particularly against the Spanish fleet. You must capture vessels or destroy.” (Given today’s layered military command-and-control structure, one must admire the brevity, directness, and clarity of this order.)
On 27 April, Dewey ordered his squadron to sail for the Philippines. On that same day, Adm. Patricio Montojo Pasaron, commander of the seven-ship Spanish squadron in the Philippines, moved his ships from Manila Bay to Subic Bay because he felt that with his ships and the shore batteries surrounding Subic, he could defeat the larger American force. At Subic, he sank, futilely, three of his vessels to block the eastern channel but then found, belatedly, that the shore batteries were not operational. He returned to Manila Bay on 28 April.
On 30 April, Dewey, by now off Luzon’s west coast, made a reconnaissance of Subic Bay but, of course, did not find the Spanish ships. That night, he sailed south. Early on 1 May, Dewey and his squadron sailed into Manila Bay. He was aboard his flagship, the USS Olympia, at the head of his squadron. His ships steamed past Corregidor, which the Spanish used as a lighthouse base, signal station, and checkpoint for ships entering the bay.
Commodore Dewey continued boldly at about eight knots on his course into Manila Bay within range of the onshore Spanish guns at Cavite and very shortly under the guns of Admiral Montojo’s ships, which were backed up in the bay near Cavite. Dewey’s squadron followed behind his flagship in column “keeping their distance excellently,” he wrote later.
In his autobiography, Dewey described the attack on the Spanish fleet early in the morning of 1 May:
The misty haze of the tropical dawn had hardly risen when at five-fifteen, at long range, the Cavite forts and Spanish squadrons opened fire. Our course was not one leading directly toward the enemy, but a converging one, keeping him on our starboard bow. Our speed was eight knots, and our converging course and ever-varying position must have confused the Spanish gunners. My assumption that the Spanish fire would be hasty and inaccurate proved correct.
So far as I could see, none of our ships was suffering any damage, while in view of my limited ammunition supply it was my plan not to open fire until we were within effective range and then to fire as rapidly as possible with all of our guns.
At five-forty, when we were within a distance of five thousand yards, I turned to Captain Gridley and said: “You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.”
From then until shortly after noon, Dewey’s squadron steamed back and forth past the Spanish fleet, closing the range on each successive run. His ships’ guns fired rapidly and accurately. By the time the attack was over, the eight ships of the Spanish fleet, including Montojo’s flagship, the Reina Cristina, had been sunk or scuttled in the bay. Dewey had not lost a single ship or a single sailor.
“The order to capture or destroy the Spanish squadron had been executed to the letter. Not one of its fighting vessels remained afloat,” he wrote. In his diary that night, Dewey recorded the day’s action rather succinctly and concisely, with just a hint of modest understatement: “Reached Manila at daylight. Immediately engaged the Spanish ships and batteries at Cavite. Destroyed eight of the former, including the Reina Cristina and Castilla. Anchored at noon off Manila.”
Dewey’s impressive victory against the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay did not, however, gain him any control over Manila. In a few days, the shore batteries of Cavite fell to the commodore, but Manila itself remained in the hands of the Spanish. Dewey had only seventeen hundred men of his own, barely enough to man his ships. Therefore, Dewey, not a man to remain idle, blockaded the port, encouraged Emilia Aguinaldo (whom he had brought with him from exile in China) and his Filipino insurgents to surround the city, and requested from the U.S. government a land force large enough to take the capital of the Philippines.
While awaiting the arrival of the ground forces, Dewey, by now an admiral (date of rank, 7 May 1898), had more than enough crises on which to expend his considerable talent. English, French, and German ships arrived in the bay ostensibly to protect their nationals from the insurgents. But the real reason, Dewey suspected, especially for the Germans, was to be on hand to pick up any territories of the islands that, in the event the Americans decided not to control the Philippines after the departure of the Spanish, might be up for grabs. Dewey handled the violations of the blockade by these interloping ships with firmness and patience. And once it became clear that the United States was not going to abandon the islands, the third-nation ships departed.
That was just one of Dewey’s problems out of the way. His biggest concern was that he was still afloat in Manila Bay with no way of taking Manila.
The War Department was very slow in shipping Army forces to the Philippines for a very good reason: at the outbreak of the war, the U.S. Army was in a deplorable state—a condition in which it found itself at the outbreak of every succeeding war in the twentieth century. The Regular Army of 1898 numbered slightly more than twenty-eight thousand men, scattered on many small posts across the country. The troops were well trained individually, but they were not trained to fight in large units. There were no organized units larger than a regiment. The Army had no mobilization plan, no doctrine for joint arms operations, no functioning high command, and few officers who had even seen a unit as large as a brigade, let alone commanded one. In addition, in spite of the long period of strained relations with Spain before the war, the War Department had no plan for military operations in Cuba, or anywhere else, for that matter.