When it comes to America’s forgotten battles, Vietnam and Korea have nothing on the Spanish-American War. Despite an unprecedented territorial yield, our country’s first multi-ocean conflict receded from memory long before its last acknowledged American veteran died in 1992. Fighting two world wars over the next 50 years can do that.
Charles Johnson Post was one of almost 20,000 U. S. troops who landed in Cuba with the Fifth Army Corps in June, 1898, months after the mysterious sinking of the battleship U. S. S. Maine in Havana Harbor had drawn the Americans to invade the Spanish colony. Post would recall his pride at being part of only the third amphibious assault in U.S. military history, at Siboney. Chaos reigned; the army lost valuable horses by pushing them off boats too far from shore. But as the Spanish defenders withdrew inland, Post shared in a general optimism:
We could feel
ourselves swelling with satisfaction. We were in a foreign country; we had met
the enemy, and he had retreated. We were veterans!
Hard
fighting soon tempered his enthusiasm. The fighting itself was over by autumn, but bloody all the same. Then yellow fever added to the toll. Post’s
memoir, The Little War Of Private Post,
is written with a survivor’s sensibility, focused not on victory but the
terrors and frustrations of a simple soldier. War is hell, even short ones.
Subtitled
An artist-solider’s memoir of the Spanish
American War; the book includes four color and 16 black-and-white
illustrations done by Post, a noted painter and magazine illustrator when he
died in 1956. Post writes with a pictorial eye, alive to the scenic panoply around
him on the deck of his Cuba-bound troopship:
The mornings were
beautiful. The marvelous sapphire blue of the warm tropic seas, the flying fish
that never lost their novelty, the occasional porpoise or dolphin, or perhaps
some lazy turtle slowly paddling as we passed him, had a never-ending
allurement. The cool and fantastic clouds slowly coiling up from the hot lands
just over the horizon took odd shapes as they eddied among the cooling geysers
of air rising from the ocean.
Post’s
easy humor is never far from the surface, as when discussing ammunition: “Each
cartridge was as big as your finger, with a .45-caliber slug at its front end.
It could, properly directed, knock down two men, the one it hit and the one who
fired it.”
It
was a war that saw an outnumbered, outgunned force conquer one of the prize
colonies of the Caribbean in a matter of weeks, but Post was not one for
tubthumping. The battles may have been decisive; the cause in Post’s mind just
(“Peace can only be achieved through justice; and justice, so far, has to be
fought for.”) But the cost was very high.
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| Post painted this scene of his comrades gathered around a blockhouse atop San Juan Hill soon after its capture. The blockhouse was a final stop for many Americans, as it nearly was for Post. Image from http://talkerofthetown.com/2016/01/09/mr-cranes-vivid-story-scenes-1-11-the-charge-up-san-juan-hill/ |
Post’s
writing reminds me of another observer of the Spanish-American War, Stephen
Crane, with his way of bringing the reader directly into the action, as when he
experienced battle for the first time:
Beside me I heard
a dull muffled chonk, and a man clutched his knee and grunted; I
had heard the chonk of the bullet in
the bone a fraction of an instant before the straight-line hiss of the bullet.
Bullets travel ahead of their own sound; this gives conviction to the standard
Army saying that you’ll never hear the bullet that gets you.
It
takes a while before The Little War
reaches this pitch of excitement; through the first third of the book, Post
focuses attention on smaller details which amused him after joining his unit.
He starts out telling about red flannel ribbons, known as bellybands, that women made for soldiers to protect “from all forms
of pestilence and intestinal fevers.”
There
is much description of favorite songs; of cooking contraptions; of military
preachers, whom Post found invariably annoying. Travelling south to Florida,
the soldiers found themselves enjoined to avoid civilians, out of fear of
exciting Johnny Reb hardcores. Instead, the blue-shirted troops were greeted
warmly – despite their resemblance to a hated invader of living memory.
The
only grumbling Post heard was from a sheriff in Lakeland, Florida who didn’t
like black Provost Guard troops ordering whites around: “You’re in the Army and
maybe it don’t make no difference in the Army. But it shore gravels us folks
around here. It ain’t natural.”
You
may have more patience for this sort of period detail than me, in which case
these opening chapters might well swim by. Post doesn’t quite ramble; his
discursions do have points. But he was writing in a time when writers catered
to longer attention spans, and it shows. For me, it was a slog getting to the
actual reason for reading, Post’s first-hand experiences of the war itself.
Post
was in the second wave of the assault on San Juan Hill, which became the turning
point of the Cuba campaign. He gives a vivid account of the hard fighting in
and around the hilltop, including how the first U. S. officer to reach the summit,
Lieutenant Ord, was shot dead by a wounded Spanish soldier.
Post
marvels at how the Spanish entrenched at San Juan Hill, digging in at the very
crest of a steep slope and leaving themselves blind from directly below, where
Ord and the rest of General Hawkins’ attack force assembled: “It is no
discredit to the men of Hawkins’ two regiments, or to Lieutenant Ord, to say
that San Juan Hill was defended by brave Spaniards and thoroughly incompetent
Spanish military engineers.”
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| Post here depicts the 1st U. S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, i. e. the Rough Riders, preparing to load a dynamite gun on a ship docked in Tampa. To the left of the gun, in his signature spectacles, is the Regiment's second-in-command, Theodore Roosevelt, en route to glory. Image from https://history.army.mil/art/A&I/AVOP-0506.htm. |
Regarding
the most famous soldier in that battle, Theodore Roosevelt, Post is fairly critical.
Roosevelt’s leading his Rough Riders atop Kettle Hill (later confused with San
Juan Hill, where Post and most of the heavy fighting was) is described as a sideshow
nearly lost if not for the timely assistance of some of those same black troops
who raised hackles back in Lakeland. Seeing the Rough Riders up close, Private
Post was not impressed:
The Rough Riders
were the supreme of the elite; no regiment has ever received the newspaper
space that was devoted to them. They were good men – make no mistake about
that, even if some did admit it easily – and they could man the trenches or a
cotillion with intrepidity. In addition to having Teddy [Roosevelt] as its
second in command, this regiment had its own press agent in Richard Harding
Davis, to whom the human beings not listed in the Social Register were merely varied forms of pollution.
As
far as the overall U. S. strategy in Cuba, Post writes it was sound in the
main, calling it “a commando raid before the word ‘commando’ had been invented.”
But logistically the attack was a disaster. No one seemed to think of bringing
a map. An observation balloon was sent up to provide direction; it served instead
as a target for long-range enemy fire.
Fifth
Army Corps commander William Rufus Shafter weighed 300 pounds; one of Post’s
illustrations shows him in a cart sagging under his weight. Post notes Shafter
was picked to lead only because he had no postwar political ambitions. Still Post
respected Shafter’s leadership, whether in getting sick troops out of Cuba or not
yielding to advice to clear San Juan Hill after the first bloody day:
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| Post's depiction of General Shafter on his buckboard command cart watching his troops march for Havana. |
…he had made sound
military judgments, and his choice of strategy was good. He had not succumbed
to General Kent’s desire to retreat after we had captured San Juan Hill, he had
played superb military poker with the Spanish General Toral, and he had captured
more Spanish soldiers than he had men in his whole Fifth Army Corps, more
machine guns, and more artillery as well! Any criticism of General Shafter
rests, with better grace, upon the complaisant contract-brokers in the War
Department in the Washington of those days.
It
is here that Post’s biggest beef with the Army lies, in its procurement policies.
Whether it was providing beds with missing slats to save on wood, or feeding its
men bad beef and hardtack as tough as ceramic tile, the government’s obsession
with sending men off to die while spending as little as possible on them is one constant
Post notes, in battle and at ease.
On
the voyage home, a fever-ridden Post fended for himself in cramped quarters. It
was to be his other survival test, after San Juan Hill:
Down below,
forward, in the former steerage-class latrine, was always a line of sickly men.
One morning the door was half-open, blocked by the body of a dead man whose
yellow hand extended across the opening. He had died that morning in there,
most likely from heart failure and dysentery. At half past three that
afternoon, when I went back, the body was still there, grotesquely huddled,
but it had been pushed under the washstands and no longer interfered with the
door.
Plenty
of moments like this in The Little War
make the point that the Spanish-American War was no rum-and-cigar party for
Uncle Sam imperialists, but a reckoning of the challenges and costs of war as tactics
evolved beyond muskets and drill lines.
As
a memoir, The Little War has a
scattered quality about it. Post obviously took a long time with it, as he
lived for nearly 60 more years after the war’s end and it was published only
after his death. I wonder if it was assembled from short essays Post wrote in
his lifetime for magazines or as notes for himself. There is much repetition of
themes and even some incidents, such as the deaths of comrades, that make me
wonder if he had planned this as a book at all.
Recalling
how he and his comrades jeered at one shirker after San Juan Hill, Post humbly contemplates
why he didn’t break: There are many
obscure factors that make for the persistent pride which keeps one going the tougher
it gets. Courage, perhaps, is nothing more than a willful pride that is too
proud to act ignobly, much as it may envy it.
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