The Admiral and the Ambassador (16 page)

A US Navy court of inquiry determined in late March that the battleship
Maine
had been blown up by a Spanish mine, a determination that history has cast in doubt, but one that set the stage for war. With the yellow press clamoring for a military intervention in Cuba, Congress urging recognition of the rebel forces, and American business leaders shifting from isolationism to recognizing the market gains to be had from annexing Cuba and the Philippines, President McKinley found himself swept up in a surge of pro-war sentiment.

The navy had already been exploring different scenarios for war, plans that included fighting in Cuba and the Philippines. Strategists like Alfred
T. Mahan, whose 1890 book
Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783
undergirded the argument for a robust US Navy to expand American political and economic power, and such political leaders as Henry Cabot Lodge, a powerful Republican senator from Massachusetts, were urging the United States to seize a larger role on the international stage. Behind the scenes, Theodore Roosevelt, an assistant secretary in the Department of the Navy, agitated for more focused preparations, including bolstering the American fleet.
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Negotiations and gamesmanship continued as McKinley demanded that Spain withdraw from Cuba, though the president simultaneously refused to recognize the rebel forces. He prepared a message to Congress seeking permission to intervene in Cuba, which Congress approved on April 19, 1898. The message called for Cuban independence and the immediate withdrawal of Spanish forces, with American military intervention as the final step. Spain responded by withdrawing its ambassador to the United States and, on April 23, declaring war. McKinley quickly ordered naval ships to blockade Cuba and, as the nation geared for battle, accepted the resignation of Secretary Sherman—two weeks shy of his seventy-fifth birthday—and replaced him with fellow Ohioan William R. Day, who had been brought into the administration to handle the Spanish-Cuban crisis.

The focus of most Americans was on Cuba, but in February—ten days after the sinking of the
Maine
—Roosevelt had sent a telegram ordering Commodore George Dewey, stationed in Nagasaki, to sail for Hong Kong to be in closer proximity to the Spanish-held Philippines in the event war broke out. The idea, developed in a War College scenario the previous year, was that a US naval attack on the Philippines would force Spain to spread its naval forces more thinly, giving the United States an advantage in Cuba. Dewey, though, had already set sail, deciding on his own that Hong Kong, seven hundred miles from Manila, was a better anchorage than Nagasaki, some 1,400 miles away.

Dewey was new on the job: he had taken command of the Asiatic Squadron, as it was known, in January. Calling it a “squadron” was a bit grandiose: Dewey's command consisted of his flagship, the
Olympia,
under Captain Charles V. Gridley; a small cruiser, the
Boston;
the gunboat
Petrel;
the
Concord,
a supply ship; and the
Monocacy,
a rather worthless paddle
steamer. In Hong Kong, Dewey bought two more supply ships, and after Roosevelt's order, the squadron was buttressed by three other ships, though its ammunition supply was about 60 percent of its capacity.

Dewey agreed with the War College assessment that the best place to attack the Spanish forces would be at Manila Bay, despite heavy land fortifications that could make entering the bay treacherous. Even blockading Manila—there was one entrance to the harbor—would effectively isolate the Philippines. Dewey was already rolling around different approaches when the British administrator for Hong King notified him on April 23 that since war had broken out between the United States and Spain, the US naval squadron would have to leave British waters at Hong Kong.

Dewey sailed the fleet the next day to Mirs Bay, a Chinese anchorage just northeast of Hong Kong, and awaited orders. They were quick in coming; McKinley made the decision that day to attack, and Dewey set sail two days later after receiving intelligence that the Spanish ships were planning to defend the Philippines at Subic Bay, near Manila.

As thin as Dewey's squadron was, the Spanish fleet was even weaker, and while Dewey had few details about the strength of the enemy, the Spanish commander knew all too well his forces would not be able to mount a very vigorous defense. Admiral Patricio Montojo y Pasarón, like Dewey, had been contemplating a fight for Manila and was uncertain about how to defend the city. He dismissed an open sea engagement as suicidal given the superior American guns. He didn't have enough mines and ammunition to defend the bay at its opening to the sea and was distressed to learn that land-based battlements at Subic Bay, north of Manila Bay, had not been upgraded to war readiness. Defending Manila itself would invite a disastrous shelling of civilians. Montojo ultimately decided to position his fleet off Cavite in Manila Bay, nearer the straits to the ocean and where his ships could receive some artillery protection from a land battery.

Dewey's squadron arrived at Subic Bay on April 30 and found it empty of Spanish ships. Dewey presumed that meant Montojo had retreated to Manila Bay. Islands and shoals narrowed the navigable entrance to the bay to a width of about three miles, a passage that should have been easily defended. Dewey worried that Spanish cannons on the bluffs could reach his ships as they passed into the bay, and he gambled that a night attack would
give him the best chance of success. So around midnight on April 30, with lights darkened, his ships began moving through the straits, cruising at full speed and hoping the gunners' aim would be bad in the dark. Dewey was surprised to draw only a smattering of ineffective fire; the guns, it turned out, were lightly manned because the Spaniards didn't think Dewey would hazard a nighttime attack. And what Dewey also didn't know was that Montojo and his chain of command were viewing the coming battle with a sense of doom, assuming they didn't stand a chance of victory. In fact, one of the factors in Montojo's decision—defending Manila not in open water but from such close proximity to the city and the shore—was to enable his crews to swim to safety when their ships were sunk.

About quarter after five on the morning of May 1, Montojo's ships and the land batteries near Manila opened fire at the approaching squadron, but most of the shells fell harmlessly into the sea. Dewey arrayed his ships in a straight line at intervals of up to four hundred yards, making them even more difficult to hit. When the
Olympia
reached within five thousand yards of the Spanish fleet, Dewey issued his famous order to the ship's captain, “You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.”

And fire they did. The squadron made five passes by the Spanish fleet, using guns from starboard and then port side in alternating patterns as they cruised in an elliptical path past the immobile Spanish ships. The Americans' marksmanship was weak but good enough, and shells blistered the Spanish ships, whose gunners were even less effective than the Americans. After several passes, Montojo sallied forth on his flagship, the
Reina Cristina,
to engage the
Olympia,
hoping to change the course of the fight. But the
Reina Cristina
was much slower than the
Olympia,
and by moving to engage the Americans, Montojo exposed his flagship to the waiting guns of the American squadron. After suffering crushing damage, Montojo ordered the
Reina Cristina
back to the fleet—it would sink a short time later—and moved his flag and command to the
Isla de Cuba.
Little good it did.

Dewey halted the action for a short time and had breakfast while he awaited an accounting of his remaining ammunition, concerned that his gunners had done little damage to the Spanish ships while draining his supply of ordnance. As reports came in, though, Dewey learned that he had more ammunition than he thought and that the Spanish ships had indeed
been heavily damaged. As Montojo took advantage of the lull to maneuver the remainder of the Spanish fleet closer to shore, Dewey sent word to Don Basilio Augustin, the Spanish governor general in Manila: if the shore batteries did not cease firing, he would shell the city. The batteries went silent, and Dewey's squadron moved in for the final battle against Montojo. It began about 11:15 AM; an hour later, the white flag went up over Cavite.

The tally was remarkable. Three of Montojo's ships sank during the battle; Dewey's men burned six others to ensure they couldn't be brought back into action. Montojo lost 161 men, mostly from his
Reina Cristina,
and another 210 were wounded. Dewey, remarkably, lost no ships and no men, with only a handful of men wounded. Spanish forces still held the island and Manila itself, but Dewey's victory sealed them off; American ground forces arrived by August, just as the war was winding down, and the Americans took military control of the islands.

Before the battle of Manila Bay, the Philippines were a minor part of the American consciousness. When people thought of Spain and the possibility of war, the focus turned to Cuba. And few Americans had ever heard of Dewey, who before taking command of the Asiatic fleet had been president of the navy's little-known Board of Inspection and Survey. Yet within days, Manila Bay was part of everyday conversation, as was Dewey, who was feted as a hero in an orgy of nationalistic pride. He was immediately vaulted into the upper echelon of the nation's military and, more directly, naval heroes, despite the reality that Dewey's victory had as much to do with the weakness of the Spanish defenses as it did with Dewey's military seamanship.

“Commodore Dewey's victory is one of the greatest naval triumphs of modern times and will rank in history with the achievements of John Paul Jones, Nelson, Perry, Farragut, and other heroes,” President McKinley told a visiting congressman on May 2. “It's true that our ships were superior to those of Spain, but it must be remembered that Commodore Dewey engaged not only the opposing fleet, but the Spanish forts. The battle was a hard-fought one, and the fact that Commodore Dewey was able to win it shows that he's a hero.” McKinley also said he planned to promote Dewey from commodore to rear admiral.
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Not to be outdone, members of Congress fell over each other to heap praise on Dewey and the US Navy. “It was a glorious victory,” said
Representative James R. Mann of Chicago. “The American officers and men are the best in the world. Commodore Dewey can have anything he asks for at our hands, and if we should be so unfortunate as to lose a man of his caliber in battle, the same consideration will be shown to his widow.” Another congressman, Charles B. Landis of Indiana, was similarly taken with Dewey's feat. “Commodore Dewey's victory adds another bright page to our naval history, which is resplendent with heroic deeds,” Landis said.

The American people do not now appreciate the magnitude of this victory and the splendid courage and daring of Dewey and those who were with him. Way off from his base of supplies in the Asiatic sea he and his brave companions deliberately and fearlessly grappled with a fleet practically equal to their own, and, nestling under the guns of a strong fortress, ran the risk of floating and submarine mines, and in a few hours wiped the enemy from the sea. To the names of Jones, Decatur and Farragut must be added that of Dewey. God bless him—he is a dandy.
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Jones, of course, was the naval hero of the Revolutionary War. Stephen Decatur won his spot in naval history with battles against the French during the French and Indian War and against the pirates of the Barbary Coast in 1804. Decatur sailed again for the United States during the War of 1812, ending up as a prisoner when his ship was heavily damaged by British warships. After the war, Decatur went to Washington as a naval commissioner, but died young, at age forty-one, from a wound suffered in a pistol duel with former Commodore James Barron, who had accused Decatur of damaging his reputation and career. Decatur's body was interred near Washington but was reburied in 1844 near his parents' graves in the St. Peter's Church cemetery in Philadelphia, beneath a tall Corinthian column topped by a stone eagle with wings spread.

David Farragut, the last of the trio of naval heroes invoked by Congressman Landis and other Dewey admirers, won his fame in the Civil War, where his exploits at the Battle of Mobile Bay (“Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead!”) and in seizing the city of New Orleans led to his appointment as the US Navy's first admiral. Unlike Jones and Decatur, Farragut lived to a relatively ripe old age of sixty-nine before dying in 1879
in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, the family plot marked by a tall marble replica of a mast adorned with a carved stone flag; belaying pins, ship cable, sextant, and other sailing tools; bas reliefs of two forts (probably Forts Jackson and St. Philip, which Farragut took during the Battle of New Orleans); and several shields. The monument, erected by Farragut's family, was carved by Casoni and Isola, among the best-known nineteenth-century stone artists in New York.
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