The Roughest Riders (23 page)

As on Kettle Hill, the Spanish had chosen to defend the geographical peak of San Juan instead of the military crest below it. The strategic miscalculation created for the Americans a protected zone of sorts beneath the military crest. Once the Americans had crossed over the meadow, the slope of the hill rose sharply to the lip of the lower ridge, which offered them cover from the defenders' line of fire. There was no choice but to get through the killing field to reach it, but the American guns hammered the Spanish positions more and more effectively, encouraging the troops to step up their advance. They continued to climb even as the firing from the Gatlings and the danger from Kettle Hill decreased.

General Linares knew the moment was at hand when he saw his soldiers falling in growing numbers all around him, shot dead or wounded by American gunfire. It was now about 1:30 in the afternoon of July 1, and the sheer force of the invaders' manpower advantage had proved to be overwhelming as they swarmed over the peak and took possession of the blockhouse. The Buffalo Soldiers of the Twenty-Fourth and the other first-line attackers howled as the Spaniards abandoned the blockhouse and their trenches and began the retreat down the far side of the hill toward Santiago. The Americans fired at them as they ran down the hill, and for the moment they ignored the wounded soldiers left behind, who groaned where they lay writhing on the ground. One of the last Americans to be killed in the battle was Lieutenant Ord, who had sparked the American assault when he urged the men to charge. One of the British officers who had earlier been critical of the Americans' performance was moved to cry out, “It's a great day for us Anglo-Saxons!”

Roosevelt and his men were still on the peak of Kettle Hill as the Spanish fled down the far sides of both Kettle and San Juan. At about 1:35, he asked Sumner and Wood for permission to follow the Spaniards as they scrambled over to San Juan and down to the harbor. His objective was to take the northern spur of San Juan Hill with his men. Both officers agreed, and Roosevelt began to descend in their wake. At the same time, the Ninth and Tenth had charged down the back slope of Kettle Hill, screaming as they started to run toward the northern slope of San Juan Hill as fast as the terrain and the condition of their legs allowed. The smell, the very feel and taste of victory spurred them on.

When Roosevelt saw that only five of his Rough Riders were following him—the others claimed to have not heard his command—he returned and berated the rest of the group for not charging with
him. The Rough Riders and some other regiments then joined him, about eight hundred in all. But before they took off, a Spanish shell smashed into the sugar-refining kettle, killing two of the men with flying shrapnel and wounding a third. The men moved on and sliced through one of the barbed wire fences protecting the northern slope of San Juan Hill. The remaining troops on top of Kettle Hill fired at the Spaniards in support. The Rough Riders, the Buffalo Soldiers of the Ninth and Tenth, and other troops ran ahead together. They detoured around a small lake that sat in a cradle of land in the Heights. The charge across the narrow, marshy valley straddling the two hills was exhausting, but they rushed on in the face of enemy fire from the northern slope.

They made it to the top a little after 2:00
PM
, when Roosevelt (who had again been nicked, this time in his left hand by a spent bullet) was surprised by two Spaniards who leapt out of the trenches and fired at him from ten yards away. Miraculously, their bullets missed the leader of the Rough Riders. Roosevelt fired his own gun twice, missing one of the defenders, who ran off, and killing the other. Rough Rider Cliff Scott witnessed the encounter and reported, “The colonel jerked his gun and made a hip shot that was good.” Roosevelt's kill was especially rewarding, since he had made it with a gun that had been removed from the
Maine
, whose sinking triggered the war in the first place. The Rough Riders ran to the peak of San Juan Hill, where they joined the Twenty-Fourth and other regiments that had already taken the blockhouse and overrun the Spanish trenches.

Sumner and Wood rode up on horseback moments later with the rest of their brigades, and Sumner strung them out across the hill in a long defensive perimeter in anticipation of a Spanish counterattack. They were prepared for any surprises the Spanish might have planned for them, as they now commanded the topmost peak between the Heights and Santiago de Cuba, the latter of which they
could see from the ridge about three hundred yards west of the blockhouse. But the Spanish had little if anything left and launched no counterattack.

The Americans were half-starved after their momentous victory and were unexpectedly rewarded when they found a huge pot of Castilian stew cooking over a slow fire burning in the officers' mess tent atop the hill. Besides the stew, there was bread, smaller pots of rice and peas, salted fish, and most satisfying of all, bottles of wine and a demijohn of good Cuban rum. The men began to attack the provisions without waiting for an invitation to assuage their hunger and thirst. The Spanish defenders, however, had fewer mouths to feed than the Americans did, so the officers made the men line up in an orderly fashion in an effort to stretch the food as far as it would go.

F
rom the western ridge of San Juan Hill, the American troops had a clear view of the harbor and the city, its streets empty except for the commotion of Spanish troops wandering shell-shocked in every direction. A number of Buffalo Soldiers from the Tenth and some white regulars started to run down the hill toward Santiago without authorization, but an officer called them back and told them to remain on the ridge until they received orders to proceed. Stephen Crane had joined them at the overlook and described the men as “dusty” and “disheveled,” their shirts glued to their backs with sweat as they gazed down the hill, weary from all the “marches and the fights.” And still, they had been ready to continue the battle without anyone ordering them to fight on.

The Spanish, for their part, were not yet ready to concede defeat. They reformed into three lines of defensive positions, forming a triple perimeter to protect the city, and then commenced firing artillery shots up at the hill to keep the Americans from charging down on them. The Americans remained on the peak of San Juan, digging trenches of their own with anything that came to hand—their own shovels and abandoned Spanish equipment, including
cooking utensils, dishes, cups, cans, machetes, and the sharp edges of their mess kits. Around 2:30 in the afternoon, the generals sent word down to Shafter that the Heights had been taken. Shafter struggled from his cot, mounted his horse, and attempted to assess the situation from El Pozo. His aides told him that Lawton was apparently still bogged down at El Caney and had yet to march from there to support the troops on Kettle and San Juan Hills. Shafter was concerned that the spread of land between Kettle and El Caney remained unoccupied by American forces.

Shafter's repeated orders to Lawton to abandon El Caney and head southwest to reinforce the troops in the Heights fell on deaf ears throughout the afternoon. The battle had dragged on far longer than anyone had anticipated, but Lawton considered El Caney to be strategically important and was determined to take it before moving on. In Lawton's report after the siege on El Caney ended, Lawton didn't acknowledge receiving any orders from Shafter. Lawton would not make it over to San Juan until the following day, July 2, after he rested his battered brigades overnight. The troops on top of San Juan exchanged fire with the Spaniards throughout most of the afternoon, and it wasn't until around 4:00
PM
that the Spanish attempted their first offensive operation in the campaign. Linares sent a contingent of four hundred men up the Heights in an effort to encircle the Americans from their right flank. The effort failed, however, when the Gatlings opened up on them, sending them retreating back over the ridge toward Santiago.

There was little left to do now but hold the positions on the Heights and wait for further orders. The officers took stock of the situation and used the opportunity to count their losses. They knew their casualties were heavy, but the final toll of those killed or seriously wounded in the brutal conflict would not be known for a while to come. Adding up the final numbers after any war has
always been a dicey business, complicated both by imprecise report-age in the field and by the information's potential use as political propaganda. But there was little doubt that both sides had suffered badly. Lawton's cost in dead and wounded at El Caney numbered 450 men—7 percent of his forces. The outnumbered Spanish suffered 300 casualties, almost 60 percent of the defenders in the village. Lawton's men took 127 Spanish soldiers prisoner, and another 100 escaped down the trail to Santiago.

Over on San Juan Hill, the American dead and seriously injured came to more than 10 percent of the troops engaged there, a total of almost 1,500 men when added to the losses at El Caney. About 200 Spaniards were mortally wounded and another 300 were captured. Linares himself was wounded as he stood near the blockhouse, but he lived on to return to Spain, where he died sixteen years after the war at age sixty-six. Among the Rough Riders, about half of the 500 Roosevelt started with were rendered unfit for duty because of illness suffered during the various campaigns, 86 were killed or wounded, and others went missing. Fifty of his men were with him as they dug into their positions on San Juan Hill. The Buffalo Soldiers suffered the heaviest losses in percentage terms: about 17 percent of the 1,685 that they started with.

The commanding generals on both sides, Shafter and Linares, were heavily criticized for their strategic decisions during the campaign. “Shafter's conduct of the campaign was incompetent and culpable,” read a report disseminated by British military strategists, “and his ultimate success was undeserved good fortune. No precautions were taken against reverses. The daring of American troops was exceeded only by their extreme rashness.” The Brits called Roosevelt and the Rough Riders examples of audacity laced with imprudence.
Linares was excoriated for holding back ten thousand of his men in Santiago and sending so few to defend the Heights and El Caney. The Spanish general, however, shifted the blame to Cuban rebels, whom he claimed diverted his forces, and to the “inappropriate” and “unorthodox” fighting style of the American invaders.

The American forces remained vigilant in their positions on San Juan Hill through the long night of July 1 and the early hours of the next day. They were determined to not give up any ground, but they were aware of the number of Spanish troops guarding the city and the harbor in Santiago. They expected a counterattack at any time in a last-ditch effort by the Spanish to reverse the fortunes of the war.

But it never came. The small hours of the morning of July 2 remained still and silent. When Lawton arrived later in the morning with his own forces, which he had rested overnight at El Pozo, the men on the hill knew that the battle for San Juan Hill was truly over. Lawton brought up his big guns, which opened a constant bombardment on the troops forming the perimeter around the city. The Spanish squadron guarding the harbor was also in range of the American artillery. American ships now began to move in toward Santiago from the open water, closing in on the Spanish flotilla. The Spaniards felt the noose tightening. Their options were limited. Should they attempt to withdraw the Spanish fleet from the harbor or risk being ensnared by an American blockade—or worse, watch their ships being sunk by the advancing American armada?

The Spanish naval defenses fell under the command of Admiral Pascual Cervera, whose fleet consisted of several cruisers and destroyers, none of which were in particularly good condition. The cruiser
Cristóbal Colón
lacked much of its armature, and another, the
Vizcaya
, was hampered by a porous bottom. Also at Cervera's disposal were his flagship, the
Infanta Maria Teresa
, the cruiser
Oquendo
, and the destroyers
Pluton
and
Furor.
An attempt to run the American blockade with its superior ships and firepower would be
tantamount to suicide. Cervera's best hope, short of surrender, was to try to ram the fastest American cruiser, the USS
Brooklyn
, with the
Infanta Maria Teresa.

On land, Shafter tried to assume command of his operation on July 2 and the morning of July 3, moving his troops down the slope of San Juan Hill, closer to the eastern side of Santiago, already under cover of his heavy guns. He positioned the men in a semicicle about a mile east of the city, where they faced the triple perimeter of the Spanish land defenses, who met the Americans' advance with artillery of their own. Faced with the prospect of suffering even more casualties than he had taken already, Shafter cabled Secretary of War Russell Alger—a distant relative of rags-to-riches storyteller Horatio Alger—with a request to withdraw his men to a point at which they would be out of range of the Spanish guns. Alger had already been attacked for appointing Shafter to head the Cuban expedition in the first place, and for inadequately preparing the army for the war. Alger's response to Shafter was immediate and emphatic:
Hold your ground!
The press was at that moment trumpeting the news of the great American victory in Cuba, under Alger's watch, and there was no way he wanted Shafter to let the victory be clouded by even the appearance of defeat.