CHAPTER 9
A Splendid Little War
On a still and starless night, Captain Charles
Sigsbee felt the ship beneath him shudder.
He had just taken a seat at his wooden desk,
straightened a piece of paper and begun to write a letter to his
wife. It was a warm night, and the cabin mess attendant had
delivered Sigsbee’s civilian’s thin coat to wear in the heat. As
the captain reached into his pocket, he pulled out an unopened
letter, dated ten months ago, and addressed to his wife by a
friend. Sigsbee sat down to write an apology for forgetting to
deliver the note; he wrote the date at the top of the letter,
“February 15, 1898.”
The sorrowful notes of taps penetrated the metallic
walls of the ship to the quarters below. “I laid down my pen,” he
later wrote, “to listen to the notes of the bugle, which were
singularly beautiful in the oppressive stillness of the
night.”
Most of his enlisted men had already fallen asleep,
rocking in their hammocks, suspended like cocoons between the heavy
beams of the ship. To those on the shore, the ship appeared as a
great garrison of steel, measuring 319 feet, 6,683 tons and housing
328 souls. Two massive smokestacks towered over the decks, and in
the scattered moonlight, water sparked as it lapped against the
hull.
As Sigsbee folded his letter and slid it into the
envelope, he felt the ship rise as though an enormous ocean swell
had passed beneath her; then he heard the inhuman wail of twisting
metal followed by the sound of screaming men. The lights went out
on the USS Maine.
On the seafront of Havana, in homes and cafés, the
explosion from the harbor shook furniture, shattered windows and
unhinged doors. Every light in the city went dark, and people ran
into the streets, drawn to the show of rockets and fireworks.
Debris flew 150 feet in the air, raining paper and fragments over
the ship. Gray smoke billowed in the coal-black sky, while orange
flames licked below. They watched as one of the twin smokestacks of
the Maine heaved over, and the bow disappeared into the
blackness as fire consumed the ship. The reflection of the inferno
on the water turned the harbor a glaring red.
Sigsbee groped his way through the darkened,
smoke-filled quarters, feeling the Maine rolling seaward.
Squinting and trying to adjust his eyes to the dark, he took in all
the damage around him. The explosion had taken place near the front
ammunition magazine in the forward part of the ship—right below the
berth where the enlisted men slept in their hammocks. “On the white
paint of the ceiling was the impression of two human bodies— mere
dust,” he would later report.
As the captain made his way onto the deck, a
dreadful calm and discipline prevailed in spite of all the
violence. The captain was informed that the explosion had taken
place at 9:40 p.m. The ship had sustained much damage, and one of
the smokestacks was lying starboard. The compartments below were
filling with water, and the Maine would soon go under.
Cries from men in the water echoed: “Help! Lord
God, help us! Help! Help!” Sigsbee ordered his officers, most of
whom had been spared in their quarters far from the explosion, to
lower all undamaged lifeboats and set out to rescue the sailors of
the Maine. Boats from the City of Washington, as well
as Spanish seamen, paddled toward the wreckage to rescue the
wounded. The Maine continued to sputter and rupture as
flames ignited live rounds aboard the ship until nearly 2:00
a.m.
Newspapers would write that Captain Charles Sigsbee
had heroically stayed on board the Maine until he was the
last man to leave his ship. Sigsbee saw it differently: “It is a
fact that I was the last to leave, which was only proper; that is
to say, it would have been improper otherwise; but virtually all
left last.”
The wounded were taken aboard nearby ships or
carted to the hospitals on the shore. Sigsbee worried that his
sailors would be taken to hospitals where yellow fever existed, but
there were no hospitals in Havana that didn’t house the dreaded
fever. Doctors, nurses and civilians tried to mend the crushed
bones, deep cuts and hideous burns of the sailors. Many survived,
but only partially, losing eyes or limbs or faces in the process.
When the final death toll came in, including a number of wounded
who later died, 268 had perished in the explosion.
Aboard the City of Washington, Captain
Charles Sigsbee dispatched his telegram to the secretary of the
navy in Washington, D.C. He ended the message with a warning:
“Public opinion should be suspended until further report . . . Many
Spanish officers, including representatives of General Blanco, now
with us to express sympathy.”
Regardless, two days after the tragedy of the
Maine, William Randolph Hearst sent forth his morning
edition with a definitive yet unsubstantiated headline:
“Destruction of the Warship Maine Was the Work of an Enemy.”
The enemy, the paper clearly illustrated, was the Spanish.
A Spanish officer in Havana held the newspaper up
to Charles Sigsbee. In it, he could see an artistic rendering of
his ship, as she once was, anchored above a Spanish mine. In
another illustration, wires connected the Maine to the
Havana shore.
“What do you think of that?” the Spanish officer
asked.
Still irritated that the Havana newspapers had been
unfair to him in the past, Sigsbee remarked, “If the American
newspapers gave more than the news, the Spanish newspapers gave
less than the news: It was a question of choice.”
Tensions in Havana flared over the next few days as
separate American and Spanish inquiries studied the remains of the
Maine. Sigsbee watched helplessly as divers picked through
his capsized ship and bodies were recovered. More was at stake than
just the destruction of a U.S. Navy vessel and loss of
seamen.
In fact, the issue of disease had become yet
another facet of imperialism. Bacteriology had been dominated by
Germany and France, but tropical medicine became medicine’s new
frontier for England and the United States. Colonizing Africa,
India and the Americas would be impossible without controlling the
fevers so deadly to white settlers. What’s more, medicine itself
began to take on an imperialist slant—if disease spawned and spread
from tropical countries like Cuba, it was America’s responsibility
to step in and clean them up for the sake of American health. As
Robert Desowitz, a professor of tropical medicine, wrote: “An
undercurrent of opinion had long held that the United States should
take over Cuba for medical reasons, a yellow fever cleansing. The
sinking of the Maine was just the ticket to do so.”
In this spirit, Americans vehemently debated the
question of Cuba over dinner tables, in men’s clubs, even from the
pulpit. News of Spanish concentration camps and starving Cuban
prisoners softened American sentiment toward intervention, the
prospect of sugar softened economic reasoning, and the thought of
toppling a smug European presence just seemed appealing in
general.
As the Maine—and national pride—erupted in
flames and sank into a watery grave in the Havana harbor, America
had its battle cry. The cause of the explosion would be publicly
debated in the weeks following the tragedy, and well into the next
century. A 1976 examination of the USS Maine’s records
finally resolved that the explosion, an internal one, most likely
resulted from spontaneous combustion: The coal had been located
dangerously close to the ammunitions magazine. In the three years
before the Maine steamed into the Cuban port, a number of
other vessels reported fires in the coalbunker. In 1898, however,
the United States Court of Inquiry found a different cause: An
enemy mine situated under the bottom of the ship.
If the reason for war with Cuba was not immediately
evident, it soon found its clarity in the publications of William
Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. In the end, the
Spanish-American War would be the most popular war this country
ever fought. While only 1 in 6 soldiers would make it into combat,
200,000 volunteers boarded trains and waited in American military
camps hoping to go. The war would be won in just 113 days,
liberating Cuba, adjoining Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to
the United States.
In spite of this, the war would cost more lives
than ever expected. Over 2,500 American soldiers would be lost—not
to the Spanish, but to disease. Only 385 would actually die in
action. With far more volunteers than there were accommodations to
hold them, soldiers crowded into American camps hoping to make it
to Cuba before the fighting ended or before typhoid or dysentery
picked them off one by one.
Conditions in Cuba were no better, where not only
typhoid, dysentery and malaria ran rampant but also yellow fever.
As fever season encroached, one soldier wrote that taps was played
continuously in the camp: “The volleys became more frequent and one
bugle followed another throughout the day; they followed each other
almost as if they were but echoes among the hills about us.”
Eventually, the camps had to stop playing taps for dead soldiers
because the unceasing bugle notes brought down general
morale.