McKinley spent most evenings during May and June 1898 in the “war room” that had been fashioned just off his office. A top-secret facility that he himself had helped outfit, the chamber served as the command-and-control center from which McKinley, significantly more than any president to date, could view the progress of the war in a primitive version of real time. Technicians had installed a switchboard with twenty telegraph lines connecting him with officers in the field, the navy, and other locations in the Caribbean. Some fifteen telephone lines ran directly to the eight executive departments, as well as to the House and Senate.
After kissing Ida good night and tucking her in, McKinley would often linger in the room until well after 1 A.M., puffing on a cigar and amiably chatting with the telegraph operators who staffed the room around the clock. He would study huge maps hanging from the walls that had been procured by Henry Pritchett. Each was studded with the latest positions of American troops and ships—red pins depicting locations of Spanish forces, white pins showing the Americans. When ideas occurred to him, and they often did, he would leave messages for his secretary on the newly invented Dictaphone.
The first of the white pins on the Cuba map was placed on Guantánamo Bay around June 10, 1898. Some 648 marines had easily taken the harbor, the best on the southeast stretch of the Cuban coast.
Yet the point on the map that most fixated McKinley and his team was the area around Santiago. Here, with the Spanish fleet trapped in the harbor, the United States possessed an opportunity to deliver what might be a fatal strike to the Spanish. Sink the fleet there and Spain would have almost no means of resupplying its troops in Cuba. Even the stubborn generals of the Spanish army would then have to consider suing for peace.
The navy could not maintain a blockade outside Santiago forever, nor root the Spanish ships out on its own, so protected was the harbor’s ocean-facing defense. The army, on the other hand, might be able to wipe Spanish troops off the hills behind the port and attack Santiago from the rear. The Spanish were so vulnerable to a ground attack that Rear Admiral William Thomas Sampson reported that if Washington could send ten thousand men, the city and the fleet could be in American hands within forty-eight hours.1
Getting the army to Cuba was easier said than done. The circus in Tampa was still tripping over itself and unready to put a force to sea. Pressured by the navy, which took a perverse delight in the army’s misfortunes, as well as his own sense that victory was in his grasp, McKinley fired off a series of messages asking when William Rufus Shafter would be ready to sail. Polite inquiries at first, the presidential correspondence grew increasingly hard edged until he ordered his general to get moving. Even when the portly commander did get his men aboard invasion ships, there were further delays—they lost a week when the navy mistook its own vessels for the enemy.
Not until June 14, 1898, more than three weeks after the Spanish had been spotted in Santiago de Cuba, was the United States finally ready to mount an invasion.2 Some 32 troop transports, 2 water tenders, 3 lighters, and 12 naval escorts containing 819 officers, 15,058 enlisted men, 30 civilian clerks, 89 newspaper reporters, 11 foreign military observers, 272 teamsters and packers, 2,295 horses and mules, 200 wagons, 7 ambulances, and 1 observation balloon set off for a rendezvous with the navy off Santiago. They still had no idea when, where, or how they would launch their attack. They would work that out when they got there.
On June 20, 1898, the American commanders Sampson and Shafter, surrounded by foreign military attachés and journalists, clambered into four small boats alongside the USS Gloucester and headed for a secluded stretch of Cuban coastline at Aserraderos, about twenty miles west of Santiago. The American flotilla had arrived off the southeast coast earlier that morning, greeted enthusiastically by Sampson, who had provided a tour of sorts by steaming slowly back and forth near the mouth of the harbor while Shafter studied the coastal defenses. Now they were heading ashore to meet the commander of the revolutionary forces in eastern Cuba, Calixto García e Iñiguez, for a firsthand assessment of the situation.
As their boats glided over the turquoise water, the Americans were struck by the beauty of the place they had come to liberate, a soft beach backed by craggy, steep hills bursting with lush vegetation. In the distance, they saw their welcoming party, rebels who had waded into the surf. Water glistening over their dark skin, the men waved excitedly at the approaching Americans. As each craft softly ground into the shallow bottom, the Cubans ran into the surf and hoisted the boats aloft, Americans still sitting in their seats, and carried them through the remaining stretch of water to the dry beach where mules were already waiting for them.3
Up a steep, rugged, twisting trail the group went, horses nervously placing each hoof so as not to slip, no animal more uncomfortable than the one assigned to the rotund Shafter, which gave “profound groans of anguish during its ascent.”4 The heat was hard to bear, especially for Shafter, who not only carried at least a hundred pounds he didn’t need, but was also clad in a dark blue army uniform. All were relieved when their group arrived at a clearing, in the middle of which stood the thatched hut of the rebel commander García.
Tall and almost majestic with his high riding boots, white mustache, and balding head, García had dreamed of this moment for decades. He had fought in three uprisings against the Spanish dating back to 1868 and bore the scars to prove it. Once, to avoid capture as a young man, he had tried to kill himself by firing a heavy revolver under his chin. The bullet traveled through his mouth and exited the center of his forehead, but miraculously García survived, aided by two Spanish surgeons who took a “professional interest” in his case.5 Well traveled—he had visited Paris and New York and could speak English well—García fancied himself a loyal and valuable ally for the Americans.
Spreading maps out on a rough table, the Cuban pointed with a strong finger at the place where he thought the Americans should land, settling a disagreement between Shafter and Sampson. The Spanish, García said, had only lightly defended the eastern shore around Daiquirí, a small village with a rickety old dock on a shallow indentation on the coastline. It would, he said, make a serviceable landing area. García also suggested attempting a second site, about five miles to the west at the village of Siboney. After an hour of suffering in the heat, the men shook hands and the newcomers made their way back down the trail to the ship.6
As the Americans thanked their rebel escorts and climbed into their boats, the two groups parted with vastly different ideas of their respective roles in the coming battle. The misunderstanding would prove disastrous for the Cubans.
The American landing on June 22, 1898, was carried out with all the good-hearted bumbling that characterized the war effort back home. Waiting aboard the “prison hulks,” as the cramped transports were called, the soldiers sang songs and called out to passing boats, begging to be taken ashore. Wearing heavy blue flannel shirts and wide-brimmed hats, their long bedrolls tightly tied and slung over their left shoulders, the men were carried to the beach in rows of small boats pulled by a slow-moving steam launch and would have been easy pickings for a crack shot. Yet to everyone’s relief, no Spaniards were to be found, likely scared off by an early morning naval bombardment or the presence of 1,500 rebels nearby. “The country would have offered very great difficulties to an attacking force,” Roosevelt said. “It was little but a mass of rugged and precipitous hills, covered for the most part by dense jungle. Five hundred resolute men could have prevented the disembarkation at very little cost to themselves.”7
Faulty logistics planning made the risk even greater. The ship that transported the Rough Riders from Havana promptly sailed away after unloading the men, leaving Roosevelt with only a yellow mackintosh, a toothbrush, and the extra pairs of glasses he had sewn into the linings of his tunic and hat. No provision had been made for transporting animals ashore, and dozens were simply herded off the transport ships for a swim of several hundred yards to the beach. Several of the first horses to disembark immediately became confused and began swimming out to sea, among them Roosevelt’s own horse, Rain-in-the-Face, which drowned. A quick-thinking bugler helped prevent further losses when he guided the horses back to land by playing familiar tunes such as “Stables,” “Boots and Saddles,” “Four Right,” and “Charge.”
Among the rifles, rations, and gear that American troops waded ashore with that morning were Spanish phrase books that their officers had distributed in the hopes of fostering happy relations with the Cuban rebels they would soon meet. The men earnestly practiced simple greetings and basic questions that, even if delivered in an incomprehensibly thick American accent, would show their hearts were in the right places. Yet no sooner did they lay eyes on their new allies than their optimistic faces dropped.
The rebels on the beach were not at all what the U.S. soldiers expected. Oddly believing they were rescuing people just like themselves, many found the rebels’ skin a few shades too dark for their liking. The men of the junta, the public face of the revolutionary movement in the United States, were largely of Spanish origin, a suntanned pigment. But here in the east of Cuba, most were ex-slaves from Africa, just like the ones the men knew in the Deep South.
The Americans might have eventually gotten over their initial prejudices, but they quickly decided that the rebels’ conduct also left much to be desired. Clothed in rags that suggested little more than the “outline of a jacket or trousers,” few seemed to bathe regularly, and their hair was dirty and ragged. Over and over, American troops would complain that the rebels looked “disgusting.” One member of the Massachusetts Volunteers later wrote, “They are a filthy, indolent, thievish, immoral set, and it is a burning shame.”8
Nor did the Cubans endear themselves with the way they interacted with their “liberators.” British journalist John Black Atkins noted: “The Cuban insurgent regarded every American as a kind of charitable institution, and expected him to disgorge on every occasion. The Cuban was continually pointing to the American’s shirt, coat, or trousers, and then pointing to himself, meaning that he desired a transfer of the property.”9
One clash in particular irked the Americans, accounts of which quickly spread around their campfires. Several U.S. soldiers had happened upon a bull in Siboney and were about to humanely shoot it for food. But before they could, a handful of Cubans arrived and “stabbed and stabbed” it with their knives till it fell. “ ‘Why,’ they [the Americans] asked in effect, ‘should we fight for men like these? They are no better than the Spaniards.’ ”10
Such sentiments spread right up the chain of command. Roosevelt, upon meeting the insurgents, decided immediately they would be of no help in the actual fighting, describing them as “a crew of utter tatterdemalions as human eyes ever looked on, armed with every kind of rifle in all stages of dilapidation.”11 A major in the Ninth Cavalry said, “The Cubans in my opinion are not worth fighting for.”
The harshest blow to proud García was Shafter’s plan for integrating the rebels in battle. Having assumed that his men would fight shoulder to shoulder with the Americans, García was devastated to learn that Shafter planned nothing more glorious for his men than carrying supplies and digging trenches.12 For an army, however ragged, that had been fighting for years, it was a humiliating affront, especially when delivered by greenhorns who, if entrusted with a machete, might have been a greater danger to themselves than to the Spanish. His temper up, García fired off a note to Shafter stating that his men would not be used as “pack animals” and were too weak from months of fighting to be reduced to carrying heavy loads.
Understandable sentiments though they were, the rebuff marked the first misstep in what became a public relations disaster for the Cubans. American newspaper reporters, no doubt with American officers whispering in their ears, interpreted García’s complaints as a sign of laziness and ingratitude. From that moment on, nearly every effort by the revolutionaries to help with the invasion was spun in the worst terms or simply ignored.
Viewing each other with suspicion and derision, the two “allies” prepared for the march to the city of Santiago de Cuba.
On the afternoon of June 30, 1898, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph E. Maxfield gave the order for his small support team to twist the valves on tubes of hydrogen gas and watched his silk balloon gradually take shape. The pilot of the army’s sole observation balloon, Maxfield would soon ascend to one thousand feet, a vantage point from which he could reconnoiter the San Juan Heights, the sloping hills where the Spanish and Americans would settle their dispute.
From Maxfield’s balloon, the coming battlefield was a postcard of tropical beauty. To the left were the glistening swells of the turquoise Caribbean, ships of the blockading American fleet plainly visible. Ahead he could see San Juan Heights, principally consisting of San Juan Hill, a 125-foot summit crowned with a Spanish blockhouse, a small valley to the right with a pond at the base, and another rise that would become known as Kettle Hill for the sugar-making equipment that stood at its top. Both hills were well suited for defense, their flanks largely brown and barren, a scene that reminded some of the summer orchards of Orange County, California. Along each hill, the Spanish had prepared reinforced trenches, in places two or three rows of them, most fringed with strings of barbed wire.
Everywhere else, however, the jungle was thickly grown over. General Adna Chaffee, a veteran of the Indian wars, described it as a “sea of brush that was thicker, more dense, more difficult to penetrate than any place I had ever seen in my life. This brush is high and so thick as to exclude the circulation of air.”13 Dividing the jungle from the more barren slopes of the hills was the steeply banked, waist-deep San Juan River.
Gazing further to his right, Maxfield could see the red roofs and yellow walls of the tiny village of El Caney, where the sixteenth-century explorer Hernán Cortés was supposed to have prayed the night before he sailed for Mexico, but now was guarded by half a dozen blockhouses and trenches. Atop a nearby hill stood the sturdy stone church that the Spanish had turned into a formidable fort called El Viso.
Shafter’s plan of attack was remarkable only for its optimism. One division led by Brigadier General Henry Ware Lawton was to charge on El Caney, securing the Americans’ right flank. Then, after what was assumed would be no more than two hours, Lawton was to wheel his men around to join the main assault on the heights, where two divisions under the command of Brigadier General Jacob Kent and Major General Joseph Wheeler’s Cavalry Division would have launched attacks of their own. García and the rebels were to block roads leading to the battlefield, preventing nearby Spanish reinforcements from joining the attack. By the afternoon the Americans would be looking down on Cervera’s ships and the city of Santiago, demanding the Spanish surrender.
Shafter, gravely ill since coming ashore, believed that his overwhelming numbers and his artillery could carry the day. Indeed, in one skirmish on the road to the heights, the Spanish had fled when they saw superior American forces. Some 5,400 Americans would attack the El Caney fortification, held by just 520 Spaniards under General Joaquín Vara del Rey y Rubio. On the San Juan Heights, the numbers were even more heavily stacked in Shafter’s favor, some 10,000 of the Fifth Corps against a mere 521 Spanish soldiers and two pieces of light artillery.14 Seeing little reason to wait for more men and equipment to be brought up the El Camino from the landing beaches, Shafter gave the order for his men to get ready to attack at shortly after dawn on July 1, 1898.
On June 8, 1898, McKinley took a break from his war planning to celebrate Ida’s birthday. The weight of war notwithstanding, these were happy days for the president. A tremendous mental and physical burden had been lifted now that the suspense was over. Despite the endless days, the pressure, and the undeniable fact that, deprived of exercise, he was hopelessly out of shape, he wrote his sister Helen that he was “standing the hard work better than I ought to have any right to expect.”
Most evenings McKinley would try to make time to walk for an hour or so around the White House grounds. Forced to host only a handful of obligatory social events during the spring and summer, he was able to spend evenings much as he liked, with Ida and in the company of close friends. Though the fighting in Cuba was just about to start, the glow of Dewey’s victory still shone brightly over the White House. Congratulations still echoed, and the threat of a protracted and bloody battle with the Spanish seemed to be subsiding.
In the newspapers that he read each day and from friends in Congress, it was becoming evident that the country was coming over to his way of thinking. His earlier reluctance to declare war was forgiven, in fact even admired as the work of a skilled statesman. As The Chicago Times-Herald wrote, “We find that we want the Philippines.… The commercial and industrial interests of America, learning that the islands lie in the gates of the vast and underdeveloped markets of the Orient, say ‘Keep the Philippines. We also want Porto Rico.… We want Hawaii now.… We want the Carolines, the Ladrones, the Pelew, the Mariana groups.’ … Much as we may deplore the necessity for territorial acquisition, the people now believe that the United States owes it to civilization to accept the responsibilities imposed upon it by the fortunes of war.”15
Indeed, McKinley now moved closer to scoring another long-sought victory, this one not on some distant shore, but on the floors of Congress. The campaign to annex Hawaii, repulsed in its first attempt and driven into hiatus in the run-up to war, had suddenly come back to life and was gaining a certain sense of inevitability. Arguments that the United States needed Hawaii as a way station in the Pacific—once theoretical—were gaining a fresh urgency now that an American fleet was anchored in Manila Harbor and American boys were on their way there. The first U.S. ships bound for the Philippines had stopped in Honolulu for several days, a logistical necessity that Hawaiian president Sanford Dole had used to curry American favor by throwing luaus and lavish dinners for the soldiers. And that was to say nothing of the territorial ambition that had infected every corner of American society. Even McKinley was adopting the slogan of the day: “We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is Manifest Density.”16 When the Hawaiian annexation bill was brought before the House in mid-June, it was approved by a wide margin, 209 to 9. The Senate passed it 42 to 21 and on July 7, 1898, McKinley signed Hawaiian annexation into law.
A low mist clung to the San Juan Heights in the early hours of July 1, 1898, slowly burning off as the sun rose over the hills to the east. The sounds of the jungle filled the morning air—loud complaining birds and the rustle of broad-leafed plants that had been soaked by rain.
During the night, American troops had wheeled artillery into position and amid the peaceful scene made final preparations to begin their attack. At six thirty the first of Captain Allyn Capron’s men jerked on their firing lanyards and in an instant the still morning was shattered by the roar of cannons, their throaty reports reverberating throughout the valley. At El Pozo, the other main U.S. battery, Captain George Grimes, “who had the bespectacled air of a professor,” opened fire on San Juan Hill shortly thereafter, thick black smoke belching from each cannon as the shells were launched toward their targets. Shafter had hoped this opening barrage would soften up the Spanish and clear the way for the Americans to make their advance, uphill and across open terrain. It was to be the first of many miscalculations this day.
Capron’s guns, positioned more than a mile away, failed even to startle the Spanish. The old stone fort he targeted was hardly damaged at all,17 and the surrounding forms of Spanish soldiers crouching in trenches were so unmoved by the firing that American soldiers joked they must have been dummies. Grimes’s cannons were, if anything, less effective. The smoke they emitted only made it easier for Spanish gunners to zero in on them with their own, more advanced, smokeless cannons. Peering toward the Spanish lines, it appeared to American reporters and artillerymen to be all too easy for the enemy. First they noticed a “tiny ring of bluish smoke” and an instant later, the “vicious scream of shrapnel” as a shell burst over their heads, fragments striking the Cubans and Rough Riders who had unwisely gathered nearby.18 After less than an hour, Grimes halted fire. And so, with an inauspicious start, the battle for Cuba began.
According to plan, Major General Lawton and his men had maneuvered around El Caney the night before and now surrounded the area on three sides. He had a scant 120 minutes to lead his force uphill and take four wooden blockhouses, a church in the village—the sturdy El Viso—as well as numerous trenches. Undisturbed by the artillery, however, the Spanish easily cut down the first troops who emerged into the open with their accurate Mausers, a smoke-free weapon that made it nearly impossible for the Americans to determine the exact location of the Spanish marksmen. There was little Lawton’s troops could do but throw themselves to the ground and attempt to slither up the hill in the tall grass, hardly the banzai charge that Shafter had hoped would send the Spanish fleeing.
At the main point of attack, opposite the San Juan Heights, the Americans still had to make a tortuous one-mile trek through the jungle, cross the San Juan River, and then somehow spread out on the fringe of the exposed banks of San Juan and Kettle hills, where they were to wait for the order to advance. It would have been hard enough, but Maxfield’s observation balloon, floated aloft along the same trail, provided an unmistakable guide to the Americans’ position. “Why it was ever taken to such a position nobody knows, but there it was—huge, fat, yellow, quivering—being dragged straight into a zone of fire that would surely ruin it,” one journalist wrote.19
When the Americans emerged from the jungle and tried to fan out at the foot of the hills, they were hit hardest, try though they would to conceal themselves in folds in the ground or in the tall grass. More men would die here, trying to hide in the brush and wondering what was going on with their commanders, than in any other place during the war.
The brigade led by Colonel Charles Wikoff suffered the most. Crossing the San Juan a little past noon, Wikoff was trying to position his men along the riverbank when he was shot through the chest. He died within fifteen minutes. Lieutenant Colonel William Worth did his best to take over, but he, too, was gravely wounded, as was Lieutenant Colonel Emerson Liscum when he assumed command.20
To the right, things were no better for Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, who had taken up positions in a sunken lane in front of Kettle Hill. Smartly attired in his custom-made khaki Brooks Brothers uniform trimmed with a blue polka-dot scarf, Roosevelt was much impressed by the Spanish fire. “The Mauser bullets drove in sheets through the trees and tall jungle grass, making a peculiar whirring or rustling sounds; some of the bullets seemed to pop in the air,” he later wrote.21
Among Roosevelt’s Rough Riders was Captain Bucky O’Neil, who believed officers should never display fear. Paying scant regard to the enemy, he calmly moved among the troops casually smoking a cigarette. As O’Neil strutted back and forth, his men implored him to take cover. Addressing one plea, O’Neil removed his cigarette long enough to blow a puff of smoke and laugh. “Sergeant, the Spanish bullet isn’t made that will kill me.” Several minutes later, however, exactly one such round tore into his mouth and exited the back of his head, “so that even before he fell his wild and gallant soul had gone out into the darkness.”22
By 2 P.M., Shafter, still very much sick and attempting to manage the battle from a cot, had grown so frustrated with the attack at El Caney, where troops had just taken a two-hour break, that he ordered Lawton to withdraw and support the main attack on San Juan Heights. Lawton ignored the command, fearing a blow to morale and yet more casualties. The entire battle teetered on disaster.
Throughout the afternoon, however, the Americans repositioned themselves for a fresh assault. Capron and his men, who had earlier failed in their bombardment, were wrestling their cannons over the rough terrain to better positions from which to fire on El Viso. At about the same time, American sharpshooters worked their way close enough to Spanish trenches to finally hit the riflemen.
The combined effect would sow panic into the Spanish lines. Shells from Capron’s booming cannons devastated the walls of El Viso, blowing off heavy chunks of rock and masonry. It was finally the break the Americans needed. Sergeants called on their men to fire faster, and “Remember the Maine!” echoed above the din of battle. Troops moved closer still until General Adna Chaffee ordered the Twelfth Infantry to get to their feet and charge the Spanish position. Jumping over wire fences and leaping trenches “like a hive of angry bees,” the Americans swarmed up the hill toward El Viso.23
A gruesome scene awaited them. A dozen Spaniards lay dead on the floor, their blood splattered on the walls. Outside, body parts littered the ground. Along one trench, a string of men lay with bullet holes in their heads, their brains leaking out “like white paint from a color tube.”24
With the remainder of the Spanish force running for their lives, the Americans cavorted “like school boys, cheering and waving their hats.” Now occupying the high ground, the Americans could pour down fire on the blockhouses and village, one round shattering the skull of wounded Spanish general Vara de Rey as his men tried to pull him to cover. By 3:45 the fighting at El Caney was over. Of the original 514 Spaniards at El Caney, only 103 made it back to Santiago, the rest killed or taken prisoner. The Americans lost 441 men—81 killed and 360 wounded.25 It was a terrible price for a sideshow to the real attack.
The final charge up San Juan and Kettle hills, one of the most celebrated events in American military history, is depicted in drawings as a heroic rush of unified lines, swords drawn, a flag carrier leading a solid mass of men. Nothing could be further from the truth. Journalist Richard Harding Davis watched the charge. “I think the thing which impressed one the most, when our men started from cover, was they were so few. It seemed as if someone had made an awful and terrible mistake. One’s instinct was to call them to come back,” he wrote. The men moved forward laboriously, “slipping and scrambling in the smooth grass, moving forward with difficulty, as though they were wading waist high through water, moving slowly, carefully, with strenuous effort.”26
Foreign attachés, observing from behind American lines, were aghast. “It is very gallant, but very foolish,” one said. “Why, they can’t take it you know!” But on they came. “It was a miracle of self-sacrifice, a triumph of bull-dog courage, which one watched breathless with wonder. The fire of the Spanish riflemen, who still stuck bravely to their posts, doubled and trebled in fierceness, the crests of the hills crackled and burst in amazed roars, and rippled with waves of tiny flame. But the blue line crept steadily up and on.”27
The next few moments defined the reputation of the young Colonel Roosevelt. Displaying a level of bravery that bordered on foolishness, he led his men from the saddle of his horse, Texas, up the slopes of Kettle Hill. Clearly an officer and a prized target, Roosevelt ignored the whizzing Mauser bullets that struck the earth around him and exhorted his men to speed their charge. One bullet grazed his elbow, and Texas was hit several times. Proximity to Roosevelt could prove fatal. Coming across one soldier sheltering behind a small bush, Roosevelt shouted, “Are you afraid to stand up when I am on horseback?” Before Roosevelt could finish bawling him out, the man pitched forward, felled by a round likely intended for the colonel.
The Spanish, holding the crest of Kettle Hill all morning, might have been able to repulse the American rush. But whether intimidated by the charge or intending to clear the way for an artillery barrage, they decided to make a run for it. By the time the Rough Riders and members of the Ninth Cavalry, an African American unit, reached the summit, the Spanish trenches were empty.
The simultaneous battle on San Juan Hill also now tilted in the American favor, thanks in large part to Lieutenant John Parker, a free-thinking West Pointer who arrived at the front with a new weapon that even his commanders did not fully appreciate how to employ in combat. Parker realized that the long-range modern rifles forced cannons to remain too far off their targets, greatly reducing their accuracy and effectiveness. Gatling guns, however, could be used in close support of the infantry, providing them with the covering fire they needed to make their rush on the hilltops of the San Juan Heights. “Machine guns, with a fire equivalent each to a regiment of sharpshooters, were a decisive and controlling factor, completely taking the now impossible function of artillery and performing it better than artillery ever did in history,” Parker later boasted.28 From a range of six hundred to eight hundred yards, Parker’s Gatlings raked the rim of the Spanish trenches for eight minutes. One Spanish officer later said, “It was terrible when your guns opened—always. They went b-r-r-r, like a lawn mower cutting the grass over our trenches. We could not stick a finger up when you fired without getting it cut off.”29
At around the same time, Roosevelt, standing atop Kettle Hill, joined the attack on San Juan Hill, crossing the small valley that connected the two rises. Stepping over a wire fence, Roosevelt called on his men to advance and set off at a run, fully expecting to lead a swarm of yelling soldiers into the Spanish flank. Yet after one hundred yards he turned around to find only five men with him. Scampering back to Kettle Hill, ready to curse his cowardly troops, he learned his command had been drowned out by battle. Trying a second time, Roosevelt led the group helter-skelter up the side of San Juan Hill, arriving at its summit to find that most of the Spanish had already fled.
By late afternoon, the Americans held all of the San Juan Heights. In the entire battle, they lost 225 dead and 1,384 wounded, 10 percent of their force. The officer corps was especially hard hit, with 22 dead and 94 wounded. Far from invigorated, the Americans were physically spent. Only three-quarters of a mile from Santiago, they didn’t have the strength to finish the job. Indeed, Shafter doubted his men could even hold the hilltops for which they had just so dearly paid.