As such, he carried an M1 Carbine rather than a Garand or a Thompson, though he did occasionally make use of a Sten that wound up in his possession. Image : Battle of Manila Bay, 1898.My grandfather was in the divisional artillery, 65th Infantry Division during WW2. In 2009, he cofounded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. Kyle Mizokami is a defense and national-security writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in the Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and the Daily Beast. Like many conventional state-on-state conflicts, the Spanish-American War upset the old order and set the stage for a new one. The handing over of Guam and Philippines would have greater repercussions down the road, as placed the United States on a collision course with another rising, expansionist country: Japan. The defeat of a continental European power, Spain, was a major military accomplishment. The Spanish-American War made the United States a global power. Although Washington granted Cuban independence, it retained a say in Cuban affairs. As a result of the war the United States annexed the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico, and occupied Cuba until 1903. On July 18, the Spanish government sued for peace, and negotiations to end the war ceased on August 12. American forces only grew stronger and Spanish forces only grew weaker, and thanks to the blockade the latter had no prospect of relief. Despite the briefness of the campaign thus far Spain’s defeat was clearly imminent. Navy, Santiago surrendered on the seventeenth. Meanwhile, the Spanish Caribbean Squadron was destroyed on July 2 at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba, and after bombardment by the U.S. Working with indigenous Cuban troops, the Army marched on Santiago and forced a series of battles that, while not entirely successful, demonstrated that Spain’s hold on the island was permanently broken. Marine at Guantanamo Bay and another on the island of Puerto Rico. Army’s Fifth Corps made an unopposed landing east of Santiago. The land campaign started on June 22, as the U.S. The actual war in and around Cuba was brief. ground forces arrived in July, and after token fighting, the Spanish government in the Philippines surrendered. This severed Madrid’s sea lines of communications to the Philippines, and consequently its hold on the entire archipelago. The first action of the war was on May 1 in the Battle of Manila Bay, in which Commodore George Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron quickly defeated the local Spanish fleet and shore defenses. Navy was in better shape, with sufficient ships to take on a blockade/sea control mission around Cuba. With war imminent, the Army and Marine Corps began a rapid buildup during which it was besieged by amateurs and recalled Civil War veterans to regain knowledge on large-scale conventional operations. Following the end of the Civil War, the Army had optimized itself for small-scale insurgency warfare against Native American tribes in the West and had distanced itself from large-scale conventional war. Army consisted of only 28,747 officers and men spread through the country in company-sized formations. Never before had the United States attempted war on such a global scale. The United States was equally ill-prepared. Spain maintained weak naval squadrons in both Cuba and the Philippines, but distance rendered it unable to reinforce either in any meaningful sense. It was not an army capable of fighting a conventional war. An impressive force on paper, in reality it was poorly trained and supplied and more of a garrison force to protect landowners from insurgents. The destruction of the ship, as well as the deaths of 266 sailors, made war inevitable even for those, like President William McKinley, who wished to avoid it.Īt the time war broke out, Spain maintained 150,000 regular ground forces and eighty thousand local militia in Cuba. In Havana harbor at the request of the American ambassador, the Maine was reportedly struck by an underwater mine, although it seems far more likely in hindsight the sinking was the result of an accidental onboard explosion. The sinking of the battleship USS Maine on February 15 was the last straw in a long and increasingly tense series of crises between Washington and Madrid. The march towards war in America was multifaceted: even liberal-minded Americans favored war to liberate Cuba from a brutal military occupation. Americans with an eye toward expanding America’s business interests and even creating an American empire couldn’t help but notice weakly held European colonial possessions in the New World and the Pacific. The admission of Washington State to the Union in 1890 had consolidated America’s hold on the continent. Meanwhile, in North America, the American doctrine of Manifest Destiny had run its course.
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