The Emergence of American Amphibious Warfare, 1898–1945. David S. Nasca
the Gulf Coast or the eastern seaboard of the United States.78 Once naval dominance was established around these islands, the U.S. Navy conducted reconnaissance and shaping operations to prepare the operational battlespace for invasion. The U.S. Navy did possess Marine detachments, but they were simply not enough to project military power ashore. American military forces in theater had to wait until either the U.S. Army was mobilized and trained for the upcoming invasion or additional Marine units were raised and deployed from the continental United States.
The U.S. Army’s leadership quickly took the lead in organizing the mobilization of an all-volunteer expeditionary force to conquer Cuba and Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, the U.S. Army took a long time to mobilize and concentrated its units in Florida in preparation to deploy as the expeditionary force.79 In addition, the U.S. Army did not have a long history of conducting amphibious warfare—only, to a limited extent, during the American Civil War with the capture of major ports along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts in the South as well as controlling the Mississippi River. Unfortunately, that was many years previously, and the U.S. Army did not yet appreciate the importance of amphibious operations; instead, it focused on physical conditioning and basic training, especially with an emphasis on marksmanship, field craft, hand-to-hand combat, animal husbandry, and horsemanship. Meanwhile, officer and noncommissioned officer leadership was in short supply within the regular forces and, as a result, had to be supplemented with ad hoc selections of potential officers based on past military leadership, education, physical fitness, character, and leadership potential. While officers and noncommissioned officers were drafted from the ranks, they received training in military leadership, tactics, organization, logistics, and administration. Unfortunately, when it came to embarking the large military force onto ships in preparation for amphibious operations in Cuba and Puerto Rico, Major General Shafter from Port Tampa, Florida, notified the Adjutant General of the United States Army in Washington, DC, that he encountered numerous difficulties in loading men, equipment, and animals onto the ships and that the infrastructure to move the expeditionary force from the camps to the ships made quick loading impossible.80
By June 1898, the United States was positioned to launch the final part of its war with Spain. While the U.S. Navy quickly destroyed Spanish naval forces, Spain’s colonial garrison had time to dig in and fortify its positions in both Cuba and Puerto Rico, while in the Pacific, the Philippines was threatening to drift into chaos. In these hostile, uncertain conditions, the United States’ ground and naval forces were making final preparations for destroying Spanish colonial forces and seizing control of the Caribbean. In the American military leadership’s assessment of the intelligence reports they were receiving from Cuba and Puerto Rico, the United States was at a severe disadvantage in that they would be landing troops on a hostile shore against enemy forces that had had years to prepare and fortify their positions against potential invasion. Through practicality and the technology it currently had on hand, the American military began its first steps in modernizing amphibious warfare and adapting the tools and opportunities offered by the Second Industrial Revolution.
Technological Influences on the United States Military and Its Impact on Amphibious Warfare
The Spanish-American War was the first major war the United States fought overseas. Despite having fought against Great Britain, France, and even the Barbary States, these conflicts were either waged mostly at home within the United States or on international waters. Unfortunately, the United States did not have a great success rate in winning overseas conflicts, since these conflicts were either open-ended affairs or else ended in a stalemate. In addition, the wars fought on the North American continent depended on the national welfare of the United States and were against weaker, less organized opposition, as seen in its victories over the American Indians and Mexico. Meanwhile, the American Civil War was a matter of national survival, and the performance from both the North and South during that conflict was observed by the major European powers as simply uninspired and amateurish at best.
The war with Spain, just like previous conflicts involving the United States, caught the Americans at a disadvantage in terms of training, experience, and planning. In fact, according to Graham A. Cosmas’ study of American military capabilities during the Spanish-American War, American military planners discovered they had an acute shortage of shipping, personnel, and facilities to support the immediate deployment of an American expeditionary force to the Caribbean in July 1898. Both Secretary of War Russell Alger and Quartermaster General Marshall Ludington had taken drastic steps to alleviate naval transportation, which included chartering not only every available American steamship and ocean-going vessel in the Gulf of Mexico, but also going as far as to recruit foreign vessels as well.81 Since the United States had not yet taken the time to fully explore how much war had changed in the nineteenth century, the American republic’s reactions were the typical knee-jerk response (as in past conflicts) to ensure it could quickly close the gap militarily with the opposition. However, unlike its previous wars, the United States was better positioned industrially, scientifically, and financially to push for significant changes in its country’s military forces as well as to utilize the tools and weapons to help the American expeditionary forces succeed in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Although the United States military went into the Spanish-American War with few technological innovations, the operational environment, combined with the requirements to win the war, encouraged pragmatic thinking and improvisation on the part of the field commanders and troops.
While some of the military leadership in the American forces did serve in the American Civil War and the Indian Wars, the military operations during the Spanish-American War were more or less alien to anything they had experienced before. In addition, the lesson learned from the American Civil War was that the conduct of war was changing and that war was becoming increasingly industrialized and dominated by technology. Jared Diamond explains in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, “Technology’s history exemplifies what is termed an autocatalytic process: that is, one that speeds up at a rate that increases with time, because the process catalyzes itself … that new technologies and materials make it possible to generate still other new technologies by recombination.”82 The technological development and employment from Diamond’s study was best understood by examining how the older military commanders used their American Civil War experience with the rifle and cannon against the Spanish. In addition, technological improvements in steamships, telegraphs, railroads, smokeless gunpowder, and increasingly powerful artillery made it clear that the complexity and operation of these tools of war required specific training, discipline, and specialization in order for the American military to succeed.
In the case of amphibious warfare, not much had changed in its applications throughout military history. In fact, it continued to stagnate and was really still an ad hoc operation that depended on luck and leadership for its success. Even during the Spanish-American War, amphibious warfare was conducted much as it had been forty years earlier during the American Civil War. Despite the United States’ significant industrial advantages over Spain, military practical experience and knowledge in such operations had atrophied, especially when the missions of both the Army and Navy went their separate ways. The lack of cooperation between the Army and Navy became apparent during the planning and execution of landing American ground forces on Cuba. According to Alfred T. Mahan, the movement of American ground forces from Tampa to Cuba was essential to the war’s success, but required the U.S. Navy to peel away ships from the blockade as well as assemble the numerous small vessels needed to check the possible harmful activity of the Spanish gunboats along the northern coast and, afterward, at Santiago.83
The debarkation of Fifth Army Corps, under General William R. Shafter, in the vicinity of Daiquiri and Siboney near the Cuban capital of Santiago, was a lesson in patience. The Quartermaster’s Department in 1898 was still not ready for war and required more time. It had to find the landing craft necessary to land the men, guns, and supplies on the enemy beaches. In addition, both the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy did not have any specialized boats for amphibious warfare, which were an essential ingredient in ship-to-shore movements to projecting military power ashore. To compensate for the lack of amphibious boats, the American military had to improvise by making use of the lifeboats and borrowed Navy steam launches. Meanwhile, for the disembarkation, the Quartermaster’s Department had to employ steam lighters from American harbors to supplement the expeditionary