B IBLIOTECA DE PROBLEMAS

CARL CAVANAGH HODGE

P

ower, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Between 1898 and 1905 the United States and Japan filled vacuums of power, the first occasioned by a revolt against the colonial regime of Spain in the Caribbean, the second by the fail-ing hold of China’s Qfail-ing dynasty on Korea and Manchuria. The resultfail-ing Spanish-American and Russo-Japanese Wars represent pivotal conflicts between declining and emerging powers at the dawn of the twentieth century. Because in each case naval capacity was fundamental to victory, these conflicts accelerated the global naval arms race and intensified great-power competition in the decade leading to World War I. Additionally, both wars involved the application of maritime strategy, defined loosely in a classic of the time as “the principles which govern a war in which the sea is a substantial factor.”¹

A Mania Born in America

Navalism, the idea that possession of an oceanic navy constitutes an essential at-tribute of great-power status, was a strategic vogue of the late nineteenth century.² It was legitimated intellectually by, above all, the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan, who argued that the sea power of Great Britain had provided it with both security and a command of ocean lanes sufficient to make it the preeminent global power.³ American navalists ultimately succeeded in launching the United States on a cen-tury of expanding sea power owing to the catalyst of the Spanish-American War and the political consensus that Theodore Roosevelt crafted as president in the years directly following.⁴ Victory in that war projected the United States into the western Pacific and changed its relationship with another emerging naval power, Japan, fundamentally. Mahan’s philosophy of sea power may in fact have exerted its most profound influence on the oligarchs of Japan’s Meiji regime. Ever since Com-modore Matthew C. Perry’s ships had sailed into Edo Bay in 1853, Japan had been painfully aware of its vulnerability to seaborne aggression. Naval weakness was prominent among the factors favoring the toppling of the shōgunate by means of the restoration of the Meiji emperor, a state-sponsored drive toward industrializa-tion and administrative raindustrializa-tionalizaindustrializa-tion. After 1898 the appearance of the U.S. Navy

152 NEW INTERPRETATIONS IN NAVAL HISTORY

in the Philippines lent intellectual coherence to the arguments of Japanese navalists in pressing the case for a modern navy.⁵

Characteristic of American strategic ambition in the nineteenth century, by contrast, was a precocity outrunning capacity. Before and after the Civil War the United States articulated sphere-of-interest doctrines it could redeem only with the convergence of luck and circumstance.⁶ With the crisis of Spanish colonialism in Cuba, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 required an American response; the news of the repression of rebellion in Cuba stirred public opinion in the United States to such a froth of indignation that Progressive sentiment demanded an application of righteous might for which the United States of 1898 was ill prepared.⁷ When President William McKinley asked Congress to authorize the use of force to protect American interests, the legislature exceeded him with a joint resolution declaring Cuba sovereign and demanding the withdrawal of Spanish troops.⁸ The opportun-ism in evidence here was present also in Japan’s much larger war with Russia, 1904–

1905, if not in the invocation of a humanitarian cause then certainly in the choice of an adversary against whom national capabilities could be tested. Although a com-parison of the apprenticeship of American and Japanese naval power in these con-flicts recommends itself for this reason alone, lessons learned and not learned in the prosecution of the wars tell us a good deal about the nature of emerging Pacific rivalry between the United States and imperial Japan over the following decades.

States of Readiness

By the 1890s both Spain and tsarist Russia were ripe for humiliation at the hands of more-vigorous states. The Spanish fleet had never recovered from its joint defeat (with that of Napoleonic France) under the cannon of the Royal Navy off Cape Trafalgar in October 1805. That the Spanish navy of 1898 was no longer capable of battle with a first-rank power was revealed in the opening gambit of the war with the United States, not in the Caribbean, but in the western Pacific, where a second-rate power defeated it with aplomb.⁹ Japan’s foe of 1904, Russia, was a vastly more capable state than Spain yet only circumstantially able to prevail in a war with Japan in Korea and Manchuria. Prominent among Russia’s liabilities was the nature of the tsarist regime, which made Russian Far Eastern policy ambiguous, its attitude to the prospect of war with Japan casual, and the prosecution of the war uncertain.

By the 1870s Meiji Japan had by contrast developed a variant of parliamentary government, a professional bureaucracy, independent courts, armed forces with universal conscription, and an education system dedicated to literacy and numer-acy.¹⁰ Japan’s immediate foreign-policy concern was the waning of the Qing dynasty in China and its implications for Korea and Manchuria, especially the prospect of European predations on the Asian mainland following the defeat of the Boxer Rebellion—a concern heightened by subsequent Russian behavior in signing a convention with China over Manchuria yet failing to abide by its commitment to

GREAT-POWER APPRENTICESHIPS 153

withdraw some two hundred thousand troops from the region. On the eve of the war with Russia the Imperial Navy had six battleships less than ten years old, seven armored cruisers, and seven protected cruisers of the same age.¹¹ Japan offered to declare Manchuria beyond its sphere of interest if Russia would do the same for Korea, yet it was primed for war before and during the dance of diplomacy. And note: Japan made a formal declaration of war on 10 February 1904, after the navy had sailed on 6 February. During the night of 8–9 February Japanese destroyers launched a torpedo attack on Russian ships anchored at Port Arthur. Troops mean-while occupied Fusan, Masan, and Chinhae Bay, on the south coast of Korea, mean-while the navy supported the landing of troops at the port of Chemulpo, on the west coast. The Combined Fleet’s commander, Vice Adm. Heihachirō Tōgō, had sent the destroyers against the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, while the Second Fleet, under Vice Adm. Sotokichi Uryū, took four cruisers to escort merchant vessels carrying three thousand troops to the Chemulpo landing.¹²

At the time of the Cuban crisis the American republic had only recently begun to strengthen the capacity of government to cope with the economic and social rigors of industrial maturity. One of the ways in which government was to be-come more purposeful was symbolized in the power of the New Navy. When the popular indignation over Spain’s abuse of its colonial subjects turned openly bel-licose following the destruction of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor on 15 February 1898, the U.S. Navy facilitated the coming-out of the United States as a great power.¹³ However, the McKinley administration was not as unified as the Meiji oligarchy of 1904 on the need for war; nor was Congress united on the means to wage it. The condition of the U.S. Army, after all, gave grounds for pause. At the time of the war declaration its strength stood at 28,747 officers and enlisted men, a pale expression of the martial potential of an industrial nation of seventy-three million people. A bill to authorize a force of a hundred thousand men immediately ran into headwinds from congressmen voicing the traditional distrust of a large standing army and from state governors who feared that the constitutional right of states to maintain their own militias might be impaired.¹⁴ A compromise permit-ted the federal army to recruit up to sixty-five thousand men for a period of two years, and an additional bill authorized the president to call for volunteers above that ceiling. McKinley issued a call for 125,000 and was rewarded with mass enthu-siasm, but the expeditionary force thereby raised created a decentralized system of recruiting, uneven standards for training, and “too many men chasing too little equipment, weapons and accommodation.”¹⁵ Logistical ligatures were not up to the sudden demand placed on them.¹⁶ Operational planning was haphazard. The force was assembled to depart from Tampa, Florida, land in the vicinity of Santiago de Cuba, and then assist the Navy in the destruction of the Spanish fleet in the harbor.

Tampa had the advantage of proximity to Cuba, but it was a comparatively small

154 NEW INTERPRETATIONS IN NAVAL HISTORY

port and was more modestly endowed with railway connections than Charleston, South Carolina, or the Gulf cities of Mobile, Alabama, and New Orleans, Louisiana.

The invasion force languished in Tampa Bay for five days, leaving at last on 14 June be-cause of a report that Spanish warships were prowling off the northern coast of Cuba.¹⁷ The Beachheads of Expansion

The war’s first engagement was nonetheless joined in its secondary theater, the Philippines, and that engagement was decisive in the very sense intended by Ma-han’s theory of sea power—aided at every step by the incompetence of the Spanish command at Manila Bay, where Adm. George Dewey sank three Spanish warships and set six ablaze at a cost of negligible damage to his own squadron.¹⁸ In the Carib-bean, American naval power was equally central to the war’s outcome, yet not by virtue of its maritime operations.¹⁹

The invasion convoy sent against Cuba, consisting of twenty-six transport ves-sels and six supply ships carrying 16,058 men, 819 officers, 959 horses, and 1,336 mules, arrived unmolested off Santiago de Cuba on 20 June. Maj. Gen. William Shafter, at the head of the Fifth Army Corps and in command of land operations, thereupon surprised Rear Adm. William Sampson with the news that he intended not to assault the heights at the harbor entrance but rather to land his force at Dai-quirí and strike an inland route toward Santiago de Cuba to capture the city from the rear. The calculation that a landing at Daiquirí would meet with only mod-est resistance was well founded.²⁰ Yet the lack of good docking facilities forced the transports to land the force over the beach, whereas a heavy surf made it impos-sible for them to navigate close to shore, so that supplies were loaded onto boats and ferried to the beach. Heavy artillery intended for attacking the fortifications of Santiago de Cuba was abandoned; the challenge of getting hundreds of horses and mules ashore was answered by pushing them overboard in the hope they would swim there.²¹ Then, in its advance toward Santiago de Cuba the army labored in winter-weight wool against tropical heat, insects, disease, and roads turned to mud by afternoon rains.²²

The critical engagements came at El Caney and San Juan Hill on 1 July. A Span-ish force of 520 under Gen. Joaquín Vara del Rey y Rubio defended the fortified vil-lage of El Caney against some 6,600 Americans commanded by Gen. Henry Ware Lawton. At San Juan Hill the numerical odds were more balanced: 10,400 Span-iards and 8,400 Americans. In both instances the Americans carried the day, but these successes had little to do with a unity of conception or execution. Envisioning the capture of El Caney in no more than two hours, Shafter expected that American force then to march westward and join the right flank of the main attack on the San Juan Heights. The plan unraveled when the Spanish garrison at El Caney offered spirited resistance, so that an action peripheral to the main objective imperiled the operation.²³ An attack on San Juan Hill originally scheduled for 10:00 am did

GREAT-POWER APPRENTICESHIPS 155

not move off until long after noon, delayed waiting for the El Caney force (which would not arrive until the next day); in the meantime the Spanish on the heights poured fire on the Americans below, crouching behind what cover they could find, ridges and small rises. At 1:00 pm Lt. John D. Miley, General Shafter’s aide, seized the initiative. With no order from his superior on when his men should move, he instructed the anxious generals around him to take the heights “at all hazards.”²⁴ They did, but although Shafter had planned then to move on directly against San-tiago de Cuba, his troops were now in no condition to advance farther. Only three thousand of the fifteen thousand men of the American force occupied the position immediately following the assault; they were delirious with exhaustion, had no ar-tillery support, and were thinly strung out along the crest of the San Juan Heights.²⁵ The plan had been too clever. Not that the war’s outcome was in doubt—in 1898, American forces in and around Cuba were going to prevail one way or another. But a national embarrassment due to the comic-opera incompetence of the U.S. Army was eminently possible.

The San Juan engagement so rocked Shafter’s confidence that on 2 July he asked Admiral Sampson, whom only two weeks earlier he had treated as his junior, to launch a naval attack on Morro Castle on the eastern side of the entrance to San-tiago’s harbor and on the Socapa batteries on the opposing side. At this point the Spanish general Ramón Blanco y Erenas informed Adm. Pascual Cervera y Topete that his fleet should sortie from the harbor and run the blockade, as the Americans, having captured the San Juan Heights, were in a position to attack the entrance to the harbor. Happily, this meant that responsibility for the American cause now swung back to the U.S. Navy.²⁶ Of Cervera’s six warships none were battleships and only four were armored cruisers. The heaviest of these, Almirante Oquendo and Vizcaya, displaced only 6,890 tons and would face in the worst scenario Samp-son’s armored cruisers Brooklyn and New York, both of which displaced more than eight thousand tons, and his battleships, Indiana, Iowa, and Oregon, all of which exceeded ten thousand tons. By the time Cervera was ordered to run the blockade, on 3 July, the U.S. North Atlantic Fleet had arrived to reinforce it. Sampson’s ad-vantage in firepower alone might have been decisive—18,847 to 6,014 pounds of broadside—but tactical circumstance compounded his advantage. After a quixotic attempt by the armored cruiser Infanta Maria Teresa to ram Brooklyn, Cervera’s squadron ran westward along the coast and was completely destroyed, at the cost of minor damage to Brooklyn, Texas, and Iowa and one death, against 323 Spanish killed and 151 wounded.²⁷ Following two weeks of siege by Shafter’s army the Span-ish garrison at Santiago de Cuba surrendered, and on 12 August Spain’s representa-tion in Washington agreed to preliminary terms.

As hostilities wound down in Cuba, they graduated to a new stage in the Phil-ippines. In January 1899 a constituent assembly declared the Philippine Republic

156 NEW INTERPRETATIONS IN NAVAL HISTORY

under President Emilio Aguinaldo; because the United States had sought and re-ceived help from Filipino insurgents in the effort against Spain, Aguinaldo rea-soned that Filipinos were owed an assurance against American rule. This assur-ance Maj. Gen. Elwell S. Otis, the U.S. Army’s man on the spot, lacked the political authority to offer. His position was not helped by the McKinley administration’s insistence that the insurgents must submit to the authority of the United States or by instructions that the Army protect people and property only in and around Ma-nila. The first American troops—115 officers and 2,386 enlisted men of what was later designated the Eighth Corps—had arrived in the Philippines in June 1898 and were thereafter reinforced only in trickles, because of a scarcity of transport; when a third contingent arrived on 25 July the force totaled 10,946 officers and men, mostly state militia.

In the meantime, fighting broke out between Aguinaldo’s men and the Ameri-cans in a nighttime skirmish around Manila, during which Dewey’s warships pro-vided artillery support.²⁸ In November Otis was able to hazard an offensive with thirty-five thousand men intended to defeat the Filipino army and occupy the main island of Luzon. The war then entered a difficult guerrilla phase. In early 1900 Gen.

Arthur MacArthur, father of Douglas MacArthur, took over Otis’s command with a determination to coerce respect from the population wherever affection was ab-sent.²⁹ By the end of 1900 MacArthur’s army had reached a total strength of seventy thousand, and the U.S. Navy blockaded foreign arms shipments to the guerrillas.

Isolating rebel units geographically from each other, the Navy facilitated American mobility with an amphibious capacity to land troops anywhere the coast permitted.³⁰

As a result of this apprenticeship in counterinsurgency, the Philippines were destined to assume a central role in American strategic thinking. The U.S. Navy had taken Midway Atoll in 1867; the annexation of Hawaii followed the war with Spain, in 1898. By the outbreak of World War I, Hawaii had been transformed into a major Army and Navy base for the protection of America’s colonial Pacific empire. Still, the Philippines were a possession in the western Pacific, some 6,454 nautical miles from California and 4,612 from Hawaii. Although there were voices raised in Washington that Japan represented a threat to the Philippines, as long as the Meiji regime remained preoccupied with Russian encroachment in Manchuria the regional balance of power was acceptable. The astonishing performance of the Japanese fleet in 1904–1905 overthrew this assumption.³¹

The Japanese attack on Port Arthur in 1904 sought to prevent the main Russian squadron—six battleships and six cruisers—from leaving the harbor to challenge the Japanese seizure of the Yellow Sea and Korea Bay. The Japanese operation has been criticized because its failure to destroy the Port Arthur squadron forced the Combined Fleet to impose a protracted blockade;³² nonetheless, the Imperial Japa-nese Navy had control of the sea around Korea and the Liaodong Peninsula while

GREAT-POWER APPRENTICESHIPS 157

the invading army was put ashore. The shock effect of the preemptive move against Port Arthur became a cornerstone of Japanese strategic culture, an underappreci-ated one until its reappearance in the skies over Pearl Harbor in 1941.³³ With the Russian navy temporarily neutralized, Japan was with ease and speed able to trans-port troops over water to the theater of war and supply them. Additionally, Japan had advantages of seaborne access to Korea similar to those enjoyed by the United States in transporting troops to Cuba, with the difference that its coastline directly across from Korea was studded with fine harbors connected directly by rail with garrisons in the interior.³⁴

By the time the First Army, under the command of Gen. Tamemoto Kuroki, met the tsar’s forces for the first major land engagement of the war, at the Yalu River in late April, it could bring to bear three divisions. This force, composed of two

By the time the First Army, under the command of Gen. Tamemoto Kuroki, met the tsar’s forces for the first major land engagement of the war, at the Yalu River in late April, it could bring to bear three divisions. This force, composed of two

In document INVESTIGACIÓN OPERATIVA (página 139-149)