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The Asiatic Squadron Entered The Mouth Of Manila Bay

On 24 April 1898, two days before the president signed the declaration of war against Spain, Long initiated the action in the Pacific with a cable to Dewey: "War has commenced between the United States and Spain. Proceed at once to the Philippine Islands. Commence operations at once, particularly against the Spanish fleet." Dewey had already been ordered out of neutral Hong Kong by the British governor, whose affectionate postscript bespeaks the depth of Anglo-American sympathy on the eve of the war: "God knows, my dear commodore, it breaks my heart to send you this notification." The Englishman, like many Americans, doubted the Asiatic Squadron's superiority over the Spanish fleet of Admiral Patricio Montojo, but Dewey was confident that his force was "far superior to the Spanish." On 31 March he had written his son, "My squadron is all ready for war and would make short work of the defenses of Manila."

Disdaining China's neutrality, Commodore Dewey anchored in Mirs Bay (Dapeng Wan), a secluded anchorage 30 miles northeast of Hong Kong Island. As soon as the refugee American consul in Manila, Oscar F. Williams, came aboard the flagship Olympia with the latest news, Dewey steamed for the Philippines. Looking for the Spanish squadron, Dewey poked into Subic Bay. It was empty. "Now we have them!" Dewey exclaimed, correctly concluding that Montojo was hiding in Manila.

About midnight on 30 April 1898 the Asiatic Squadron entered the mouth of Manila Bay, 30 miles from the colonial capital. The flagship Olympia was in the van. To the suggestion that one of the supply ships take the lead to detonate any mines in the channel, Dewey curtly replied, "I have waited sixty years for this opportunity. Mines or no mines, I am leading the squadron in myself." His words echoed Farragut's at Mobile Bay and the parallel was self-conscious. "I confess," Dewey later wrote, "I was thinking of him the night we entered Manila Bay and with the conviction that I was doing precisely what he would have done." He did it so well that in the short run, at least, his fame far surpassed his mentor's.

As Dewey had anticipated, his ships struck no operable mines on the way in. By 3:00 A. M. he could see the lights of Manila. The city's heavy guns could have posed a serious danger to Dewey's thinly hulled cruisers, but to save the inhabitants from bombardment by the Americans Admiral Montojo had anchored his seven obsolescent ships well below Manila, in shallow water off the Cavite arsenal. Montojo's flagship, the Reina Christina, displaced 3,520 tons and mounted six 6.2-inch guns. The other Spanish ships were much lighter and mostly wooden-hulled. They were no match for Dewey's principal warriors, the cruisers Olympia, Baltimore, and Boston, all of which carried main batteries of 8-inch guns. The battle was over before it began.

At 5:40 A.M., nattily dressed in a white uniform and golf cap, Dewey leaned over the rail of the pilot house and shouted to the Olympia's skipper, Captain Charles V. Gridley, "You may fire when you are ready, Gridley." For six hours, with a pause to count irreplaceable ammunition, Dewey's ships paraded in column before the anchored Spaniards, blasting them into bloody submission. By a little past noon Montojo had lost his seven warships and approximately four hundred men killed or wounded. The white flag went up over Cavite arsenal. The American ships had experienced limited superficial damage, and seven sailors were wounded. No American died in the battle that had eliminated Spanish naval power in the Pacific, an ignominious end for a proud people whose great explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, commanded the first European ship to reach the Philippines in 1521.

Dewey's work was not done. Manila's impudent shore batteries continued sniping at him until he silenced them with the threat of a bombardment. Then, when the Spanish governor general refused to let him use the cable to notify Washington of his victory, Dewey cut the underwater link with the rest of the world. His messages, carried by a dispatch boat to Hong Kong and then cabled to Europe and the United States, did not reach Washington until 7 May. In the meantime, the rumors flew thick and furious that the Spanish had inflicted heavy damage on his squadron.

The gloom settling over the Potomac was dispersed as if by sunburst with the news of the decisive outcome in Manila Bay. Dewey hats, cigarettes, canes, spoons, candlesticks, and paperweights appeared in every souvenir shop. Theodore Roosevelt notified Dewey: "Every American is in your debt." Senator Henry Cabot Lodge introduced a resolution authorizing bronze medals for all the men who fought at Manila and a jeweled sword from Tiffany's in New York for the newly promoted rear admiral. In the faroff "crooked bay" the newly minted hero wondered if this fame would last: "There must follow other battles in the Atlantic and the glory of triumph in them may surpass that which has come to me."

Meanwhile, he had to consolidate the American position in the Philippines. At any time he could force the Spanish to surrender Manila, but he lacked an occupying force. He therefore established a blockade of Manila while awaiting the arrival of the U. S. Army, en route from San Francisco. He was kept busy monitoring ships of the British, German, and Japanese navies, which had arrived to observe the siege and to be ready if a true power vacuum were created by a sudden American departure. Most troublesome to the commodore was the German Vice Admiral Otto von Diederichs, whose squadron for a time was stronger than Dewey's. The American overreached himself, insisting on a nonexistent right to board and inspect German warships entering the bay, and before the two flag officers reached a procedural accommodation Dewev's latent anti-Germanism had solidified into a paranoia that would affect his policy recommendations for the rest of his life.

Dewey also had to worry about an enemy squadron on its way to Manila from Spain, via the Mediterranean and Suez. The Navy Department reinforced him with two monitors and promises of more modern warships, but the Spanish squadron of Admiral Manuel de la Camara was on paper superior to Dewey's in weight of armor and caliber of gun. This threat evaporated on 9 July with the Spanish government's decision to recall Camara. American preparations for an attack on the Spanish coast by battleships of the now victorious North Atlantic Squadron had sobered Madrid and saved Dewey from embarrassment. Although Camara had reached the Red Sea, Dewey had not developed a plan of operations. It is uncertain whether he intended temporarily to abandon Manila Bay to Camara while rendezvousing with reinforcements coming from San Francisco or to steam south from Manila to intercept Camara while the Spaniard was still encumbered with supply ships.

Once Camara turned back and Dewey reached a modus vivendi with von Diederichs, the commodore had only three competing groups on his hands: the Spanish in Manila, the Filipino insurgents led by Emilio Aguinaldo, and an American army of ten thousand men commanded by General Wesley Merritt. On 4 August Dewey's bluewater force was augmented by the monitor Monterey, a heavily armored low-profile, light-draft weapons platform ideal for attacking large shore batteries from a variety of angles in the shallow waters around Manila. Two days later he .gave the Spanish notice of imminent attack. He and General Merritt negotiated a complicated plan with the Spanish to permit occupation of Manila after nominal facesaving mutual artillery fire and without loss of life, but the arrangement miscarried and two American soldiers were killed approaching the city. Dewey inconsiderately blamed his sister service: "The Spanish carried out their part to the letter. So did my ships; but, as I said before, the army was too brash and rushed in too soon."

With the city successfully occupied by the army on 13 August, Dewey washed his hands of the difficult problem posed by the Filipino insurgents, who understandably thought they had a right to joint occupation of Manila and who distrusted the Americans. Like any American naval officer, he took pride in thinking himself apolitical. Moreover, he was ambivalent about the insurgents' capacity for selfrule. In September an army general reported to the secretary of state that "Admiral Dewey fully concurs" in the view that Aguinaldo and his followers "cannot maintain independence without the help of some strong nation." As an open rupture between the U.S. Army and the insurgents appeared increasingly likely, Dewey became apprehensive. "We don't want a war with them if we can help it and perhaps it would he better to give up the islands rather than have one." It was too late.

The war and its consequences seemed to validate the theories of Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose published writings and correspondence influenced the shapers of strategy. It was Mahan's war in that it permanently wedded the United States Navy to his preferred strategy of capital-ship warfare, the goal of which was command of the seas achieved through decisive engagements between battlefleets. Trafalgar was always his model, as anachronistic as this may have been in 1898.

At the same time that the Spanish-American War permanently transformed the strategy of the United States Navy it also fundamentally altered the geopolitical relationship between the United States and the rest of the world. With Spain's permanent cession of Guam and the Philippine Islands, the forwardmost American naval base in the Pacific was to be in the Philippines, at either Manila Bay or the more defensible Subic Bay. To secure its lines of communications to this island bastion, the United States Navy soon built bases in Hawaii and on Guam. One great question of the coming century would be whether this thin line could be protected against the other new sea power of the Pacific - Imperial Japan.

In the Caribbean, Cuba achieved nominal independence because Congress had appended the Teller Amendment prohibiting American acquisition of the island to the declaration of war. But the United States soon forced Cuba into semiprotectorate status by means of the Platt Amendment to the army appropriations bill of 1901. That device authorized the U. S. Army to maintain order on the island at the same time that the navy was guaranteed a permanent base at Guantanamo Bay. With another naval base in Puerto Rico and a quickening national interest in building a transisthmian canal, the United States was rapidly making the Caribbean an American lake, which the new Mahanian navy would soon have to defend against yet another rising sea power - Imperial Germany.

Kenneth J. Hagan. Not Merely a Navy for Defense. This People's Navy: The Making of American Sea Power. The Free Press. Copyright 1991.

Empire by Default : The Spanish-American War and the Dawn of the American Century Now, moving from the councils of Madrid to the conferences in Washington, from the victory at Manila Bay to the battle of San Juan Hill, from factional in-fighting to inflammatory journalism, prizewinning historian Ivan Musicant offers a dramatic narrative that, in this centenary year, will stand as the definitive account. Step-by-step, Musicant takes the reader through the thicket of arguments and decisions that led to America's almost accidental mantling as an imperial power. Here are the issues and debates, the strategies and obstacles, the ideals, interests, and missed opportunities. Here, too, are the political conflicts of the day - conflicts that America would encounter repeatedly in the century to come and that reveal as much about the flaws in its governmental system as they do about the ambiguities in the nation's vision of itself.

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