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Upon arriving at Guantánamo Bay in 1741, British troops had to go out of their way to stir up an enemy, which, outmanned and underarmed, melted away upon the British arrival. This time, too, the marines seemed to have arrived at a part of Cuba all but abandoned by the Spanish. “We went ashore like innocents,” Huntington wrote, “and made a peachy camp and slept well on the tenth.” Frank Keeler remembered being astounded by the nonchalance of Huntington and his staff. “While we were stacking arms and unloading the ship the Spanish had every chance in the world to close in on us and slaughter or kill everyone,” Keeler wrote in his diary. “To think of the risk we went through makes me angry with our Commanding Officers every time I think of it. The Spanish were laying in the bushes all around watching us and they knew every movement we made even to where our sentry were posted.” Why the Spaniards didn't end the thing then and there is not clear. A captured Spanish prisoner reported that they'd been ordered not to fire until the Americans had unloaded their equipment. “They were hungry,” Keeler wrote, “and wanted our food more than dead Yankees.”
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The Americans set up camp in a small clearing above Fisherman's Point, on the opposite side of the bay from where they had disembarked
a century and a half earlier. Huntington described the clearing in his official report to the marine commandant. “The ridge slopes downward and to the rear from the bay, the space at the top is very small, and all the surrounding country is covered with a thick and almost impenetrable brush. The position is commanded by a mountain, the ridge of which is about 1,200 yards to the rear.”
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The first night the marines “slept with our clothes on and rifles by our side,” Keeler remembered. “Had the Dons surrounded the hill they could have fired upon us with deadly effect, for they could have fired from all sides without hitting their own men.”
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In hindsight, Huntington's choice of a campground seems inauspicious. In Key West, Huntington had proved incapable of checking the abuses of the
Panther
captain; at Guantánamo, he lacked the confidence to question the decisions of his superiors. In the three days between occupying the outer harbor and the arrival of the marines, the navy had seen little or no enemy activity along the shores of Guantánamo Bay. When the
Panther
pulled in, Captain McCalla directed the marines toward a landing site and campground selected in advance by a colonel in the Cuban Army. McCalla informed Huntington that it was safe to erect tents. As a veteran commander, Huntington might have thanked McCalla for his assistance and proceeded as he had been trained to do: secure a safe landing site, identify a suitable campground, and entrench. A young captain in Huntington's command remembered the colonel declaring the position “faulty” and deploying pickets. But that's as far as Huntington's initiative went.
Spain opened fire the following afternoon. “I was looking at my watch,” wrote Keeler. “It was just 5 o'clock, Saturday, June 11th, when we received the greatest surprise of our lives.” Some of the men were in the water bathing; some “were asleep when the reports of the rifles rung out.” As the marines dove for their guns, the “bullets came among [them] like rain.” There was no place to hide. “We dodged about trying to find shelter but there was neither trees or big rocks to get behind.” U.S. Marine Corps major Henry Clay Cochrane remembered being surprised by the vulnerability of the camp and disappointed in Huntington's response to the initial onslaught. When the marines went ashore on June 10, Cochrane remained aboard the
Panther
to oversee the unloading of cargo. He first set foot on land just as the Spaniards
launched their initial attack. Dashing up the hill at the sound of gunfire, Cochrane claims to have found Huntington not leading the counterattack but entirely missing, as if unable to stomach the excitement. Only after the attack was repulsed, according to Cochrane, did Huntington emerge to assess the damage.
The marines lost two men that first afternoon, privates William Dunphy and James McColgan. According to Keeler, the two had been posted like sacrificial lambs, some five hundred yards in front of a main body of pickets, to the north of camp, in the direction from which the Spanish fire was sure to come. Again, it did not take a career officer to recognize that Dunphy and McColgan occupied “a very dangerous place ⦠down in the valley on a cross road ⦠with no chance to escape.”
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The two had been deliberately murdered at close range. They “were unspeakably shocking to look at,” Captain Charles L. McCawley would later recall. “Their faces and the upper parts of their bodies were literally torn to pieces and it was first thought that they had been mutilated.” Part of a retrieval party, Keeler remembered shivering at the sight of his two comrades. “Were we to be treated likewise?” he wondered. “Was this Christian warfare?” U.S. newspapers carried reports of the alleged mutilation, confirming public assumptions about Spanish “barbarism.” The rumors of mutilation were later retracted, and the damage was reported to be the work of the diabolical Mauser.
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Beginning the night of June 11, the Spanish treated Huntington's marines to three straight days without sleep. “I do not know why I did not expect night attack for we had a flurry in the PM,” Colonel Huntington wrote his son, “and we had two men really assassinated ⦠but I did not.”
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“It was not with the pleasantest feelings that we got supper that night,” Keeler recalled. Around 9:00 p.m., their supper was interrupted by gunfire from U.S. pickets stationed now in an orderly circumference around the marines' exposed ridge. Still, with intimate knowledge of the nearby terrain, the Spanish were able to penetrate the marines' flanks, moving into bunkers dug by General Pareja's forces the day before the Americans arrived. The Spanish shredded the marines' tents, but miraculously none of the men were hit, giving credence to the emerging sense that the Spanish sharpshooters were misnamed. “The Spanish troops really shoot awfully,” Colonel Huntington remarked.
“One could hear the bullets humming high in the air while various marks show that our men, although
entre nous
badly scared, shot low and stirred up the dirt and I believe we did kill 17 and probably wounded three times that.”
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Not all the Spaniards were poor shooters. After several hours' pause they opened up again in earnest, just after midnight. About to head for cover, acting assistant surgeon John Blair Gibbs was struck through the temple from eight hundred yards. Gibbs was the third casualty among Huntington's marines, and his death was felt the keenest. Popular among officers and enlisted men alike, he was the son of a soldier killed with Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn. A physician with a profitable practice in Manhattan, he had volunteered the minute war was declared, insisting he be sent to Cuba in the company of the first ground troops. It was only the next morning that “we learned with sincere regret that our surgeon Doctor Gibbs and Sergeant Major Good had been killed in the early morning battle,” Keeler wrote. “We were all sorry to lose the surgeon for the other one left was no earthly good.”
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Sunday, June 12, was a busy, somber day at Guantánamo Bay. There were two new bodies to bury in addition to Gibbs's. The Spaniards did all they could to make Gibbs's funeral as grave as possible, punctuating the chaplain's words with gunfire, as if honoring Gibbs with a final military salute.
As fear and fatigue combined with stifling heat to sow bitterness and fray nerves, some of Huntington's lieutenants began to doubt the wisdom of their mission. Two officers approached Colonel Cochrane, second in command to Huntington, asking him to urge Huntington to clear out of Guantánamo Bay. Huntington needed no urging. While Cochrane exploded at the men, Huntington was aboard the
Marblehead
, putting the matter before Captain McCalla. McCalla was no more sympathetic to withdrawal than Cochrane. He ordered Huntington back to camp, assuring him that he'd take perfect care of Huntington's body should he be killed. The issue was dropped and the marines did the next best thing for themselves short of pulling out of Guantánamo Bay. They struck camp, dug real trenches, and added two new field pieces and two automatic guns to their artillery, finally leveling the playing field.
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That same afternoon, a series of new arrivals brought a bit of cheer to the marines. First came an American flag, sent from the
Marblehead
to bolster the marines' spirit and remind them why they were fighting. Once rigged to a pole sent from the collier
Abarenda
, the flag would continue to float over the bay until well after hostilities had ended.
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“Three times three cheers went up from the battalion,” wrote Keeler, “and from all the ships in the harbor came back an answering echo. Several of the ships fired a salute and blew their steam whistle. âThe flag up, and up to stay.'”
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Next came a bottle of whiskey, in the hand of a journalist, one among a phalanx of newspaper reporters who stormed ashore, relieved to be where the action was after so much idleness in Tampa and Key West.
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Finally, and most significant, came a detachment of sixty Cubans from the First Army division led by Colonel Enrique Tomas. Well after the war, Tomas remembered signaling the Cubans' arrival at the bay by placing a white horse, backed by a Cuban flag, on Leeward Point, near the mouth to the Guantánamo River. “When the commander of the
Marblehead
saw it, he was to send a boat for us,” Tomas recalled. “They must have been watching for the signal, for no sooner had we led the white horse into sight and hoisted the flag, than the boat put out from the ship.” Meanwhile, “there was much cannon firing from the Marblehead, and we all knew that when we got into the fight we should have a good chance to strike lusty blows for Cuba.”
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Keeler remembered taking heart at the sight of the Cubans. “They seemed just as glad to join us as we were to have their assistance.” Tomas recalled the gracious welcome afforded the Cubans as they arrived aboard the
Marblehead
. “It was plain they were glad to see us. We were glad to be there, for it meant we got some hot breakfast and hot coffee.” McCalla greeted Tomas in French, and distributed clothing and arms to Tomas's men.
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Meanwhile, the Spanish did not stand on ceremony; no amount of funerals, flags, field guns, trenches, journalists, whiskey, or Cuban reinforcements would deter them on the evening of June 12. “Several nights without sleep” had made the marines “miserable,” Keeler recalled. They “had a presentiment that when the next attack came it would be by as large a force as the Spaniards could get together.” When the Spanish did open fire, Keeler believed thousands of Spaniards
were arrayed against him, so ear shattering was the noise. “Fully three-thousand rifles cracked as if one man had fired all, and the bullets seemed to come from every direction,” he noted. “We were surrounded. You can form no conception as to what the discharge of 3000 rifles mean by night, it makes a fearful racket. We were surprised and in many cases our hair stood on ends. We could not but feel our time had come, but we would make our lives cost them as much as possible.”
Keeler was indeed surrounded. He'd been posted along the cliff behind the marines' encampment, between the camp and the bay. So far from the camp itself did Keeler and his fellow pickets appear to the U.S. ships in the harbor that the ships mistook them for Spaniards and were doing everything possible to take them out. “We were laying with our feet to the sea on the bluff,” Keeler wrote in his journal, “and âboom su'e' a shell passed so near that the wind from it took off my hat.” Shrapnel from one of the missiles hit Keeler's neighbor. He “had a frightful piece torn out of his leg shattering the flesh down to the bone from hip to knee.” Finally, the American ships understood their mistake, “and there was no more firing from the ships that night.”
And a long night that was. The Spaniards shot away through the wee hours, leading Keeler to despair of ever seeing the sunrise or his comrades' faces again. “We could not but believe that a greater part of our companions had been killed and could but expect our own lives would [not] be long spared. But we stood, or rather laid, on our ground. There was nothing else to do, for to stand up would mean death.”
But the sun came up, and as its slanting rays illuminated the American flag, so recently planted, the roar of gunfire yielded to “cheer after cheer from the ships in the bay.” What could it mean? Keeler wondered. “We were unable to guess.” But the cheers were for Keeler and his fellow marines. Looking on from the ships, the sailors couldn't imagine how anybody had survived the Spanish onslaught. Much less
everybody
; going out to collect their dead, the marines were amazed there were none to be found. One marine had gone missing, and was later found in the water at the base of the cliff, a bullet in the middle of his chest.
Gratified by the marines' willpower, Captain McCalla himself rowed in from the
Marblehead
to commend the troops. McCalla apologized
to Keeler and his fellow pickets for accidentally targeting them. Generous to the Cubans, McCalla was no less generous to the marines. Though “a Naval Officer,” Keeler wrote, “he had more regard for the Marines than we were used to receiving. There was not a man in our command who did not like him, and he treated us as gentlemen.”
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