Empire by Default: The Spanish-American War and the Dawn of the American Century
Ivan Musicant. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1998. 750 pp. Bib. Ind. Maps. Notes. Photos. $37.50 ($33.75).
Reviewed by Dr. Michael J. Crawford
If during this centennial year of the Spanish-American War you have time to read only one book on that conflict, Ivan Musicant’s Empire by Default would be a good choice, and a reasonable alternative to the standard one-volume treatment, David F. Trask’s excellent The War with Spain (1981; reprinted, Lincoln, NE, 1996). Musicant devotes more substantial sections than does Trask to the political and diplomatic context in the United States, Spain, and Cuba, as well as in Puerto Rico and the Philippines, necessary for making sense of the naval and military campaigns. Still, the bulk of this study is a gripping narrative of naval and military operations.
The work reads easily. Musicant writes in a conversational tone and has a good ear for the apt quotation. He takes the space needed to explain each important element of the story. Among the book’s strengths are the evaluations of the strategic and tactical options available to the naval and military leaders, both U.S. and Spanish, at each critical junction, and the cogent appraisals of the major actors.
Commodore George Dewey, for example, was a competent naval officer, without any interest in creating an American empire, and lacking a deep understanding of international affairs. He owed his appointment as commander-in-chief of the Asiatic Squadron to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt’s faith in him as someone who would “act fearlessly and on his own responsibility when the emergency arose.” After his spectacular victory at the Battle of Manila Bay, poor advice misled Dewey into believing that the Philippine insurgents against Spanish rule would be satisfied with something less than complete independence. Yet his handling of the blockade of Manila, during which he thwarted interference by the German Navy, was impeccable.
In Musicant’s account, the U.S. Navy comes across much better than does the U.S. Army. Domestic politics caused many of the Army’s problems by forcing the Army’s leaders to mobilize a larger number of volunteers than they were equipped to handle. The Secretary of the Army’s lack of initiative and the absence of a general staff further impaired the Army. The Navy, in contrast, benefited from early planning for war with Spain, from Roosevelt’s energy at the Navy Department before he left to join the Rough Riders, and from the strategic vision of Alfred Thayer Mahan.
Disagreements over the allocation of naval resources during the Santiago de Cuba and Puerto Rican campaigns illustrate the difference between the Army’s and the Navy’s approaches. The Army focused on the needs of the local theater, particularly protection of its troop convoys, pressing the Navy to deploy large forces in support. Naval leaders held the global situation in mind, weighing the realistic needs of the Caribbean theater against the importance of supporting Dewey at Manila and of threatening the Spanish coast.
Musicant judges that, still saddled with an organization suited to the fighting of Indian Wars, the Army was unprepared to fight a war overseas. He marvels that, despite scandalous inefficiencies in logistics and medicine, the Army managed to send abroad 35,000 soldiers and secure victory in the field. “Critics pointed to the stark contrast between the clean efficiency of the navy’s conduct of the war and the bloody, disease-ridden methods of the army.” Next to the Army scandals, the Navy’s embarrassments—such as criticism of the accuracy of naval gunfire, and the squabble between Rear Admiral William T. Sampson and Commodore Winfield S. Schley over credit for destroying the Spanish squadron at Santiago de Cuba—paled into seeming insignificance, and Musicant makes scant mention of them. The absence of an overall assessment of the Navy’s conduct of the war is a surprising omission in an otherwise fine work.
Empire by Default is written for the general reader; for a more academic treatment, read Trask. Musicant synthesizes the secondary literature and published documentary sources but ignores historiographical debates, will find no inkling, for example, that some authors continue to question Admiral Hyman G. Rickover’s conclusion (see pages 30-39 in this issue) that the explosion of the USS Maine was accidental. (Compare How the Battleship Maine was Destroyed, 1976; reprinted, Annapolis, 1994; and Peggy Samuels and Harold Samuels, Remembering the Maine, Washington, 1995).
Readers will discover here many examples worth pondering of naval leadership, naval diplomacy, and interservice cooperation. The study underscores the value of planning, of sound strategy, and of naval officers’ knowledge of international law and current world politics.
The Pacific War Revisited
Gunter Bischof and Robert L. Dupont, eds. Baton Rouge, LA : Louisiana State University Press, 1997. 220 pp. Photos. Bib. Ind. $25.00 ($23.75).
Reviewed by Mark R. Peattie
Given the titanic scale of the conflict and the vast range of topics still worthy of investigation or reinterpretation, the future of World War 11 studies seems limitless. The volume under review certainly suggests this. The product of a conference held in 1991 at the Eisenhower Center of the University of New Orleans on the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, its nine essays cover a variety of topics dealing with the war in the Pacific. Conference essays grouped around so large and amorphous a theme seldom comprise a completely satisfactory whole, and this volume is no exception. Considered separately, however, each of the essays has something of interest to tell us.
While its title, “Rethinking the Pacific War,” overstates its arguments, D. Clayton James’s introduction to the volume makes two useful contributions: an enumeration of the ways in which the Pacific theater was substantively different from the conflict in Europe and the provision of a brief bibliographical tour of the Pacific War, concentrating on its two most controversial issues, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the use of atomic weapons against Japan.
The first four contributions that follow may be loosely considered to deal with U.S. strategy in the Pacific. Michael Schaller continues his demythologizing of Douglas MacArthur, whose reputation among professional historians now seems to have sunk to about the level of George McClellan. If Schaller is right that Franklin Roosevelt backed MacArthur’s plan to reconquer the Philippines in 1944 (in the face of opposition by the Joint Chiefs) because of the political threat posed by MacArthur, his essay reminds us of the ways in which, in a democracy at least, domestic matters so often intrude upon strategic considerations. Ronald Spector continues this theme by asserting that the racial attitudes and the impatience of the American public forced the hand of U.S. commanders in making decisions about the strength and timing of operations, including the use of atomic weapons to end the war. Daniel Blewett’s chapter on U.S. naval logistics demonstrates how wartime energy, improvisation, leadership, and luck overcame prewar neglect of this crucial aspect of the war at sea. Kenneth Hagan’s essay on the ultimate success of U.S. submarines in waging guerre de course against Japan is a brief cruise, but not much more than that, through waters well charted by major studies of the subject.
The next section groups together two narrative essays that reflect the human dimensions of the Pacific war, though they seem out of place in a collection whose perspective is generally analytical and which deals with larger strategic issues. Gregory Urwin’s chapter on the way in which Americans captured on Wake Island maintained their morale and cohesion during years of captivity in Japanese prison camps forms an uplifting postscript to the well-known saga of the defense of Wake. Kathleen Wames’s “Nurses Under Fire” is much in the same vein, recounting as it does the heroism and professionalism of U.S. nurses in the South Pacific.
The final section of the conference volume treats the question of bombing Japan as the principal means to end the conflict, a controversy that apparently has no end. Herman Wouk recycles the story of General “Hap” Arnold’s determination that conventional bombing be given the opportunity to defeat Japan and of his consequent opposition to the use of the atomic bomb as unnecessary. Without a doubt, the most important chapter in the volume is its final chapter. In it, Stephen Ambrose and Brian Villa refute Gar Alperovtiz’s assertion that there were viable alternatives to dropping the bomb. Further, they contend that its use purged the American public’s desire for revenge, while at the same time discrediting the Japanese military and thus giving the civil government a face-saving way to surrender. Taken together, Ambrose and Villa argue, these two developments contributed to the early postwar reconciliation of the two peoples.