To Hell With Spain:
A Preview, Part One
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
October 2013

When I came up with the idea for Infantry Attacks: To Hell With Spain, I thought it a good one as it would cover a well-known conflict involving American forces. It fulfills that promise, but the Spanish-American War was a complex affair and the scenarios needed a lot of testing to make sure the Infantry Attacks system will handle the fighting of a generation before the Great War (when all was done, it turned out to work just fine). The result’s a fine expansion for Infantry Attacks. As far as I know, this is the only wargame ever published showing the battles of the Spanish-American War on a tactical level. Here’s the first half of them:

Scenario One
Cuzco Wells
14 June 1898
The U.S. Marines landed at Fisherman’s Point on Guantanamo Bay and set up camp on a hill near the beach. The location proved tactically unsound as it was exposed to fire from the brushy hills all around, from which Spanish troops with their smokeless powder could harass the Marines with little chance of being spotted. Within 48 hours of the landing, Camp McCalla (named for the Marine commander) was under constant fire with the Marines unable to do anything but dig in and fire back at the bushes. “One hundred hours of fighting” ensued, and with the Marines near exhaustion a local Cuban rebel leader advised them to send out troops to destroy the Spaniards’ only local source of fresh water at Cuzco Beach. With no water supply, the Spaniards would have to pull out of the area and thus lift the siege of the Marine base. Commander McCalla sent out a detachment of Marines led by Cuban guides, with the gunboat USS Dolphin following them up the coast to provide gunnery support.

This scenario uses boards from Elsenborn Ridge.

Conclusion
Captain George F. Elliott led Marine Companies C and D in the assault, which was soon joined by a platoon from A Company that had been in an outpost position. The two sides traded long-range fire until USS Dolphin opened fire from the seaward side, causing confusion in the Spanish ranks and making their soldiers far easier targets for the Marines. The Spaniards soon retreated out of the valley, and the Marines completed their mission of destroying the well.

Notes
This is a relatively small scenario, with only one board actually in play (the other is open sea on which the gunboat Dolphin can steam about). Despite it small size it has the gunboat (which is pretty dangerous to both sides), U.S. Marines and Spanish guerillas, making for an unusual game.

Scenario Two
Las Guasimas, Day One
23 June 1898
When Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt stepped off the boat and onto Cuban soil at the head of his Rough Riders, he was greeted not by enemy gunfire but by allies whom he described as “. . . a crew of as utter tatterdemalions as human eyes ever looked upon, armed with every kind of rifle in all stages of dilapidation.” These were the Insurrectos, Cuban rebels led by General Demetrio Castillo. They were hardly the freedom fighters in the mold of George Washington’s Continental Army that the Yellow Press had led the Americans to expect, and soon the rebels fell like “human vultures” on the American supplies being offloaded onto the beach. The Americans quickly dismissed them as good for nothing but scouting, but when they encountered the first real Spanish position on the ridgeline at Las Guasimas, Castillo promised eight hundred of his men for the attack. On the day before the Americans attacked, a rebel force much smaller than 800 tried to encircle the Spanish forward line, which consisted of Puerto Rican militia and Cuban levies.

This scenario uses a board from Battle of the Bulge.

Conclusion
The rebels under Colonel Carlos Gonzales Clavel made two separate attempts to cut the Puerto Rico Battalion off from the rest of the Spanish force, but both were turned aside. However, his scouts later brought back intelligence that the enemy was busy reinforcing and fortifying the ridgeline at Las Guasimas. Castillo passed this information along to Generals Wheeler and Young, and once again promised 800 men for the battle tomorrow. None of the 800 showed up, as the rebel general decided to sleep in that morning.

Notes
Another small scenario, in which Puerto Rican militia in Spanish service fight Cuban rebels. It’s tough on the Cubans, as the Puerto Ricans have the high ground and fortifications. Neither side’s that enthusiastic about the whole thing.

Scenario Three
Las Guasimas, Day Two
24 June 1898
The original war plan had called for landing the US Army’s Fifth Corps at the northern Cuban port of Mariel. But the appearance of Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete’s cruiser squadron in Santiago harbor on the south Cuban coast changed all that. After reaching Cuba and meeting with his counterparts in the U.S. Navy and the Cuban rebel command, Fifth Corps commander General William Shafter decided to land his troops at the hamlet of Daiquiri. Situated sixteen miles east of Santiago where the Navy now had Cervera blockaded, Daiquiri was an iron mining hamlet with no harbor and just one dock used by ore transports. That made for a slow landing by boat, after which the troops discovered that the “Camino Real” (“royal road”) which the maps said ran from Daiquiri to Santiago actually resembled “the roughest mountain roads in the southern part of our own Appalachian Mountains.” Nevertheless, Shafter was determined to send a force inland quickly, as he was concerned that any delay would put his troops in danger of being decimated by yellow fever.

While General Henry Lawton’s infantry headed up the road to the coastal town of Siboney, Shafter’s deputy commander Gen. Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wheeler rode ahead of them and discovered a Spanish force massing on a ridgeline at Las Guasimas. Though ordered by Shafter to stay behind and oversee the Daiquiri beachhead, the ex-Confederate cavalry commander instead ordered Brigadier General Samuel Young’s 2nd Cavalry Brigade out of Daiquiri and up the road to attack the Spanish position the next morning. The cavalrymen would be going into battle on foot, as poor planning had resulted in most of their horses being left behind in Florida.

This scenario uses a board from Battle of the Bulge.

Conclusion
Major General Arsenio Linares had allowed the Americans to land at Daiquiri unopposed, and then withdrew his forces from the coastal region as the Americans advanced to Siboney. His rather unconvincing explanation to his troops was that he did not want to sacrifice their lives to American naval gunnery fire. But at Las Guasimas he formed a strong defensive position, with his forward line on the ridge and two more lines in reserve farther west. Cuban rebel attacks on his forward line were brushed off with ease, but soon Linares became concerned that the American infantry to the south under Lawton would march westward along the coastal road and then cut northward behind him to attack Santiago. So obsessed was he with this idea that by the morning of the American attack, Linares had already issued the order to withdraw from Las Guasimas. The commander on the scene, Brigadier General Antonio Rubin, sent some of his reserves forward to reinforce the line on the ridge but then prepared to evacuate the rest of his troops. As a result, the American attack fell on only a fraction of the total Spanish force, which pulled up stakes and retreated with the rest of the Spaniards after only two hours of fighting. The Americans (who were utterly unaware of the Spanish retreat plan) claimed the battle as a great victory, while the Spanish deemed it a successful rearguard action. In any event, the front-line Spanish troops joined their comrades in the retreat to Santiago as the exhilarated but exhausted Americans consolidated their position.

Notes
It’s the same ground as the previous scenario, but this time the Spanish have brought up some much, much tougher regulars along with a battery of very good artillery. The Cubans have melted away and left the fighting to the Americans – the Rough Riders and Buffalo Soldiers.

Scenario Four
El Caney
1 July 1898
After taking the Spanish position at Las Guasimas, Fifth Corps advanced up the road to Santiago unimpeded except by the atrocious condition of the Camino Real. Supply problems soon became a far greater threat to the U.S. Army than the Spanish, since the latter remained inside the Santiago defenses and gave no indication of any intent to counterattack. This was due largely to the fact that the US Navy had Santiago blockaded by sea while the Cuban Insurrectos had cut the city off from supplies by land, leaving the Spanish garrison progressively growing weaker from living on half rations.

General Shafter set about improving the American supply and communications lines while ordering his men not to attack until reinforcements arrived, but all that changed on June 28th when he got word that a Spanish relief column was on its way toward the city. He had to bring the Spanish to battle before they could be reinforced, and the first order of business was to make sure no such reinforcements could reach the city. To that end, Shafter approved General Henry L. Lawton’s proposal to march his division northward and capture the heavily-fortified village of El Caney on the road to Guantanamo. This would block any reinforcements from Guantanamo from reaching Santiago and would also secure Fifth Corps’ right flank. Lawton would then march 2nd Division southwestward to a flanking position on the San Juan Heights so that he could roll up the Spanish lines there when the rest of Fifth Corps attacked frontally later that morning. Lawton assured Shafter that El Caney would fall in less than two hours, so Shafter gave the order to delay the main attack on the Heights until after Lawton was in position on the Spanish flank.

This scenario uses boards from Elsenborn Ridge and Road to Berlin.

Conclusion
Lawton failed to bring any support weaponry to the attack on El Caney other than one battery of light field guns. Those guns had little effect on the well-fortified village, so he maneuvered a brigade north of the village while a second would attack from the south and a third would begin in reserve. The town did not fall in two hours – not even close. The Spaniards in El Caney bravely held off Lawton’s entire division all day long, despite repeated dispatches from Shafter requesting Lawton to break off the attack and support the main effort against the San Juan Heights.  Lawton felt that to comply would be to admit defeat, so he continued the attack until the Spanish finally fled El Caney late in the afternoon. Thus a small Spanish force kept an entire American division busy until after the attacks on San Juan and Kettle Hills were concluded.

Notes
The Spanish have a thick belt of fortifications and a small but tough garrison to hold it, regulars with good morale and superior artillery. The Americans must take all the fortifications from them, and to do it they have numbers. Do they ever have numbers: a superiority of nearly 10 to 1, surely the greatest mis-match in any published Infantry Attacks or Panzer Grenadier scenario. And they’re going to need every one of them.

Scenario Five
San Juan Heights
1 July 1898
General Shafer’s plan for the main assault on Santiago had many flaws. He had far too little artillery support to effectively suppress the entrenched Spanish defenders on the heights east of the city. Then, his diversionary assault at the River Aguadores failed to draw any Spaniards away from Santiago, as the Spanish had simply dismantled the only bridge there and thus left the river impassable. Then there was the fact that Shafter planned to deploy his force for battle by marching it down a narrow jungle road, across a stream and then out into the open right in the face of the Spanish defenders. That meant the Spaniards would have the Americans within rifle range as soon as the latter appeared, single-file, out of the jungle. The Spaniards made this all the more likely by lining the entire forest front with barbed wire except where the road exited the trees.

Brigadier General Adna Chaffee strongly objected to this plan, saying the Spaniards would “. . . have their guns trained on the openings. If our men leave the cover and reach the plain from [that road] alone they will be piled so high that they will block the road.” But luckily for Shafter, General Linares’ plan was just as bad. He deployed his army evenly around the entire perimeter of Santiago rather than concentrating it eastward to face Shafter’s army. So the entire Spanish force standing in the way of Shafter’s 8,000 men amounted to roughly a tenth of that.

This scenario uses boards from Battle of the Bulge and Kokoda Trail.

Conclusion
The lead American units on the Camino Real successfully exited the jungle and began to form lines of battle . . . but were then told to halt and await further orders. The anticipated casualties then mounted quickly when Lawton’s planned flanking maneuver from the north failed to materialize and no orders to advance were received. More units exited the jungle either on the road or by bushwhacking off-road and cutting through the barbed wire, but the latter resulted in terrible casualties. Third Brigade lost its commander and two of its regimental commanders while still forming lines, while 6th Infantry Regiment lost 127 men in ten minutes after bursting out of the jungle right in the face of the Spanish right flank. An Army Signal Corps balloon that had been brought up to track troop movements instead served to fix the position of American troops in the jungle underneath it, and the latter suffered badly until the balloon fell to Spanish rifle fire. Desperate calls from Shafter to Lawton to withdraw from El Caney and join the main battle fell on deaf ears, and by then Shafter was of little use anyway as he was bedridden with gout, anxiety and malaria.

Finally, the dismounted cavalry near Kettle Hill on the American right received an order to advance around two o’clock, and the already heat-exhausted men began to make their way up the hill with units intermingled and no real order. Colonel Roosevelt reported encountering regiments that were firing in place but not advancing because they had not received the order to advance, but he pushed past them and soon everyone was on the march. Most Spanish troops abandoned Kettle Hill and made for the trenches to the rear before the Americans reached the summit. As the Americans formed up on Kettle Hill for another charge, Gatling guns raked the Spanish trenches on San Juan Hill as American infantry advanced there. The Spanish began to break and flee the trenches, but even then confusion reigned among the Americans with buglers sounding a withdrawal just as C Company, 16th Infantry Regiment was about to reach the summit. The wavering Americans eventually got their advance going again, and the remaining Spanish on the hilltop were finally overwhelmed as the dismounted cavalry from Kettle Hill reached the summit of San Juan Hill and converged with the American infantry there. But the Americans had received orders to hold the hilltops in anticipation of a Spanish counterattack, leaving the Spanish still in possession of their secondary trench lines farther west.

It had been a costly victory. The Americans took almost exactly ten percent overall casualties in the battles of El Caney and San Juan Heights, losses that took the fight out of Fifth Corps. Reports of incoming Spanish reinforcements caused General Shafter to spend the next two days actually talking about abandoning the Heights and pulling back to El Siboney. But Lawton and others convinced him to keep Fifth Corps in position, a good call since the Spanish could not have brought enough forces to bear to dislodge even a weakened Fifth Corps.

Notes
Actually, that last scenario doesn’t feature the greatest numerical disparity in either of our tactical combat series: this one does. The Spanish once again are well-fortified, and the Americans not only have numbers, they have the Rough Riders and the Buffalo Soldiers. They also have abysmally poor leadership that makes it difficult to advance.

Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and award-winning journalist, he has published over 100 books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children and his dog, Leopold.