“You may fire when ready, Mr Gridley.” The cruiser USS Olympia opens up with her forward battery on Spanish shore defences in The Philippines. Or at least that is what appears to be occurring in this still from an 1898 film entitled ‘The Battle of Manila Bay’. However, a closer look at the image, in particular the mirror-like aspect of the sea, reveals this to be a fake. The film, produced by J. Stuart Blackton, a former employee of Thomas Edison, is one of the earliest examples of the power of moving images to shape public perceptions of war.
The Battle of Manila Bay was the first of two major naval actions during the Spanish-American War. The battle itself had occurred only a few weeks prior to the release of Blackton’s film. A US Navy squadron led by the 6,000 ton protected cruiser USS Olympia had sunk the entire Spanish Pacific Squadron off Cavite in the southwest corner of Manila Bay. This event, the first victorious fleet action in American history, had made a national hero of its commander Admiral George Dewey, immortalised his flag captain Charles Gridley, and raised patriotic pride to a new level in the nation.
The true one-sided nature of the battle was not widely reported. Of the Spanish fleet, only one ship, the unarmoured cruiser Reina Cristina, had made a fight of it. Of the other ships, the wooden-hulled Castilla was already immobile owing to a serious leak and had arrived in port under tow; the old Thames-built cruiser Velasco and her two sisters had had much of their armament removed and placed as shore batteries; and the steel-hulled Armstrong-built gunboats Cuba and Luzon were small, weakly-armed and unprotected. All of these ships had suffered delays in their construction owing to chronic economic problems affecting the Spanish state, making them comparatively obsolete even when first commissioned. Castilla’s troubled construction had spanned three decades.
The American ships, in contrast were modern, more heavily armed, and better protected. Even the USS Boston, the second ship in the nation’s ‘New Navy’ was a better fighting ship than any in the Spanish squadron, whose primary role had been to police an increasingly rebellious native population. The Spanish commander Admiral Montojo was fully aware of this. He died bravely aboard the Reina Cristina, having attempted to minimise loss of life to crewmen and civilians by positioning his ships in shallow water away from the heavily populated waterfront of Manila. American casualties amounted to less than a handful. The ease of Dewey’s victory was underscored by the fact that of more than 5,500 shells expended by the American squadron, less than 150 hit their intended targets. They’d won the battle even with defective gunnery.
America’s decision to go to war with Spain was putatively in response to the destruction of the USS Maine in Havana Harbour on 15th February. At around 9.40pm, this battleship had inexplicably exploded at anchor, causing the deaths of more than 260 American sailors. The event sent shock waves across the world, especially when the blame for the disaster was expediently laid by the US government at the door of Cuba’s colonial masters, Spain.
In truth, the US had had its eyes on the island since the twin ideologies of The Monroe Doctrine and ‘Manifest Destiny’ had legitimized the projection of American power into Latin America. Cuba’s political and economic integration had been strongly advocated by expansionist politicians in the South antebellum. In 1848, Spain had rejected an offer of $100m for the island made by US President Polk, and an improved offer of $130m by the incoming Pierce Administration six years later. Further negotiations had been scuppered after the leaking of a secret US ministerial memo dubbed ‘The Ostend Manifesto’. This protocol, which advocated taking the island by force should the Spanish government refuse to sell, had been received with angry denouncements by politicians in the North and also in Europe.
Relations had become further strained between the two nations in 1873 with the Virginius Affair. The Virginius was a fast paddle-steamer that was intercepted by Spanish authorities on its way to land men and munitions in support of a Cuban anti-slavery insurgency. The ship’s captain, an American naval officer, was denounced as a pirate and summarily executed along with several British and American crewmen. This development was met with shock and anger in the US, and calls for war with Spain. However, the federal government knew full well at this time that its navy was in no state to tackle the latter’s powerful fleet of ocean-going ironclads.
At the end of the American Civil War, there had been roughly 700 warships in commission in the US Navy, but owing to a combination of cost-cutting and neglect, this number had shrunk to barely 50 mostly obsolete vessels by the end of the 1870s, placing it below the power of other navies in the hemisphere. In 1885, during an early American attempt to meddle politically in South American affairs, the arrival of the powerful British-built Chilean protected cruiser Esmeralda off Panama City had pressured US forces to abandon their military occupation of nearby Colon. At the time, it was believed the Esmeralda was capable of destroying the entire US naval expedition ship by ship. This humiliating retreat prompted the then Secretary of the Navy, William Whitney to declare: ‘We have nothing that deserves to be called a navy’.
However, in the early 1880s, Whitney’s predecessors had already begun work that would soon repudiate this statement with the ordering of three steel-hulled cruisers and a smaller despatch vessel. Known as the ABCD ships, the USS Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Dolphin constituted a ‘squadron of evolution’, which offered the essential shipbuilding experience and naval training from which the modern hegemonic US Navy first developed. The construction of more warships, including the USS Maine, meant that within a decade after the Panama Crisis the US had achieved naval supremacy over Chile. This was confirmed in 1891 during the so-called ‘Baltimore Crisis’; a fatal brawl involving US sailors in Valparaiso, for which the Chilean government felt obliged to issue a formal apology and pay damages. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until the mid-90s with the completion of the Indiana Class battleships, and the powerful armoured cruisers Brooklyn and New York that the US Navy overtook that of colonial Spain.
The victory at Manila Bay was hardly the first instance of US imperial expansion in the Pacific sphere. Midway Island had become an American possession shortly after the end of the Civil War. The US Navy had set up a coaling and repair station at Pearl Harbour in 1887, and the whole Hawaiian archipelago had fallen under US control following annexation in 1893. The most easterly islands of Samoa had been in American hands since 1889, the scenic anchorage of Pago-Pago becoming another important coaling depot for her so-called Asiatic Squadron.
What the US Navy sorely lacked was a secure naval base in the western Pacific, having to rely on foreign ports such as Hong Kong and Nagasaki for refuelling and repair. Most Americans had never heard of The Philippines when war broke out – even sitting President William McKinley admitted to having only a hazy idea of their exact location. In fact, the islands lay only 600 miles east of Hong Kong, from where Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron was politely expelled by the ‘neutral’ British immediately after the US declaration of war on April 25th 1898. Having no forward base, destroying the Spanish squadron ‘on the way home’ made both tactical and strategic sense to the Admiral.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 