As you well know, the news has been, and is, full of news about wars — Gaza and Ukraine headline the news most days. I guess there’s been a war going on somewhere just about forever. Some we can remember and the history books are full of them.
One war that we all learned about in school is the Spanish-American War. In case you don’t remember, the Spanish-American War was an 1898 conflict between the United States and Spain that ended Spanish colonial rule in the Americas and resulted in the U.S.’s acquisition of territories in the western Pacific and Latin America.
But it’s an interesting war… and hey, they started it. Actually, they did. A little-known fact about this war is that Spain declared war on the United States first — on April 24, 1898. The United States, more than a little bit ticked off at being caught napping on the issue, declared war the very next day — and then backdated the declaration to April 21. The “Battle of the Declarations” was the very last thing the Spaniards won.
A week later a fleet of American battleships steamed into Manila’s harbor and sank the entire Spanish Pacific fleet — like shooting fish in a barrel. Considering the Spanish fleet was anchored — and silent — it really was just that easy.
A couple of months after that, Americans landed in Cuba. Teddy Roosevelt had resigned as Secretary of the Navy to lead his “Rough Riders” into battle. The Rough Riders forced the Spanish fleet into a retreat that found it beached and burning up and down the Cuban shore line. The whole war took less than four months, and at the end of it, America got Guam and Puerto Rico for free, and bought the Philippines at a cut-rate price. And — in all the hubbub, the U.S. somehow managed to annex Hawaii. Apparently, some folks there still aren’t too happy about that.
Spain never had a chance. Oh sure, Spain could kick around Cuba, who’s bid for independence, and Spain’s brutal repression of that effort started the whole shebang to begin with. But when they tangled with the U.S., Spain got spanked by superior firepower, and a country that was itching to use it.
Yet another little-known fact about this war was that for years the United States had a contingency plan to kick some serious butt up and down the entire Western Hemisphere — called the “Kimball Plan.” It was kind of the national equivalent of a sixth-grader waiting for that second-grader to rough up a younger kid, so he’d have a legitimate excuse to beat him up and take his lunch money.
The Spanish-American War was America’s debut out of the ranks of the second-raters. Up until that time, all our other wars — like those couple of wars with Britain and the nasty intramural squabble among the states, that we called the Civil War — had been fairly even skirmishes.
The Spanish-American War, however, was a slam dunk. We lost more people fighting the Filipinos, who apparently didn’t think much more of the Americans buying their country for a lousy $20 million, than we did fighting the Spanish. (Actually, there was a Philippine-American War — it lasted three years and cost 4,200 American lives.)
Since 1898, we’ve been involved in other lopsided wars — but in those wars, we had help, and we didn’t come away with any real estate to speak of. I’ve always heard that real estate is the gold standard in war gains….
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