As you well know, the news has been, and is, full of news about wars \u2014 Gaza and Ukraine headline the news most days. I guess there\u2019s been a war going on somewhere just about forever. Some we can remember and the history books are full of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One war that we all learned about in school is the Spanish-American War. In case you don\u2019t 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.\u2019s acquisition of territories in the western Pacific and Latin America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it\u2019s an interesting war\u2026 and hey, they<\/em> started it. Actually, they did. A little-known fact about this war is that Spain declared war on the United States first \u2014 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 \u2014 and then backdated the declaration to April 21. The \u201cBattle of the Declarations\u201d was the very last thing the Spaniards won.\u00a0 A couple of months after that, Americans landed in Cuba. Teddy Roosevelt had resigned as Secretary of the Navy to lead his \u201cRough Riders\u201d 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 \u2014 in all the hubbub, the U.S. somehow managed to annex Hawaii. Apparently, some folks there still aren\u2019t too happy about that. 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 \u2014 called the \u201cKimball Plan.\u201d It was kind of the national equivalent of a sixth-grader waiting for that second-grader to rough up a younger kid, so he\u2019d have a legitimate excuse to beat him up and take his lunch money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Spanish-American War was America\u2019s debut out of the ranks of the second-raters. Up until that time, all our other wars \u2014 like those couple of wars with Britain and the nasty intramural squabble among the states, that we called the Civil War \u2014 had been fairly even skirmishes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Spanish-American War, however, was a slam dunk. We lost more people fighting the Filipinos, who apparently didn\u2019t 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 \u2014 it lasted three years and cost 4,200 American lives.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since 1898, we\u2019ve been involved in other lopsided wars \u2014 but in those wars, we had help, and we didn\u2019t come away with any real estate to speak of. I\u2019ve always heard that real estate is the gold standard in war gains\u2026. As you well know, the news has been, and is, full of news about wars \u2014 Gaza and Ukraine headline the news most days. I guess there\u2019s been a war going on somewhere just about forever. Some we can remember … Continue reading
A week later a fleet of American battleships steamed into Manila\u2019s harbor and sank the entire Spanish Pacific fleet \u2014 like shooting fish in a barrel. Considering the Spanish fleet was anchored \u2014 and silent \u2014 it really was just that easy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Spain never had a chance. Oh sure, Spain could kick around Cuba, who\u2019s bid for independence, and Spain\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2014 30 \u2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"