A Century Late, Medal for TR

By George DeWan | Staff Writer

MIDST THE BLOOD and sweat of battle on a steamy midsummer day on the outskirts of Santiago de Cuba in 1898, Col. Theodore Roosevelt called on his Rough Riders to make the charge up Kettle Hill in the face of an onslaught of Spanish bullets from its crest. It was then that the future president felt the wolf rising in his heart.

The 39-year-old gamecock in a pince-nez and a dirty Brooks Brothers tailored uniform -- a blue polka-dot bandanna streaming behind his battered slouch hat -- was deliriously happy to be at last in the thick of battle. He had thought about this moment for years.

"Every man who has in him any real power of joy in battle knows that he feels it when the wolf begins to rise in his heart," Roosevelt had written in Cosmopolitan Magazine six years earlier, when he still was on the sedate battlefield of the U.S. Civil Service Commission. "He does not then shrink from blood and sweat, or deem that they mar the fight; he revels in them, in the toil, the pain and the danger, as but setting off the triumph."

TR's final triumph now appears imminent. More than a century after Roosevelt's exploits in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, the U.S. Army has recommended to the White House that he be awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military decoration. Since President Bill Clinton has said he would award the honor if the Army recommends it, all that remains is choosing the day for the ceremony.

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July 1, 1898. On this day, the Spanish-American War reached its climax.

The war grew out of Cuban rebels' struggle for independence from Spain, with American sympathies strongly on the side of the rebels. The spark that set off the war was the sinking of the U.S. battleship Maine by an explosion in Havana Harbor on Feb. 15, 1898. Although the cause of the blast never has been firmly established, Congress as well as the press blamed Spain.

In April, a belligerent Congress recognized Cuba's independence, demanded Spain's withdrawal from the island, and authorized President William McKinley to use the armed forces to force Spain out. The first step took place on May 1, when Commodore George Dewey led a U.S. naval squadron into Manila Bay in the Philippines, then a Spanish territory, and quickly destroyed the Spanish fleet stationed there. Then attention turned to Cuba, where an army of regular and volunteer troops, the Fifth Army Corps, was put under the command of Maj. Gen. William Shafter.

Enter Theodore Roosevelt. Then the assistant secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt lusted after military action. He and his friend Col. Leonard Wood formed a volunteer cavalry regiment that came to be known as the Rough Riders, with Wood in command, Lt. Col. (later full colonel) Roosevelt his deputy. And it was on to Santiago de Cuba.

The newspaper reporting of a preliminary skirmish at Las Guásimas on June 24 was the beginning of distorted coverage of the war that blew up the exploits of Roosevelt and the Rough Riders at the expense of the regular Army troops who vastly outnumbered them and whose valor was their equal. On July 1, Shafter planned to subdue Santiago by first taking control of San Juan Heights, which lay a mile or two east of the city. On the left flank, two infantry divisions totaling about 10,000 men would attack the most difficult and best fortified section of the Heights, including San Juan Hill. On the right flank, the Rough Riders and other cavalry -- horseless, except for the officers -- would attack Kettle Hill and then the entire north end of the Heights.

It would be a day of fierce battle, of bloodshed and of death, bravery and heroics all around. At 1 o'clock, the 490 men of the Rough Riders got the call to go into action. Astride his horse, Roosevelt was a perfect target for Spanish bullets, and even later, while dismounted, he was at the head of his troops, urging them on, almost inviting some sharpshooting Spaniard to knock him off. One bullet did knock off his glasses, but he carried a number of spares in his pocket.

The popular mytholgy may be that Roosevelt and his Rough Riders were alone in charging up Kettle Hill, but this is the fault of the mythmakers, not of Roosevelt himself, who gave credit where it was due. (They never charged up San Juan Hill, as part of the myth would have it.) There were a number of other cavalry units in the division who fought bravely that day. But it was Roosevelt who took the initiative, and he was the officer primarily responsible for taking Kettle Hill.

With the guns roaring, bullets flying and terrified men looking for a leader, Roosevelt galloped forward from his rear position and took charge. He cajoled, he cursed, he screamed and exhorted his men forward. Forty yards from the crest of the hill, Roosevelt jumped off his horse, Texas, and fought the rest of the day on foot. When the top of the hill was reached, most of the Spaniards had fled. But Spaniards began firing on Kettle Hill from entrenched positions at the top of the far ridge.

Under heavy fire from the Spanish, Roosevelt rallied his men for another charge, this time down the far side of Kettle Hill, across the narrow valley and up the opposite slope. As they rushed across the valley and up the next hills, journalist Richard Harding Davis watched in amazement.

"They walked to greet death at every step, many of them, as they advanced, sinking suddenly or pitching forward and disappearing in the high grass, but the others waded on, stubbornly, forming a thin blue line that kept creeping higher and higher up the hill," Davis wrote in his book "The Cuban and Porto Rican Campaigns." By the time they reached the crest of San Juan Heights, most of the Spanish had fled. Two of them, however, fired at Roosevelt. He fired twice with his pistol, missing the first and killing the second.

"When we reached the trenches we found them filled with dead bodies in the light blue and white uniform of the Spanish regular army," Roosevelt later wrote in his book "The Rough Riders." "There were very few wounded."

With the infantry occupying San Juan Hill on the left and the cavalry on the right, the entire San Juan Heights was under control, and the Americans dug in. After a little more than two weeks of negotiations, the Spanish garrison at Santiago surrendered.

A total of 22 Medals of Honor were awarded for actions on July 1, two of them to Rough Riders. Soon it will be 23.