The Spanish and American WarThe Americans were brought into The Spanish and American War on February 15,1898. The Americans came into this war because a naval boat of ours called the Maine was blown up.
On that boat, 327of our sailors were killed in the explosion. With this explosion, the navy used it by having a slogan ,Remember the Maine, to get volunteers into the navy to help fight. We though that the Spanish were to blame for blowing up our ship. But, really there was something wrong with the engine which lead to the big explosion.
This was not found till they lifted the ship out of the water in 1911. When this happened many newspapers journalist {yellow journalism} took advantage of the explosion and wrote whom they thought did the explosion or who did the people want it to be. One of these newspaper tycoons was William Randolph Hearst. He took great advantages of the war and stretched the truth to the extreme.
He did this just to sell more newspapers and to make money. Hearst went over in his personal boat and took pictures in Cuba of poor and starving people there. He even captured a couple of the Spanish soldiers and turned them over to the Americans. America fought because we had big money in Cuba. All together we had over a $250 million dollars invested there with sugar and other materials that we did not what to be destroyed. We also had $100 million dollars invested in the tobacco plantations, and $50million in transportation.
Our president at that time was William McCleain. He did not want to get in this war because he hated war. But when he did he decided to take some other thing that we need also. These things are the Philippines, Guam, and Portico for navel passages.
On April 11,1898 McCleain gave a speech to congress for war, and they approved it. The war looked in big favor for the Spanish because they had an army of 400,000 men and we only had only 28,000 men, but this changed after congress declared war. The national guard got 1million recruits during the war, this was the highest ever. In the war there were two generals from the Civil War.
These guys are William Shaft who weighed 320 pounds. He had to get a special tub and had to be hoisted up onto his horse. The other one is Joe Weeles. This man was a little forgetful. This was proven when sometimes he would yell to his troops lets go get those Yankees.
There is one more very famous leader in this war. This man was the leader of the roughriders and became one of are presidents, this man is Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy was the first member of his family to be in a war, because his dad paid someone else so he didnt have to fight in the Civil War. He did this because he thought it was disrespectful to his wife that was a strong supporter of the south. America had a problem getting people to join the army because more men died of diseases then died from bullets. There was also another disadvantage, this was that our men werent trained to fight in the jungle.
We also had another problem we only had normal one shot guns, but the Spanish had auto-mastics and could fire and kill many men before reloading. We were also stupid during the war especially in one fight that was both a victory and a defeat. This is because we we lost 17,000 men, but still won the fight. This battle was a slow up hill march to a fort. This battle, which is refereed to as a death march.
Another big victory was won by are navy. This victory was when our navy destroyed all the Spanish ships that were trying to escape. In that battle we killed 400 of their sailors and captured 1700 others. Yet we only lost one men in this battle. On July 17,1898 we marched in to the their capital and nothing stop us from taking it over, but we had lost over 25% of are men to
