American Rifle - Alexander Rose [131]
On the other side of the fence, Leonard Wood was pleased that his Rough Riders, adhering to the finest diehard traditions, maintained strict discipline and obediently waited for their officers’ commands before firing—the racket of hundreds of magazines simultaneously being opened, loaded, and shut must have been quite a sound; but once the shooting started, it unexpectedly became impossible to maintain any sort of control.45 The smarty-pants commentators back home, noted Davis, had “foretold that the cowboys would shoot as they chose and . . . would act independently of their officers.” But “as it turned out, the cowboys were the very men who waited most patiently for the officers to give the word of command.” All the same, he added, once that word was given, the fighting turned “breathless and fierce, like a . . . street-fight.”46
The fetish for disciplined fire was hard to maintain once commanders began realizing that aggressive attacking combined with massive firepower worked wonders against even entrenched infantry.47 “By sweeping the ground that we were advancing over with a storm of bullets,” wrote Brigadier General Frederick Funston, “we could so demoralize the enemy that his fire would be badly directed.”48 Dug-in defenders subjected to such a fusillade refused to stand up and fire back, testament to the long-held diehard conviction that repeaters and magazine-fed rifles, not marksmanship and mastery of the single-shot Springfield, were key to emerging triumphant from any modern battle.
Crouching and crawling at San Juan Hill, and harassed by the spat and whine of Mauser bullets, some seven thousand American troops unleashed upon the tiny outpost at its brow one of the greatest concentrations of rifle fire hitherto ever delivered. So intense was the American fire that their Krags’ metal parts became burningly hot as the men pulled the trigger and bolt without rest up to 150 times in rapid succession. The soldiers took to pouring the precious contents of water bottles over their rifles to cool them down.
The vast majority of the tens of thousands of bullets hit nothing but wall, air, or dirt; but even so, after Roosevelt’s triumphant charge up San Juan Hill, it was noticed that every Spanish casualty in the trenches had been shot several times in the face or had “little holes in their heads from which their brains were oozing” (Roosevelt’s words). Any Spaniard unwise enough to poke his head above the parapet for a look-see had run smack into a fusillade of fire. They weren’t killed by American sharp-shooters. Quite the opposite, in fact. Roosevelt later said his orderly “had stopped to shoot, and two Spaniards fell as he emptied his magazine. These were the only Spaniards I actually saw fall to aimed shots by any of my men, with the exception of two guerrillas in trees.” The latter might have been downed by someone like Lieutenant Charles Muir of the Second Infantry, who was officially recorded as being “of the class of distinguished sharpshooters” and, in classic progressive style, a “man who mixes brains with gun powder.” He shot two Spaniards, both at an impressive eleven hundred yards.49
Aside from its heroic splendors, San Juan taught American troops distinctly unmythical lessons about the realities of modern combat. With respect to Lieutenant Muir’s sharpshooting talents, the two unlucky Spaniards would almost certainly have survived being hit. Roosevelt’s men had quickly discovered that it was difficult to wound the enemy grievously, let alone kill him, using their new Krag ammunition.
The old .45 rifles, conversely, used by guerrillas and the Spanish irregulars had inflicted terrible wounds. (“There was one thing to be said for those old Springfields,” reflected General Funston, “and that was that if a bullet from one of them hit a man he never mistook it for a mosquito bite.”) But as Roosevelt noticed, “the Mauser