To most Americans, San Juan Hill conjures up images of Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders dashing up the hill to victory, but other soldiers also played an important role in driving the Spanish off the heights overlooking Santiago, Cuba. One such soldier was 1st Lt. John J. Pershing, the quartermaster of the 10th Cavalry, the famed "Buffalo Soldiers." Pershing's experiences in Cuba gave him important battlefield experience and showed him how an army at war behaves. This would pay off when Pershing led the American Expeditionary Forces into battle on the fields of France in World War I, less than twenty years later.
As tensions heated up between the United States and Spain, Pershing was teaching tactics at West Point. Desperate to join the action he foresaw as inevitable, he bombarded the assistant secretary of war, George Meiklejohn, with letters. Realizing the importance of combat duty, he wrote, "if I should accept any duty which would keep me from field service, indeed if I did not make every effort to obtain an opportunity for field service I should never forgive myself."1
Read Full Article »
