Before learning of Commodore George Dewey’s destruction of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on the morning of May 1, 1898, few Americans knew anything about the Philippine Islands. In her Pulitzer Prize–winning In the Days of McKinley, Margaret Leech tells the story of the newly elected president apologetically informing one supplicant for a consular post that no appointment remained except to “a place called Manila, `somewhere away around on the other side of the world [though] he did not know exactly where, for he had not had time to look it up.’” When Dewey had left for Nagasaki, Japan, to take command of the United States Navy’s Asiatic Squadron in December 1897, President McKinley was said to have admitted that “`he [still] could not have told where those darned islands were within two thousand miles.’”[1]
The Navy knew little of the Philippines, either. Dewey’s aide Nathan Sargent would later write that on the eve of the war “no ship of our service had been there for years [and] the latest official report on file in the Office of Naval Intelligence concerning them bore the date of 1876.”[2] It was not quite so uninformed as its commander in chief, however. The “new navy” ideology of the late nineteenth century stressed preparing for war in time of peace, and officers at the Naval War College (founded in 1884) had been developing plans for war with Spain since 1894. Their focus, like everyone else’s, was on the Caribbean, but they did not ignore Spain’s possession in the Far East. An attack on Manila would divide Spanish resources and prevent a concentration of force in the Western Hemisphere. The city’s capture might also serve to ensure that Spain accepted American demands for a postwar indemnity. But other officers wanted the Asiatic Squadron to ignore the Philippines and instead sail west to prey upon Spanish shipping in the Atlantic. A June 1897 revision of the Navy’s war plan restored an attack on the Philippines but included no suggestion that the seizure of Manila would be but a prelude to acquiring an American colony in Asia.[3] Dewey’s victory would nourish that idea.
Whatever the war plans’ authors might have envisioned, nothing had been done to prepare the Asiatic Squadron for combat. Dewey discovered that the four ships of his command—one a mere gunboat and another a Civil War–vintage paddle-wheel steamer—did not hold even a peacetime supply of ammunition. Dewey’s flagship, the cruiser Olympia, was scheduled to return soon to the United States. On his own initiative, Dewey ordered the ships to concentrate at Hong Kong. About 600 miles (roughly three sailing days) to the northwest of Manila, it was, as Sargent would put it, “the nearest port to his quarry.” If the United States went to war, neutrality laws would deny the squadron access to supplies and facilities at the British colony or in Japanese ports, so Dewey established a base at Mirs Bay, adjacent to Hong Kong but in Chinese waters. (Dewey reasoned that China could not enforce a declaration of neutrality.) By April 1898 his squadron had been reinforced by two locally purchased supply ships, the revenue cutter McCulloch, and three additional cruisers. Should the Spanish naval commander in the Philippines, Admiral Patricio Montojo, keep his fleet intact and decide to give battle to the Americans, the outcome could hardly be in doubt. Dewey’s six warships heavily outweighed and outgunned the unprotected cruisers and gunboats that made up the Spanish naval squadron in the Philippines.[4] For this reason, Dewey’s real claim to his countrymen’s adulation lay not in his success in the subsequent battle in Manila Bay but in the initiative he had shown in preparing the squadron for action.